Eight Columbia Faculty Members Receive Guggenheim Fellowships

Columbia’s new Guggenheim Fellows are among 181 selected from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants. The John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation was established in 1925 to “add to the educational, literary, artistic and scientific power” of the United States, “and also to provide for the cause of better international understanding.”

Guggenheim fellows receive a cash award, which they can spend as they wish. The amounts vary, as they are adjusted to the needs of each recipient. Since 1925, there have been more than 17,300 Guggenheim Fellows, including Nobel Prize Winners, Poet Laureates and other major prizewinners.

Timothy Donnelly , associate professor of writing at Columbia, is also a 1998 graduate of the School of the Arts and won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award earlier this year for The Cloud Corporation. He recently received a fellowship from the New York State Writer’s Institute.

Stephen S. Hall , adjunct professor at the School of Journalism , is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work centers on the intersection of science and society. He has written numerous essays, stories and books, including most recently, Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience, which grew out of a 2007 cover article in The New York Times Magazine— where he served as editor.

Jennifer S. Hirsch is professor and deputy chair for doctoral studies in the department of sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health. Her research spans from the anthropology of love to gender, sexuality and migration and how it relates to sexual, reproductive and HIV risk practices.

Matthew L. Jones , associate professor of Contemporary Civilization in the department of history, is currently writing a philosophical, technical and labor history of early to modern calculating machines with the support of the National Science Foundation. He is also working on a book project, Love, Inclination and Inertia, about the intertwined history of natural and social cohesion, from the late scholastics to Emilie Du Châtelet.

Christia Mercer , the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia, specializes in the history of early modern philosophy with a focus on sixteenth century Platonism, history of science, metaphysics and philosophical methods. Her books include Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origin and Development. She is the recipient of the 2008 Columbia College Great Teacher Award.

Alex Mincek received his doctorate in Music Humanities from Columbia. He is a composer and performer, whose music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Miller Theatre and the Strasbourg Musica Festival.

Kate Soper, assistant adjunct professor of music, is a composer, performer, vocalist and managing director for Wet Ink—a new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries. She has received awards from the Fromm Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Music Theory Society of New York State and ASCAP. She will be a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2012-13.

Benjamin Taylor is an assistant adjunct professor of writing at the School of the Arts. His published works include Into the Open, Tales Out of School (winner of the Harold U. Ribalow Prize) and The Book of Getting Even, a Los Angeles Times favorite book of the year. His next book Naples: Declared is scheduled for release in May 2012.

Professor Jamal Joseph talks about growing up in New York City and the life stories chronicled in his autobiography, Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion & Reinvention . (3:59)

Four Columbia faculty have been named research fellows by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which awards two-year, $50,000 grants to support the work of exceptional young researchers early in their careers. The fellows are: Xi Chen, assistant professor of computer science; Valentino Tosatti, Joseph Fels Ritt Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics; Jonathan Vogel, assistant professor of economics; and Junfeng Yang, assistant professor of computer science.