Two Northwestern Faculty Named Guggenheim Fellows

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences faculty member Jacqueline Stevens and Northwestern University School of Law faculty member Kristen Stilt are among the 2013 Guggenheim Fellows newly named by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The fellowships were awarded this year to a diverse group of 175 scholars and artists from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants from the United States and Canada appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

Stevens, professor of political science, directs the Deportation Research Clinic in the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern. Her current studies of deportation law enforcement engage European fantasies of conquest in the 12th to 17th centuries as well as the quotidian of government documents revealing contemporary illegalities, including practices resulting in the unlawful deportation of U.S. citizens from the United States. Stevens’ work has appeared in Political Theory, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Social Text, Third World Quarterly and many other scholarly venues, as well as in The Nation magazine and The New York Times.

Stilt, professor of law and an affiliated faculty member in the history department in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, studies the historical development and contemporary practices of Islamic law. Using historical and comparative approaches, her Guggenheim project seeks to understand the growing phenomenon of enshrining references to Islam and Islamic law in national constitutions. A social history of constitution-making, the project will span a wide range of countries in the Muslim world. Stilt is the author of “Islamic Law in Action: Authority, Discretion, and Everyday Experiences in Mamluk Egypt” (Oxford University Press, 2011) and the co-editor of the forthcoming “Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law.”

“These artists and writers, scholars and scientists, represent the best of the best,” said Edward Hirsh, president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has always bet everything on the individual, and we’re thrilled to continue the tradition with this wonderfully talented and diverse group. It’s an honor to be able to support these individuals to do the work they were meant to do.”