By Menachem Wecker
When Jeffrey Cohen first learned in the middle of March that he had won a Guggenheim fellowship, he had just come home from teaching his graduate seminar and was checking his email before putting his daughter to bed.
“My shouts of joy attracted the family to the room,” said Dr. Cohen, professor of English and director of the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute. “We had ice cream that night together to celebrate.”
Dr. Cohen was asked to keep the news to himself until the award was announced last week in the New York Times, which proved no easy task. “I’m not good at keeping secrets,” he said. “It was torture holding the good news in!”
The fellowship will allow Dr. Cohen, who will not teach from this July until June 2012 but will continue to direct the institute, to conduct archival work at the British Library and work on his book, Stories of Stone: Dreaming the Prehistoric in the Middle Ages.
The book will focus on human responses to two forms of “lithic encounter in the Middle Ages,” according to Dr. Cohen, particularly stones as “primordial natural substances” and the use of stones as “seemingly timeless elements in architectures that have long outlived their builders.”
“Stone invited medieval writers to think innovatively about time, materiality the power of art and the endurance of history,” Dr. Cohen wrote in his application for the Guggenheim fellowship. In the application, Dr. Cohen noted a series of questions the book would address, culminating in, “How does stone enmesh itself so profoundly in human desires, especially for stories that might endure epochs rather than mere years?”
“I’m grateful to Peg Barratt, dean of the Columbian College of Arts and Science, for enabling me to take off the full year to dedicate to the project without negative financial repercussions,” he said.
Dr. Cohen’s application was one of 180 that won a Guggenheim fellowship out of more than 3,000 applications. “That means even more than it seems, in that those who apply are a self-selecting group,” he said.
In addition, he applied for an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, which he also won. The two fellowships will help Dr. Cohen work on the book, which he has had to put off for “a long time” as he juggled chairing the English department, directing the institute, teaching and serving on committees in the English and Judaic studies departments and as an inaugural member of the Innovation Task Force.
In addition to being excited about the fellowships, Dr. Cohen says he is “profoundly grateful” to colleagues who wrote letters of support and to the university for “offering a space where humanities research is valued.”
Dr. Cohen said he is also very pleased to be in the company of some admired GW colleagues who have also won Guggenheim fellowships, particularly Gail Paster, “my former mentor in the English Department”; the novelist Tom Mallon, director of the Creative Writing Program; and Leo Chalupa, vice president for research.
But along with the joy, Dr. Cohen says part of him feels a little guilty about winning two fellowships in a time when humanities research enjoys little funding, and when he knows he was competing with friends and former students.
“Knowing that I got the fellowships meant that many scholars with excellent projects did not,” he said. “The selection committees must really have to split hairs to decide who gets the awards.”
“I feel like I’ve won the scholar’s lottery,” he said. “It is fantastic to have such an endorsement of my research project, and it gives me a great deal of confidence as I work on my book.”