NEWS
NORMAN, OKLA. – University of Oklahoma professors Lucas Bessire, Ph.D., and Amanda Cobb-Greetham, Ph.D., have been named John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellows. This national award honors scholars, artists and scientists who are selected on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.
“We are incredibly honored that the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation has recognized the scholarly contributions of not one, but two of the University of Oklahoma’s exceptional faculty members,” said OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. “The work done by Dr. Bessire and Dr. Cobb-Greetham has enhanced many lives by providing a deeper understanding of their respective fields, and their research impact will be significantly amplified as Guggenheim Fellows.”
Guggenheim Fellows represent a wide variety of backgrounds, fields of study and accomplishments. Bessire is a professor of anthropology and Cobb-Greetham is a professor of Native American history and culture.
Bessire’s research interests include natural resources, inequality, affect and genre. He has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Bessire is the author of Behold the Black Caiman: a Chronicle of Ayoreo Life, the co-editor of Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century and author of Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains, which won five book prizes and was named a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award. As the focus of his Guggenheim Fellowship, Bessire is working on a book called The Plains Interior, which explores how people reckon with personal, economic and ecological changes on the contemporary High Plains.
During her tenure at OU, Cobb-Greetham, a member of the Chickasaw Nation, has contributed to the elevation of Native American Studies from a program to a department and the establishment of the Native Nations Center for research and community engagement.
Cobb-Greetham was awarded the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellowship from the Harvard Radcliffe institute for Advanced Study in 2021-2022. She is the winner of the American Book Award for her book Listening to Our Grandmothers’ Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females. She was the co-editor of The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations, has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and served as the editor of American Indian Quarterly, a leading journal of Native American studies, for nine years. The focus of her Guggenheim Fellowship will be the completion of a collection of interrelated essays, Bright, Golden Haze: Oklahoma/Indian Identity in Myth and Memory, which places Oklahoma history and mythology at the center of the American story, turning on the perceived fulfillment of manifest destiny and the perceived “conquering” of Native peoples.
This year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded 171 fellowships to scientists, writers, scholars, and artists honored across 48 fields. Since its establishment in 1925, the foundation has granted nearly $400 million in fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award and other internationally recognized honors. The great range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the fellowship program.
Previous Guggenheim Fellows from OU include Norman H. Boke (1952), Berry Campbell (1940 and 1941), Walter Stanley Campbell (1930 and 1931), Gilbert C. Fite (1964), Kyle Harper (2013), Scott Johnson (2018), Donna J. Nelson (2003), Jens Rud Nielsen (1931), Paul G. Ruggiers (1956), Kester Svendsen (1952), Alfred Barnaby Thomas (1929) and Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski (2011).
For more information on Guggenheim Fellows, go to www.gf.org.
About the University of Oklahoma
Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. OU serves the educational, cultural, economic and health care needs of the state, region and nation. For more information visit ou.edu.
