THREE HUMANITIES FACULTY RECEIVE GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIPS

   COLUMBUS -- Three Ohio State University College of Humanities faculty members have been granted John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships for 1999-2000. The grants are considered the most prestigious fellowships available to humanists.

   “This kind of announcement is a dean’s dream,” said Kermit L. Hall, dean of the College of Humanities. “One Guggenheim fellowship is a feat in itself; three fellowships in one year is nothing short of extraordinary. I am extremely proud of these faculty members and what their achievements say about the caliber of scholarly work being produced in the college.”

   Added President William E. Kirwan: “These fellowships represent the kind of scholarship and creative activity that will help propel Ohio State to the highest ranks of public research universities. It is enormously gratifying to know these scholars are being recognized nationally for their important work.”

   The recipients are:

   -- Dick Davis of UPPER ARLINGTON, professor, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, for two projects: Literary Hybridity -- a study of Hellenistic, 11th century Persian and medieval European secular romances, and Verse Translation as a Source of the Genres and Rhetoric of English Poetry, examining how English poetic genres were borrowed from other language traditions. Davis is the author of 18 books of original poetry, translations and literary criticism. In addition to his department course work, Davis teaches poetics, literary history and translation for comparative studies and English. He has received awards from the Arts Council of Great Britain and the British Institute of Persian Studies, has received a Fulbright grant, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. At Ohio State, he received the 1997 Mortar Board/SPHINX honor society Teaching Award.

   -- Robert C. Davis of CLINTONVILLE, associate professor, Department of History, to complete work on his book, White Slaves, Black Masters: the Italian Experience of Enslavement in the Early-modern Era, 1500-1800. Davis also has been awarded fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the Harvard Villa I Tatti in Florence, both of which he declined in order to accept a Folger Shakespeare Library fellowship in Washington, D.C., in 1999-2000. Davis has received other grants, including a Fulbright, to fund research for the book, a study of Italians’ responses to their enslavement by Barbary Coast Muslims. Davis also is the author of Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and Workplace in the Pre-Industrial City and The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late- Renaissance Venice. He is deferring his Guggenheim fellowship until 2000-2001.

   -- Joseph H. Lynch of CLINTONVILLE, professor, Department of History, to write Deathbed Conversion to Monastic Life, 850-1250, about the medieval practice of becoming a monk or a nun on one’s deathbed to resolve moral tension over one’s lifestyle. Lynch has been invited to become a fellow at the National Humanities Center in 1999-2000, and has won four previous national fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. A past director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and former Department of History chair, Lynch studies medieval social and religious history. An author of four books and numerous articles, he has received the university’s Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Distinguished Scholar Award. Lynch will defer the Guggenheim fellowship until 2000-2001.

   The National Humanities Center selection committee considered 507 applications for the approximately 35 fellowships awarded for 1999-2000. Guggenheim Fellowships are grants supporting scholars and artists for six to 12 months. The average amount of a fellowship grant in 1998 was approximately $31,683. Because the purpose of the Guggenheim Fellowship program is to help provide fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible, grants carry no special conditions.

Contacts:
Dick Davis, 292-5643; davis.77@osu.edu
Robert Davis, 292-2674; davis.711@osu.edu
Joseph Lynch, 292-2203; lynch.1@osu.edu