Six NYU Professors Receive Guggenheim Fellowships

Six NYU faculty members have been awarded fellowships this year from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted almost $240 million in fellowships to more than 15,500 individuals.

Scores of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prize winners appear on the roll of fellows, which includes Ansel Adams, 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. The following is a description of NYU’s winners and the work they are pursuing:

Ulrich Baer, associate professor of German and comparative literature, received his Guggenheim to pursue research on Sigmund Freud’s theory, which suggests that people make art because they cannot act out their most basic instincts: sex and aggression. Essentially, Baer notes, “Freud says because we cannot kill our father or sleep with our mother (which would unravel our social fabric), we direct these energies into producing art, which then gives us a different kind of satisfaction and ensures the survival of the species.” Baer, the author of Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (MIT Press, 2002), among other titles, is currently writing a book on the representation of clouds in light of this major theory of art advanced by Freud.

Catherine Barnett, a professor in the McGhee Liberal Arts Program in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies and an adjunct faculty member in the undergrad Creative Writing Program of the Faculty of Arts and Science, will use the Guggenheim grant to continue writing poems for her second book. Barnett won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award for her first collection of poems, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, which was published by Alice James Books in May 2004. Her honors include a 2004 Whiting Writers Award, the 2004 Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a 2005 Pushcart Prize.

David Garland, Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and a professor of sociology at NYU, has been conducting a sociological examination of the system of capital punishment that operates in America today. “Punishment is a social institution with causes and consequences, meanings and functions that go well beyond the immediacies of criminal justice,” says Garland. “My aim is to understand the persistence of the death penalty in contemporary America, to explain the system’s strange forms and peculiar characteristics, and to examine how it actually functions in American culture and society.”

Rinne Groff, an instructor in the Department of Dramatic Writing at the Tisch School of the Arts, is a writer and performer. Her plays include Jimmy Carter was a Democrat, Inky, The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem, Orange Lemon Egg Canary, and The Ruby Sunrise, and have been seen at Soho Rep, HERE, the Connelly Theater, PS122, the Kitchen, and 29th Street Rep, among others. Groff is a founding member of Elevator Repair Service Theater Company and has been a part of the writing, staging, and performing of their shows (both in New York City and on European and U.S. tour) since the company’s inception in 1991. On stage, she frequently performs with Target Margin Theater, with whom she is also an associate member.

Michael Purugganan, is a professor in the Department of Biology and at NYU’s Center for Comparative Functional Genomics. He received the Guggenheim for his work on “The Ecological Transcriptome” and has focused his research on identifying the genes responsible for the evolution of adaptations that occur in nature. In addition to his 60 peer-reviewed publications in Science, Nature, Genetics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, amongst others, he is also the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Young Investigator Award and is currently primary investigator (PI) or co-PI on several multi-million dollar genome grants from the National Science Foundation for his research on rice and Arabidopsis genomics. He is an editor of Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, and associate editor of Molecular and Developmental Evolution.

Darin Strauss, an adjunct faculty member in the undergraduate Creative Writing Program, is author of the international bestseller Chang and Eng and of the New York Times “Notable Book” The Real McCoy. He is also a screenwriter who has collaborated with Julie Taymor, Disney films, and Gary Oldman (for the upcoming film version of Chang and Eng). His fiction has been widely anthologized, translated into 13 languages, and published in 17 countries. His third novel, as well as a book of stories and essays, is forthcoming from Dutton later this year.