Four Philadelphians among this year’s Guggenheim Fellows

Four Philadelphians are part of the 100th class of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship winners.

Gettysburg College professor Jim Downs, choreographer Merián Soto, University of Pennsylvania political science professor Matthew Levendusky, and Temple University film and media arts professor and filmmaker Rea Tajiri are among the 198 selected for the fellowship from more than 3,500 applicants.

“It’s incredibly humbling,” Levendusky said. “I applied but never expected to win … These fellowships are incredibly competitive, so it’s a huge honor to be selected.”

Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Fellowship has been awarded to “exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form,” a news release said. The foundation has granted over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 applicants, according to the organization’s website.

To apply, applicants are required to submit a project proposal with a detailed budget. Their entries are reviewed by the Guggenheim Fellowship board of trustees, who select the projects that receive a monetary stipend and the opportunity to pursue independent projects under “the freest possible conditions.”

Tajiri, who was awarded the United States Artists Fellowship earlier this year, said she was surprised to be named a Guggenheim Fellow. Given the country’s recent peel back on educational funding, Tajiri said the state of current affairs adds even more importance to her project.

Tajiri will delve into the history of the resettlement of Japanese Americans in major U.S. cities after World War II. Her father was one of the Japanese Americans who relocated to Chicago as part of the government-sponsored program.

The project, called “Non-Alien,” will draw from the “rethinking of race consciousness” and the civil rights movement.

“It carries a certain kind of weight at this time, with things being so precarious,” she said, “It really raises the stakes about personal voice and the weight of responsibility that artists have.”

Levendusky is also leading a considerably timely project. His work will examine how the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022, which effectively overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the federal constitutional right to abortion, reshaped American politics and further divided U.S. voters.

Downs, who researched public health and epidemiology under Harvard University’s Andrew Mellon New Directions Fellowship, will use the Fellowship to uncover how the field of public health has developed since the cholera pandemic of 1866.

His book project, titled Dead in the Water: A New Origin Story of Public Health, will also challenge long-standing ideas linked to public health in the U.S., and how Black and Native American populations outside major Northeast cities were overlooked when developing public health scholarship.

“Typically, historians think about public health exploding in the Northeast, mostly in New York City,” Downs said. “I want to explore both the global impact of the cholera pandemic, but also focus on what was happening in the West among Indigenous populations and among Black population in the post [Civil War] South. The funding is going to help me do research in the archives in the West, the South, and other parts of the world.”

For Soto, a longtime dancer, filmmaker, video artist, and the creator of Branch Dance, her series of projects will hearken back to her roots.

The Temple University dance professor plans to use the Guggenheim stipend to support “various legacy projects” and bring her meditative Branch Dance to her native Puerto Rico.

“I am grateful for this recognition of my 50-plus-year career in dance,” Soto said in a statement. “It’s a validation of my continued creative potential.”

For a complete list of Guggenheim Fellows, visit gf.org.

This article has been updated to include quotes from the Fellows.