Guggenheims Awarded to Three CLA Faculty
Three College of Liberal Arts (CLA) faculty members have received 2007 Guggenheim Fellowships in the 83rd annual U.S. and Canadian competition sponsored by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
CLA’s 2007 Guggenheim fellows are Daphne Berdahl, professor in anthropology; Hisham Bizri, assistant professor in cultural studies and comparative literature; and David Treuer, associate professor in English. The three received fellowships because of their distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. In the past 10 years, CLA faculty have won only three other Guggenheims.
"This is an extraordinary accomplishment for these three outstanding College of Liberal Arts faculty members," said Steven Rosenstone. "Their creative work, their research, and their teaching are extraordinary, and the college is immensely proud of them. They are perfect examples of the wonderful faculty we have in CLA—people who, every day, teach and mentor our students."
About the Award Winners
Daphne Berdahl is associate professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Global Studies in CLA. She is author of Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland and co-editor of Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in East Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union. She is currently completing her second book on the politics of memory in the former German Democratic Republic. In addition, she is working on a project focusing on the relationship between mass consumption, globalization and changing practices of citizenship in post-Berlin Wall Germany.
Hisham Bizri is a practicing filmmaker from Lebanon and an assistant professor in CLA's Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. Professor Bizri is founding director of the U of M Institute for Advanced Study Film Collective and in 2006 presented a first-of-its-kind symposium on film and culture in the Arab world. He is also the co-founder of the Arab Institute of Film in Amman, Jordan. Bizri's films have been shown internationally including the Louvre, Cairo Opera House, Biennale des Cinema Arabes (Paris), Milan Film Festival (Italy), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), Harvard Film Archives (Cambridge), Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Cinematheque Francaise (Paris).
David Treuer is an associate professor in CLA's Department of English. He teaches Native American literature, the modernist novel, Nabokov and Proust, and he is the translator or many Ojibwe stories and texts. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Canada, a Pushcart Prize, the 1996 Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the Pen West prize in 1999. He has held a Bush Artists Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Documenting Endangered Languages Fellowship and a U of M McKnight Land-Grant Professorship. Treuer’s
latest novel, The Translation of Dr Apelles, was named a "Best Book of 2006" by the Washington Post, Minneapolis Star Tribune, City Pages and Time Out.
A fourth University of Minnesota faculty member, Peter McMurry a professor with the Institute of Technology’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, also received a Guggenheim fellowship.
About the Guggenheim Award
The 2007 fellowship winners include 189 artists, scholars and scientists selected from nearly 2,800 applicants for awards totaling $7.6 million. Decisions are based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisors and are approved by the Guggenheim Foundation's board of trustees. What distinguishes the Guggenheim Fellowship program from all others is the wide range in interest, age, geography and institution of those it selects as it considers applications in 78 different fields, from the natural sciences to the creative arts. The new Fellows include writers, playwrights, painters, sculptors, photographers, film makers, choreographers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists, and scholars in the humanities. A list of current and past U of M Guggenheim recipients is available on the website for the Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs & Provost.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Mr. and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died April 26, 1922. The organization awards Guggenheim Fellowships to professionals who have demonstrated exceptional ability by publishing a significant body of work in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and the creative arts, excluding the performing arts.