Two Penn professors receive Guggenheim Fellowship

5.6 percent — that’s a percentage smaller than the chances of being accepted to most Ivy League schools.

With such long odds, having two award recipients from the same University and the same department is a fairly unprecedented occurrence.

The Guggenheim Fellowship is a grant awarded to “men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." It is highly competitive, and these two professors are among 175 recipients selected out of 3,100 applicants.

Kathleen Brown and Sally Gordon, who are both colleagues and friends, are professors in Penn’s history department, although Gordon is also a professor in Penn's Law School. Further coincidence arises in that their research covers similar areas, although they took different roads to what they do today. Both Brown and Gordon are already well established and recognized, and they bring a distinct passion they bring to their areas of study. 

“We’re both working on questions that have a lot to do with slavery,” Gordon said. “We’re good friends too, and it's really amazing.“

Brown is a professor of history specializing in gender and race in early America, so it comes as something of a surprise that she came to Penn originally to teach women’s history, a field related but not completely synonymous to what she is doing now.

“It evolved because Penn undergraduates weren't interested in taking women's history,” Brown said, and so “over the years that has evolved into tackling the history of gender,” as well as unusual people in early American society.

As the author of multiple books about gender and race in early America, she intends to use her Guggenheim grant to continue researching the subject and to continue writing her third book.

“It’s really about taking slavery apart. I’m really interested in the arguments people made to end slavery,” Brown said. “I’m really interested in not only the kind of arguments they made to win over skeptical white people, but the consequences of that,” adding that the effects of these arguments still affect us in the present day.

Gordon's enthusiasm is contagious, and her research crosses a multidisciplinary span. Her work involves research into the role of religion in American public life and the law of church and state.

“I was a junior in college when i took a course in American religious history, and it just changed the way I thought about the world,” Gordon said of what sparked her interest in the subject. “And then I went to law school.”

Holding three degrees in law, history and religion, she said that she's “sort of a typical Penn professor in that I’m very interdisciplinary,” and that “there’s terrific scholarship in all of these fields, in religious history, in law, but they don’t really talk to each other. I try to make connecting threads.”

She plans to use her Guggenheim funding on research trips to various archives, such as traveling to Monticello in Virginia, and the book she is currently working on, which focuses on the history of the separation of church and state in colonial times.

"I’m actually tracking the ways disestablishment was implemented by the states," Gordon said. "I’m finding all kinds of interesting and unexpected things.”

Both professors ended by expressing their delight in having their work recognized, and the way being at Penn has enabled their work.

“I hope you got the sense that I’m teaching here for 20 years, and I’m really still excited about my job,” Gordon said. “There’s not many people who can stay that motivated for that long.”

“It’s a really exciting thing to get a Guggenheim — I love teaching,” Brown said. "It makes you feel really good about what you’re doing, and I feel really lucky.”

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