Three professors receive
fellowship awards
By Emily Jones
Staff
Writer
Three Purdue professors were recently awarded Guggenheim
Fellowships, joining an elite group that includes such famed recipients
as Ansel Adams, Langston Hughes and Henry Kissinger.
Ann W. Astell, Freydoon Shahidi and Patricia Curd
learned in early March that they were to be named Fellows. The official
announcement came April 11.
Astell is a professor of English at Purdue. "I
was beside myself with joy; it was a dream come true," said Astell
upon learning that she had been awarded the fellowship. "It will
give me a whole year to devote to research and writing."
She is working on a book to be titled "Eating Beauty,"
in which she will explore medieval asceticism, mysticism and aesthetics.
Astell said she plans to travel during her year
off from Purdue. She will journey to Washington, D.C., to make use of
the city’s libraries and then England, where she will study medieval
manuscripts.
Shahidi, a professor of mathematics, was awarded
the fellowship on the basis of his work, "New instances of functorality."
Shahidi will be using the fellowship to continue
his work in number theory, an area of mathematics he has been studying
for the past 20 years. He will work on further proofs of Langlands Conjecture
with other mathematicians, including Langlands himself, at Princeton
University. Shahidi said he may also do some work at UCLA and overseas.
"I’m honored and glad to have gotten
(the Guggenheim Fellowship)," said Shahidi. "I was blessed,
I suppose."
Curd, a professor of philosophy, was named a Fellow
for her work on the translation and study of Anaxagoras of Claxomenae,
a Greek philosopher who preceded Plato.
Curd said the writings of Anaxagoras are important
because they give additional insights into the work of the later great
philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle.
"It was pretty exciting, it’s been quite
a year for me," said Curd, who has been awarded three other fellowships
this year in addition to the Guggenheim.
Curd will spend next fall in Research Triangle
Park, N.C., on a National Humanities Center Fellowship. Another fellowship
at Cambridge University will take her to Britain in the spring of 2002.
Curd has also been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship
for university teachers.
Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded to artists,
scholars and scientists on the basis of distinguished achievement in
the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. This year’s
183 Fellows were chosen from a group of more than 2,700 applicants and
will receive awards totaling $6,588,000. The Guggenheim Fellowships
are designed to allow recipients time for artistic or scholarly work.
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