6/7/07 - Texas A&M English Professor Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship for 2007-2008

Faculty members in the English department at Texas A&M University have started a new tradition: earning John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships. The department learned this past spring that Associate Professor Robert J. Griffin was awarded a Guggenheim for 2007-2008. He is the third English professor to earn this fellowship in the past five years. The other two are Margaret Ezell and Jerome Loving, both distinguished professors.

“To provide some context, only seven English departments in the nation had more than one Guggenheim during this five-year period,” said Paul A. Parrish, Regents Professor and head of the English department. “And only two exceeded the number awarded to Texas A&M.”

Griffin plans to use his fellowship to finish work on Anonymity and Authorship, a book length study on the cultural history and poetics of anonymous publication in the period known for the rise of the author.

Prior to arriving at Texas A&M in 2005, Griffin, who earned his Ph.D. at Yale University, taught at Bowdoin College and Tel Aviv University. His research specializes in theoretical and methodological problems in literary and cultural history. His book, Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1995. He edited both The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, 2003, and ELH Essays in Honor of Ronald Paulson, 2005. Griffin is also the associate editor of Poetics Today.

Ezell, who received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003-2004, worked on the 1645-1714 volume for the new Oxford English Literary History series. Loving, awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002-2003, finished work on his biography of Theodore Dreiser.

Guggenheim fellowships are awarded on the basis of distinguished past achievement and promise for future accomplishment to professionals in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and creative arts. Since 1925 the Foundation has granted more than $256 million in fellowships to more than 16,250 individuals.

Erin Wood