Four UCLA professors have been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation — Elisabeth Le Guin, professor of musicology; Catherine Opie, professor of photography; Sylvan Oswald, professor of drama; and Lothar von Falkenhausen, professor of Chinese archaeology and art history.
Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded to a broad range of scholars, writers and artists based on prior achievement and exceptional promise. The foundation awarded 168 fellowships this year, the program’s 95th. In all, 49 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields from 75 academic institutions are represented in this year’s class of fellows, who range in age from 29 to 85.
Elisabeth Le Guin, who is chair of the musicology department in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, is a performer and musicologist whose dual allegiances manifest as a series of dialogues, in tones and words, between theory and practice. She helped found Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and the Artaria String Quartet. Her second book, “The Tonadilla in Performance,” won the 2015 Kinkeldey Prize from the American Musicological Society. She is a 2016 recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award.
Le Guin’s Guggenheim Fellowship was awarded for a community-project based in Santa Ana, California, called El Cancionero de Santa Ana. The project aims to reflect, translate and enhance the complex cultural life of the largely Mexican immigrant community in which Le Guin has lived since 2014. She will be working in coordination with the community of local musicians and activists at El Centro Cultural de México. READ MORE