Three Dartmouth faculty members have been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The prestigious fellowships provide support to outstanding scholars and artists in midcareer, allowing them to pursue their work without restriction.
, the William R. Kenan Professor of Ancient Greek History; , professor of English and creative writing; and , the Charles A. and Elfriede A. Collis Professor in History, are among the 198 scientists, scholars, writers, and artists to win Guggenheim fellowships this year. They were selected from among nearly 3,500 applicants from the United States and Canada.
“This honor recognizing the exceptional work of these three professors is a testament to the depth and impact of Dartmouth’s scholarship in the humanities and the full range of fields across the liberal arts,” says . “We celebrate these faculty members for expanding our understanding of our humanity and history in a way that advances civilization.”
, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, praises Christesen, Dever, and Gaposchkin as distinguished teacher-scholars.
“The commitment of these outstanding writers, researchers, and educators to the core values of a liberal arts education is inspiring, and their work exemplifies the vital role these values play in bringing positive change to the world,” Smith says.
In the , Edward Hirsch, an award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation, says, “We believe that these creative thinkers can take on the challenges we all face today and guide our society towards a better and more hopeful future.”
Dartmouth’s 2025 Guggenheim Fellows
Paul Christesen’s areas of expertise include ancient Greek history with a focus on Sparta, sport history, the relationship between sport and political systems, and the use of geographic information systems, aka GIS, to compile archaeological data.
Christesen is aiming high for the monograph he plans to finish during his fellowship, Living Luxuriously in Ancient Sparta.
“My hope for the project is that it will fundamentally change the way we view Sparta, so that we understand the Spartans less as a rigorously austere society and more as a place where a relatively small group of people at the apex of the socioeconomic pyramid lived a luxurious life that was made possible through the exploitation of a large number of enslaved agricultural laborers,” says Christesen, who is currently leading students on the in Greece.
This thesis runs counter to the widely held view that Sparta was an austere, martial society, an understanding reflected in the term “Spartan,” dating back to the mid-17th century.
“This revisionist perspective, built through study of ancient texts as well as new readings of archaeological artifacts, has wide-ranging ramifications for our understanding of ancient Sparta,” Christesen writes in his project proposal.
“Furthermore, it calls into question the image of Sparta regularly conjured by far-right partisans in the present day.”
And Christesen is ready to take his disruption of the popular view of Sparta’s meaning to a wider audience.
“Although scholars cannot and should not control public discourse about the past, they should feel an obligation to make available narratives that are well-grounded, useful, and accessible,” he writes.
Citing his work in the popular media on subjects including the ancient Olympics and his on ancient Greek history that has drawn more than 1 million views, he stands ready to take his arguments to the people, he says.
“At a time when a toxic combination of polarized politics and technology is facilitating the spread of misinformation and outright lies, that obligation is more pressing than ever before. Living Luxuriously will offer a compelling alternative to prevailing and largely inaccurate views of Sparta,” Christesen writes.
Carolyn Dever, a scholar of gender studies and 19th-century British literature, has written extensively on Victorian and feminist studies, psychoanalysis, and literary theory.
Dever will use the Guggenheim grant to write Habits of Love: An Autobiography of My Mother. The book, a memoir, examines the complexities of growing up while guarding the secret Dever’s mother shared only with her: a world of delusions that welcomed the child into thrilling realities that were entirely different from her everyday life. A luminous and brilliant figure whose struggle with mental illness emerged publicly when Dever was a teenager, Kristine Dever then disappeared. She reemerged in her daughter’s life only seven years later, in a chance encounter on Boston’s Red Line when Dever was a graduate student at Harvard.
Dever’s book explores how people learn to understand the worlds around them and to distinguish among realities, including play, fantasy, and even works of the imagination. “Habits of Love will open fresh questions about the origins of interpretation for those of us who seek the lush excesses of meaning in words on the page. As a book with a mother and daughter at its heart, Habits of Love also tells a story of intense devotion and crushing loss,” Dever writes in her Guggenheim project proposal.
And while this will be the most personal and vulnerable work she has undertaken, Dever says it will explore questions that have been “absolutely central thematically, topically, theoretically, to my academic work.”
From her first book, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins, to her most recent project, Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field, about an aunt-niece lesbian couple who wrote in one voice, as a man, Dever’s work has always explored questions of identity, imagination, immersion, desire, and power. Habits of Love represents a change of register, Dever says, and an opportunity to tell a different kind of story.
Dever received a special Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction, according to the Guggenheim Foundation.
The help of , associate provost for research development and alliances, was invaluable during the application process, Dever says. “She is a phenomenal reader and editor and supporter and doula for academic work. We are so fortunate to have Charlotte Bacon on our team at Dartmouth.”
Cecilia Gaposchkin describes herself as a medievalist whose research revolves around the religious and cultural history of the Middle Ages.
In particular, she studies “how religious ideas and practices underwrote and reinforced institutions and ideologies of power,” Gaposchkin writes in her Guggenheim application.
During her year-long sabbatical, she plans to work on her book project, The Cross Invincible: A Long History of the Cross as a Weapon of War. The book “seeks to answer, how did the symbol of Christ’s sacrifice, his passion, become a weapon of warfare? At first glance it seems to be a complete inversion. A paradox,” Gaposchkin says.
But this was a concept that was “in the wind” of medieval Christendom, Gaposchkin says. Earlier work, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology, examined how ecclesiastical rituals supported and underwrote an ideology of crusading.
Then, while Gaposchkin was working on a paper exploring the significance of relics in the Crusades, she discovered a small image of the 7th century Byzantine emperor Heraclius, who led crusades against the Sasanian Empire, literally using the cross as a lance against his enemies.
“It’s such a stunning image, such a breathtaking statement of the ideology of the cross,” she says.
The simple answer is that, early on, Christ’s cross is understood to be his weapon against the devil, Gaposchkin says.
“Once it’s a weapon, it’s a weapon. And once the devil is connected as the invisible enemy, an eschatological frame can be connected to the visible world. Your military enemy, particularly if they’re non-Christian, becomes the devil’s servants. The ability to apply the spiritual within the temporal world is just too ideologically powerful.”
It has become a powerful cultural motivator and phenomenon in history.
“And you can see it everywhere. It’s deeply implicated into Christian nationalism through history,” she says.
Christesen and Gaposchkin, who are married, are a rare example of spouses receiving Guggenheims at the same time. (A Guggenheim official says it is infrequent but not unprecedented).
“I’m delighted and honored to be chosen as a Guggenheim Fellow, and of course the fact that my wife Cecilia and I received Guggenheims in the same year makes it even more special,” Christesen says.
Gaposchkin says, “It feels extremely good as a way of validating the types of choices and compromises in the way we’ve supported each other over the years to both win in the same year. It’s something we can share. And neither of us have to feel bad that the other one didn’t win.”
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Among alumni, , a University System of Maryland Regents Professor, also was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies.
Faculty in all disciplines interested in applying for external funding opportunities such as the Guggenheim fellowship have access to resources through Dartmouth’s .
Recent Guggenheim winners include Professor of Music , Professor of English and Creative Writing , Professor of Anthropology , Assistant Professor of Music , James O. Freedman Presidential Professor , Daniel P. Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy , Professor of English and Creative Writing , Frank J. Reagan ’09 Chair of Policy Studies , Professor of Earth Sciences , Associate Professor of Music , Professor of English and Creative Writing Emerita , and Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History .
