Five Berkeleyans among 2019 Guggenheim winners

Five UC Berkeley professors are among this year's 168 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellows. The prestigious fellowships recognize scholars with impressive achievements who also show promise in fields ranging from the natural sciences to the creative arts. Berkeley's five winners include: - Brian DeLay , an associate professor in the history department who is an expert on the American West, transnational history and the US-Mexico borderlands. He is currently writing a book about the arms trade in the Americas for W.W. Norton & Company and plans to use his fellowship to "launch a digital humanities project that tracks the movement of weapons around the world from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to World War I. James Vernon , a professor of history who specializes in Britain and Late Modern Europe. He describes himself as a "historian of modern Britain with broad comparative and theoretical interests in the relationship between local, national, imperial and global histories. He plans to use his fellowship to write a mini-history of London's Heathrow Airport, which he calls "a laboratory for many of the characteristics we associate with neoliberalism - the deregulation and privatization of industry and security systems, the growth and outsourcing of highly gendered and racialized forms of labor, the explosive growth of the service, retail and finance sectors, as well as the emergence of an environmental politics addressing climate change and sustainability.