Philippe Bourgois and Carlin Romano of the University of Pennsylvania have been named 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellows. 

Selected from a field of nearly 3,000 applicants, they are among a group of 175 scholars, artists and scientists noted for their “basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise” in the eighty-ninth annual competition for the United States and Canada.

Bourgois, a Penn Integrates Knowledge professor, is the Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Family and Community Medicine. He holds appointments in the Department of Anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences and the Perelman School of Medicine’s Department of Family and Community Medicine. His Guggenheim Fellowship research project will involve writing a book called Cornered.

“[It is] about daily life in an impoverished de-industrialized U.S. inner city neighborhood that has been turned into an open air drug supermaket plagued by internecine violence, police brutality and public and private sector abandonment,” Bourgois said.

Romano is a lecturer in the Annenberg School for Communication. He also serves as critic-at-large for The Chronicle of Higher Education and is professor of philosophy and humanities at Ursinus College. He has also taught in the English and Philosophy departments at Penn.

“My Guggenheim project, ‘Is There an Asian Philosophy?’ is meant to do the same thing as America the Philosophical, the book for which I got the award: turn a cultural cliché on its head and see what’s there,” Romano said.

More information and a complete list of the 2013 Fellows are available at www.gf.org.