3 Humanities professors among 5 UCLA faculty to receive Guggenheim Fellowships

Five UCLA professors — including three from the UCLA Division of Humanities — are among the 171 Guggenheim Fellows for 2023.

Presented annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the fellowships recognize the recipients’ prior achievements and exceptional promise. The grants, which vary in amount, are intended 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.”

Representing the Humanities Division are professors Michael Berry (Asian Languages and Cultures), Alex Purves (Classics) and Michael Rothberg (English and Comparative Literature). The full list of UCLA honorees:

Michael Berry, a professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies and director of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies. Berry’s scholarly interests include contemporary Chinese literature, film and translation. His fellowship will be devoted to translating the third volume of Han Song’s experimental dystopian science fiction “Hospital Trilogy,” entitled “Dead Souls.”

Scott Cummings, UCLA’s Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics and the founding faculty director of the UCLA Program on Legal Ethics and the Profession. Cummings teaches and writes about the legal profession, legal ethics, access to justice and local government law. His latest research explores how innovative legal mobilization produces transformative social change.

Prineha Narang, UCLA’s Howard Reiss Professor of Physical Sciences. Narang’s research aims to better understand the dynamics of nonequilibrium states in nature. The physical world — from gas giants in the solar system to living organisms, and even particles — exists in a state of nonequilibrium, making her studies essential to understanding how complex physical events unfold.

Alex Purves, a professor and chair of the UCLA Department of Classics. Purves studies ancient Greek poetry from the perspective of the body, time and the environment. She has published on Homer, Sappho, Herodotus and other early Greek authors; for her Guggenheim project, she will focus on 20th-century receptions of Homer and the sea.

Michael Rothberg, a professor of English and comparative literature, and an expert in the interdisciplinary field of Holocaust studies. Rothberg’s work focuses on the social and political implications of remembering histories of political violence, including the Holocaust, trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism.

In all, the new class of fellows represents 48 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 72 academic institutions, 24 states and the District of Columbia, and two Canadian provinces. According to the Guggenheim foundation, previous fellows include more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize and National Book Award.