April 14, 2005
Two UW faculty members awarded Guggenheim fellowships
Two UW faculty members — David Shields of English and Mark Ellis of geography — have been chosen to receive Guggenheim Fellowship Awards for 2005.
The two were among 186 fellows announced last week by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, for Guggenheim Fellowship awards totaling about $7 million. The awards are given on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise of future accomplishment.
Shields, a professor of English, joined the UW in 1988. He is an award-winning author and essayist whose writing includes the novels Heroes (1984) and Dead Languages (1992), as well as the nonfiction works Baseball is Just Baseball: The Understated Ichiro, and Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season. Shields is currently at work on a project titled A Meditation on the Brute Fact of Human Mortality.
Ellis, a professor of geography with an affiliate appointment in the Center for Studies of Demography and Ecology, joined the UW in 1999. His research centers around migration, ethnicity and local labor markets with an emphasis on the socioeconomic impacts of immigration in U.S. cities. Ellis is at work on a project titled Daily Geographics of the Color Line in American Cities.
The year’s fellowship selections, chosen from about 3,000 applications, reflected a diverse spectrum of work, interests and age. The youngest recipient is a 29-year-old New York composer; the oldest is a 76-year-old writer, illustrator and choreographer in San Francisco.
Since it started giving out the awards in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted about $240 million in fellowships to about 15,500 individuals. Former Guggenheim Fellows include photographer Ansel Adams, composer Aaron Copland, playwright Langston Hughes, novelists Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth and Eudora Welty, as well as scientists Linus Pauling and James Watson. The full list of 2005 Guggenheim Fellows is available online at http://www.gf.org.
