Two UC Davis faculty members and one professor emeritus have been awarded prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships, the foundation announced on April 8.

Frances Dolan, professor of English, Artyom Kopp, assistant professor of evolution and ecology, and Lynn Hershman Leeson, professor emeritus of technocultural studies, are among the 180 artists, scientists and scholars from the United States and Canada recognized for stellar achievement and exceptional promise by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Guggenheim Fellowships are intended to provide recipients with blocks of time ranging from six to 12 months in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible. In 2008, the average amount awarded to fellows in the United States and Canada competition was approximately $43,200.

The fellowship will provide Frances Dolan with the first leave she has taken from university teaching in 10 years.

“I was thrilled. Thrilled and delighted, and I couldn’t wait to tell my mother,” she said of her reaction upon hearing news of the award. “This gives me the opportunity to focus my energy on research and writing. And the amazing thing is to have a year in which I don’t have to multitask.”

English literature, history

Dolan plans to spend her fellowship year in Davis and London researching and writing a book that examines how modern research methods are indebted to 17th century scholarly debates in England about the nature of evidence and how it should be evaluated. Working across many fields, she is digging into such evidentiary genres as legal depositions, confessions, conduct books, trial proceedings, letters, pamphlets and plays.

After obtaining a Ph.D. in English at the University of Chicago in 1988, Dolan spent 14 years as a professor of English at Miami University in Ohio before coming to UC Davis in 2003. Her teaching and research focus on 16th and 17th century English literature and history, and, more recently, how these areas of the past affect the present. Dolan is author of three books, including the critically acclaimed Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy, which examines how 16th and 17th century formulations of marriage have created problems within this institution that stretch into modern times.

Dolan has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and has served as president of the Shakespeare Association of America.

Artyom Kopp will use his fellowship year to do “something very different from anything I’ve done in the past,” he wrote in an e-mail from Taiwan, where he is currently conducting field research. “The short version is that I will be trying to do a genome-wide analysis of cis-regulatory gene expression divergence between different populations.”

The longer version is that Kopp plans to sequence and compare the RNA of hybrids between different populations of Drosophila flies (evolutionary geneticists’ favorite study organism), in order to conduct an analysis that he hopes will weigh in on one of evolutionary biology’s most hotly debated topics. This is the notion that mutations in the sections of genes known as cis-regulatory regions (which are the regions that do not encode proteins, but rather determine when, where, and in what amount these proteins are produced) may play a predominant role in the natural variation that is found between individuals of the same species.

Distance is a motivator

If his research approach works, Kopp wrote in the e-mail, “it can later be adapted to any organism, and can be refined to investigate the genetic basis of specific morphological and physiological traits.”

Kopp will be spending his fellowship year in Austria working with population geneticist Christian Schlötterer’s group at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna. The physical separation from his Davis laboratory is a special boon, he wrote, as it will force him to concentrate on new ideas and research. “If I stayed in Davis, the temptation to keep doing what I normally do might prove too strong to resist.”

Before joining the UC Davis faculty in 2002, Kopp received a Ph.D. in developmental biology from Washington University in St. Louis in 1999, then worked as a post-doc with Sean Carroll at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for three years. Kopp and his lab group combine developmental and evolutionary genetics to understand the origin of changes in physical traits and ecological adaptations among organisms.

Currently on the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute where she is chair of the film department, Lynn Hershman Leeson was a professor of art at UC Davis from 1993 to 2005. She has worked extensively in photography, video, film and installation art, and received numerous national and international awards. During her Guggenheim Fellowship term, Hershman Leeson will be working on her next film, Women Art Revolution, the (Formerly) Secret History.

Since 1925, the New York-based Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $273 million in fellowships to nearly 16,700 people. This year’s 180 fellows were selected from some 3,600 applicants in the United States and Canada.

Recent UC Davis Guggenheim fellows are Marisol de la Cadena and Li Zhang, who both received fellowships in social sciences in 2008, and Douglas Kahn, who received a fellowship in film, video and radio studies in 2006.