Five receive Guggenheims

What do two environmental geographers, a philosopher of dance, a scholar of American silent films, and an expert on the Eucharist, have in common?

They all are 2002 Guggenheim Fellows in the College of Letters and Science.

The five were among 184 scholars from the United States and Canada who were chosen for the prestigious award from among some 3,000 applicants. The five L&S fellows placed UW–Madison alongside UCLA and Columbia University in the largest number of Guggenheim Fellowships awarded to a single institution this year.

The goal of the Guggenheim Foundation is to provide fellows with blocks of time in which they can work on books and other scholarly projects with as much creative freedom as possible.

“We are very proud of our Guggenheim fellows,” says Phillip R. Certain, dean of Letters and Science, who was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1978. “This is a highly competitive process in which fewer than 6 percent of all proposals are funded. The awards reflect the ongoing tradition of high quality and diversity of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences in our college.”

UW–Madison’s 2002 Guggenheim Fellows and their research projects are:

• Noël E. Carroll, Monroe C. Beardsley Professor of the Philosophy, the philosophy of dance.
• Lea Jacobs, professor of communication arts, the decline of sentiment in American silent film.
• Matthew Turner , associate professor of geography, socioecological complexity and the history of environmental scientific practice in the Sahel.
• Lee Palmer Wandel, professor of history and religious studies, the Eucharist in the early modern world.
• Karl Zimmerer, professor of geography, the rural-urban geography of conservation and resource management.