3 faculty members named Guggenheim fellows

Three faculty members have received Guggenheim Fellowships for research in the varied fields of technopolitics, quantum field theory and Greek tragedy.

Paul Edwards, associate professor in the School of Information; Martin Einhorn, professor in the Physics Department; and Yopie Prins, associate professor of English and comparative literature, and adjunct associate professor of classical studies, were among the 184 artists, scholars and scientists selected from a pool of more than 3,200 applicants. Awards for all winners totaled $6.75 million.

Edwards

Edwards, also the director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, is the first Guggenheim fellow from the School of Information. The fellowship will allow him to spend a year in South Africa researching a book on the technopolitics of information in that country during the later apartheid era, the transition to democracy and the creation of an open government. He defines technopolitics as "the strategic practice of designing or implementing technologies to enact political goals."

Edwards says both pre- and post-1994 South African regimes used information technologies to underwrite their sovereignty, but in nearly opposite ways. Edwards also seeks to puzzle out the global implications of emerging South African technopolitics, including recent calls by some South African activists for the establishment of a "right to information across regions and across the globe." These activists see such a right as essential to global struggles against inequality and in support of meaningful, participatory democracy.

"Both South Africa's past and its present have enormous implications for questions of sovereignty, multiethnic statehood, the effects of globalization, and international peace and security," Edwards says. The support from the Guggenheim Foundation will help him start to delineate what some of those implications are.

Einhorn will use the fellowship for further study of quantum field theory in curved spacetime. He describes quantum field theory as the "mathematical language that is used to talk about natural phenomena."

Einhorn

Often, the study of quantum field theory is done as if the universe were perfectly flat, he says. However, on cosmological scales, the universe isn't really flat. This raises the question, he says, of how to express the basic laws in a way that's compatible with cosmology.

Doing quantum field theory in non-flat backgrounds "is still in a rather primitive state," he says. "I hope to be able to make some progress in how quantum field theory works in curved spacetime and how you use it to understand the history of the universe."

During the next year, he will conduct research at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara; at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem through a visiting professorship from the Lady Davis Fellowship Trust; and at the Center for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago.

Prins' fellowship is for her project entitled "Ladies' Greek," a book about the entry of women into Greek studies in Victorian England and America.

Prins

"I am especially interested in how women learned to translate and to perform Greek tragedy during the formation of women's colleges," she says. "Through their identification with letters of the Greek alphabet, Victorian women of letters give us another perspective on the history of Classics."

She says the book makes an "interdisciplinary contribution to literary criticism, translation studies, the history of women's education, the reception of Greek drama, 19th-century Hellenism and gender studies."

The fellowship will allow her to concentrate on researching and writing the book during the next year. She will travel to women's colleges and look through their archives, in search of first-hand accounts from women learning ancient Greek.

Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment, according to the Guggenheim Foundation. Since 1925, the foundation has granted more than $220 million in fellowships to more than 15,200 people.

The full list of year 2003 fellows is http://www.gf.org.

More stories

• University takes measures to reduce health care expenditures
• U-M increases emphasis on programming to support diversity in the workplace
• Madam President, meet Mr. President
• New spam tactics target University
• Fee increases allow for better fire, life safety systems
• 3 faculty members named Guggenheim fellows
• 2003 U-M Spring Commencement activities
• Research administration staff award winners announced
• 7 faculty, 6 graduate students receive fellowships at Humanities Institute
• Spotlight: Wild woman
• All-day event seeks ways to improve health of Latino children
• An excellent department
• Chefs promote healthy eating through M-Fit Culinary School
• Local, organic, delicious, and sustainable
• Star Search
• U-M study: Injuries worse for drivers and passengers who have been drinking alcohol
• Piano man Grijalva keeps the University's ivories tickled white
• Hopwood Awards encourage and compensate young writers