Politixia
School of Arts & Sciences: Three 2023 Guggenheim Fellows
Based on “prior achievement and exceptional promise,” three Penn Arts and Sciences faculty have been awarded the prestigious 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. They are Heather K. Love, a professor of English; Jennifer M. Morton, the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Philosophy; and Projit Bihari Mukharji, a professor of the history and sociology of science.
They were among 171 chosen in the United States and Canada from nearly 2,500 applicants for awards in 48 scholarly disciplines in this 98th annual competition for funding. Created and initially funded in 1925 by Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son, the foundation seeks “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.”
Dr. Love, one of three fellows in the category of literary criticism, is the graduate chair of the English department. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, 20th century literature and culture, affect studies, sociology and literature, disability studies, film and visual culture, and critical theory. She is the author of Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory, a genealogy of queer theory, and Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, which weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. She has written on comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. She is currently at work on a project on the uses of the personal in academic criticism.
Dr. Morton, one of three fellows in the category of philosophy, researches the philosophy of action, moral philosophy, the philosophy of education, and political philosophy. She is interested in how “poverty and class shape our agency.” She is the author of Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility, which focuses on the ethical costs that first-generation and low-income students pay to take advantage of opportunities for socioeconomic mobility through education. During the 2023-2024 academic year, she will be a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Dr. Mukharji, one of three fellows in the category of history of science, technology, & economics, is interested in issues of marginality and marginalization both within and through science, focusing on people who are disempowered. His ambition is “to write histories of science that are anti-colonial without being nationalist or identitarian.” He is the author of Nationalizing the Body, about South Asian doctors and medical subordinates employed in the lower echelons of the colonial medical establishment in British India; Doctoring Traditions, about how Ayurveda, ancient Indian medicine, modernized under colonialism; and Brown Skins, White Coats, about race science in India from 1920-1966. His current project, Psychic Socialism, explores Cold War-era scientific efforts in India to tap into the psychic powers of individuals to build a new science.
