Four Penn professors awarded 2023 Guggenheim Fellowships

Four Penn faculty members were awarded the 2023 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. 

Penn professors Ezekiel Emanuel, Heather Love, Jennifer Morton, and Projit Mukharji were chosen from around 3,000 applications for their distinguished scholarship in various subject areas and artistic fields. 

Emanuel — who teaches in the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School — is one of two Guggenheim fellows for medicine and health. He is a renowned oncologist, bioethicist, and senior associate at the Center for American Progress. Emanuel also serves as Penn's Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and a chair at the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy. 

His upcoming project, Creative Rejuvenation, seeks to answer how one can catalyze structural change and institutional Rejuvenation. During his time off next semester, he aims to use the resources provided by the Guggenheim Fellowship to write a book addressing the question using his expertise in the American healthcare system.

"Business has a mechanism of getting rid of organizations that don't stay nimble, that don't improve, but you can't destroy a health system,” Emanuel told The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Love — an English professor in the College — received the fellowship for literary criticism. She has previously authored two books: "Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History" and "Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory." 

Her project as a Guggenheim Fellow will be a new book titled "To Be Real: The Passion of the Self in Queer Writing."

"My work is all in the history of sexuality and queer theory," Love said.

"To Be Real" will analyze queer writers' usage of personal anecdotes and the first person. It will also explore personal revelation and its capacity to impact discourse. Love will address the history of this experimentative writing style and the impacts of academic anecdote writing in moments of crisis. 

Morton, a Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Philosophy, received the Guggenheim fellowship for philosophy. Morton also works in Penn's Graduate School of Education and is a senior fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Ethics and Education. She also authored the multi-awarded book, "Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility."

Next year, she will serve as a fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Her next project will explore how poverty affects how people exercise their agency. 

"My background is in philosophy of action," Morton said. "The project is to look at the empirical work that has been done on poverty in behavioral economics, psychology, and sociology. As a philosopher, I aim to bring these different empirical findings into conversation through an ethical lens."

Mukharji — an associate professor in History and Sociology of Science — is one of three Guggenheim fellows for the history of science, technology, and economics. Mukharji has authored and edited multiple books, most recently "Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences."

Mukharji is passionate about researching the marginalization of people within and through science by examining anti-colonial histories of science.

Former United States senator Simon Guggenheim and his partner Olga founded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in honor of their late 17-year-old son. This fellowship is awarded to mid-career individuals with exceptional, established academic work and promising future endeavors.