Three professors named Guggenheim Fellows

Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences faculty members Héctor Carrillo and Dyan Elliott and School of Communication faculty member Jeffrey Sconce are among the 2020 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.

Héctor Carrillo

Carrillo, professor of sociology and gender & sexuality studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is also co-director of the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN). His research interests include sexualities, migration, race/ethnicity, transnationalism, health promotion and HIV/AIDS, and he has begun a new research project on the “sociology of genealogy.”

“I am truly happy and profoundly thankful to be selected for this prestigious fellowship,” said Carrillo, also a faculty associate with the University’s Institute for Policy Research. “The fact that I’m studying the sociotechnical aspects of amateur genealogy and the interactions of genealogists with the documents and records that they access seems especially significant right now. This is a time when reflecting on family, together and apart, and forging links with our forebears acquire relevance for many of us as we think about our past and present and imagine our futures.”

Dyan Elliott 

Elliott, the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History in Weinberg, is a medieval historian, analyzing church history through the shifting lenses of gender, sexuality, spirituality and the ongoing tensions between orthodoxy and religious dissent. 

“My work has been immeasurably enriched by the community of Northwestern scholars — both students and fellow faculty members,” Elliott said. “I am honored and deeply grateful to be a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.”

Elliott will pursue the project “The Quick and the Dead: The Medieval Church and the Exhumation of Christians.” 

“It will show how the desecration of Christian bodies, although condemned by the church for centuries, was destined to become one of its most fearsome and effective instruments of terror,” she said.

Jeffrey Sconce

Sconce is associate professor in the Screen Cultures program in the School of Communication’s Radio/Television/Film department. 

“I am extremely grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for recognizing my past work and for supporting my current research,” Sconce said. “I will use my time as a fellow to complete research and writing on my current book project, a history of the media’s role in binding personal and public fantasy.”

Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, said it’s “exceptionally encouraging to be able to share such positive news at this terribly challenging time.

“A Guggenheim Fellowship has always offered practical assistance, helping fellows do their work, but for many of the new Fellows, it may be a lifeline at a time of hardship, a survival tool as well as a creative one,” Hirsch said. “As we grapple with the difficulties of the moment, it is also important to look to the future. The artists, writers, scholars and scientific researchers supported by the Fellowship will help us understand and learn from what we are enduring individually and collectively, and it is an honor for the Foundation to help them do their essential work.”