Man-Made Mass Deaths Subject for Guggenheim Fellow

Contact: Michael Cinelli
Phone: (713) 831-4794

Man-Made Mass Deaths Subject for Guggenheim Fellow

Religious studies professor Edith
Wyschogrod, whose life’s work is to study the way in which mass
death affects society’s ideas of time, memory, history and
community, was awarded a 1995 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Wyschogrod, the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and
Religious Thought at Rice University, is the first religious studies
faculty member to receive this honor. She is one of only 152
Guggenheim recipients in the United States and Canada this year.

“This enables me to complete a project that I see as my life’s
work,” Wyschogrod said. “That is exploring 20th-century, man-made
mass destructions and finding out how these events affect the way we
understand the idea of community. I want to explore what kind of
conceptual shifts occur in light of mass deaths.”

Already, Wyschogrod has developed a few cogent concepts about
these types of violent incidents: the main one being that death is
bureaucratized; and that late in the 20th century you can kill more
people in a smaller time frame than you were able to in the past.

Religious Studies department chair Werner Kelber said
Wyschogrod’s research explores the “gravest issues facing humankind,
namely the genocidal inhumanity that has left us with the necropolis
of the 20th century.”

“While death is hardly a novel topic for philosophers of
religion, the sublimity of Wyschogrod’s ethical and philosophical
reflection on mass destruction, and the exquisite nobility of her
language have earned her international reputation,” Kelber added.”She has long maintained that the experience of death camps and the
technological feasibility to engulf us in global conflagration have
changed the manner in which we experience our selves, temporality,
the human community and death itself.

“This Guggenheim project seeks to reconstitute our condition in
the postmodern world.”

Wyschogrod will leave Rice in September for a year supported by
the Guggenheim Fellowship. She will conduct much of her research in
Houston, but she plans a few trips to Eastern Europe.

“The project has taken longer than I expected, but I’m committed
to this project,” Wyschogrod said. “Particularly to the
philosophical aspects of it. The Guggenheim will give me the free
time I need to complete it.”

This is not the first honor Wyschogrod has received. In 1993 she
served as the president of the American Academy of Religion.

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