Two professors named Guggenheim Fellows

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Music department assistant professor Daniel Trueman GS '99 received a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue his work with electronic instruments.

English professor Diana Fuss and music professor Daniel Trueman GS '99 have each received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a prestigious national award that recognizes the work of advanced professionals in an academic field.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which recognized 187 scholars from some 3,000 applicants this year, awarded a total of $7.5 million to this year's winners. Fellows receive a grant to supplement a proposed research project and are selected based on previous academic achievements and recognized potential.

Fuss received the award for her research project entitled "Poetry and the Art of Resuscitation." Trueman, who is an assistant professor, earned his fellowship for music composition. Guggenheim fellowships are rarely given to untenured professors, making Trueman's award particularly significant.

"The Guggenheim Foundation is a memorial foundation, and in fact my project is about memorialization; it's about poetic elegy, so it's very exciting and moving to me that the foundation has bestowed this fellowship," Fuss said in an interview.

Fuss will take a sabbatical next year to complete her proposed book, which will examine the ways 19thand 20th-century Anglophone poets revive the dead through elegy. The book will explore the eerie topics of speaking corpses, ghosts and the wandering dead.

"Historians tell us that there was a cultural silence about death in the19th century, that people were fearing death and that that fear made people stop talking about it," Fuss said. "But in point of fact, my research shows that poets were talking about it all the time."

Fuss is most interested in American 19thand 20th-century literature and poetry, women's literary studies and literary theory. She hopes that her book will serve as the foundation for a new lecture course at the University on American poetic elegy from Puritan poetry to the present.

Trueman studies ways to create new forms of musical expression by experimenting and building electronic instruments. He has studied folk music, which influenced his work, and plays the violin.

"For me, writing music is kind of like a musical mirror where I write music and learn about myself in the process, and I find that very interesting," Trueman said. "It's one of these things where from piece to piece [it] is very different."

Trueman is involved in several performing groups on campus, including the electronic music performance group Interface, the quartet QQQ and most recently, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), which Trueman co-founded.

"In terms of where my heart is most, it's in writing music for smaller ensembles coming out of chamber music and small groups of people jamming together," Trueman said. "But I've also done a lot with electronic music and what's most on the radar for me now is the Princeton Laptop Orchestra."

PLOrk is a 15-person ensemble that tries to integrate computers with conventional music, creating "meta-instruments." Musicians interact with their instruments in many ways other than typing alone, as they play laptop-centered music through unique, hemispherical speakers that emit sounds more like conventional instruments.

Trueman has several projects in mind for his fellowship year including a chamber piece featuring a piano, percussion and himself on electrical violin for The Society of New Music and a laptop quartet for a New York-based group called So Percussion.

"I'd say that most of the music I write includes me as a performer in some way, and this is not necessarily the standard way of composing music today," Trueman said. "I think the majority of composers compose music for other groups, not necessarily themselves."

Trueman taught a freshman seminar based on PLOrk this fall, and is now teaching a graduate course on the subject as well as a course on 16thand 18th-century counterpoint.