Lyons named Guggenheim Fellow

By Joanna Gluckman

John D. Lyons, U.Va.’s Commonwealth Professor of French, is among 184 scholars, artists and scientists chosen this year to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The annual awards from the Joel Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation provide financial support for a year’s intensive work on a project. Selections are made on the basis of distinguished achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

The fellowship will support Lyons as he works to complete a book tentatively titled, The Practice of Imagination: Embodied Thought in Early-Modern France. The book explores the use of imagination by French writers of the 17th century.

Since 1925, the foundation has granted more than $200 million to more than 15,000 individuals, including Ansel Adams, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Isamu Noguchi, Linus Pauling, Paul Samuelson, Martha Graham, Philip Roth, Derek Walcott, James Watson and Eudora Welty.