3 awarded Guggenheim Fellowships

by Barbara Pitoniak, News Office staff

hree faculty members have been awarded fellowships from the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. They are Eric M. Beekman, professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures; Neil Immerman, professor of Computer Science; and Max Page, assistant professor of architecture and history in the Art Department.

     Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment, according to the foundation. The 2003 fellowship winners include 184 artists, scholars and scientists, chosen from more than 3,200 applicants in the U.S. and Canada. Fifteen individuals from Massachusetts were selected for fellowships. The three UMass Amherst faculty represent one of two institutions in the state garnering the highest number of fellowships. Four individuals at Harvard University received fellowships.

     "I congratulate professors Beekman, Page, and Immerman on this outstanding achievement," said Charlena Seymour, interim senior vice chancellor for Academic Affairs and provost. "We are delighted UMass Amherst faculty represent one of the two largest groups of individuals in Massachusetts to receive fellowships. This is a fine tribute to the very high quality of their scholarly work."

Eric M. Beekman

     Beekman is currently conducting research at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Florida where he is translating a seven-volume set of 17th century Dutch books on tropical plants in the South Pacific and their uses written by G.E. Rumphius. He has published 24 books since the 1960s, the majority of which are related to the study of Dutch literature. His 12-volume series of translations of pivotal Dutch works was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in the 1980s.

     In 1997, Beekman was knighted by the Kingdom of the Netherlands, receiving the "Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw" (Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion) for his outstanding contributions to the study of Dutch language and literature and his efforts to promote an appreciation and understanding of the culture of the Netherlands in the English-speaking world.

Max Page

     In 1999 Yale University Press released a collection of works by G.E. Rumphius, "The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet," which is translated, edited, and annotated by Beekman, who joined the University in 1968.

     Page is the author of "The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940" (University of Chicago Press, 1999), which won the Spiro Kostof Award of the Society of Architectural Historians, for the best book on architecture and urbanism. He also writes for a variety of publications about New York City, urban development, historic preservation, and the popular uses of history. He is currently editing two books - a documentary history of American architecture and a collection of scholarly essays on the history of the historic preservation movement in the United States - and curating an exhibition about the ways American culture has imagined the destruction of New York City. Page grew up in Amherst, and began teaching here in 2001.

Neil Immerman

     Immerman is one of the key developers of an active research program called descriptive complexity, an approach he is currently applying to research in model checking, database theory, and computational complexity theory. He has just been named to a 2003 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 1995, Immerman shared the Godel Prize in theoretical computer science, the highest honor in his field, with Robert Szelepcsenyi, of the University of Chicago, for solving a 30-year-old problem in complexity theory.

     Immerman is an editor of Information and Computation and the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science. His book "Descriptive Complexity" appeared in 1999.