The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded three University professors with prestigious Guggenheim fellowships, which will fund year-long sabbaticals for the professors to complete research and book projects.
Established in 1925 by U.S. Senator Simon Guggenheim, the foundation bears the name of his son, who died three years earlier. With no surviving heirs, Guggenheim and his wife Olga dedicated themselves to fostering art, science and scholarship.
Of the 187 fellows this year, the three University faculty members, Stephen J. Shoemaker, Dare Baldwin and Patrick C. Phillips, worked in diverse fields but share an interest in unexplored areas of research.
Stephen J. Shoemaker, religious studies
In his hometown of Atlanta, assistant professor Shoemaker attended a Protestant high school where the curriculum included a year of Christian history, an unexpected class that changed Shoemaker’s life.
“I was fascinated to learn Christianity had a history,” he said. “I never thought of it that way. I’d always just assumed it fell from the sky and was the same every time and was the same everywhere.”
This epiphany led Shoemaker to focus on religious studies at Emory University in Atlanta before getting his doctorate in that field from Duke University. While he studied all facets of Christianity, he has always returned to the early periods that first captivated him in high school.
At the University of Oregon, Shoemaker teaches classes on early and medieval history while researching the cult of the Virgin Mary, but he ventured beyond the traditionally Christian for the Guggenheim fellowship.
He hopes to complete a book that examines the discrepancies between early Christian and Islamic texts surrounding Muhammad, particularly his death.
“Truth is, the near east, the beginning of Islam, was Christian,” Shoemaker said. Therefore Christian accounts predate Muslim ones, which, he said, “don’t come until the eighth century, 100 years after the fact.”
Shoemaker said the Islamic tradition tells of Muhammad’s passing in Medina while early Christian sources speak of his presence during the Christian conquests. But Shoemaker stresses he is not looking for a definitive answer to how Muhammad died.
“It’s about asking questions of historical narratives,” he said. “Do they tell us things about how things happened or do they present a history the way a certain community remembered it?”
Dare Baldwin, psychology
The third-floor hallway of Straub Hall leading to professor Baldwin’s office is lined with a dozen images of smiling babies. Baldwin and her colleagues study infants to unlock the development of the human mind, though they also study adults about half the time.
“The adult work gives us ideas on what to look for in the infants,”
Baldwin said, “and the infants help us understand the development to adulthood. So the two complement each other rather nicely.”
Baldwin got her start in language cognition and said she sees it as a good metaphor for her work, which attempts to understand human actions – a field psychologists have only begun to study.
She said, in the same way humans can listen to a “babbling stream of soundwave changes and translate into language and meaning,” a similar thing happens with the flow of human actions.
A motion, like extending a handshake, is broken down into distinct “ballistic motions” that require intuitive processing for an appropriate response – extending one’s own hand to complete the shake – but actions are harder to decipher than language, Baldwin said.
“What are the distinct acts in the continuous motion stream?” she asked. Unlike language, “people don’t normally pause between actions.”
Baldwin will use her Guggenheim fellowship to study for six months in Australia before returning.
Patrick C. Phillips, biology
In the study of human genetics, there are two camps: evolutionary genetics and genomics. The former deals with the understanding of a single gene while the latter approaches the 2 million human genes as a whole.
Associate professor Phillips trained in the first camp but said he hopes to use his Guggenheim fellowship to continue working to bridge the gap between the two approaches.
“It’s very well worked out how one or a couple work through time,” Phillips said of individual genes. “We’re now studying 10,000 – the more complex systems that are actually responsible for generating interesting things.”
Entering college as a psychology major, Phillips thought “biology would be a good thing to know.” After his first freshman biology class, which was taught by an evolutionary biologist, Phillips said there was no turning back. This interest in psychology may help explain Phillip’s current desire to understand humanity through its genes.
Like the two genetic fields Phillips is attempting to join together, he said his work also has two parts. The first explores how genes interact to produce both physical and behavioral features. The second examines how these features and the genetic interactions that spawned them evolved over time.
Still, Phillips has a simpler explanation for his work. On a philosophical level he’s interested in how the world works, he said.
“Understanding the biological complexity of the world is a small part of that.”