Philippe Bourgois Awarded 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship

Philippe Bourgois has been named a 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.

Selected from a field of over 3,000 applicants, Bourgois is among a group of 175 scholars, artists and scientists noted for their “prior achievement and exceptional promise” in the 89th annual competition in the United States and Canada.

Bourgois is the Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Family and Community Medicine. He holds appointments in the Department of Anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences and the Perelman School of Medicine’s Department of Family and Community Medicine. His Guggenheim Fellowship research project will involve writing a book, tentatively called Cornered, based on five years of research in North Philadelphia.

“[It is] about daily life in an impoverished de-industrialized U.S. inner city neighborhood that has been turned into an open air drug supermarket plagued by internecine violence, police brutality and public and private sector abandonment,” Bourgois said.

Bourgois is the author of several books, including In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio and Righteous Dopefiend (co-authored with Jeff Schonberg), which became a photo-ethnographic exhibit at the Penn Museum in 2009.