Four faculty chosen as Guggenheim fellows

A quartet of faculty have received fellowships this spring from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Fellows are appointed by recommendations from expert advisers on the basis of distinguished past achievement and the promise of future accomplishment. New fellows from UW–Madison are:

Heather Dubrow, Tighe-Evans Professor and John Bascom Professor of English. Dubrow, a leading scholar of Renaissance literature, will use her grant to examine lyric poetry in the early modern period. The ensuing book will answer three questions, she says: “What is lyric poetry? Why and how does it assume distinctive forms in the English Renaissance? And what do the answers to those first two questions demonstrate about genre and gender, early modern culture and about our own academic culture? To address those problems, I hope to offer new approaches to critical dilemmas such as whether lyric is internalized mediation or social interaction, and how lyric interacts with narrative,” she says.

Kenneth M. George, professor of anthropology. He will work on a new book examining the relationship of art and politics. “To answer that question, I will turn to my long-term collaboration with Indonesian painter Abdul Djalil Pirous, examining how our time together has helped me understand the cultural and political significance of contemporary Islamic art in Indonesia between 1970 and 2000,” he says.

!IR”Julia K. Murray“, professor of art history. Murray will write a history of Kongzhai, a now-obliterated and forgotten monument to Confucius. “It stood some 25 miles west of Shanghai,” she says. “It was where a lineal descendant purportedly buried Confucius’ robe and cap over 1,000 years after his death. In the early 17th century, local scholars and officials began constructing a shrine there. Several generations of patrons enlarged the site and embellished its structures. Kongzhai was devastated by the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century. It was partially rebuilt and continued to exist until 1966, when the Red Guards destroyed it during the Cultural Revolution.”

Ken Ono, professor of mathematics. Any user of the Internet or cash machines can credit Ono’s area of research for the security systems that protect privacy. A specialist in numbers theory, Ono studies elliptical curves and modular forms. “They were made famous in the Broadway play, ‘Proof,'” he says. “They have both theoretical and applied uses. For example, cryptography is what allows you to have a PIN (personal identification number) when you use a cash machine.”

UW–Madison is among 89 institutions recognized with Guggenheim Fellows this spring. In all, 184 fellows were selected.