Three professors win coveted Guggenheim Fellowships

A trio of University of Wisconsin–Madison professors — a scholar of early modern literature, an analyst who studies the impact of social networks on children and a geoscientist who teaches his subject through the lens of arts and music — have been awarded 2023 Guggenheim Fellowships.

English Professor Elizabeth B. Bearden; Jason Fletcher, a Vilas Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs; and Stephen R. Meyers, a Vilas Distinguished Professor of Geoscience, were among 171 scholars selected from almost 2,500 applicants in the United States and Canada by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Winners are selected for both their prior achievements and exceptional promise.

Bearden, who studies early modern literature from antiquity to the Renaissance, often focuses on the use of verbal description for visual representation. Her second book, 2019’s Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability, was the winner of the Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities.

Fletcher, a professor with the La Follette School of Public Affairs, also has appointments in Applied Economics and Population Health Sciences. His research examines the effects of early social networks on children’s long-term physical and mental health outcomes, estimating the ways in which in utero and early life experiences impact later life health, cognition and mortality. Fletcher won a 2012 William T. Grant Foundation Award to study the interplay of genetics and social settings in youth development.

Meyers is the founder of the tadada Scientific Lab, a multidisciplinary effort that merges science education with everything from music, art and photography to poetry and film. A trained sedimentary geologist, Meyers’ research homes in on the statistical analysis of the paleoclimate, including variability in ice sheets and sea level change. His Guggenheim Fellowship is part of the Foundation’s new Climate Change Fund and is supported by 1989 Guggenheim Fellow Jerold S. Kayden, the Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded more than $400 million in Fellowships, and its roster of Fellows includes Nobel laureates, as well as winners of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.