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11 unusual facts about Guggenheim Fellowship


A. J. M. Smith

As early as 1939, Smith applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the preparation of an anthology of Canadian poetry.

Alden Nowlan

Nowlan's most notable literary achievements include the Governor General's Award for Bread, Wine and Salt (1967) and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 1967, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his collection Bread, Wine and Salt was awarded the Governor General's Award for Poetry.

Cyrus Hoy

He served as the general editor of the Regents Renaissance Drama series, and was a Guggenheim Fellow.

Dody Weston Thompson

In 1952, she was co-awarded the prestigious Albert M. Bender Award (known informally in the West as the “Little Guggenheim”) which financed a year's work in photography.

Dorothy Nelkin

Her work was widely cited and she received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984, the John Desmond Bernal Prize of the Society for the Social Studies of Science in 1988, the John McGovern Award of the American Medical Writers Association in 1999, and election to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1993.

E. Franklin Frazier

In 1941 Frazier embarked on a year-long study of family life in Brazil, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Harry Gottlieb

In 1923, Gottlieb settled in Woodstock, New York and in 1931, spent a year abroad studying under a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Russell Weigley

Weigley was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1969-70.

Underground Literary Alliance

The six of them met in Hoboken, New Jersey, in October, 2000, in order to launch the group and commence their activism by signing a statement of protest against a Guggenheim grant given to Rick Moody, an already-wealthy writer.

Welcome Change Productions

Alice Elliott is an Academy Award® nominated director, a writer, producer, university level teacher, advocate for the disabled, cinematographer, and the recipient of 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.


Aaron Cicourel

Cicourel held a Russell Sage Foundation Post Doctoral Fellowship at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center, a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship at London University in England, a Guggenheim Fellowship at the University of Madrid in Spain, and was a Fulbright lecturer in Brazil and Spain.

Alfred Métraux

In 1940, upon his return to the United States from South America, he was in residence at Yale University with a renewal of his Guggenheim Fellowship.

Ann Nelson

Ann Nelson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.

B'nai Yosef Synagogue

Every inch of wall space, including the prayer hall, is covered with murals painted by Archie Rand, professor of art at Brooklyn College, fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, and a Laureate of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.

Blake Bailey

In 2005, Bailey was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on his biography, Cheever: A Life, which won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Bonnie Marranca

She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship in the UK, and Fulbright Senior Scholar who has taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, NYU, Duke University, the University of California-San Diego, Free University of Berlin, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona Institute for Theatre .

Carl Safina

Safina is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Pew Fellow in Marine conservation, an Utne Reader visionary, and a recipient of Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo’s Rabb Medal, among other honors.

Carlos Escudé

In 1981 he earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale; in 1984 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; in 1986 he was decorated with the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins for promoting peace and friendship between Argentina and Chile; in 1996 he received the Konex Award, and in 2003 he was appointed 2003-2004 Ashley Fellow by Trent University (Canada), nominated as “likely the most distinguished political theorist in Latin America”.

Colette Inez

She has published ten poetry collections and has won the Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA Fellowships) and two Prizes and many other awards.

Felix Morley

He obtained a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, which resulted in his book The Society of Nations (1933) and a Ph.D. from the Brookings Institution.

G. Michael Bancroft

He was awarded the RSC's Rutherford Memorial Medal in 1980, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982/3, and the CIC and Montreal medals of the Chemical Institute of Canada in 1996 and 2002 respectively.

George Mandler

He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, received the William James Award from the American Psychological Association (APA), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Fellowship status in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Cognitive Science Society.

Giovanni Pascoli

Part of Pascoli's work was translated into English by Lawrence Venuti, who in 2007 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Humanities for that reason.

Gordon Thomas Whyburn

After two years as an adjunct professor at U. of Texas, with the aid of a Guggenheim fellowship Whyburn spent the academic year 1929/1930 in Vienna with Hans Hahn and in Warsaw with Kuratowski and Sierpinski.

Jon Lowenstein

Lowenstein was recently awarded the 2012 Open Society Foundation’s Audience Engagement Grant and was named a 2011 Guggenheim fellow in photography for his work on the South Side, Chicago.

Lee Hyla

Lee Hyla (born August 31, 1952, Niagara Falls, New York) is an American classical music composer who has been the recipient of the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Goddard Lieberson Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the St. Botolph Club Award, and the Rome Prize.

Leonard Gardner

His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire, The Southwest Review, and other publications, and he has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Leslie Thornton

Thornton has received many awards in the field: the Maya Deren Award, the first Alpert Award in the Arts for media, a nomination for the Hugo Boss Award, two Rockefeller Fellowships, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation and, Art Matters, and, most recently, a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Lionel W. McKenzie

McKenzie has been the recipient of numerous professional awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973, election to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1978, the Order of the Rising Sun in 1995 and honorary doctorates from Keio University in 1998 and Kyoto University in 2004.

Lloyd Noel Ferguson

While affiliated with Howard University, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953 and an NSF grant in 1960 that allowed him to travel to the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, Denmark, and to ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

Peggy Seeger

Seeger's father was Charles Seeger (1886–1979), an important folklorist and musicologist; her mother was Seeger's second wife, Ruth Porter Crawford (1901–1953), a modernist composer who was one of the first women to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Randolph Greene Pack

Through the Pack Foundation, Randolph "became a founder of the Mexican Institute of Renewable Natural Resources" (Instituto Mexicano de Recursos Naturales Renovables, or IMERNAR), headed by Enrique Beltrán, who received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1932 for his conservation efforts.

Reinhard Bendix

In the course of his lifetime, he received many honors, including fellowships from the Fulbright Program and the Guggenheim, a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, as well as being named a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, and was accepted into both the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Roger Parker

He received the "Premio Giuseppe Verdi" in 1985 (award ceremony 1986), was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1986-87, and in 1991 was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association.

Ulfert Wilke

He received the Guggenheim Fellowship twice (in 1959 and 1960), which he used to travel to work and study first in Munich and Rome, and later Kyoto, Japan where he lived in monastery and studied Japanese Zen calligraphy under the monks.

United States Air Force Academy Preparatory School

Nine prep school graduates have held the Cadet Wing's top leadership position as cadet wing commander, and prep school graduates have earned prestigious awards, including the Rhodes Scholarship, Fulbright Scholarship, Order of the Daedalians Scholarship, and the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Verlyn Klinkenborg

In 2007, he received a Guggenheim fellowship, which funded his book The Mermaids of Lapland, about William Cobbett.

William S. Livingston

During his tenure, he received Ford and Guggenheim Fellowships, chaired two departments, developed numerous programs and served as Dean of the Graduate School and acting President of the University of Texas at Austin.

Wilson Marcy Powell

Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941, Powell put together the Kenyon Cosmic Ray Expedition, and took a cloud chamber to the top of Mount Evans in Colorado.