Four from Penn awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

Three Penn professors and a senior critic in the School of Design were awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation last week.

Recipients of this year's fellowship - grant money given to artists, scientists and scholars for their research efforts - include English professor David Wallace, Sociology professor Susan Watkins, Music professor Anna Weesner and design critic Alexi Worth.

According to the press release, the four are among 180 selected from a 3,000-applicant pool.

"I'm ecstatic about the Guggenheim fellowship," Watkins, a visiting research scientist from the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote in an e-mail.

With the grant, she intends to write a book, Navigating AIDS in Rural Malawi, based on research that she, her colleagues and a number of undergraduate and graduate students have been conducting since 1997, she said.

Wallace will work on a two-volume compilation of the first literary history of Europe during the medieval period of 1348-1400 published in English.

His final project outline promises "the excitement of a continuous read."

Weesner was also enthusiastic about her future endeavors.

The fellowship will support her sabbatical next year, during which she will work on new chamber music compositions using mostly strings, piano and singers, and record existing original pieces.

Worth will also be propagating his own work in the arts, particularly painting.

"Alexi's wit - his keen sense of the perverse figurative qualities of everyday life, and his sharp take on contemporary art - have been so important to our graduate students," Joshua Mosley, acting chairman of the Fine Arts department, wrote of Worth. "His work is a stunning reflection of his thinking."

University President Amy Gutmann also expressed pride toward the award winners.

"While Penn faculty have won Guggenheims in a wide range of disciplines over the years, the subfields represented this year ... are all areas in which Penn has a particularly distinguished tradition," she wrote in an e-mail. "This is concrete evidence of Penn's progress from excellence to eminence."

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