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Guggenheim winners

BY CYNTHIA LEE
Today Staff Writer

While literary translator Michael Heim will be studying how people learn or brush up on languages on their own outside the classroom, geographer Laurence C. Smith will soon be exploring the Arctic to document the rapid changes that are occurring due to Arctic warming.

Heim and Smith are among four UCLA faculty who have won 2006 Guggenheim Fellowships and a share of the $7.5 million that will support the endeavors of 187 artists, scholars and scientists in the United States and Canada. The fellowship will allow them to take a year’s leave to concentrate on their research.

They were chosen from nearly 3,000 applicants in 78 different fields based on the recommendations of hundreds of expert advisers to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s Board of Trustees.

“Indeed, it is a great honor to win this prestigious award,” said Jia-Ming Liu, a professor of electrical engineering. An expert in lasers and nonlinear optics, Liu is using his fellowship to advance far-field laser nano-microscopy, using lasers to image the structures inside a cell in three dimensions and with a resolution on the scale of only nanometers.

Liu won one of only two Guggenheim Fellowships presented to engineers this year. The other went to an MIT professor.

Anthony Pagden, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, said his fellowship will allow him to complete a research project he began five years ago. He will be tracing the evolution and transformation of cosmopolitanism from the early 18th century to the present.

“Cosmopolitanism is the belief that all peoples share a common human identity, [and that] all can or should belong to a world community, undivided by race, ethnicity or nationality or language,” Pagden explained. Originating in ancient Greece, this social theory became a key movement in the Enlightenment.

Heim, professor of Slavic languages and literatures and the official English translator for books by German novelist Günter Grass and Czech writer Milan Kundera, uses 12 to 15 languages — “depending on how you count,” he adds — in his work, primarily translating fiction and drama into English.

Heim is very familiar with the focus of his fellowship — lifelong language acquisition on one’s own. “I have been learning and relearning languages nonstop for more than 50 years,” he said. With his Guggenheim, he hopes to write a book based on his scholarly work. He plans to include helpful hints on learning languages and some memoir material.

Smith, associate professor of geography, will be traveling extensively through the Arctic for a book that will look at the effect and impact of global warming on high-latitude environments and summarize current thinking about the future.

Smith’s work on the devastating impact of climate change on Arctic lakes was chosen as one of the top 100 scientific discoveries of 2005 by Discover Magazine.

A complete list of Fellows can be seen on the Guggenheim foundation’s Web site: www.gf.org/newfellow.html.