David Garland, Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and a professor of sociology at New York University, is among the 187 winners of the 2006 Guggenheim Fellowships, which are awarded to artists, scholars, and scientists for distinguished past achievements and exceptional promise of future accomplishments.
The fellowship winners are selected from more than 3,000 applicants for awards totaling $7,500,000.
Garland’s scholarship is a sociological examination of the system of capital punishment which 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,” said 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.”
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 full list of year 2006 Fellows is on the World Wide Web at http://www.gf.org.