Profs Win One Year Fellowship

Harvard’s latest Guggenheim Fellowship winners plan to use their funds to study subjects ranging from garage sales to Ethiopian music.

Unlike in years past, two of this year’s five Harvard winners came from the Department of Music.

Professors Daniel P. Carpenter, Margaret Crawford, Kay K. Shelemay, Anne C. Shreffler, and Salil P. Vadhan ’95 beat out some 2,800 applicants.

The 189 artists, scholars, and scientists who won the Guggenheim Fellowships will receive a total of $7,600,000, according to a press release.

All five of Harvard’s winners plan to use their grants, announced last Friday, to finance a year off from teaching.

“One is always delighted to get a Guggenheim,” said Shelemay, the Watts professor of music and professor of African and African American studies.

Shelemay plans to take the next year off to conduct research in Boston and Washington, D.C., for a book on Ethiopian music and musicians in the United States.

“It’s very interesting to look at creativity, both musical and artistic, within these newly formed African communities in North America,” Shelemay said.

Shreffler, the Ditson professor of music, said she plans to complete a book to be titled, “New Music, Avant-Garde, and Politics in the Early Cold War (1945-63).”

“With teaching it’s hard to have continuous time to concentrate,” Shreffler said. “You like to have periods when you can focus on teaching and periods when you can focus on research.”

Crawford, a professor of urban design and planning theory at the Graduate School of Design, also cited the importance of time off from the classroom.

“My school only gives one semester off every six years, and this will buy me an extra semester,” said Crawford, who plans to use the time to work on a book to be titled “Rethinking Urban Space, From the Bottom Up.”

She will focus on the Los Angeles dynamics of street vending, garage sales, and vacant-lot transformations.

“Even if they may appear to be trivial, they actually are significant in the way they rethink urban space,” she said. “We’ve been working on this project for 10 years, so now I’m going to sit down and write it.”

Not all the winners will spend the next year authoring books. Carpenter, a professor of government, plans to spend the year collecting data in archives in the northeast and western New York.

“This is very early in the project, so a book is some years away,” he said.

Some of the documents he has already found have made their way into his classes, including Moral Reasoning 74, “The Theory and Practice of Republican Government.”

Vadhan, the McKay professor of computer science and applied mathematics, will continue research that he and his students began a couple years ago on zero-knowledge proofs, applicable in the field of cryptography.

In zero-knowledge proofs, one party proves that a statement, often mathematical, is true without revealing anything but the validity of the statement itself.

“We’re reaching the point when we might be able to get an almost complete characterization,” Vadhan said.

He expects to complete the project while spending a sabbatical at the University of California, Berkeley.