The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded fellowships to two Dartmouth faculty members last week: Linda Fowler, professor of government, and Ronald M. Green, professor of ethics and religion.
The Guggenheim Foundation awarded $7,112,000 for the year among 186 fellows. Recipients were selected from over 3,000 applicants.
Fowler will use her Guggenheim award to continue her study of the decline of institutional competence in U.S. foreign affairs. She is currently the Frank J. Reagan Chair in Policy Studies and has served as the director of the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences.
Green is the Eunice & Julian Cohen Professor for the Study of Ethics and Human Values and the director of the Dartmouth Ethics Institute. His fellowship will support his examination of ethical, religious and literary perspectives on genetic enhancement.
Fowler's interest and research into the role of the U.S. Congress in foreign affairs developed last year with the help of two Dartmouth Presidential Scholars, Matt Slaine '06 and Jarred Hyatt '06.
Slaine is business manager of The Dartmouth.
Under Fowler's directions, Slaine and Hyatt helped research her theory that a disjunction has developed between the studies of domestic and foreign affairs, and that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has diminished in significance.
"This project represents the very best of Dartmouth, which is faculty members having the resources and time and wherewithal to think about things and the assistance of really smart students to help them get started," Fowler said.
Over the next year, Fowler said she plans to use her grant to pull together research and make progress on her book, titled "The Semi-Sovereign Senate and the Decline of Institutional Competence in U.S. Foreign Affairs."
Green will also use his Guggenheim to continue work on a book -- "Changing Our Genes: Ethical, Religious and Literary Perspectives on Genetic Enhancements."
Much of Green's research will look into the portrayal of genetic enhancement in science fiction literature.
"Much of this post-humanism genre is a literature about the problems of genetic enhancement; but I am going into it with an open mind and will consider forms of genetic enhancement that could be ethically sound," Green said.
He has served on numerous science ethics committees, including the bioethics committee of the March of Dimes, the Human Embryo Research Panel of the National Institutes of Health and the Ethics Advisory Board of Advanced Cell Technology. Green is doing work in Europe this term for the Dartmouth College Ethics Institution.
"It is an honor for our program, because the Guggenheim is a pretty hard grant to win," religion chair Susan Ackerman said.
With the announcement of this year's awards, 36 Dartmouth professors in total have received the fellowship since the Guggenheim Foundation was formed in 1925.
Recent Dartmouth recipients of the Guggenheim prize include studio art lecturer Susan Walp and music professor Larry Polansky in 2004, economics professor Douglas Irwin and history professor Bruce Nelson in 2002, and computer science professor Bruce Randall Donald and French professor Marianne Hirsch in 2001.
The Foundation has supported more than 15,500 scientists, scholars and creative artists with grants totaling over $230 million.
Famous past fellows include photographer Ansel Adams, composer Aaron Copland, poet Langston Hughes, diplomat and presidential adviser Henry Kissinger, scientist Linus Pauling, dancer Martha Graham and writers Philip Roth and Eudora Welty.
