Two Northwestern professors named Guggenheim Fellows

Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences faculty members Matthew Johnson and Lincoln Quillian are among the 2019 Guggenheim Fellows newly named by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The fellowships were awarded this year to a diverse group of 168 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.

Johnson, professor and chair of anthropology, is an archaeologist who specializes in “theory,” and in the complex societies of Britain and Europe, AD1200-1800. He’s written on castles, traditional houses, “polite” architecture and landscape, and on contributions to understanding historical archaeology around the world. 

“I’m stunned and flattered to be awarded a Guggenheim,” Johnson said. “It’s a great honor, a recognition for the work I’ve been doing in medieval and historical archaeology over the last 30 years.”

Johnson will use the fellowship to work on a book project, “An Archaeology of the English in the Atlantic World in the 2nd Millennium CE.”

“I see this as a ‘big book,’ Braudelian in ambition and scope, which ranges across the second millennium CE and beyond,” Johnson said. “It traces the prehistory of material practices and locations -- houses, fields, roads, villages, towns -- that led to patterns of English settlement in the New World. These practices and locations can be traced not just to early modern England and interactions with its neighbors, but back to the early Middle Ages and indeed beyond.”  

Quillian, professor of sociology and faculty fellow with the University’s Institute for Policy Research, has studied neighborhood poverty concentration, internal migration, racial residential segregation and racial attitudes.  

Most recently, he’s focused on two projects: The first project is a meta-analysis of audit and correspondence studies of racial and ethnic discrimination in labor markets around the world. The second project analyzes residential mobility patterns to better understand the sources of racial and economic residential segregation in American cities.

“I am honored to receive a Guggenheim fellowship,” Quillian said. “It is humbling to review the list of past winners, which include many social scientists that I look up to. The fellowship will facilitate my work to better understand hiring discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities in North America and Europe by combining results from field experiments.”

Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, said it’s exceptionally satisfying to name 168 new Guggenheim Fellows. 

“These artists and writers, scholars and scientists, represent the best of the best,” Hirsch said. “Each year since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has bet everything on the individual, and we’re thrilled to continue to do so 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.”