Prestigious fellowship awarded to English faculty three times

The English department at Texas A&M University has a new reason to boast; three members of its faculty have received John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships in the past five years.

“To give you a context for understanding how rare this is, only seven English departments in the nation had more than one Guggenheim fellow during this five-year period. And only two exceeded the number awarded to Texas A&M.” said Regents Professor Paul A. Parrish.

Guggenheim fellowships are awarded to professionals in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and creative arts on the basis of distinguished past achievement and promise for future accomplishment. The fellowship supports its recipients by affording them money and time to spend on their research.

The three Guggenheim recipients at Texas A&M are Distinguished Professors Jerome Loving and Margaret Ezell and Associate Professor Robert J. Griffin.

Loving was awarded a Guggenheim in 2002-2003 and used the fellowship to complete his biography of Theodore Dreiser. His book The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser (University of California Press, 2005) was published and widely reviewed. The Association of Former Students recognized him for his work with a Distinguished Achievement Award for Research.

Ezell is currently working on the 1645-1714 volume for the new Oxford English Literary History series. The Guggenheim fellowship she received in 2003-2004 enabled her to make several trips to libraries such as the British Library, the Bodleian in Oxford, and the Huntington Library in California for research on seventeenth-century material.

Griffin, who received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, plans to use the award to finish work on Anonymity and Authorship, a book on the cultural history and poetics of anonymous publication in the period known for the rise of the author.

“The Guggenheim success does two things for our department,” said Jimmie Killingsworth, professor and head of the English department. “It brings much deserved international attention to the accomplishments of our faculty, and within the university it verifies what many of us within the department have known for a long time: the excellence of these three colleagues.”

-30-

Erin Wood
College Relations Intern
erinwood@libarts.tamu.edu
979.862.4879