PHILADELPHIA Six University of Pennsylvania professors in the School of Arts and Sciences -- the School's largest number of recipients in one year since 1995 -- have been awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

Each year the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recognizes distinguished scholarly achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment by granting aid to scholars, artists and writers pursuing research in any field and creation in any area of the arts except the performing arts.

More than 3,200 individuals applied for the 2004 Guggenheim fellowships. This year, 185 recipients from 87 institutions received fellowships.  Of those 87 institutions, only five, including Penn's School of Arts and Sciences, had six or more fellows.

"I was delighted to learn that so many of our faculty members received Guggenheim fellowships this year.  These are extremely prestigious awards for which there is intense competition.  That six of them went to SAS faculty is another very gratifying indicator of the caliber of scholarship in the School," said SAS Dean Samuel H. Preston.

The new fellows from Penn are:

Joan Dayan, professor of English, who teaches courses in Caribbean studies; 19th-century American, French and English literary history; and the comparative legal and religious history of the Americas.  The fellowship will support her research on a legal, cultural and religious history of incarceration and slavery.

Talya Fishman, associate professor of religious studies and a fellow at Penn Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, whose work focuses on Judaism in the medieval and early-modern periods, with special interest in Jewish intellectual and cultural history.  She is studying the inscription of oral Torah and the formation of Jewish culture in the Middle Ages.

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 in the 20th  century.

Peter Stallybrass, professor of English, co-director of the Penn Humanities Forum, 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, who directs Penn's Jewish Studies Program.  The fellowship will assist his research into the ways the physical forms of the Talmud, the Rabbinic Bible, the Prayerbook 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 burgh of Perth in 16th- and 17th-century Scotland.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was established by former U.S. Sen. and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim as a memorial to their son who died in 1922.  Fellowships have been awarded annually since 1925.