Three University of Pennsylvania Professors Awarded 2016 Guggenheim Fellowships

University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana Mutz, music professor Timothy Rommen and theoretical chemist Joseph Subotnik have won 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships. They are among 178 scholars, artists and scientists selected from nearly 3,000 applicants from the United States and Canada. The new fellows were chosen on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. Mutz, who has dual appointments in the School of Arts & Sciences and the Annenberg School for Communication, will use her Guggenheim in conjunction with her fall sabbatical so that she can work on a study of American attitudes toward globalization over the next academic year. "The central focus of this project," said Mutz, "is the social psychology underlying the formation of attitudes toward globalization. Given that mass attitudes toward globalization are affected very little by economic self-interest, how do people form their views about their own country's relationship with the rest of the world?" Mutz teaches and does research on public opinion, political psychology and mass political behavior, with an emphasis on political communication. She holds the Samuel A. Stouffer Chair in Political Science and Communication and serves as the director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics, a non-partisan research institute at Penn, whose purpose is to promote research on the many ways in which citizens interact with the political world.