3 USC Dornsife faculty receive Guggenheim Fellowships

Three USC Dornsife faculty members have been honored with prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, Cheryl Mattingly and Daniel Lidar were among a diverse group of 173 scholars, artists and scientists selected by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from a group of almost 3,000 applicants on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Nguyen, Aerol Arnold Chair of English and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity, spoke of the sense of honor he felt at receiving the award.

“The Guggenheim has long been recognized as one of the nation’s premier fellowships, and it’s a tremendous honor to be included in this group of writers and scholars,” he said. “The most important thing about receiving the award is that it means I will be able to dedicate myself to writing full-time in the next academic year.”

Nguyen has racked up a raft of honors since the publication of his debut novel The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015), a New York Times best seller. The book, which presents the Vietnam War from multiple perspectives, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Nguyen is currently working on a second novel, The Committed, which he says will be the sequel to The Sympathizer.

“While The Sympathizer explored how war tied Vietnam and the United States together, ” he said, “The Committed examines Vietnam and France’s relationship through the opium empire that France built in Indochina, and its ramifications for France.”

Nguyen’s nonfiction book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016) was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Awards in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction.

Earlier this year he published a collection of short stories, The Refugees (Grove Press).

As well as writing The Committed, Nguyen is now editing a collection of essays by refugee writers, to be published by Abrams Press in 2018.

“Given the renewed urgency of the refugee situation, with the United Nations finding that there are about 65 million stateless people in the world, [Abrams Press] editor Jamison Stoltz and I felt that it was timely to bring together writers who are refugees and who talk about refugees,” Nguyen said.

Cheryl Mattingly.

Mattingly, professor of anthropology at USC Dornsife, is a medical and psychological anthropologist who is inspired by phenomenology, the philosophy of ethics and narrative theory.

Her research has focused on disability, family care and health disparities for minority populations, in particular African Americans. Throughout her work, she has tried to document more than large-scale forces of social injustice.

Her Guggenheim Fellowship will enable her to concentrate on her new book, Category Trouble: Stigma as Moral Experience. The book will explore recent attention to “moral striving” in anthropology that has highlighted how people struggle to transform or exceed the lives they inhabit —aspirations that sometimes increase suffering.

The book will be more experimental in its writing than her previous works, said Mattingly, who holds a joint appointment at USC Chan Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy. “Can I write compelling nonfiction short stories that also have a certain theoretical, even existential, resonance? Can my stories help us rethink stigma as a painful and personal lived experience, as a social marker of marginalized groups, and also as a feature of the human condition?” 

Mattingly said she was “stunned” at the news she had won a Guggenheim, but added that she felt a special connection to the honor,

“There is deep significance for me in receiving a Guggenheim because of the program’s long history as a supporter of innovation and creativity, especially in the arts and humanities,” she said.  “Although anthropology is generally classified as a social science, I have always been a humanities-oriented type. One reason I gravitated toward anthropology as a discipline was because its research approach and methods encouraged us to listen carefully to the stories people told us and to record those stories ‘in their own words.’”

Daniel Lidar.

Daniel Lidar, professor of chemistry and physics at USC Dornsife and of electrical engineering at USC Viterbi School of Engineering, was recognized for his pioneering research in the area of quantum information science. He was the only candidate selected this year in the category of engineering.

As scientific director of the USC-Lockheed Martin Center for Quantum Computing (QCC), home of the world’s most powerful quantum computer, Lidar conducts state of the art research using a D-Wave quantum annealing processor.

“I’m especially interested in identifying practical problems in the field of machine learning that such quantum computers can solve with a demonstrable advantage over conventional computers,” Lidar said.

He is also the director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology (CQIST) and founder of the Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Control (CQIQC) at the University of Toronto.

For Lidar, the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship affirms a lifetime of achievement and dedication to cutting-edge science — he is also a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship and a fellow of the AAAS, APS and IEEE.

 “I am humbled and deeply honored to be receiving a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship,” he said. “I would like to acknowledge the contributions of the outstanding students and postdocs I’ve had the privilege of working with over the years, which were crucial in helping me earn this award.

“The fellowship will free me up to focus on my Guggenheim research project, entitled ‘Toward quantum advantages in computation via quantum annealing,’” he added. “I plan to explore how a new generation of quantum computers that operate by keeping the computation close to the lowest energy state, might provide speed-ups or other computational advantages.”

Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, expressed his excitement at naming 173 new Guggenheim Fellows for 2017.

“These artists and writers, scholars and scientists, represent the best of the best,” he said. “Each year since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has bet everything on the individual, and we’re thrilled to continue to do so with this wonderfully talented and diverse group. It’s an honor to be able to support these individuals to do the work they were meant to do.”