Issue date: 4/15/08 Section: Campus News

Media Credit: Courtesy of brown.edu Associate Professor of History Deborah Cohen

Associate Professor of History Deborah Cohen and Professor of English and Comparative Literature Forrest Gander received Guggenheim Fellowships for 2008. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which awards fellowships in the natural sciences, creative arts, social sciences and humanities, selected 190 individuals from approximately 2,600 applicants, according to an April 3 press release.

"Everyone applies for the Guggenheim because it's there," Gander said. "It has a tradition of supporting both scholars and writers. I've been applying for years and years. I didn't think I was ever going to get one."

Cohen will spend the next academic year at the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, where she will be working on a project focusing on family secrets in Britain from 1840 to 1990.

"What I'm interested in is the development of confessional culture," Cohen said. "Why is it that so many of us feel that our intimate secrets should be barred from the public?"

Cohen said she anticipates working on the project for the next four to five years, though she hopes to teach a course resulting from her work at the Cullman Center when she returns to Brown after one year. Cohen currently is teaching a new course related to her project called HIST 1970J: "Families and Secrets."

Gander said he will be using his fellowship to continue his writing with "ecopoetics," a branch of poetry that focuses on writing's relationship with the physical world. Gander will remain at Brown in the fall, serving as the director of the literary arts program, but hopes to use the spring and fall semesters of 2009 to work on his fellowship. He said he will be using funding from the fellowship to continue his work with eco-poetics and the Chihuahuan Desert on the Mexico-Texas border and his translation of two works by the Argentine author Cesar Aira.

According to the Guggenheim Foundation's Web site, the foundation awarded approximately $8.2 million in fellowships this year. Both Gander and Cohen added that though the Guggenheim does not offer comparatively more funding than other fellowship programs, the competitiveness of the award makes the Guggenheim one of the most prestigious fellowships in the country.

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