HONOR:
Laurels for Talent: Guggenheim Fellows
This year five Indians have won the Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the most prestigious U.S. awards. A Siliconeer report.
Five Indians from a diverse array of fields have won Guggenheim Fellowships, one of the most prestigious awards in the U.S. They are: Meena Alexander, poet and distinguished professor of English, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center (poetry); Tony D’Souza, writer, Sarasota, Florida (fiction); Sumit Guha, professor of history, Rutgers University; Chandrashekhar B. Khare, professor of mathematics, University of California, Los Angeles; and Ashutosh Varshney, professor of political science, University of Michigan.
Edward Hirsch, the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, announced that in its 84th annual competition for the United States and Canada the Foundation has awarded 190 fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars, with awards totaling $8,200,000. The successful candidates were chosen from a group of more than 2,600 applicants.
Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India in 1951. She was raised in both India and the Sudan, in North Africa. She received a bachelor’s degree in French and English from Khartoum University, and a doctorate in English from Nottingham University in England.
Alexander’s collections of poetry include “Quickly Changing River” (TriQuarterly Books, 2008), “Raw Silk” (2004), and “Illiterate Heart” (2002), the winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated into several languages including Malayalam, Hindi, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, French, German and Swedish. Even her very first published poems were acts of translation: written as a teenager in English, they were published in a Sudanese newspaper translated into Arabic.
Polyglot and sensual, Alexander’s work has been influenced and mentored by the Indian poets Jayanta Mahapatra and Kamala Das, as well as the American poets Adrienne Rich and Galway Kinnell. Her poems frequently confronts the difficult issues of exile and identity, while still maintaining a generous spirit. About her work, Maxine Hong Kingston has said: “Meena Alexander sings of countries, foreign and familiar, places where the heart and spirit live, and places for which one needs a passport and visas. Her voice guides us far away and back home. The reader sees her visions and remembers and is uplifted.”
Her fellowships and awards include ones from the Fulbright Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Arts Council of England, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Council for Research on Women, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has taught at the University of Hyderabad, Fordham University and Columbia University.
Dr. Sumit Guha is professor in the department of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. N.J., and director of the South Asian Studies Program. His current research deals with the intellectual and social history of early modern and medieval India. His publications include “Health and Population in South Asia,” London 2001, “Environment and Ethnicity in South Asia 1200-1991,” Cambridge University Press, 1999 (paperback edition, 2006) and “The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan 1818-1941,” New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Chandrashekhar Khare is a professor of mathematics at the University of California Los Angeles. In 2005, he made a major advance in the field of Galois representations and number theory by proving the level 1 Serre conjecture, and later a proof of the conjecture for odd conductor.
In a paper posted on the Mathematics Arxiv on the Web in April 2005 and subsequently sent for publication to a leading mathematics journal, the then 37-year-old mathematician based at that time in the University of Utah, proved what is known to specialists in the field as the “level-1 case of the Serre conjecture.” In earlier work done with the French mathematician J.P. Wintenberger in December 2004, Khare outlined a two-part general strategy to prove the Serre conjecture fully. His 2005 result was a first key step.
According to Professor Dipendra Prasad of the department of mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, the result was “one of the outstanding results in recent times in this field.” He added that before the joint work earlier and Khare’s current result, “It was unclear to the experts in the field that the conjecture would become a theorem in the near future.” Before he moved to the United States in 2004 to take up a position on the University of Utah faculty as associate professor, Khare was on the TIFR faculty for nearly a decade.
Author Tony D’Souza was born and raised in Chicago. He earned master ’s degrees in writing from Hollins University and the University of Notre Dame, and served three years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, where he was a rural AIDS educator.
He has contributed to The New Yorker, Playboy, Salon, Esquire, Outside, the “O.Henry Awards,” “Best American Fantasy,” “McSweeney’s,” “Tin House,” “Amazon” and elsewhere, and has appeared on Dateline, The Today Show, the BBC, NPR, and other venues. He received a 2006 NEA Fellowship and a 2007 NEA Japan Friendship Fellowship.
His first novel, “Whiteman,” received the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His second novel, “The Konkans,” has just released.
Building on his work on Hindu-Muslim violence in India published in “Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life,” political scientist Ashutosh Varshney will analyze ethnic conflict in 15 cities from four countries: Indonesia, Nigeria, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. His work concentrates on three areas: cities that used to be violent but have become peaceful, cities that used to be peaceful but have become violent, and peaceful cities that remained riot-free. The emphasis is on change, which should allow him to inquire into how enduring peace is established or broken.
“Apart from the fact that this award will allow me some free time to work further on my project, it is the confidence expressed by the Guggenheim selection committee in my ability to answer a very difficult question in a multi-country framework that gives me profound satisfaction,” Varshney said.
He is the author of the acclaimed book, “Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India,” which won the Gregory Luebert Prize of the American Political Science Association for the best book on comparative politics in 2002. The book was also Choice magazine’s “Outstanding Academic Title’’ and won a Kiriyama prize. That work lead to more recent research addressing the larger question: What makes ethnic conflicts boil over in some cities while other cities, comparable in many respects, remain peaceful? His current research involves to conducting a multi-year study of cities around the world to help answer that difficult question. United Nations and World Bank officials are working with him as well.
In all, 75 disciplines and 81 different academic institutions are represented by this year’s Fellows. Fifty-six Fellows are unaffiliated or hold only adjunct or part-time positions at universities.
According to foundation president Hirsch, since its establishment in 1925 the foundation has granted more than $265 million in fellowships to almost 16,500 individuals. Scores of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prize winners 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 has assumed a greatly increased importance. Thanks to the continued and ever more generous donations of friends and former fellows, the foundation has been able to increase each year both the number of awards and the average amount of its grants.
The full list of 2008 Fellows may be viewed at http://www.gf.org.
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