Williams College Art Historian Wins Guggenheim Fellowship
WILLIAMSTOWN - The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced the award of its most prestigious fellowships to Michael J. Lewis, professor of art at Williams College.The Fellowship will allow Lewis to complete the research and writing of "The Pietist Tradition in Town Planning." "Pietist tradition," Lewis explains, "is expressed in a half century of Utopian town building by varied separatist sects as the 16th-century Anabaptists, 18th-century Moravians, and 19th-century Shakers." It is a tradition that is in parallel and in opposition to the ideal cities of the Italian Renaissance.
His project "is to do justice to this neglected chapter in the history of idea," Lewis said. "It will show that Pietist architecture … was rooted in the scholarly and courtly centers of Europe -- and reflects the fertile interaction of the Renaissance and the Reformation."
He will spend some of his year's leave from Williams in Germany, primarily doing research at the Moravian archives in Herrnhut, Germany. In the U.S. he will focus this year on the Moravian archives in Bethlehem, Penn.
Lewis said the book will sum up the meaning of "the other urban tradition, and seeks to take the measure of the Pietist contribution to urban thought, and its role as a laboratory for social experimentation."
He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and a number of books, including "Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind" (W. W. Norton) and "The Gothic Revival" (Thames and Hudson). His most recent book titled "American Art and Architecture" (Thames & Hudson, World of Art Series) provides an eloquent overview of the history of American art. His book "August Reichensperger: The Politics of the German Gothic Revival" (Architectural History Foundation) received the Society of Architectural Historians' Alice Davis Hitchcock Award for the best book of the year. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Criterion.
He received his B.A. from Haverford College in 1985 and his Ph.D. in architectural history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. He studied for two years at the University of Hannover, Germany, under the auspices of a Fulbright Fellowship. At Williams since 1993, Lewis teaches courses on American art and architecture, eighteenth to twentieth century architecture, and architectural criticism. In addition to his work on American art forms, Lewis also focuses on German art and theory.
Lewis is one of 190 successful candidates, chosen from a group of more than 2,600 applicants. Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment. In all, 75 disciplines and 81 different academic institutions are represented by this year's Fellows
