Congratulations to 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship Winner Jenny McPhee, Director of the Center for Applied Liberal Arts (CALA) and Clinical Assistant Professor of Translation and Creative Writing. Jenny oversees noncredit programming, including certificate programs, here at CALA. She will be working on a new translation of the Italian author Elsa Morante's first novel, Menzogna e Sortilegio (1948).
McPhee is one of three New York University professors to receive Guggenheim Fellowships in this cycle. This year’s 175 recipients were chosen from nearly 3,000 applicants in the United States and Canada.
“It’s exceptionally encouraging to be able to share such positive news at this terribly challenging time,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the foundation. “A Guggenheim Fellowship has always offered practical assistance, helping Fellows do their work, but for many of the new Fellows, it may be a lifeline at a time of hardship, a survival tool as well as a creative one. As we grapple with the difficulties of the moment, it is also important to look to the future. The artists, writers, scholars, and scientific researchers supported by the Fellowship will help us understand and learn from what we are enduring individually and collectively, and it is an honor for the Foundation to help them do their essential work.”
This year’s NYU Guggenheim Fellows are:
· Jenny McPhee, academic director of the Center for Applied Liberal Arts at the School of Professional Studies and clinical assistant professor of Translation and Creative Writing, has penned the novels The Center of Things (Doubleday, 2001), No Ordinary Matter (Free Press, 2009), and A Man of No Moon (Counterpoint, 2009), and co-authored Girls: Ordinary Girls and Their Extraordinary Pursuits (Random House, 2000), a collection of life stories by McPhee and her sisters Laura and Martha. Her translations from Italian include books by Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, and Pope John Paul II.
· Kim Phillips-Fein, a professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, has authored Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal (W.W. Norton, 2010) and Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (Metropolitan Books, 2017). Phillips-Fein, whose research focuses on 20th century American political, economic, and labor history, also holds an appointment in NYU’s Department of History.
· Melissa Schwartzberg, a Silver Professor in the Wilf Family Department of Politics, has authored Democracy and Legal Change (Cambridge, 2007) and Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule (Cambridge, 2014). Schwartzberg, the editor of NOMOS, the annual volume of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, also holds appointments in NYU’s Department of Classics and at NYU’s School of Law.
A complete list of 2020 Guggenheim Fellows may be found on the Guggenheim Foundation’s website.