Two UMD Profs Named Guggenheim Fellows

ARHU faculty members Nathans and Kirschenbaum win prestigious fellowship. 

ARHU faculty members Nathans and Kirschenbaum win prestigious fellowship. 

ARHU Office of Communications Staff Two College of Arts & Humanities professors at the University of Maryland—Matthew Kirschenbaum, Department of English and Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and Heather S. Nathans, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies—have been awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for 2011. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded 180 Fellowships to a diverse group of scholars, artists, and scientists.  Kirschenbaum and Nathans were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.  According to the Foundation, fellowships are “appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.”
 Matthew Kirschenbaum received the fellowship for his work, “Track changes: authorship, archives, and literary culture after word processing.” An associate professor of English and associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, Kirschenbaum specializes in digital humanities, electronic literature, virtual worlds, serious games and simulations, textual studies, and postmodern/experimental literature. He was awarded the Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize for Outstanding Essay on Textual Scholarship for his “Editing the Interface: Textual Studies and First-Generation Electronic Objects” with the Society for Textual Scholarship, 2002-2003. He was awarded a fellowship with the National Endowment for the Humanities from January 2005-June 2005. His book, Mechanisms, won the Biannual Richard J. Finneran Book or Edition, Society for Textual Scholarship, 2009; the Annual George A. and Jean S. DeLong Book History Book Prize Society for the History of Authorship, Publishing, and Reading, 2009; and the 16th Annual Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association of America, 2009.
 Heather S. Nathans received the fellowship for her new book project, “Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity in the Antebellum American Theatre.” A Professor of Theatre and Acting Director of Theatre for the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance studies, Nathans specializes in American theatre and drama, African American theatre, Jewish American theatre, theatre historiography, English restoration drama and directing. Her publications include "Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson," Cambridge University Press, 2003; "Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1781-1861," Cambridge University Press, 2009, finalist for the 2010 George Freedley Memorial Award, TLA; and "Shakespearean Educations: Power Citizenship , and Performance," for which she is co-editor and contributing author, University of Delaware Press, 2011. She is also the author of numerous articles and essays. Nathans has received fellowships from the American Jewish Historical Society,the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, the American Society for Theatre Research, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Gilder Lehrman Foundation, and the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora. Nathans was a non-resident fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University from 2001-2004. She is the president of the American Theatre and Drama Society, and she is the editor for the University of Iowa's award-winning series, "Studies in Theatre History and Culture." Since its establishment in 1925, the Foundation has granted nearly $290 million in fellowships to more than 17,000 individuals.  For more information, visit the Guggenheim Foundation.