News Release

CHAPEL HILL -- For 81 years, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has recognized distinguished individual achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment with its Guggenheim Fellowship awards.

This year’s 186 fellows, including artists, scholars and scientists, were selected from more than 3,000 applicants – and two of the fellowship recipients are University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty members.

Dr. Donald J. Raleigh, Jay Richard Judson distinguished professor of history in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Dr. Gerald J. Postema, Cary C. Boshamer professor of philosophy in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences and professor of law in UNC’s School of Law, are 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship award recipients, the foundation recently announced.

Raleigh has written, translated or edited more than a dozen books on a wide variety of issues related to Russia and was associate editor of the four-volume "Encyclopedia of Russian History," published in 2004. He was editor of the journal Soviet Studies in History (now Russian Studies in History) from 1979 through 1994.

He will use his fellowship to research an oral history project, "Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of the Class of ’67."

"The post-World War II period, in general, is still the domain of social scientists. It’s really just been the last few years that historians have turned to this period," he said. "What I’m trying to do is to trace transformative developments since World War II through the 70 or so individuals I’m interviewing, who belong to the first postwar generation."

His interviews, of which he has completed 55 at this point, focus on students who graduated in 1967 from Moscow’s School Number 20 or from the provincial city of Saratov’s School Number 42. Eight of the interviews with Saratov school graduates, including photographs from their school years, are part of a book, "Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk About Their Lives," scheduled for publication next year.

Raleigh, who has been a faculty member at UNC since 1988, has received UNC’s Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction (2002). He also has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Humanities Center.

Postema has written close to 60 publications, articles and chapters, and has written several books, including "Bentham and the Common Law Tradition," published in 1986. He has been editor of Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Law since 1997 and co-organizes (with Michael Corrado, a UNC law professor) UNC’s annual Workshops in Law and Philosophy.

He will use his fellowship to research the discipline of public reason.

"My research is an attempt to explore the role of practical reason in law and in the practice of law," he said. "It has two focal points. One is historical, and it explores the notion of practical reason and artificial reason of law in the 17^th century – the common law tradition. The other is contemporary, trying to learn what we can from the 17^th-century discussion."

Postema wrote the "Classical Common Law Jurisprudence," published in the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal ("Part I" in 2002 and "Part II" in 2003). His research, he said, will explore the social structure of law as practiced in the 17^th century and how that century’s public tradition of legal argument and reasoning would positively influence the contemporary practice of law.

Postema, who has been a faculty member at UNC since 1980, received UNC’s Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction this year and recently was appointed a fellow of the National Humanities Center (he also served as a center fellow in 1986-87). He will be the Arthur L. Goodhart distinguished visiting professor of legal science at Cambridge University in 2007-08.

Decisions on the selection of Guggenheim Fellowship award recipients are based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisers and are approved by the foundation’s board of trustees, which includes seven members who are past fellows of the foundation. This year’s awards total more than $7.1 million.

The new fellows include writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, choreographers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists and scholars in the humanities. Seventy-nine institutions are represented by one or more fellows.

Since 1925, the foundation has granted almost $240 million in fellowships to more than 15,500 individuals in the United States and Canada. Past recipients have been Nobel laureates and recipients of the Pulitzer and other prestigious prizes. Past recipients include Ansel Adams, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Dr. Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Dr. Linus Pauling, Martha Graham, Philip Roth, Derek Walcott, Dr. James Watson and Eudora Welty.

For more information on the foundation and the Guggenheim Fellowship awards, visit www.gf.org.

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Photo links:

Raleigh: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/raleigh_donald.jpg
Postema: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/postema_gerald_05.JPG

News Services contact: Deb Saine, (919) 962-8415 or deborah_saine@unc.edu