Professor Wins Prestigious Guggenheim, Radcliffe Fellowships
By Lori Wright, Media Relations
April 25, 2007
David Frankfurter, professor of history and religious studies at UNH,
has been named a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, an honor that puts him the
company of scores of Nobel, Pulitzer and other prize winners.
Frankfurter will use his $39,000 Guggenheim Fellowship prize to research
and write a book on Christianization in late antique Egypt. He also
has won a 2007-2008 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship
prize in the amount of $60,000, which also will support his research
and book.
“I am delighted but not at all surprised that Professor Frankfurter
has been awarded these prestigious fellowships. Guggenheim represents
the highest standards of American recognition of scholarship, and the
Radcliffe Fellowship allows him to follow in the fine tradition of research
in the Humanities. This happy combination of awards will support the
outstanding research he is doing, building on a very impressive foundation
in the roots of religious history. I am very proud that he is part of
our community,” said Marilyn Hoskin, dean of the College of Liberal
Arts.
Frankfurter’s research will follow classic studies of Christianization
in Africa and Central and South America and will build on the historical/thematic
approach to Egyptian religion that Frankfurter took in his 1998 book “Religion
in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance” (Princeton University
Press).
“I want to take a new approach to the Christianization of Egypt
-- how its cultural traditions were transformed in the late antique
period to assimilate Christianity. I am especially interested in redefining
the phenomena once called ‘pagan survivals’ -- when Egyptian
symbols and themes from the time of the Pharaohs reemerge in Christian
guise. The Egyptian ankh symbol becomes a popular form for the cross;
Jesus appears as the captain of a boat manned by saints; and ancient
procedures for getting written responses from the gods become redeployed
for shrines of Christian saints,” Frankfurter said.
Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement
in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The 2007
Fellowship winners include 189 artists, scholars and scientists selected
from almost 2,800 applicants for awards totaling $7,600,000. Decisions
are based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisors and are
approved by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s Board
of Trustees.
What distinguishes the Guggenheim Fellowship program from all others
is the wide range in interest, age, geography, and institution of those
it selects as it considers applications in 78 different fields, from
the natural sciences to the creative arts. The new Fellows include writers,
playwrights, painters, sculptors, photographers, film makers, choreographers,
physical and biological scientists, social scientists, and scholars
in the humanities.
Since 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted
more than $256 million in fellowships to more than 16,250 individuals.
Past fellows include Ansel Adams, W. H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Martha
Graham, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Isamu Noguchi,
Linus Pauling, Philip Roth, Paul Samuelson, Wendy Wasserstein, Derek
Walcott, James Watson, and Eudora Welty.
The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program is a highly competitive
program that provides yearlong residencies to award-winning writers,
artists, scientists and other scholars. Past fellows include Pulitzer
Prize-winning writers Geraldine Brooks and Caroline Elkins; geophysicist
and planetary scientist Maria Zuber; historian Darlene Clark Hine; anthropologist
husband-and-wife team Jean and John L. Comaroff; and philosopher Sari
Nusseibeh.
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