Haun Saussy, University Professor of Comparative Literature, was one of 177 scholars nationwide to receive a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Saussy joins UChicago professors Lainie Ross and Joe Thornton as 2014–2015 Guggenheim Fellows. The fellowships are awarded annually to scholars “who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”

Saussy plans to use his fellowship to complete a new book tentatively entitled Zhuangzi Inside Out: Translation as Citation. This project connects his longstanding interest in translation with the early Chinese philosophical text Zhuangzi. Over the course of its 2,000-year history, Saussy argues, the anecdotes and parables of the Zhuangzi have served as a model for the assimilation into Chinese culture of originally foreign texts and ideas.

“I’m not writing about [the Zhuangzi], but about the way people used that book when they observed something coming from the outside,” Saussy told UChicago News.

Learn more about Professor Saussy’s wide-ranging scholarship on comparative literature and translation in his Chicago Humanities Forum lecture on February 12, 2014, as he investigates ““The Curious History of ‘Oral Literature.’”