Two University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professors have been awarded 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships.

This year’s Illinois fellows are evolution, ecology and behavior professor Alison Bell (GNDP leader) and architecture professor Paul Hardin Kapp.

They are among 188 writers, scholars, artists and scientists chosen through a rigorous peer-review process from nearly 3,000 applicants, according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s press release.

Bell studies the evolution of behavior in the three-spined stickleback fish. She is a pioneer in the study of animal personality, using genomics and other tools to understand the causes and consequences of individual behavior differences. She is a member of the Animal Behavior Society, the International Society for Behavioral Ecology and the American Society of Naturalists. She is a 2020 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a recipient of the 2012 Young Investigator Award and the 2022 Quest Award from the Animal Behavior Society. She is the director of the Kellner Center for Neurogenomics, Behavior and Society at the IGB; a Romano Professorial Scholar; and a professor in the Beckman Institute, the Program in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, and the Neuroscience Program.

As a Guggenheim Fellow, Bell will work towards developing a conceptual framework that integrates neural and gene regulatory networks to offer new insights into fundamental questions about the origin and maintenance of behavioral diversity.

Kapp specializes in historic preservation, and he is the associate director of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management at Illinois. He is the author of “Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South” (2022) and “The Architecture of William Nichols: Building the Antebellum South in North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi” (2015), and the co-editor of “SynergiCity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City” (2012). He is a 2005 Charles E. Peterson Fellow; a 2014 and a 2023 Fulbright Scholar; a 2017 James Marston Fitch Midcareer Fellow; a 2018 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow; and a 2020 Franklin Fellow, U.S. Department of State. He is a past chair of the National Council for Preservation Education and the recent editor of its journal, Preservation Education and Research. He has been an advisor to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation, and he served on the National Register of Historic Places review panels in Illinois and Virginia.

Kapp will use his Guggenheim Fellowship for his latest book project: “Popular Iconoclasm in the Public Square” will examine how iconoclasm, as both acts of protest and works of civic artistic engagement, can alter the ways that we perceive, appreciate and engage with our most historic and monumental public spaces.