University of Pennsylvania law and history professor Sarah Barringer Gordon and history professor Kathleen Brown have won 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships. They are among 175 scholars, artists and scientists selected from 3,100 applicants in the United States and Canada.

The new fellows were chosen on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

A widely recognized scholar and commentator on religion in American public life and the law of church and state, Gordon will use her Guggenheim to work on a forthcoming book titled Freedom’s Holy Light: Disestablishment in America, 1776-1876. Her research focuses on the relationship of politics and law to belief and practice in American life. She is particularly interested in the legal history of religion and religious peoples in American colonial and national history.

“I will be spending the year taking research trips to archives around the country, and trying my best to get the book substantially written,” she said.

Freedom’s Holy Light takes its name from “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” a popular patriotic
 song written by seminary student Samuel Francis Smith in 1831. The book offers new perspectives on the disestablishment of religion during the century following the American Revolution.

Gordon received additional support for her constitutional research from the Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation.

Brown, a historian of gender and race in early America and the Atlantic World, will use her Guggenheim to work on a book project titled Undoing Slavery: Abolition and the Argument Over Humanity.

“My book tracks the expansion of the category of “human” in relation to what we usually define as “human rights” by analyzing rhetoric, imagery, appeals to empathy, changes in medical thinking, embodied experience and the gendered context of citizenship," Brown said.

Brown's current research builds on her first book about the creation of a slave society in colonial Virginia and her second book about the history of the body. She will use the Guggenheim funds to continue her research in Quaker, abolitionist and medical archives and newspapers and to write a significant portion of the book.

More information about the 2015 Guggenheim Fellows is available at www.gf.org/news/foundation-news/fellowship-awards-in-the-united-states-and-canada-2015/.