Six professors awarded Guggenheim Fellowships

The recipients from the University are Slavic languages and literatures department chair Caryl Emerson, operations research and financial engineering (ORFE) professor Jianqing Fan, classics department chair Denis Feeney, psychology professor Susan Fiske, physics professor Steven Gubser ’94 and Muhammad Zaman, a professor in the Near Eastern studies and religion departments.

Both Princeton and Johns Hopkins had six recipients, while Columbia had seven, according to the statement. Only 180 fellowships were granted to nearly 3,000 applicants.

The Guggenheim Fellowship is distinctive for its focus on personal projects, Emerson said. “It’s one of the nicest grants to get, even though you get only a short period off, as it highlights the importance of your own research.” The award is given on the basis of the merit of the project, and not just the individual, Emerson added.

“It isn’t so much the person that should be grateful, but actually the profile of the project,” she said. “I was extremely excited for my project.”

Emerson plans to use her grant to resurrect the lost work of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, whose modernist drama and literary criticism was effaced from artistic prominence by Joseph Stalin’s communist government during the 1930s.

“He’s got quite a following in Russia; he hasn’t much of a profile in the West yet,” she explained, adding that she wants to “bring him up past the invisibility barrier.”

Emerson’s research will take her far from campus. It will require her to delve into literature and film archives in Moscow, a mission that may prove problematic, she said. “With this particular writer, it’s tricky, since he’s archival, and the status of the Russian archives under [Vladimir] Putin is very uncertain,” Emerson explained. “So far literature has remained open; they haven’t been reclassified.” But, she added, “some of these archives are becoming closed again, as the country is closing down in terms of access to the West.”

Emerson said she is confident, though, that the University’s good working relationship with the archivists will ensure access to the documents.

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Fan’s research will take him abroad as well, as he works with Chinese scholars and researchers from Penn and Stanford. His project focuses on studying high-dimensional feature selection and how this relates to outcome, Fan said.

This research is also applicable to those outside ORFE, he said, as data-classification techniques can be used to study gene expression.

Fiske has already completed all of the research for her project and is using the time and resources granted by the Guggenheim Fellowship to publish her findings as a book.

As a social psychologist, she studies “how people make sense of other people,” she explained. With the sabbatical enabled by this fellowship and additional support from the Russell Sage Foundation, a social science research center in New York, Fiske said her book will focus on the perception of social status. She will study “how elites are envied, and how people look down on poor people,” she said.

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Feeney is looking at the society of ancient Rome. Though he typically researches and teaches Latin literature, his forays into the concept of time in the Roman calendar for a book got him interested in the relationship between Greek and Roman culture. He is fascinated, he said, by the “overall problem of why it was so important to the Romans to make themselves a society that was Greek in multiple ways.”

Though he may spend some time at the University of Cambridge in England, Feeney said the bulk of his research will keep him ensconced in the rich resources of Firestone Library. “Princeton is an amazing place to do the kind of work I do,” he added.

Gubser’s research will take him out of the three-dimensional world. In attempting to relate string theory to his experiments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Gubser is already running experiments creating plasmas to simulate a black hole. The physics professor is endeavoring to prove that one can geometrically recalculate properties of thermal states in five dimensions according to the premises of string theory, he explained in an e-mail.

So far, experimental data “seems to be roughly consistent,” he said, but questions remain. “How far can these string theory calculations be pushed?” Gubser said. “How well do they really agree with data? Can we understand better why they agree when they do, and how to modify them when they don’t?”

While most of his research can be completed at the University, Gubser said the grant will give him “increased freedom” to travel to Brookhaven and possibly even to Europe, where CERN is located.

Zaman, who could not be reached for comment, will pursue a project called “Islam in Pakistan.”