Five receive Guggenheim Fellowship Awards

Five Harvard affiliates are among the 189 artists, scholars, and scientists to be selected fellowship award winners by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In this 83rd annual United States and Canadian competition, winners were selected from nearly 2,800 applicants for awards totaling $7,600,000. Decisions are based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisers and are approved by the foundation’s board of trustees, which includes six members who are themselves past fellows of the foundation — Joel Conarroe, Edward Hirsch, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard A. Rifkind, Charles Ryskamp, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of achievement in the past and exceptional promise for the future. What distinguishes the Guggenheim Fellowship program from others is the wide range in interest, age, geography, and institution of those it selects as it considers applications in 78 different fields, from the natural sciences to the creative arts. The new fellows include writers, playwrights, painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, choreographers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists, and scholars in the humanities. Many of these individuals hold appointments in colleges and universities with 77 institutions being represented by one or more fellows.

The Harvard recipients and their areas of interest are as follows:

Daniel Carpenter, professor of government and director, Center for American Political Studies: The American antislavery petition in context.

Margaret Crawford, professor of urban design and planning theory, Graduate School of Design: Rethinking urban space.

Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music, professor of African and African American Studies, and 2007-08 Radcliffe Institute fellow: Ethiopian music and musicians in the United States.

Anne C. Shreffler, James Edward Ditson Professor of Music: New music, avant-garde, and politics in the early Cold War.

Salil Vadhan, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics: The complexity of zero-knowledge proofs.

Since 1925, according to foundation president Edward Hirsch, the foundation has granted more than $256 million in fellowships to more than 16,250 individuals. Additionally, the Guggenheim Foundation is successfully raising funds to enable the appointment of a larger number of fellows each year. Scores of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prize winners appear on the roll of fellows, which includes Ansel Adams, W.H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, and Eudora Welty, among others.