Professor Burney wins prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
16 Apr 2019
Ian Burney, Professor of History based in FBMH’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) has been awarded a 2019 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Ian’s award is one of just two presented this year in the category of the History of Science, Technology, & Economics, and is the only one made to a scholar based outside North America.
Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. In total, 168 fellowships were awarded this year to a diverse group of academics, writers, artists and scientists selected from almost 3,000 applicants as part of the Foundation’s 95th competition.
Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $360 million in fellowships to more than 18,000 individuals, among whom are scores of Nobel laureates, members of various national academies and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Turing Award, National Book Award and other significant, internationally recognised honours.
Commenting on his fellowship, Professor Burney said:
“It’s fantastic to be added to the list of individuals, past and present, whose work across the humanities, sciences and the arts has been judged worthy of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
“Alongside a residential fellowship at the National Humanities Center in the US, which I will take up for the coming academic year, the Guggenheim award will help me to develop my new research project on ‘a history of innocence’.
“I’m very grateful to my colleagues in CHSTM, and to friends and supporters across and beyond the University of Manchester, for helping me to achieve this honour.”
Ian’s research sits at the crossroads of the social and cultural histories of medicine, science, and the law, and has resulted in the publication of three books: Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest (Hopkins, 2000); Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination (Manchester, 2006); and Murder and the Making of English CSI (Hopkins, 2016). His most recent publication is a collection of essays - Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era (Hopkins, 2019).
As a Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Burney will be working on a project that aims to think historically about our present-day legal, scientific and media fascination with cases of wrongful conviction.
The full list of 2019 fellows may be viewed at http://www.gf.org.
You can read more about Professor Burney’s research HERE.