Three Cornell faculty members and a Cornell doctoral student are winners of Guggenheim Fellowship awards for 2000. They are among 182 artists, scholars and scientists from the United States and Canada selected from more than 2,900 applicants for awards this year totaling $6,345,000.
The Cornell winners are Vicki Caron, the Thomas and Diann Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies; Peter Dear, professor of history and of science and technology studies; John Lis, professor of molecular biology and genetics; and James Matheson, doctoral candidate in music composition.
Guggenheim Fellowship award decisions are based on the recommendations of hundreds of expert advisers and the approval of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation's board of trustees. Winners are selected based on distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.
Vicki Caron was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her study of Catholic-Jewish relations in France since 1871. She plans to use the grant to do archival and primary research to explore the relationship between traditional forms of religious anti-Semitism and more modern forms of secular and political anti-Semitism. In addition to the Dreyfus Affair and the Vichy era, she will focus on the anti-clerical struggles of the 1880s and early 20th century and the inter-war and post-1945 eras.
"I'm delighted to have received the Guggenheim," Caron said. "This is a tremendous opportunity to delve further into an important area of history where there has been relatively little research so far."
Caron is the author of Uneasy Asylum, France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942 (Stanford University Press, 1999) and Between France and Germany: The Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, 1871-1918 (Stanford University Press, 1988). Both books explore French Jewish life in the modern era. Drawing deeply on American and French archival sources, they are noted for their interpretative power. Before it was published, Uneasy Asylum won the 1997 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, awarded by the Wiener Library in London for the best unpublished book manuscript. The book was described by David Bell in The New Republic as a "detailed and quietly authoritative history of the refugee crisis."
Caron has held fellowships from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Historical Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Fulbright Program and the Whiting Foundation. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University and was an associate professor at Brown University before joining Cornell's history department and becoming the Mann professor in 1998.
Peter Dear has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a book, for a general audience, tentatively titled Making Sense in Science.
"I plan to show through a number of historical case studies from the 17th to the 20th centuries how science's concern with the question of what counts as a satisfactory explanation varies depending on culture and time," said Dear, who plans to stay in Ithaca to write the manuscript. "The history of science displays remarkable variations on this theme; what is accepted as a satisfactory type of explanation at one period or for one group of people sometimes fails to count as satisfactory at another time, or for another group."
Dear, who helped found Cornell's Department of Science and Technology Studies in 1991, received his undergraduate degree in history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University (1979) and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Princeton University's Program in History of Science (1984). He is the author of Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1995), which received the Ludwik Fleck (best book) prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science in 1998, and of an upcoming undergraduate textbook commissioned by Macmillan (U.K) titled Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 1500-1700.
Guggenheim award winner John Lis did his graduate research on prokaryotic gene regulation with Robert Schleif at Brandeis University and received his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1975. His postdoctoral work focused on Drosophila gene regulation and chromosome structure with David Hogness at Stanford University, supported by a fellowship from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation.
Lis joined the Cornell faculty in 1978 and was named a full professor in 1991. His research program has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the March of Dimes, American Cancer Society, Cornell Biotechnology Institute and a Procter and Gamble University Exploratory Research Grant.
His forthcoming sabbatical leave research will be performed in the laboratory of Susan Lindquist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Chicago. Lis plans to do research on a protein templating mechanism that is closely related to the prion mechanism that is believed to be the cause of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, better known as mad cow disease. "I postulate that the mechanism of protein templating may have a broader biological role, including the regulation of transcription of genes. This type of regulation may explain how genes are modulated over large regions of the chromosome and how regulated states are propagated over long developmental times," Lis said. "These epigenetic events are becoming an increasingly important topic in basic biology and disease, and I believe that Lindquist has an extremely tractable system to explore the molecular basis of these events."
Coincidentally, he noted, one of the transcription factor proteins his group has been studying for years has properties of these prions, in that it, too, can form amyloid fibers seen in the prion-caused disease state. The tools developed by Lindquist should allow him to investigate this, he said.
The Guggenheim award, Lis noted, "provides the opportunity to do research in a new environment and a new scientific area, while maintaining my connections to our research program at Cornell."
Fellowship winner James Matheson will use his award to support himself for the next year, he said. He is completing his doctoral thesis in addition to fulfilling his duties as lecturer of music at Ithaca College.
"A month ago I got a request from the Guggenheim Foundation for a budget," said Matheson. "Rumor has it that once they ask for that, you're going to get it -- but the fact that I got it at all was a surprise."
Matheson graduated from high school in Tampa, Fla., and studied musical composition with Gerald Levinson at Swarthmore College before coming to Cornell for his master's and doctor of musical arts. He submitted three scores to the Guggenheim Foundation for consideration: an orchestral work, a violin concerto for soloist and chamber orchestra and a solo piano composition.
Matheson's Cornell teachers include Steven Stucky and Roberto Sierra, both professors of music and prominent composers whose contrasting styles provided Matheson with a well-rounded and "complementary learning experience," he said.
Guggenheim fellows are appointed not only on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past, but exceptional promise for the future.
Although Matheson was surprised by the award, his creative efforts are well matched to the foundation's missions. A past recipient of an ASCAP award, Matheson is looking forward to the premiere of his latest work with the Chicago Symphony's chamber music series in May. On April 3 in New York, the American Composers Orchestra included Matheson's new work "Gliss" as part of its Whittaker New Music Reading sessions. "Gliss" is the score that comprises the musical half of Matheson's doctoral thesis.
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