Three professors from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences have been named 2014 Guggenheim Fellows for their achievement and exceptional promise, according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
The trio includes Asef Bayat, professor of sociology and the Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor in Global and Transnational Studies; Joy Harjo, professor of American Indian studies and English; and Catherine Prendergast, professor of English and an affiliate of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center.
They were among 178 North American artists, scholars, and scientists out of 3,000 applicants selected for the prestigious award, often characterized as a “mid-career” achievement. Two others at Illinois—Stephen Andrew Taylor, professor of music composition and theory, and Deke Weaver, a professor in the School of Art and Design—were also selected this year.
A native of Iran, Bayat specializes in the study of social movements, urban politics, and Islam in the Middle East. He studies unconventional forms of activism that may have contributed to the Arab Spring uprisings that riveted the world in 2011. In 2009, he published Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, which in some ways anticipated the revolutions of 2011.
Since Arab Spring, Bayat has actively followed changes in the Middle East, with particular interest in the role of the popular classes. Last year, he published an update of Life as Politics and edited Post-Islamism: The Changing Face of Political Islam.
Harjo, a member of the Mvskoke Nation of Oklahoma, is an award-winning poet, composer, musician, and author. Primarily a poet, she has published seven books of poetry and has been awarded the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She also has released five albums of original music, and in 2009 she won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year for her album Winding Through the Milky Way.
Her teaching and research focuses on indigenous literature, poetry, music, and theater. Harjo will use her Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her second memoir, Songline of Justice. Her first memoir, Crazy Brave, won the PEN USA Literary Award for best creative nonfiction.
Prendergast studies historical moments when culture and literature becomes “contested terrain,” such as battles over the global spread of English, arguments over grammatical correctness, and disputes over multicultural literacy in the wake of school desegregation. She has received numerous awards for her work—a Fulbright Hays Research Award supported her book, Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World, about the rapid spread of English in the Slovakia following the fall of communism.
She was named a University Scholar in 2008, and her teaching and research includes writing and disability studies. Prendergast will use her Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her book, Writer, Painter, Banker, Thief: The American Arts Colony in the Public Account.
