Emory Report homepage  

April 10 , 2006
Schuchard, Rochat awarded Guggenheims

BY michael terrazas

English Professor Ron Schuchard and psychology Professor Philippe Rochat have been awarded 2006 Guggenheim Fellowships, marking the fourth and fifth such awards for Emory professors in the last four years.

Guggenheim Fellowships carry a monetary value to allow for a minimum of six and a maximum of 12 months’ study on the particular project for which the fellowship is given. Schuchard, Goodrich C. White Professor of English, took his award for a project dedicated to compiling and editing the unpublished prose writings of poet T.S. Eliot, while Rochat’s fellowship will fund a study of the development of possession and sharing tendencies among infants.

“Ron Schuchard has long been recognized worldwide for his excellent research on T.S. Eliot, and Philippe Rochat and his team continue to break new ground in early childhood development and infant cognition,” said Emory College Dean Bobby Paul. “These Guggenheim Fellowships represent the latest and greatest of recognitions for two of the finest members of our faculty, and I look forward with anticipation to the scholarship that will be made possible by these awards.”

Schuchard, who has received complementary fellowships from Harvard’s Houghton Library and Yale’s Beinecke Library, will use his Guggenheim to travel to both of those universities and to London to collect some 700 unpublished pieces of Eliot’s prose, such as lectures and other public addresses, for publication by Faber & Faber in England and by the Johns Hopkins University Press in the United States.

“T.S. Eliot is one of the great prose writers of our age, and scholarship over the years has suffered grievously for 90 percent of the time not being aware of 90 percent of what he wrote,” Schuchard said. “The Eliot estate, and his publisher, Faber & Faber, commissioned me to bring out a multivolume edition of Eliot’s complete prose that will go an estimated eight to 10 volumes.”

Rochat, whose The Infant’s World was published in 2001 by Harvard University Press, will use his Guggenheim to continue work on early childhood and infant cognitive development. His prior research has focused on questions such as development of sense of self, language development and toddler perceptions of their own past.

“How do they respond?” Rochat has said of questions he attempts to answer of his tiny research subjects.
“How do they attend to particular events in their environment?”

Emory is becoming a regular on the Guggenheim award list; in 2002, Larry Barsalou (psychology) and Kristin Mann (history) were awarded fellowships, and a year later Natasha Trethewey (creative writing) claimed another one.

“Ron Schuchard and Philippe Rochat have built sterling reputations with their respective work in 20th century English literature and early childhood developmental psychology, and Emory is proud and gratified that institutions such as the Guggenheim Foundation have chosen to recognize their achievements,” said Provost Earl Lewis. “We’ve long said that perception often lags behind reality in the world of higher education, but awards like these indicate to me that Emory is closing that gap every day.”

TOP