Eight Princeton University faculty members who have demonstrated “exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts” will be pursuing a range of projects under the auspices of the Guggenheim Foundation during the coming year.

Among the 173 artists, scientists, and scholars chosen from a group of almost 3000 applicants, five members of the Princeton contingent are Lewis Center for the Arts Faculty members, and the others teach in the politics, history, and physics departments. 

The Guggenheim Fellowships provide grants to allow artists and scholars “blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible,” with no special conditions or requirements attached.

Phil Klay, Creative Writing Lecturer, U.S. Marine Corps veteran, and winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction for his short story collection Redeployment, will be working on a novel about U.S. involvement in Colombia.

Visiting Associate Theater Professor Aaron Landsman, who makes live performances involving people, space, time, and language, will be pursuing a long-term art and activism project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and a collaborative theater endeavor inspired by 1970s photographs.

Fiona Maazel, Creative Writing Lecturer and author of three novels, is writing a new novel about the 2008 financial meltdown.

Music Theater Program Director Stacy Wolf, also director of Princeton Arts Fellowships, is working on Beyond Broadway: Four Seasons of Amateur Musical Theatre in the U.S., which examines amateur musical theater at high schools, summer camps, community centers, and after school programs across the country.

Visiting Creative Writing Professor Claudia Rankine, celebrated author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, will be writing poetry, essays, articles and overseeing The Racial Imaginary Institute, an interdisciplinary cultural laboratory she co-founded “in which the racial imaginaries of our time and place can be engaged, read, countered, contextualized, and demystified.”

Linda Colley, Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and a C.B.E. in the U.K. for her services to history, will be completing a book on war and words: how rising levels of conflict after 1750 fostered the world-wide spread of new constitutions. Physics Professor Andrei Bernevig, continuing his research in the theoretical prediction and description of new states of matter with quantum exotic properties, is interested in developing a coherent predictive theory that links quantum chemistry with topological physics. And Mark Beissinger, Henry W. Putnam Professor of Politics and Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, will be working on a book on the growth and urbanization of mass revolt around the world and the evolving character of revolution as a mode of regime change.

In announcing the 2017 Awards, Guggenheim President Edward Hirsch said, “It’s exciting to name 173 new Guggenheim Fellows. These artists and writers, scholars, and scientists, represent the best of the best. It’s an honor to be able to support these individuals to do the work they were meant to do.”

Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $350 million in Fellowships to more than 18,000 individuals.

“I could not be more thrilled or grateful,” said Ms. Maazel. “Apart from the day I sold my first novel, winning a Guggenheim Fellowship has been the highlight of my professional life.”