James Longenbach, the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester, has received a 1995 Guggenheim Fellowship. Longenbach is among 152 artists, scholars and scientists to be chosen as fellows from a national field of 2,856 applicants.
Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. Among the 1995 fellows are poets, novelists, playwrights, painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, choreographers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists and scholars in the humanities. Many fellows hold appointments in American colleges and universities, but numerous other fellows are not associated with an academic institution.
Longenbach specializes in British and American modern literature. His research project "Modern Poetry after Modernism" examines postmodernism in American poetry. Poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbury, and Robert Pinsky will be included in the study.
Longenbach has previously authored three books, Modernist Poetics of History; Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism; and Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. Briefly summarizing his work Longenbach said, "My three books focus on modern poets (Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Stevens) in the context of 20th-century intellectual, cultural, and political history."
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