Please join me in congratulating two IU Bloomington faculty members who recently received fellowships from the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation as part of its 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows.
- Christoph Irmscher, Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of English and director of the Wells Scholar Program, is a literary scholar, biographer, and critic. During his fellowship, he will complete "Borrowed Lives," a non-memoir based on old family photographs, and work on a biography of Daniel Aaron, the Harvard scholar of American literature and intellectual history.
- David Polly, professor in and chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a vertebrate paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and geologist. His Guggenheim fellowship will focus on the onset of cyclical ice ages roughly 2.5 million years ago—a pivotal moment in Earth’s climate history—and whether this climatic shift changed how new species come to be.
Rick Van Kooten, executive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said in a recent story, “The Guggenheim Fellowship is among the most competitive honors in American scholarship, and we are incredibly proud of David’s and Christoph’s achievement. Their work exemplifies the liberal arts and sciences at their highest expression, on the one hand transforming how we understand evolutionary change, and on the other affirming literature as essential to how we make sense of being alive.”
Congratulations, Professors Irmscher and Polly!