Three Yale faculty named Guggenheim Fellows for their ‘exceptional promise’

Three Yale faculty members have been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

This year’s winners are: Alexey Fedorov, professor of geology and geophysics; Martin Hägglund, professor of comparative literature and of humanities; and Marci Shore, associate professor of history.

The Yale faculty members are among 173 scholars, artists, and scientists to receive Guggenheim Fellowships (including two joint fellowships) this year. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants in the foundation’s 94th competition.

Alexey Fedorov

Alexey Fedorov is a climate scientist whose research advances our knowledge of climate and ocean dynamics in the context of global change as well as past climate variations. He is author of more than 80 articles on a broad range of topics, from El Nino and tropical cyclones to ocean circulation and Arctic sea ice; many of them were published in Nature and Science. One of the first scholars to suggest that El Nino may be affected by climate change, Fedorov is also broadly recognized for his studies of warm climates in past geological epochs, such as the Pliocene and the Miocene. In his work, Fedorov uses a hierarchical approach that involves simulations with state-of-the-art global climate models, advanced theoretical methods, analysis of observations, and conceptual models. The ultimate goal of his research is to understand physical processes that control ocean and climate dynamics and predictability. As a Guggenheim Fellow, Fedorov will work on the problem of global ocean circulation in warm climates.

Martin Hägglund

Martin Hägglund, a philosopher, literary theorist, and scholar of modernist literature, is the author of three highly acclaimed books. His first book, “Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude” (2002), was awarded the Swedish Academy’s Grez Prize. His first book in English, “Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life” (2008), was the subject of a conference at Cornell University, a colloquium at Oxford University, and a 250-page special issue of The New Centennial Review titled “Living On: Of Martin Hägglund.” His most recent book, “Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov” (2012) was hailed by the Los Angeles Review of Books as a “revolutionary” achievement, which shows how literary theory “can and should go on living: in unflinching fidelity to how it feels to be human.” He has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2014, Hägglund was awarded the Schück Prize by the Swedish Academy. As a Guggenheim Fellow, Hägglund will complete his forthcoming book, “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom.” Ranging across literature, religion, politics, and philosophy, “This Life” develops a new vision of what it can mean to lead a resolutely secular life, both individually and collectively.

Marci Shore

Marci Shore focuses her work on the intellectual history of Central and Eastern Europe. She is the author of “Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968,” “The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe,” and “The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution.” She is also the translator of Michał Głowiński’s “The Black Seasons” and more recently of Vladimir Rafeenko’s “Seven Dillweeds,” a short piece of fiction set during the ongoing war in the Donbas. Among her recent essays is “Out of the Desert: A Heidegger for Poland,” which was published in the Times Literary Supplement. “Out of the Desert,” written as a eulogy, portrays the encounter between the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, himself a student of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and the Polish philosopher Krzysztof Michalski, younger than Patočka by 40 years. It is a fragment of a project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe” that she will be working on during her Guggenheim year.

U.S. Senator Simon Guggenheim and his wife established the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1925 as a memorial to a son who died April 26, 1922. The foundation offers fellowships 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 and irrespective of race, color, or creed.