Seven Columbia faculty members representing fields as diverse as film, math and French history have won 2009 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships, in recognition of their "exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts."

The Columbia Guggenheim recipients include Ramin Bahrani, Stacey D'Erasmo, Pierre Force, Mae Ngai, Joseph R. Slaughter, Nicholas Turse and Shou-Wu Zhang.

Guggenheim fellows receive a cash award, which they are allowed to spend as they wish. The amounts vary, as they are adjusted to the needs of each recipient; the average grant in 2008 was $43,200. Since 1925, there have been more than 16,000 Guggenheim fellows, including 100 Nobel Prize Winners and 32 Poet Laureates.

Ramin Bahrani, an adjunct assistant film professor, received his B.A. in film studies from Columbia in 1996. He wrote and directed the films Man Push Cart (2005), which won more than ten international prizes, including the FIPRESCI international critics prize in the London Film Festival; Chop Shop (2007); and Goodbye Solo (2008).  Bahrani will be the subject of prestigious international retrospectives in 2009 at the MoMA in New York City, Harvard University and the La Rochelle Film Festival in France.

Stacey D'Erasmo, assistant writing professor, received her B.A. from Barnard. A former Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University, her novel, Tea, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2000. From 1988 to 1995 she was a senior editor at The Village Voice Literary Supplement and from 1997 to 1998 she created and developed the fiction section of Bookforum. Her third novel, The Sky Below, was published in January 2009 and reviewed on the January 9 cover of The New York Times Book Review.

Pierre Force, a professor in the department of French and romance philology, specializes in seventeenth and eighteenth century French literature and intellectual history. He is the author of Le Problème herméneutique chez Pascal (1989), Molière ou Le Prix des choses (1994) and Self-Interest before Adam Smith (2003). Chair of the French department from 1997 to 2007, Force is also affiliated with the history department and a winner of the 2005Columbia Distinguished Faculty award.

Asian American studies professor Mae Ngai received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1998. She teaches courses on immigration history, Asian American history and twentieth-century U.S. history. Her book, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004), won the Frederick Jackson Turner prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association.

Joseph R. Slaughter, associate professor of English and comparative literature, teaches and publishes in the fields of postcolonial literature and theory; African, Caribbean and Latin American literatures; postcolonialism; narrative theory; human rights; and 20th-century ethnic and third world literatures. His book, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (2007), was awarded the 2008 Rene Wellek prize for comparative literature and cultural theory.

Nicholas Turse, associate research scientist at the Mailman School of Public Health, received his Ph.D. in sociomedical sciences from Columbia in 2005. The associate editor and research director of the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, Turse has written for The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, Mother Jones and The Village Voice. Turse is currently at work on Kill Anything That Moves, a history of U.S. atrocities during the Vietnam War.

Mathematics professor Shou-Wu Zhang specializes in number theory and arithmetical algebraic geometry. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1991. Before he joined Columbia in 1996, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study and an assistant professor at Princeton University. In 1998 Zhang was awarded a Morningside Gold Medal of Mathematics by the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians for his work on Bogomolov conjecture and Gross--Zagier formula.  He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Algebraic Geometry, the Journal of Differential Geometry, and Science in China.