Five UCLA professors have been awarded 2007 Guggenheim fellowship awards for extraordinary achievements in their fields.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grants fellowships to professionals in all fields except for the performing arts. Students are ineligible for the award, and faculty participants must produce a lengthy application stating their accomplishments and detailed plans of how they would use the grant if won, according to the award’s Web site.
Art Professor Jennifer Bolande, history Professors J. Arch Getty and Teofilo Ruiz, atmospheric and oceanic sciences Professor J. David Neelin, and world arts and cultures and American Indian studies Professor Peter Nabokov all won Guggenheim fellowships. The university did not disclose how much each faculty member was awarded.
“The Guggenheims are one of the most prestigious fellowships that the faculty can get,” said Roberto Peccei, UCLA vice chancellor of research.
“They give out less than 200 fellowships a year, so I think that fact that we got five of them is really terrific,” he added. “It speaks very well on the quality of the faculty of UCLA.”
Bolande plans to use her fellowship to create two new works using photography, sculpture, collage, projected images, and possibly film, sound and installation, according to a university press release.
“The fellowship will greatly assist in providing the time and resources necessary for the research, development, and production of my work ““ not only this year, but it will pave the way for what I’ll be doing in the years to follow,” Bolande said in a statement.
Getty is an authority on the former Soviet Union.
Upon receiving the grant, he plans to finish a book about the role that centuries-old forms of cultural etiquette may have played in Soviet society, according to a statement from the university.
Getty plans to spend about six months in Moscow researching in the archives of the Communist Party.
Ruiz specializes in medieval Spain, and said he hopes to continue his work on a book about Spanish festivals between 1350 and 1640 and the effect they had on the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period.
“I hoped to get the award, but I did not expect it. It is a very competitive award. I am very flattered and honored, very glad,” Ruiz said.
“I began the work seven or eight years ago. I have been publishing articles and chapters for a very long time. I am excited to be able to start writing the book I have been working on in the late spring,” Ruiz said.
Neelin is a member of UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. He will be using his grant to refine methods of analyzing rain in climate models, according to a university press release.
Nabokov will begin writing two books. One will be a fully restored, edited version of the origin myth of the Acoma Pueblo in western New Mexico, and the second is a biography of the Acoma Indian who narrated that myth to the Smithsonian Institute scholars in 1929, according to a university press release.
“Like everybody that applies, I had hopes but no expectations. When I see the Guggenheim fellowship under the acknowledgements of any book, I am in awe. I am grateful, humbled and ready to get to work,” Nabokov said in a statement. “I am … ready to sit down at my desk for a long, long time.”
With the high prestige that accompanies this award, recipients said they understand that there is a pressure to produce great things with their individual fellowships.
“There is a sense of exhilaration on one hand and responsibility on the other. This is an award with a very distinguished history,” Nabokov said.
UCLA faculty members have a long history of winning prestigious awards, with five professors having won Nobel Prizes in the past, according to a statement from the university.