Left: Sonali Gulati
Novelist Kiran Desai, academician Indira Viswanathan
Peterson, filmmaker Sonali Gulati, and neuroscientist
Charan Ranganath are among the 175
recipients of the 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship. They
were chosen from a pool of almost 3000 applicants.
Desai is the author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
and The Inheritance of Loss, which won the 2006 Man
Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle
Award. For her next, yet-to-be-released novel, titled
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Desai reportedly got
a $2.5 million advance from Knopf after submitting a
four-page proposal.
Gulati teaches film and photography at Virginia
Commonwealth University. Her short, widely
screened films include Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night,
which focuses on outsourcing, and I Am, which won
13 awards. Her other works are Name I Call Myself,
Barefeet, Sum Total, and Where Is There Room?
Viswanathan, a professor of South Asian studies
at Mount Holyoke College, specializes in Sanskrit
and Tamil literature. Her Poems to Siva was the first
translation of Shaiva devotional hymns in Tamil. She
is working on a book
called Imagining the
World in Eighteenth-Century
India. A scholar
since the ’70s, she received
her Ph.D. in Sanskrit
and Indian studies
from Harvard.
Ranganath, a professor
of neuroscience
at the University of California,
Davis, focuses
on the neurocognitive
structure of memory
and executive control.
His research suggests that a common neural system
supports both our working memory and long-term
memory tasks. To learn how different regions of the
brain contribute to working and long-term memory,
he is studying adults with normal brains and patients
with focal brain damage.