Four Columbia University and two Barnard College professors have been appointed as 2020 Guggenheim fellows. 

This morning, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the appointment of four Columbia and two Barnard professors as 2020 Guggenheim fellows. The prestigious award has been granted to 175 scholars, artists, and writers “who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts”, and grants the scholars a one-year leave from their regular duties to work on individual projects. The named professors are as follows:

Taylor Brook is a lecturer for Music Humanities at Columbia and composes music for the concert stage, electronic music, video, theater, and dance. His award-winning compositions incorporate electronics and new technologies and have been performed worldwide by soloists and ensembles such as the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, JACK Quartet, MIVOS quartet, and others.

Robert Gooding-Williams’ research and teaching focus on the philosophy of race, the history of African American political thought, and 19th-century European philosophy. His books include Look, A Negro! Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics and In The Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America. Having joined Columbia in 2014, he is now a Core Faculty and a founding director of the Center for Race, Philosophy, and Social Justice in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies,

Camille Robcis is an Associate Professor of French and History at Columbia, specializing in modern European intellectual history with a focus on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history. She is the author of the award-winning history book The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell, 2013), and her second book Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in France is forthcoming.

Dilip da Cunha, an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, is an architect and urban planner based in Philadelphia and Bangalore, India. In 2017, da Cunha launched Ocean of Wetness, an interdisciplinary design platform that imagines new possibilities for the future of habitation not only on land but also in water.

Caroline Weber, a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard, focuses on the literature and history of the French ancien régime, the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Her books include Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution and Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris. She has also written for a wide range of mainstream newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, W Magazine, and Vogue.

Lesley Sharp, an Anthropology Professor at Barnard, is also a senior research scientist in sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health. A medical anthropologist by training, her interests range from the ethical and moral consequences of innovative medicine such as organ transplant technologies to the effects of human-animal encounters in experimental lab research.

Congratulations, again, to these six talented and inspiring fellows – we’re so honored to have you in our community!