History professor named 2009 Guggenheim Fellow

History professor named 2009 Guggenheim Fellow

Credit: History Department Amy Greenberg

University Park, Pa. — Amy Greenberg, professor of American history and women's studies at Penn State, has been named as a 2009 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, to research and write a history of the little-remembered U.S.-Mexico War of 1846 and the wide-reaching cultural and political impact of America's first foreign war.

Greenberg is one of 180 Fellows, chosen this year from a group of nearly 3,000 applicants. Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment. This year's Fellows represent 62 disciplines and 68 different academic institutions, and range in age from 29 to 70, from the United States and Canada.

Greenberg is a historian of pre-Civil War America (1800-1860) with a particular interest in the politics, culture, and social history of the 1840s and 1850s. Her research has ranged from urban society and culture, as illustrated by her book Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in Nineteenth-Century America, to the role of manifest destiny ideology in foreign affairs and American society and culture, which resulted in the book: Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire.

She joined Penn State's College of the Liberal Arts in 1995 as assistant professor of history and was named associate professor in 2001 and professor in 2006. She served as interim director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center from 2005-2006. In 1999, she received the George Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching given by Penn State.

Other honors include an American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Fellowship, a Gilder Lehrman Fellowship at the New-York Historical Society, the W. M. Keck Foundation Fellowship and Mellon Fellowships at the Huntington Library. History News Network named her a Top Young Historian in 2007. The profile is at: http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/45411.html. She earned a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was established in 1925 by United States Senator Simon Guggenheim and his wife as a memorial to a son who died April 26, 1922. The Foundation offers Fellowships to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts. Past Fellows include Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners and prominent achievers such as Langston Hughes, James Watson, Paul Samuelson, Isamu Noguchi and Martha Graham.