Gretchen Reydams-Schils has been awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of her career achievements and exceptional promise.
The professor in the Program of Liberal Studies is one of just 188 scholars, scientists, and artists chosen from approximately 3,000 applicants for the fellowship created in 1925 to add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of the country.
Guggenheim Foundation President Edward Hirsch said the fellows are meeting the profound existential challenges facing humanity head-on and are “generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture.”
In “‘Becoming like God:’ Perfection in Platonism and Stoicism (1c. BCE-2c. CE),” Reydams-Schils will seek to retrieve aspects of human perfection in antiquity that are empowering and relevant.
“The project yields a distinctive model of ‘self,’ the constitution of a human being, and virtue,” she said. “This model invites us to see ourselves as fundamentally embedded in the order of the universe and as being part of a densely woven fabric of social relations.”
In our current context, and in the sphere of human action, Reydams-Schils said, perfection can be seen as imposing a literally inhuman standard, which is unattainable, destructive, and an impediment to human happiness and flourishing.
Reydams-Schils, who has concurrent appointments in classics, philosophy, and theology, said the fellowship is a validation of her vision for an interdisciplinary approach to ancient philosophy.
“My career narrative is also an ode to my department, the Program of Liberal Studies,” she said, “for the intellectual freedom it gave me to pursue this vision.”