University of Illinois creative writing professor Janice N. Harrington and history professor David Sepkoski have each received a 2020 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. They are two scholars of 175 selected from a pool of 3,000 applicants.
According to Illinois News Bureau:
Harrington will use her fellowship tenure to study space, place and African American expressiveness in the small towns and midsized cities of the Midwest. Her work will take her to once-sundown towns, the salt mines of southern Illinois, early black pioneer settlements and a variety of Midwestern archives.
Sepkoski will use his fellowship to work on a book about scientific debates in recent decades over the biological and genetic basis for human nature. The book will span from the 1970s controversy over sociobiology – a theory that explains human abilities as primarily determined by evolution and genetics – to the decoding of the human genome.
Congrats to these two on their achievements!
Top image from the Illinois New Bureau website.