Two professors in Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science have been named 2008 Fellows by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Michael D. Bess, the Chancellor’s Professor of History, and Barbara Hahn, Distinguished Professor of German, are among 190 recipients in the United States and Canada to receive a Guggenheim. Artists, scholars and scientists in all fields are eligible to apply for the highly coveted fellowships, which are awarded on the basis of impressive achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The recipients were chosen from a group of more than 2,600 applicants.
"The Guggenheim is one of the most competitive fellowships available in the humanities, so two awards in one year underscores the strength of our faculty," said Richard McCarty, dean of the College of Arts and Science. "We are pleased but not surprised that the rigorous peer review process enabled these outstanding proposals to be recognized."
Bess will use the fellowship to complete work on a book with the working title Icarus 2.0: Technology, Ethics, and the Quest to Build a Better Human. His research explores the ethical and social implications of new technologies for human biological enhancement.
"I believe that we are currently in the early stages of an epochal shift that will prove as momentous as the other great technological watersheds in human history – the shift from stone to metal tools, the substitution of steam power for human and animal sources of energy and more," he said. "However, this time, it is not our tools and systems of production, but our bodies themselves that are changing." Bess said that these technologies sound like science fiction – the bionic woman, the clone armies, the intelligent robot – to name a few.
However, Bess said they are becoming reality at an accelerating pace, and he believes society is dangerously unprepared for the impact. In addition to the Guggenheim, Bess has received a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for 2008-2009.
Alongside his work on social and cultural impacts of technological change, Bess teaches and writes about 20th-century Europe and is the author of Choices under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (Knopf, 2006).
During Hahn’s fellowship, she will continue working on Poetry Is Closest to Thought: Hannah Arendt’s Literature, a book that explores the intersection of philosophy, politics and poetry after World War II. Arendt, a political philosopher of the 20th century, had a tremendous impact on American poets, said Hahn.
"No other theoretical writer in the 20th century worked so intensively to discover the specific ‘knowledge’ mediated by literature," said Hahn. "Unlike her friends Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, Arendt did not restrict her readings of literary texts to writing essays explicitly on literature. For her, it was impossible to write any text – regardless of the topic – without turning for insight to a poem, a novel or a drama."
Hahn, who taught at Princeton before coming to Vanderbilt in 2004, will use previously unknown documents from archives in the United States, Austria and Germany for her research. "Political theory, philosophy and poetry are fields of knowledge that tend to operate independently of one another, but reconstructing their close collaboration is a precondition for understanding the second half of the 20th century and the role of Arendt and her ‘poet friends’ in it."
Hahn has published widely on German-Jewish culture; her books include The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity (Princeton, 2005). In addition, she has written essays about Friedrich Nietzsche, Charlotte von Stein and Franz Kafka, among others.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was established in 1925 by Sen. Simon Guggenheim and his wife as a memorial to a son who had passed away earlier.
Vanderbilt professors who have received Guggenheims include 2005 winner Ruth Rogaski, associate professor of history; 1999 winner Jay Clayton, the William R. Kenan Professor of English; 1994 winner Paul Freedman, former professor of history; 1992 winner John Wikswo, the Gordon A. Cain University Professor; and 1991 winners Mark Jarman, the Centennial Professor of English; and Matthew Ramsey, associate professor of history.
Media Contact: Ann Marie Owens, (615) 322-NEWS
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