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5/5/2005 12:20:00 AM

Three Rice faculty earn Guggenheim Fellowships

BY JENNIFER EVANS
Rice News staff

Three Rice faculty members are among this year’s recipients of prestigious Guggeneheim Fellowships.

Anthropologist Susan Ossman, historian Martin Wiener and computer scientist Moshe Vardi were selected by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. They are among 186 fellowship winners selected from more than 3,000 applicants for awards totaling $7,112,000. The receipt of these three awards puts the number of Rice faculty who have received Guggenheim fellowships at 37.

Ossman, visiting associate professor of anthropology, will use her fellowship to study the tensions between increasingly globalized economies and cultures and individual lives. She will explore perceptions of self, family, citizenship and national identity among those who have been residents or citizens of multiple countries. Does international life experience shape global citizens or cosmopolitans?

In a project titled “People of the Third Step: Arab Serial Migrants in a Global World,” Ossman pursues ongoing research on people from Arab nations who have been residents of two or more countries, so-called “serial migrants.” The fellowship will enable her to spend eight months developing a survey and traveling in the Arab world, Europe and the U.S. to conduct in-depth interviews to understand what kind of families and individuals such global movement creates and how increased serial migration is changing the Arab world.

The Guggenheim received by Wiener, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of History, will support his continuing study of British criminal-justice history. By examining a number of homicide cases in British colonies “that evoked fundamental questions about the nature and rationale of British authority,” Wiener will explore “a deeper understanding of the dynamics of British imperialism” and address emerging areas in the study of British history.

The result of the project will result in a book, tentatively titled “An Empire of Law? Violence, Race and Authority in the British Empire,” that will extend Wiener’s previous work on how 19th-century Britain dealt with serious crimes of violence to its empire, but with a different purpose: “to see how their treatment highlighted underlying points of stress in imperial rule itself.”

Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering and professor of computer science, will use his award to lead a six-month “Special Program on Logic and Algorithms” at the Issac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England.

The program aims to bring together leading theoretical computer scientists to bridge a longstanding divide between those who seek to ensure and verify the correctness of computing systems and those who measure and ensure the efficiency of computer resources. The divergent mathematical tools used by these two groups of theorists — formal methods and semantics on the one hand and algorithms and computational complexity on the other — have traditionally prevented them from interacting.

Vardi’s program, which will be co-organized with the University of Cambridge’s Anuj Dawar, will center around a series of workshops that focus on exciting developments in recent years that have begun to bridge the gap. In total, more than 100 leading computer science theorists and mathematicians are expected to participate in the program.

Guggenheim Fellowships have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those “who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.” The Guggenheim Foundation provides fellowships for advanced professionals in all fields — natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and creative arts — except in the performing arts. The fellowships are grants made for a minimum of six months and a maximum of 12 months. Since the purpose of the Guggenheim fellowship program is to help provide fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible, grants are made freely. No special conditions attach to them, and the fellows may spend their grant fund in any manner they deem necessary to do their work.