Three Princeton faculty, six alumni win Guggenheim Fellowships

Princeton faculty members Michael Dickman, lecturer in creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts; Yaacob Dweck, professor of history and the Program in Judaic Studies; and Yiyun Li, professor of creative writing and the Lewis Center for the Arts, have received 2020 Guggenheim Fellowships.

Five Princeton undergraduate alumni and one graduate alumnus were also awarded Guggenheim fellowships: Anna Grzymala-Busse, a 1992 alumna, and the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; Leor Halevi, a 1994 alumnus and associate professor of history and law at Vanderbilt University; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a 2006 Princeton alumnus and playwright who has taught playwrighting at Princeton and has served as a Roger S. Berlind ’52 Playwright-in-Residence; Christopher Jarzyski, a 1987 alumnus and Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Maryland; Vera Keller, a 2008 graduate alumnus and associate professor of history at the University of Oregon; and Martin Weissman, a 1999 alumnus and professor of mathematics at the University of California-Santa Cruz.

They are among 173 to receive fellowships from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants — a diverse group of scholars, artists and scientists — appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

Yaacob Dweck

Yaacob Dweck joined the Princeton faculty in 2011. He studies the Jews of early modern Europe. He has written two books, The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice and Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas, as well as an introduction to the reprint of Sabbetai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah by Gershom Scholem. Currently he is working on a Hebrew edition and English translation of Leon Modena’s Ari Nohem. Dweck translates modern Hebrew fiction and is at work with Nicholas de Lange on a translation of Ziklag Days by S. Yizhar.

He was awarded the Guggenheim for a new project on “Rabbinic Reactionaries in the Sephardic Diaspora: Notes on a Social Type.”

Read more at News at Princeton.

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