CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Two University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professors have been awarded 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships.
This year’s Illinois fellows are English professor Christopher Kempf and media and cinema studies professor Julie Turnock.
They are among 223 individuals working across 55 disciplines chosen through a rigorous peer-review process from nearly 5,000 applicants, according to the announcement of the fellows. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awards fellowships to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions.
Kempf’s project, “The Economy,” is a book of poems that will articulate the ramifications of speculative financial bubbles on built and natural space. Organized around the Great Recession of 2008, during which he was a house painter, Kempf uses nine long-poems to examine the extension of economic thinking into all aspects of individual and collective life. He gives special attention to how emergent financial instruments affect experience of place and their effects in the real world. He also examines the accessibility of financial capitalism and the cultural strategies of predatory inclusion, such as the extension of high-interest credit to finance consumption.
Kempf will use his fellowship for site-based research at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Hoover Dam and General Motors’ Fort Wayne Assembly Plant, and for archival research at Schlesinger Library’s extensive home economics collection at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission housed at Stanford University.
Kempf is the author of the poetry collections “What Though the Field Be Lost” and “Late in the Empire of Men,” and the scholarly book “Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture.” He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Illinois Arts Council Individual Artist Award and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.
Turnock’s project, “Beyond ’King Kong’”, is a technical, industrial and aesthetic history of the special-effects industry in the Hollywood studio era, circa 1915-1960, well before the digital era. It goes beyond 1933’s special effects landmark “King Kong” to examine the historical economic structures that organized personnel and production of this distinctive sector of studio-era filmmaking. Attending to the material conditions of special visual effects production and informed by extensive archival research, it centers on the labor performed by unsung “below-the-line” effects workers rarely considered in cinema histories but whose skills make much of “movie magic” possible.
Turnock is the director of the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies and the author of the books “The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism” and “Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics.” She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and is a 2020-2022 College of Media Scholar.
Editor’s notes: To contact Christopher Kempf, email ckempf2@illinois.edu. To contact Julie Turnock, email jturnock@illinois.edu.
