SIX UC BERKELEY PROFESSORS GIVEN GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIPS
By Emily Grospe

Daily Californian
April 10 2008
CA

Six UC Berkeley professors were awarded John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation fellowships this year, the foundation announced last week.

The foundation awarded fellowships to 190 artists, scientists and
scholars this year from more than 2,600 applicants, said Richard
Hatter, the foundation’s director of development and public
relations. Professors in the UC system received 17 fellowships
in total.

Fellows are chosen on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional
promise for continued accomplishment in their field of research,
Hatter said.

History professor Margaret Lavinia Anderson, anthropology professor
Stanley Brandes, classics professor John Ferrari, philosophy professor
Paolo Mancosu, psychology professor Arthur Shimamura and rhetoric
and film professor Kaja Silverman were awarded.

The foundation awarded $8.2 million total this year, with the average
award being $43,000, Hatter said.

Silverman felt this award was gratifying particularly because she was
awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Berkeley on the same
day she was notified of the fellowship.

"Being recognized both as a teacher and researcher meant a lot to me,"
Silverman said.

Awarded professors said they would be using the fellowship to
temporarily step away from teaching in order to focus on research.

Mancosu will be examining the interplay between the philosophy of
mathematics and mathematical logic from 1900 to 1940 at the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. next spring.

Department of Philosophy Chair R. Jay Wallace noted Mancosu’s broad
range of talents in philosophy

"He combines … philosophical sophistication, technical competence
and wide-ranging historical knowledge," Wallace said.

Anderson will be researching Germany’s relationship to the Ottoman
empire and its Armenian minority from the 1890s to the 1930s at
Stanford University.

History Department Chair Mary Elizabeth Berry mentioned the difficulty
of Anderson’s work.

"It takes a whole lot of brains, heart and courage to take on a subject
as complex and controversial as the Armenian genocide-she’s got them
all," Berry said.

Shimamura will spend a year in New York working on a book on the
psychology of art and aesthetic.

"It gives me freedom financially and time-wise to really devote myself
to this," Shimamura said.

Ferrari, who specializes in ancient philosophy, will take a year
off to explore fiction and the limits of social meaning. He said he
was very grateful that the award would afford him the time to sit,
think and write.

"My job calls on me to give grades and award prizes. It’s nice to be
on the receiving end of an award," Ferrari said.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress