Two UI faculty members awarded Guggenheim fellowships

Judith Pascoe, a professor in the University of Iowa Department of English, and Steven Ungar, a professor in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature, both in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, have been awarded 2012 Guggenheim Fellowships.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the awarding of 181 fellowships, selected from among nearly 3,000 applications in research and artistic creation, on April 13.

Pascoe is a scholar of British Romanticism whose works have changed the ways in which 19th-century theatricality and performance, historical consciousness, and women’s writing are discussed and understood. She has published three books on 19th-century literary and cultural history: The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice (2011), The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (2006), and Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (1997). She has also contributed scholarly editions of works by poet Maria Jane Jewsbury, poet and novelist Charlotte Smith, and poet Mary Robinson. Her essays have appeared in The Hudson Review and The American Scholar.

Pascoe has been awarded research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. She was a Fulbright Lecturer in Japan in 2010. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and joined the UI Department of English in 1993.

Ungar has taught French literature, thought, and film at the UI since 1976. His book-length publications include Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (1983), Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France Since 1930 (1995), Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2005, with Dudley Andrew), and Cléo de 5 à 7 (2008). His articles and reviews on literary topics include studies of writings by Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis-René Des Forêts, Patrick Modiano, Frantz Fanon, W.G. Sebald, and Milan Kundera. Recent publications on visual culture include an article on Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante and a book chapter on Jean Rouch’s Moi, un noir. Forthcoming publications include a Yale French Studies article on the perpetrator portrait in Jonathan Littell’s Le Sec et l’humide and a book chapter on the Groupe des 30 collective. Ungar will use the Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a book-length study, Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France, 1927-1962.

Other 2012 Guggenheim winners with UI connections include Writers’ Workshop poetry alumni Jim Moore and Brighde Mullins and fiction alumnus Lance Olsen, and Nonfiction Writing Program alumna Lia Purpura.

Often characterized as “mid-career” awards, the prestigious fellowships are intended for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. Learn more at http://www.gf.org.