HSS Highlights
The School of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of English are rightly proud of two current faculty members, Helen Phillips and Sigrid Nunez, and alumna Tina Satter, a noted playwright and director, who have been awarded 2020 Guggenheim Fellowships. This year's fellowships were awarded to a diverse group of 175 writers, scholars, artists, and scientists. Appointed on the basis of both prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen through a rigorous peer-review process from almost 3,000 applicants in the foundation's 95th competition. After nearly a century, the Guggenheim Fellowship Program remains a significant source of support for artists, scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and scientific researchers.
Associate Professor Helen Phillips
Associate Professor of English Helen Phillips '07 M.F.A., has won wide acclaim for her novel The Need, which was cited in Time's Best of 2019 list and longlisted for the National Book Award. She has authored five books, including Some Possible Solutions (2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award); The Beautiful Bureaucrat, New York Times Notable Book of 2015 and finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award); And Yet They Were Happy (2011 Notable Book by The Story Prize); and Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green, a children's adventure novel.
Adjunct Professor Sigrid Nunez
M.F.A. Fiction Program adjunct professor Sigrid Nunez won the National Book Award for her novel The Friend in 2018. Her other novels include A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, and Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. A prolific writer, Nunez has also contributed to The New York Times, Threepenny Review, Harper's, McSweeney's, Tin House, The Believer, and Conjunctions. Her honors and awards include four Pushcart Prizes, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature.
Writer and director Tina Satter studied in Brooklyn College's M.F.A. playwriting program from 2007 to 2009. She is the artistic director of the Obie-winning theater company Half Straddle, based in New York City. Her notable works include Ghost Rings, Ancient Lives, and Seagull (Thinking of you).
Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, remarked that, "It's exceptionally encouraging to be able to share such positive news at this terribly challenging time...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."
