Angela Esterhammer Wins Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
Angela Esterhammer, who served as principal of Victoria College from 2012 to 2024, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to further her work on Scottish novelist John Galt. (Photo by Minh Truong)
Professor Angela Esterhammer, the former principal of Victoria College and alumna Vic 8T3, has won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
The 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows consists of 198 distinguished individuals from across 53 disciplines. Esterhammer is one of only four Canadians who received a fellowship this year and one of only two from Canadian universities.
One of the other winners is author Sheila Heti, who was the Vic Pelham Edgar Distinguished Visitor in the Humanities in 2023.
The fellowships, established in 1925 by American businessman and philanthropist Simon Guggenheim, provide a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”
Esterhammer was principal of Victoria College for 12 years from 2012 to 2024. She will use the fellowship to continue her research on John Galt, one of the most popular and prolific Scottish writers of the 19th century.
“I’m thrilled, and extremely grateful for the Guggenheim Foundation’s outstanding support of scholarship and creativity, especially in arts and humanities fields,” she said.
Esterhammer is general editor of The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt, of which eight of 20 planned volumes have been published—a result of her work with undergraduate research assistants at Victoria College. She is working on a monograph on Galt in the context of late-Romantic print culture, the world of international publishing, writing and reading 200 years ago.
“Galt was an astoundingly prolific and popular fiction writer as well as an entrepreneur who had a key role in Canadian settlement,” she said. “Galt conversed and corresponded with writers, artists, Indigenous leaders, politicians, diplomats and technological innovators on both sides of the Atlantic. Exploring the entanglements of the local and the global, his writing zeroes in on themes that remain as urgent now as they were in his time: identity, community, power, injustice, truth, moral action.”
“We often hear about the wonderful achievements of Victoria students,” said Victoria University President Dr. Rhonda McEwen. “This happens within an environment where learners are inspired by outstanding faculty. Angela Esterhammer exemplifies leaders who know, go and show the way. Professor Esterhammer’s Guggenheim Fellowship is in recognition of the brilliance of her scholarship, maintained while leading at Victoria College, a world-class academic environment.”