Two Guggenheim Fellows Named in SAS
April 2005
Two faculty members in the School of Arts and Sciences have received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The new fellows include Professor of Romance Languages Victoria E. Kirkham and Professor of History Thomas J. Sugrue.
Kirkham is a scholar of Italian literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Her work also explores interdisciplinary relations between literary and visual traditions, gender studies and cinema. She is the coauthor of Diana's Hunt, Caccia di Diana: Boccaccio's First Fiction (1991); the author of The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio's Fiction (1993); and Fabulous Vernacular: Boccaccio's Filocolo and the Art of Medieval Fiction, which won the Modern Language Association of America's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies for the year 2000. Her most recent book, co-edited with Pamela J. Benson, is Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy (2005).
A member of the faculty since 1972, she has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Harvard Villa I Tatti Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Newberry Library as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. She has been a guest scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities and has held appointments as a visiting professor Johns Hopkins University as well as the Villa I Tatti, on whose Academic Advisory Board she has served. In Italy, she recently became a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Ente Nazionale Giovanni Boccaccio. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College, master’s degrees from the University of Illinois and Johns Hopkins and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. The fellowship will support her dual biography, “The Marriage of Laura Battiferra and Bartolomeo Ammannati,” which reconstructs the lives and art of this 16th-century couple.
Sugrue, who is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor of History and Sociology, is also the chair of the graduate group in history. A member of the Penn faculty since 1991, he has been a visitor at both New York University and at L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in France and a research fellow at the Brookings Institution.
His work focuses on 20th-century American political, urban and social history, and he has written extensively on modern American culture and politics, 20th-century conservatism and liberalism, race, urban economic development and poverty and public policy. He is the author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History and book prizes from the Urban History Association and the Social Science History Association. Sugrue also has received the Greek Council's Outstanding Professor Award and the Department of History's Richard S. Dunn Teaching Award. He holds his doctorate from Harvard University, master's degree from Cambridge University and bachelor's degree from Columbia University. He will use the fellowship to finish his book, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Unfinished Struggle for Racial Equality in the North, which will be the first large-scale history of the struggle for civil rights in the American North in the twentieth century.
Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded annually for distinguished scholarly achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. They include substantial stipends and are among North America’s most prestigious research awards.
These fellowships, for which there were more than 3,000 applicants in 79 fields, are awarded annually for distinguished scholarly achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. They include substantial stipends and are among North America’s most prestigious research awards. This year, 186 individuals received fellowships.