The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has named two faculty members at The University of Texas at Austin to its 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows:
Noah Isenberg, Charles Sapp Centennial Professor in radio-television-film and the executive director of UTLA and UTNY in the Moody College of Communication
Bret Anthony Johnston, Mari Sabusawa Regents Chair in writing in the College of Liberal Arts and director of the Michener Center for Writers in the Graduate School
“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators and creators in art, science and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation in this week’s announcement. “As the foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work.”
The two professors were selected out of over 5,000 applications across disciplines. Each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue an individual project. Read more about the professors and their projects below.
Noah Isenberg
The fellowship will be in support of Isenberg’s biography of filmmaker Billy Wilder, who wrote and directed films such as “Sabrina” and “Sunset Boulevard.” The biography is under contract to appear in the Yale Jewish Lives series at Yale University Press. Isenberg has previously worked on a cultural history of Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot,” for which he was a faculty research fellow at the Harry Ransom Center during the spring of 2022.
Isenberg is the Charles Sapp Centennial Professor of Radio-Television-Film and serves as executive director of the University’s two study-away centers UTLA (Los Angeles) and UTNY (New York City), where he is based. He is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller “We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie,” and he has been awarded several national and international research fellowships and awards.
Bret Anthony Johnston
With the fellowship, Johnston will be exploring the challenges facing the shrimping industry on the Texas coast, through a novel tentatively titled “The Gulf.” Through the novel, he will hear from coastal residents who are part of a once booming industry that’s now facing myriad obstacles, and how their livelihoods are changing.
Johnston is the director of the Michener Center for Writers and an internationally bestselling author. His novel “Remember Me Like This,” which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, has been translated around the world and is being made into a major motion picture. Johnston has written about the Texas Gulf Coast previously in the award-winning “Corpus Christi: Stories.”
