Two U-M Women’s Studies Faculty Win Guggenheim Fellowships

Women’s Studies Professors Dena Goodman and Jonathan Metzl are among five University of Michigan faculty members who have been awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships for distinguished service and their “exceptional promise” for future accomplishments in research.

This year’s 2006 fellowship winners include 187 artists, scholars, and scientists selected from nearly 3,000 applicants for awards totaling $7.5 million.

Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. Since 1925, the foundation has granted more than $247 million in fellowships to more than 16,000 individuals. Some past winners include Ansel Adams, Langston Hughes, and Henry Kissinger.

The fellowship validated History and Women’s Studies Professor Dena Goodman’s work and “will allow me to get away from the complexities of life and teaching in Ann Arbor to do the hard work of reflecting on the research I’ve done and shaping it into a book that will touch modern readers,” she said.

Goodman will try to understand women’s lives in the European past when she spends time in France finishing a book manuscript that explores how the practice of writing letters shaped women’s consciousness of themselves as women and as active, modern subjects in the decades before the French Revolution.

Psychiatry and Women’s Studies Associate Professor Jonathan Metzl’s research interests include pharmaceutical advertisements, the history of medicine, and gender and health. For his Guggenheim project, he will research and write a book about the relationships between stigmatizations of race and mental illness in the United States. He will study modern-day stigmatizations of persons with schizophrenia as being excessively violent or hostile, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

“Through extensive analysis…I hope to show how these conceptualizations of schizophrenic patients as violent emerged during the civil-rights era of the 1950s–1970s in response to a larger set of conversations about race,” said Metzl, whose archival work will mainly occur in Lansing and Ionia.