2015 Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded to Carmela V. Franklin and Seth L. Sanders

Carmela Vircillo Franklin, ISAW Affiliated Faculty Member, and Seth L. Sanders, former ISAW Visiting Research Scholar, were both recently awarded John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships for 2015. Professor Franklin’s research in connection with this fellowship will focus on a critical edition of the Liber Pontificalis of the twelfth century. Professor Sanders will work on a project entitled “Why We Can’t Read the Torah: The Form of the Pentateuch and the History of Ancient Hebrew Literature.”

Carmela Vircillo Franklin is Professor of Classics at Columbia University. Professor Franklin received her B.A. and Ph.D. in Classics (Medieval Latin) from Harvard University. She joined the Columbia faculty in 1993. From July 1, 2005, until September 2010, she served as the 20th Director of the American Academy in Rome. Her research focuses on medieval Latin texts and their manuscripts, and much of it is conducted in Europe’s great manuscript repositories, especially the Vatican Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Seth L. Sanders is Associate Professor of Religion at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. Trained in Bible, Semitic languages, and comparative religion at Harvard, Hebrew University, and Johns Hopkins, Professor Sanders studies how political identities and religious experience were created in ancient Israel. His work connects the Bible, Jewish identity, and political thought from ancient Israel to modern nationalism. As a Visiting Research Scholar at ISAW in 2010-2011, Professor Sanders conducted research on “Rituals of Revelation: The Ancient Near Eastern Roots of Jewish Mysticism.”