Historian Wins 2011 Guggenheim
Top Stories - People - Press Clips - @Work - What's Happening - Faculty Authors Historian Wins 2011 Guggenheim - Inga Kiderra | May 2, 2011 Eric Van Young, professor of history at UC San Diego and a specialist in the history of colonial Mexico, has won a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2011-12. Awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and often characterized as "midcareer" awards, the prestigious fellowships support scholars and artists who have already demonstrated "exceptional capacity." In the annual competition's 87th year for the United States and Canada, Van Young was one of 180 successful candidates, selected from a group of some 3,000 applicants. His fellowship-winning project is a book in progress titled "Lucas Alaman and Mexico: A Life Together,1792-1853." Mexico's Alaman has often been compared to Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the fledgling United States. A founder of the Mexican Conservative Party, he is, in the words of Van Young, "one of those 19th-century polymaths—statesman, entrepreneur, political thinker, historian, journalist, botanist, mining engineer—whose career would be impossible to replicate now." Van Young has been working on Alaman's biography for about 10 years, he said, primarily from archival sources in Mexico, first becoming intrigued with him during his previous project on Mexican Independence. (Alaman authored a magisterial, five-volume history of the independence movement. What drew him to Alaman's story, he said, is "his rather schizoid image in Mexican history: sort of sinister, but also very smart and quite a modernizer.
