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.

Frances 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.

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.

Artyom Kopp will be in Austria at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna during his fellowship year. His project consists of sequencing and comparing the RNA of hybrids of different populations of Drosophila flies in order to address one of evolutionary biology’s most hotly debated topics. This is the notion that mutations in certain regulatory sections of genes may play a predominant role in the natural variation that is found between individuals of the same species.

Kopp joined the UC Davis faculty in 2002 after earning a Ph.D. in developmental biology from Washington University in St. Louis and working as a post-doc at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He 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, Lynn Hershman Leeson was a professor of art at UC Davis from 1993 to 2005. During her Guggenheim Fellowship term, Hershman Leeson will be working on her next film, “Women Art Revolution, the (Formerly) Secret History.”

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.