La historia de Guerrero

Cultural anthropologist Laura A. Lewis became the first JMU professor to receive a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The 12-month fellowship will allow her to continue her ethnographic research on the historical and cultural construction of race and identity in a historically black region of Mexico.

Lewis has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a rural community in Guerrero, a state on Mexico's Pacific coast, since 1997. JMU granted Lewis educational leave for the 2002-03 academic year to continue her research and to write a book manuscript, tentatively titled Narratives of History, Race and Place in the Making of Black Mexico.

The prestigious Guggenheim fellowship is one of about 200 granted annually to help scholars, artists and writers secure a block of time, free from other duties, to pursue their work.

The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation receives nearly 3,500 applications each year from professionals who have shown exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or creative ability in the arts.

Lewis says, "I am grateful to be recognized for this work and happy that JMU shows such commitment to faculty research, which is central to developing a compelling intellectual environment for scholars and students alike."

Lewis has also earned a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend to support her research for two months. She received a Summer Visiting Scholar's Award from the University of Chicago-University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Joint Center for Latin American Studies to fund one month of study at the University of Chicago Libraries. She earned her master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Chicago.
Among the well-known recipients of past Guggenheim fellowships are filmmaker Ken Burns, playwright Sam Shepard, historian David McCullough, composer Aaron Copland and writers Langston Hughs and Kurt Vonnegut.

Story by Janet L. Smith ('81)