PROVIDENCE – Five members of the Brown University faculty have been awarded 2007 Guggenheim Fellowships, the university announced today.

The new fellows, selected on the basis of distinguished achievement and exceptional promise, are:

* Jeffrey Brock, an associate professor of mathematics, whose research focuses on low-dimensional geometry and topology, particularly in spaces with hyperbolic geometry. A graduate of Yale University, he received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of California-Berkeley. In his Guggenheim project, titled “Models, Bounds, and Effective Rigidity in Hyperbolic Geometry,” Brock will explore the possibility of using a kind of “mathematical DNA” for a 3-dimensional space to relate its topological and geometric properties.

* Susan Harvey, a professor of religious studies, who specializes in late antique and Byzantine Christianity, focusing on Syriac studies. She is widely published in the fields of asceticism, hagiography, women and gender, hymnography, homiletics, and piety in late antique Christianity. Harvey will work on her current book project, “Teaching Women: Biblical Women and Women’s Choirs in Syriac Tradition.”

* Michael L. Satlow, an associate professor of Judaic studies and religious studies, whose specialty is early Judiasm. A member of the board of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and a co-editor of the Brown Judaic studies series, he earned his Ph.D. in ancient Judaism from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Satlow will investigate how the Jews of late antiquity understood their relationship with God, in a project titled “Jewish Piety in Late Antiquity.”

* Robert O. Self, an associate professor of history whose teaching and writing focuses on 20th-century U.S. history. He is the author of the award-winning “American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland.” Self will work on a project titled “The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in America from Watts to Reagan,” examining gender, sexuality, race and political culture from the 1965 Watts riots to Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980.

* Michael J. Tarr, the Fox Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences and a professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences, who focuses on the interaction of cognitive and perceptual knowledge. A fellow of the American Psychological Society, he earned his bachelor’s in psychology at Cornell University and his doctorate in brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his fellowship, Tarr will collaborate with colleagues in applied mathematics, computer science and neuroscience to develop a more comprehensive model of visual object recognition, in a project titled “Statistical Models of Structured Visual Object Recognition in Humans.”

They are among 189 artists, scholars and scientists selected, from nearly 2,800 applicants, to receive awards totaling $7.6 million.

“We are extremely proud that the Guggenheim Foundation is honoring our five distinguished colleagues with one of the most prestigious fellowships available to scholars,” said Rajiv Vohra, dean of the faculty at Brown.

Additional information is available at www.brown.edu/a>.