Guggenheim Announces 2009 Fellowship Awards for the United States and Canada

According to President Hirsch, since its establishment in 1925 the Foundation has granted more than $273 million in Fellowships to nearly 16,700 individuals. Scores of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prizewinners grace the roll of Fellows, including Ansel Adams, W. H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Isamu Noguchi, Linus Pauling, Philip Roth, Paul Samuelson, Wendy Wasserstein, Derek Walcott, James Watson, and Eudora Welty.

In a time of decreased funding for individuals in the arts, humanities, and sciences, the Guggenheim Fellowship program is all the more important. The continued and ever more generous donations from friends, Trustees, former Fellows, and other foundations have ensured that the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation will be able to continue the mission Senator and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim set for it: to "add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country, and also to provide for the cause of better international understanding."

Thanks to continued support from The Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation was again able to offer a Fellowship in Constitutional Studies, a field inaugurated last year: Risa L. Goluboff, a professor of law and history at the University of Virginia Law School, will use her Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct research on the vagrancy laws of the 1960s. In the field of Translation, which was also offered for the first time last year, two Fellowships were awarded: Carl W. Ernst, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will be preparing a translation and study of the poetry of al-Hallaj; and Howard C. Goldblatt, interim director of the University of Notre Dame's Center for Asian Studies, will be translating Mo Yan's Tanxiang Xing. Guggenheim Fellowship Awards, 2009

The Foundation is deeply indebted once again to its scores of expert advisers and its Committee of Selection, both of which are composed exclusively of former Fellows, and to its Board of Trustees, six of whose members are also Guggenheim alumni.