Six professors in the School of Arts and Sciences have received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, the largest number of recipients from the school since 1995. Every year since 1925, the John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has recognized distinguished scholarly achievement and exceptional promise for the future by giving aid to scholars, artists and writers pursuing research in any field or creation in any area of the arts except the performing arts.

This year, 185 individuals from 87 institutions received Guggenheim Fellowships. Penn is one of only five institutions with six or more fellows in this year’s class.

The 2004 Guggenheim Fellows from Penn are:

Joan Dayan, professor of English, who teaches courses in Caribbean studies, American, French and English literary history and the comparative legal and religious history of the Americas. The fellowship will support her research on the history of incarceration and slavery.

Tayla Fishman, associate professor of religious studies, whose work focuses on Judaism in the medieval and early modern periods with an interest in Jewish intellectual and cultural history.

M. Susan Lindee, professor of history and sociology of science, who specializes in 20th-century biological and biomedical sciences, particularly radiation biology, human genetics and genomics. She will use the grant to investigate war, science and medicine in the United States during the 20th century.

Peter Stallybrass, professor of English, director of the Center for the History of Material Texts and a trustee of the English Institute at Harvard University, who is exploring the relationship between material forms of writing and methods of reading and literary composition in early modern England and America.

David Stern, professor of classical Hebrew literature and director of Penn’s Jewish Studies Program. The fellowship will aid his research into the ways the physical forms of the Talmud, Rabbinic Bible, the Prayer Book and the Passover Haggadah have shaped Jewish culture.

Margo Todd, professor of history, who is an expert on early modern English and Scottish history and the culture of Reformed Protestantism in Britain and early America. She is compiling an urban history of the royal burg of Perth in 16th- and 17th-century Scotland.