On April 8, five UVA professors were honored with Guggenheim fellowships, awarded to those who have demonstrated exceptionally productive scholarship or creative ability in the arts. In 1925, former U.S. Senator and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim established the fellowships in memory of their son.
Former prize winners include Ansel Adams, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Nabokov.
The Prize Winners
Dan Addison
Who: Francesca Fiorani, associate professor of art history.
Interests: Renaissance art and culture, focused on bridging the gap between the history of ideas and the materiality of objects.
New project: Leonardo’s Shadows, a book that will be a synthetic, cultural study that combines the close, technical analysis of shadows in Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings with the artist’s theoretical knowledge of optics recorded in his notebooks and drawings. Her plans include spending time in Italy studying da Vinci’s paintings and materials in historic libraries in Florence.
Who: Risa Goluboff, Law School professor.
Interests: The history of civil rights, labor and constitutional law in the 20th century.
New project: A book that will explore how the collapse of vagrancy law was an integral part of the social revolutions of the 1960s, as well as the legal and social implications of that collapse in the decades since.
Who: Deborah Lawrence, associate professor of environmental sciences.
Interests: The consequences of land-use change on tropical ecosystems.
New Project: Work on the effects of “slash and burn” agriculture and land-use transitions in the tropics, especially the tropical forests of mainland Southeast Asia.
Jane Haley
Who: Charles Marsh, professor of religious studies.
Interests: Marsh’s Lived Theology Project is concerned with the practical consequences of religious commitment.
New Project: Feasts on the Journey to Freedom: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a biography of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis in 1945 for participating in an attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler.
Dan Addison
Who: Lisa Russ Spaar, associate professor of English.
Interests: Poetry. Her writing was described by the Los Angeles Times as “heightened lyricism, swelling music ... [with] a muscular, thrumming undercurrent.”
New Project: A fourth full-length collection of poems—including a series of poems about women associated with the Lake District poets, particularly Dorothy and Dora Wordsworth—that explores the ways in which the languages of Eros and religious devotion, at their most intense, are interchangeable.
