Columbia Faculty Members Receive Guggenheim Fellowships

Columbia professors in disciplines such as classics, sociology, music and writing were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for 2015. They are among 175 scholars, artists and scientists chosen from more than 3,100 applicants this year and were selected based on significant achievements and future promise.

The award comes with a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to pursue their work. Since it was established in 1925, the Foundation has awarded over $325 million to more than 18,000 individuals.

Columbia's 2015 Guggenheim Fellows are:

Meghan Daum (SOA'96) is an associate professor at the School of the Arts. She is the author of four books; her latest, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, was published in November 2014. Daum has lived in New York, Nebraska and now Los Angeles, where she has been a columnist on the op-ed page of The Los Angeles Times since 2005. She has written for other publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine and Vogue.

Kristoffer Diaz, adjunct professor of theatre at the School of the Arts, is a New Dramatists resident playwright. He has written short works as well as full-length plays including The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity (a Pulitzer finalist in 2010 and winner of the Lucille Lortel Award for outstanding play), Welcome to Arroyo’s, The Upstairs Concierge and The Unfortunates. His work has been produced, commissioned and developed at theaters worldwide, among them the Public Theater, The Goodman Theatre in Chicago, London's Donmar Warehouse.

Brent Hayes Edwards, a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, who has writen extensively on jazz, the African diaspora, Francophone literature, 20th century cultural politics in Paris, surrealism, and more. One of his most noted books, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association and the Gilbert Chinard prize of the Society for French Historical Studies. Edwards currently co-edits the journal Social Text and is working on two books.

Carmela Vircillo Franklin is Professor of Classics. Franklin also served as director of the American Academy in Rome from 2005-2010. Her research and writing focus on medieval Latin texts and their manuscripts. Professor Franklin will use the fellowship to prepare the first critical edition of the Liber pontificalis of the 12th century, to be published in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. This text is at the center of a larger project provisionally entitled “The Liber pontificalis of Pandulphus Romanus: From Schismatic Document to Renaissance Exemplar,” a study of the reception of the papal chronicle created during the schism of 1130.

Rivka Galchen, an adjunct associate professor of writing at the School of the Arts, has had her work published in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times and more. She continues to work with Harper’s as a contributing editor. In 2010, The New Yorker chose Galchen for its “20 Under 40” list of fiction writers. The Canadian-American's first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances was published in 2008 and named as a finalist for the Mercantile Library's John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the Canadian Writers' Trust's Fiction Prize and the 2008 Governor General's Award, one of Canada's most prestigious literary prizes.

Cathy Park Hong, a Korean-American author and poet, is an adjunct professor of writing at the School of the Arts. Her work is known for including mixed languages such as in her 2007 book of poems, Dance Dance Revolution, for which she was awarded the Barnard Women Poets Prize. She won the Pushcart Prize for her first book Translating Mo'um, published in 2002. Her most recent book of poems, Engine Empire, came out in 2012. Hong’s poems have been published in A Public Space, Poetry, Paris Review, The Nation and other journals. She has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a Fulbright. She is also an associate professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music. His work in electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated and improvisational forms is documented on more than 140 recordings. His music has been presented by orchestras worldwide, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble and more. Lewis won an American Book Award for his 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, a history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

Jonathan Rieder is the former chair and a current professor of sociology at Barnard and Columbia.  His work focuses primarliy on contemporary American culture and politics; unity and division in the United States; the sociology of culture; and race, ethnicity and American pluralism. He is the author of various books and essays on U.S. racial history including Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter From Birmingham Jail and The Struggle That Changed a Nation.