"I was ecstatic,” says Tarek El-Ariss, professor and chair of Middle Eastern studies, who was at home reading when he got the email informing him that he’d been awarded a 2021 Guggenheim fellowship. “I felt that this was a tremendous recognition of my work and my new book project.” The fellowship comes with a no-strings-attached grant of $30,000 to $45,000 that enables winners to work “with as much creative freedom as possible,” according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
El-Ariss, along with Joshua Bennett and Alexander Chee , were chosen from among nearly 3,000 applicants this year. El-Ariss hopes to travel to the Middle East and Europe during the summer to work on his third book, Water on Fire: The Making of a Literary Scholar, a collection of essays about storytelling, displacement, and monsters throughout Arab history.
Bennettplans to develop his first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, and his third poetry collection, The Study of Human Life. “I write primarily about kinship. That’s the through-line of my work as both a poet and a literary critic,” says the professor of English and creative writing and African and African American studies, who also won a $50,000 Whiting Foundation fellowship this year.
Chee learned he had won a Guggenheim 20 minutes before teaching his first-year writing seminar. “I could see the congratulations message notifications hitting my phone out of the corner of my eye,” says the associate professor of English and creative writing. Chee, who is working on a project about the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945 and its effects on Korean culture, also won a $50,000 United States Artists fellowship this year. “I’m really curious to see what I can do with this kind of support now,” he says. In addition to working at archives in New York City and Boston, he plans to take at least two trips to South Korea, including a visit to Goheung, the small coastal Korean town where his grandparents were born.
Dartmouth is one of 10 colleges and universities with multiple winners among this year’s 184 Guggenheim fellows.
—Maud McCole ’23
