AUSTIN, Texas—Three professors from The University of Texas at Austin have been appointed Guggenheim Fellows on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.
The professors are John R. Clarke of the College of Fine Arts, Daniel S. Freed of the College of Natural Sciences and Michael Gagarin of the College of Liberal Arts. They are among 184 artists, scholars and scientists selected from more than 2,800 applicants for awards totaling $6,750,000. The winners of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 78th annual United States and Canadian competition were announced by the foundation president, Joel Conarroe.
The winners are selected on the basis of recommendations from hundreds of expert advisers and are approved by the foundation’s board of trustees, which includes seven members who are themselves past fellows of the foundation.
Clarke, the Annie Laurie Howard Regents professor at The University of Texas at Austin, has taught in the Department of Art and Art History since 1980. His entry was titled “Humor, power and transgression in ancient Roman visual culture.”
He has published extensively on ancient Roman art and culture. His 1998 book, Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100 B.C.-A.D. 250, won the Dallas Museum of Art’s Vasari award. His book on visual representation and non-elite Romans, Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans, will be published by the University of California Press in 2003. As a Guggenheim Fellow, Clarke will conduct research in Italy for a book titled Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture.
Freed, a professor in the university’s Department of Mathematics, submitted an entry titled “Applications of K-theory to geometry and physics.” He has received National Science Foundation grants in geometric analysis and has been a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award, the O’Donnell Foundation Grant, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and other awards. He is a member of the American Mathematical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served on the Scientific Advisory Council and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, Calif., and served from 1990-99 on the steering committee of the IAS/Park City Mathematical Institute.
Gagarin, the James R. Dougherty Jr. Centennial professor of classics, has taught at The University of Texas at Austin since 1973. In addition to his classics courses, he regularly teaches in the Plan II Honors Program and in The University of Texas School of Law. He is an authority on ancient Greek civilization, in particular Greek law and rhetoric. Among his books are Early Greek Law and Antiphon the Athenian: Oratory, Law and Justice in the Age of the Sophists, which has just been published by The University of Texas Press. He is the general editor of a 15-volume series of new translations of the Greek orators that also is being published by The University of Texas Press. During his Guggenheim fellowship, he will write a new book on Writing and Orality in Ancient Greek Law, based on a series of lectures he gave at the Sorbonne in Paris last May. Gagarin is president of the American Philological Association, the professional society for classicists in the United States and Canada.
The new Guggenheim Fellowship Award winners include writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, choreographers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists and scholars in the humanities. Many of these individuals hold appointments in colleges and universities, with 86 institutions being represented by one or more fellows. A number of those named have no academic affiliation. Since 1925, the foundation has granted more than $200 million in fellowships to more than 15,000 individuals.
