Guggenheims awarded to six University scholars

Six faculty members -- George Chauncey, Prasenjit Duara, Constantin Fasolt, William Hanks, Lars Peter Hansen and Raymond Pierrehumbert -- have been named Guggenheim fellows by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The University has the second highest number of faculty members awarded Guggenheim fellowships this year of any university in the country, surpassed only by Princeton, which has nine fellows. Harvard has five fellows, and Michigan, Berkeley and Yale have four each.

The foundation chose 158 scholars, artists and scientists to receive the fellowships on the basis of unusually distinguished achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The winners were chosen from 2,791 applicants and will share fellowship awards totaling $4.5 million.

Chauncey, Associate Professor in History, will use his fellowship to continue his research on homosexuality and American culture, focusing particularly on the making of the gay world from 1935 to 1975. Chauncey's book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 won the 1994 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for a work of history and the Organization of American Historians' 1995 Frederick Jackson Turner Award and 1996 Merle Curti Social History Award.

Duara, Professor in History, will research the discourses of Japanese colonialism in Manchukuo (Manchuria) from 1932 to 1945. He has conducted extensive research in East Asia, particularly in China, and is the author of Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942, which was awarded the American Historical Association's John K. Fairbank Prize in 1989 and the Association of Asian Studies' Joseph R. Levenson Prize in 1990. His most recent book is Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, published by the Press in 1995.

Fasolt, Associate Professor in History, will study Hermann Conring, a 17th-century German physician best remembered as a political theorist and the founder of German legal history. A native of Germany, Fasolt has focused much of his work on medieval and early modern European political thought. He received the University's Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1989.

Hanks, Professor in Anthropology and Linguistics, will use his fellowship to research the historical emergence of colonial Maya language. A recipient of a joint Ph.D. in anthropology and linguistics from the University in 1983, he has conducted extensive fieldwork in Mexico and is known for his work on Yucatec, a complex language spoken on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula by today's descendants of the ancient Maya.

Hansen, the Homer J. Livingston Professor in Economics, will study empirical implications of alternative models of decision making under uncertainty. Hansen's research, which combines econometrics with macroeconomics and finance, characterizes and tests dynamic economic models. He is the co-author of several papers on the topic, including "Implications of Security Market Data for Models of Dynamic Economies" and "Pessimism and Risk in General Equilibrium."

Pierrehumbert, Professor in Geophysical Sciences, will continue his research on the fluid dynamics in the atmosphere, in the oceans and on other planets. He will use his fellowship to study the general circulation of Mars, in collaboration with the Anglo/French Mars Modeling Project. Pierrehumbert is known for his work on the applications of chaotic dynamics to mixing problems in planetary atmospheres.