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Iowa State's James Dow receives Guggenheim Fellowship
- James Dow,
professor emeritus of foreign languages and literatures at Iowa State University,
has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Dow will use the award to prepare the most extensive grammar of the Cymbrian
language ever published. Cymbrian is a minority language still spoken primarily
by about 300 inhabitants of Lusern in the Alps of northern Italy and a few
other small Italian villages.
People from German descent have inhabited this section of Italy for centuries.
Dow says Cymbrian is Germanic in form and at its height was spoken by thousands
of individuals in a large remote area of the Italian Alps.
"Over time, dominant languages (German and Italian) started to take
over," Dow said. "In post-World War II, market factors made the
language even more rare.
"The language will not likely survive the 21st century," Dow continued,
"and may disappear within the next generation. It is urgent to complete
basic work on the language while some of those who can best answer significant
questions are still alive."
In his yearlong Guggenheim fellowship, Dow will prepare a text of the Cymbrian
grammar, edit taped recordings made in 1941 under the auspices of the Nazi
regime, and write an introduction in English and German and commission an
Italian translation of the tapes.
Dow has long researched the use of folklore by the Nazis prior to and during
World War II. He recently uncovered a study of the Cymbrian language made
by a German, Bruno Schweizer during the early days of the war. Schweizer
was a civilian employee of the National Socialist Cultural Commission, a
sub-branch of the SS Ancestral Inheritance (SS Ahnenerbe) with responsibilities
in linguistics.
Dow has accessed Schweizer's private papers detailing the Cymbrian language
study and the tapes the German made of the villagers. He will use those
papers, the tapes and personal interviews with residents of Lusern to create
a complete Cymbrian grammar.
Only the eighth Iowa Sate faculty member to receive the Guggenheim fellowship,
Dow is the first Iowa State recipient in 34 years. The Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation provides fellowships for advanced professionals in all fields
(natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, creative arts) except the
performing arts.
Fellowships are awarded to individuals who have already demonstrated exceptional
capacity for productive scholarship or exception creative ability in the
arts.
Dow is a recipient of the 2001 LAS Award for Excellence in Research, the
2001-2002 ISU Distinguished Humanities Scholar award, the 2003 Regents'
Faculty Excellence award, and was elected in 2004 a Fellow of the American
Folklore Society. He has been instrumental in discovering and revealing
how National Socialist ideology appropriated folklore studies in his books
The Nazification of an Academic Discipline, Folklore and Fascism,
and contributed substantially to the 732 page German volume Völkische
Wissenschaft.
His latest book, The Study of European Ethnology in Austria, written
with his colleague in Vienna, Olaf Bockhorn, was published last April. In
the book Dow and Bockhorn look at the study of ethnology in Austria before,
during and after World War II, including racist educational communities
that adhered to a unique view of the "myth-ritual" theory of mythology.
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