Guggenheim Fellows: Dorothy Weeks and Cora Lutz
Guggenheim Fellowships were established in 1925 to “add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country, and also to provide for the cause of better international understanding. The Fellowships are intended for individuals who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”
In 1949, of the 144 fellowships awarded, only 17 went to women scholars. Of these 17, two were awarded to faculty members at Wilson College. Their work reflected scholarship in cutting edge science and the liberal arts during the Middle Ages.
Dorothy Weeks was the first woman to earn a PHD in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Professor Weeks and her physics students tour the Chambersburg Engineering Company
Dorothy Weeks spent the academic year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work on her research project “Studies of the Zeeman effect in the arc spectra of titanium and vanadium.” Several years later she began new work for the National Science Foundation.
In later years, she worked at Harvard University as a spectroscopist on the Solar Satellite Project – an Orbiting Solar Observatory – also known as “SkyLab”.
Cora Lutz earned a PhD in Classics from Yale University and came to Wilson in 1935. With the funds from the Guggenheim Fellowship, she returned to Yale to complete her work on Remigius of Auxerre, a ninth century scholar and teacher. She spent time in Europe to work with the original manuscripts. In 1954, Lutz won a second Guggenheim and completed a second volume of the work.
“I am tracking down the manuscripts of a treatise of Remigius on the seven liberal arts. The significance of this work in the educational scheme of the Middle Ages has been demonstrated vividly by the fact that now I have come upon manuscripts of it ranging from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries in libraries all over Europe from Naples to Cambridge.”