Guggenheim Fellowships are were chosen on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. This year, two UChicago faculty were chosen, including Professor Howell.
April 10, 2023
Howell
Professor William Howell

William Howell, the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics, is among the 171 Fellows selected in this year’s class from nearly 2,500 applicants to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His fellowship will support projects on how U.S. political institutions shape our democracy.

“The new class of Fellows has followed their calling to enhance all of our lives, to provide greater human knowledge and deeper understanding,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, according to the announcement. “We’re lucky to look to them to bring us into the future.”

Howell is a leading political scientist who has written widely on separation-of-powers issues and American political institutions, especially the presidency. In addition to his appointment as Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at Harris, he serves as chair of the Department of Political Science. He also co-hosts Not Another Politics Podcast.

Most recently, Howell co-wrote Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy with Terry Moe. He’s authored and co-authored numerous books, including Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government—and Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency.

With the support of his Guggenheim Fellowship, Howell intends to work on writing projects during his sabbatical next year.

“I plan to write a book and some papers that examine how the design of political institutions and the emergence of the modern administrative state have downstream political implications for parties, electoral competition, and, more broadly still, democracy itself,” Howell said.

The Fellowship will also support his work as director of the Center for Effective Government, which was founded in 2019 to improve the performance of government through institutional reform.

“I can hardly wait to get after the work that this Fellowship is intended to underwrite,” Howell said. “What a great honor and privilege this is.”

Another UChicago professor, Orit Bashkin, also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Professor Bashkin is a historian who works on the intellectual, social and cultural history of the modern Middle East. As a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, she teaches classes on nationalism, colonialism and postcolonialism in the Middle East, modern Islamic civilization and on Israeli history.

Her Guggenheim Fellowship will support a book project on the history of Middle Eastern Jews from the early modern to the modern period. Drawing from Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew sources, Bashkin will show how Jews remembered and understood Ottoman and Arab politics through contemporary and biblical narratives.

Adapted from a story originally published at UChicago News.