Overcoming competition, four professors take home Guggenheims

Four University professors won prestigious Guggenheim fellowships Friday, providing them with one-year stipends to research topics ranging from Jane Austen to Gregorian chant.

Politics professor Jennifer Hochschild, music professor Peter Jeffery, English professor Claudia Johnson and comparative literature professor April Alliston were among 182 winners selected from a pool of 2,982 applicants.

The awards, known as John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellows, were announced publicly in the New York Times yesterday.

Hochschild said yesterday she will use the fellowship to finish her book "Madison's Constitution and Identity Politics." She said James Madison, who graduated from Princeton in 1771, designed the Constitution with "small and fluid factions that focus on economic interests" in mind.

However, "politics has recently become more about identity politics," she said, referring to the tendency of politicians to categorize voters based on ethnicity or religious affiliation. This trend has been showcased in the 2000 presidential elections, she said, citing "the increasing appeal to Hispanic voters by both Gore and Bush."

"It's a great honor to get it," she said, calling the Guggenheim award a "badge of honor" in academic circles.

Jeffery will try to finish a book on the origins of Gregorian chant. Specifically, he will study a one-page eighth century manuscript housed in the library of a Calvinist college on the border of Hungary and the Ukraine. He noted that last time he traveled to the area to study the manuscript the college was inside the borders of the Soviet Union.

Though he was not the first to study the document, Jeffery "figured out it is the earliest and most primitive manuscript" of Gregorian chant. "I'm one of the only non-Hungarians who has ever seen it," he said.

His book, in addition to being a treatise on music, "is a study of what the manuscript reveals about the educational system at that time," Jeffery said.

Choirboys, many of whom were orphans or illegitimate children given up for adoption, would study and sing the chants — in the process learning how to read. "A lot of them went on to have important ecclesiastical careers, a lot of them were elected Pope," he said.

"It's been a long time," he said of the 10 years he has spent writing the book. "It's very important. It's time to get it done."

Jeffery said he was not notified of receiving the award, unlike the winners who received letters Friday. "I didn't know until I started getting e-mails," he said. "I figured if it was in The New York Times, it must be true."

Austen

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For her part, Johnson will study the way 19th and early 20th century readers formed cults around Jane Austen. For example, "during World War I, she was very popular among soldiers in the trenches," Johnson said. "It helped them endure the ordeal of living in close quarters."

Johnson said she will travel to England to complete the project, titled "Jane Austen: Cults and Cultures."

"I love Jane Austen. I teach her a lot and I'm interested in how people love authors," she said. "I'm really excited to take the whole year off and travel."

Alliston said she will work on an ongoing project, "Character and the Plausibility: Gender and the Genre of Historical Narrative, 1650-1850," when she takes her Guggenheim fellowship in the 2004-2005 academic year.

"It is about how conventions of character types . . . were connected to the understanding in the period of plausibility or verisimilitude which was supposed to distinguish the novel . . . from historiography," she said.