Two GC Professors Win 2012 Guggenheim Fellowships

Two professors at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York—Dagmar Herzog and Joan Richardson—are among the recipients of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships for 2012.

Dagmar Herzog, the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar and professor of history, was awarded a fellowship for her trans-Atlantic research project on the European and American histories of psychoanalysis, trauma, and desire. It is titled “With History in Mind: Psychoanalysis in a Postwar World.”

Joan Richardson, professor of English, comparative literature, liberal studies, and American studies, and executive officer of the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies, was awarded a fellowship for her project, titled “Images, Shadows of Divine Things.” It is an experiment in secular spiritual autobiography that draws its design, somewhat, from Jonathan Edwards’s similarly titled text.

Professor Herzog, who was appointed to the faculty in 2005, conducts transnational and comparative research on how religion and secularization have affected social and political developments in modern Europe. She is an expert on the histories of Nazism and the Holocaust and their aftermath, and she is particularly attentive in her research to methodological innovations in critical source analysis and in gender and sexuality studies. Her most recent book is Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History. She is also the author of Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics; Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany; and Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden. She has edited six anthologies, including Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe's Twentieth Century and Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective. She has also published in more than twenty journals and edited volumes. Professor Herzog earned her B.A. at Duke University and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Brown University. She was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Professor Richardson, who joined the faculty in 1987, is the author of a two-volume biography of the poet Wallace Stevens—Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879-1928 and Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923-1955. She is also the co-editor, with Frank Kermode, of the Library of America edition Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Her study, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein, was nominated for the 2011 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Richardson is currently at work completing another volume, Pragmatism and American Culture. Her essays and interviews on such topics as Stevens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jonathan Edwards, Stanley Cavell, Alfred North Whitehead, William James, poetry, pragmatism, and the HBO series Deadwood have appeared in the Wallace Stevens Journal, Raritan, Configurations, The Hopkins Review, Bookforum, and as chapters in edited volumes, among other publications. Her awards include a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Richardson’s work reflects an abiding interest in the ways that philosophy, natural history, and science intersect with literature. Having grown up bilingual in New York City while learning to read and write Demotic Greek before acquiring those skills in English, she has always been deeply preoccupied with the nature of language itself. Experiencing life and literature “in Greek” remains essential for her and informs her Guggenheim project.

The Graduate Center

The Graduate Center is the primary doctorate-granting institution of the City University of New York (CUNY). The school offers more than thirty doctoral programs, as well as a number of master's programs. The Graduate Center is also home to more than thirty interdisciplinary research centers and institutes and offers an extensive array of public lectures, exhibitions, concerts, and theatrical events. Further information on the Graduate Center and its programs can be found at www.gc.cuny.edu

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

United States Senator Simon Guggenheim and his wife established the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1925 as a memorial to a son who died April 26, 1922. The Foundation offers Fellowships to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions and irrespective of race, color, or creed.