Jeffrey Masten, professor of English and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern, was recently named a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Masten’s work focuses on book history, sexuality and early modern English literature.
The Guggenheim award will help support Masten’s research into early printed copies of literary texts and the changing histories of gender and sexuality registered by the readers who owned, marked up and read them across time.
“I’m very grateful to receive this recognition from the Guggenheim Foundation,” Masten said. “In these times of book-banning and don’t-say-gaying, I’m especially pleased to have Guggenheim support for work on the long history of queer texts, LGBTQ and women readers, and their physical books. Faced with extremist legislation aimed at narrowing and censoring education, our knowledge projects that find and tell these stories remain crucial. I look forward to having more time for research and writing on these topics,” said Masten.
This year, the Foundation awarded 180 artists, writers, scholars and scientists from across the United States and Canada. Selected from a pool of nearly 2,500 applicants, the fellows were appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.
“Now that the past two years are hopefully behind all of us, it is a special joy to celebrate the Guggenheim Foundation’s new class of Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 fellow in poetry. “This year marks the Foundation’s 97th annual Fellowship competition. Our long experience tells us what an impact these annual grants will have to change people’s lives. The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. It is an honor for the Foundation to help the Fellows carry out their visionary work.”
Masten’s book, “Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), has been hailed as “a high-water mark in early modern sexuality studies” and won the Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award for best book in early modern drama studies. He has written influentially about the history of collaboration and conceptions of authorship in “Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama” (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Masten was named Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence by the University in 2006.