 |
With subjects ranging from 10th century monks and marriage alliances to the wine and beer industry of 20th century America, three Berkeley scholars have captured prestigious fellowships awarded annually by the Guggenheim Foundation. Professors Glenn Carroll, Geoffrey Koziol and Lydia He Liu are among the 164 artists, scholars and scientists nationally who will receive awards totaling almost $4.89 million for 1997. There were 16 recipients altogether from the nine UC campuses. This is the 73rd year for the awards by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which are based on distinguished achievement in the past and the promise of future exceptional accomplishment. Carroll, the Paul J. Cortese Professor of Management at the Haas School of Business, received support for work on "The Strategy and Organization of Specialty Producers.." His research demonstrates that-contrary to all expectations-many small specialty producers are able to thrive in industries that are moving toward increased concentration in large organizations. Instead of crowding out the small producers, the giants out compete each other. The survivors then move to the "center of the market," creating homogenized products and leaving room for small businesses to produce a diversity of new specialty products, Carroll has found. He documents his theory with data from the beer brewing and wine-making industries, but notes that similar trends have been found in book publishing, music recording, newspaper publishing, passenger airlines and banking. Koziol, associate professor of history and former chair of medieval studies, received his award for research titled "Monks, Marriage and Discourses of Power in 10th-Century France." His research shows how a medieval kingdom could maintain political unity in the absence of any centralized government. The secret was a network of alliances that anticipated the alliance system of modern European states. The Guggenheim will support Koziol's intent to write the political history of monasticism from the ninth through the 11th centuries in France. Liu, associate professor of East Asian Languages and Comparative Literature, won support for her project, "Missionary linguistic enterprise in 19th-century China." Liu has studied how Protestant missionaries undertook biblical and secular translations and publishing in China to create some of the first moments of translatability between European and Chinese languages. "The missionaries' translations began to allow different cultures and peoples to talk to each other, not just about each other," said Liu. "Such talk has never stopped since." With her works, she hopes to "re-open the questions of universalism, cultural relativism, colonial modernity, global circulation of books, technology and meanings," she said, "by examining the key texts in the missionary-Chinese translations of the period." Some of these texts include early classical Chinese versions of the Bible, translations of international law and grammar books. The Guggenheim award-combined with a 1997-98 fellowship from the National
Humanities Center in North Carolina-will help Liu afford to take off the
next academic year to write a book on her study. She will do so at the National
Humanities Center. |