History professor wins Guggenheim Fellowship

by Tom Parisi

Stephen Kern's research is, quite literally, murder. For the past 10 years, the veteran NIU history professor has combed through some of the past two centuries' most celebrated murder novels—ranging from "Oliver Twist" to "Silence of the Lambs." Along the way, he is assembling a history of the concept of causality, examining how scientists explain the act of murder and how novelists dramatize it.

Stephen Kern

"The way writers answer the `whydunit' changes in relation to culture," Kern said. "Through literature, I'm able to track a major shift in the way European and American thinkers rendered the motives and explanations for human behavior."

Impressed with the project, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded to Kern its prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, accompanied by a $35,000 grant. The year-long fellowship will allow the historian to complete his forthcoming book: "A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Philosophy Since 1830."

The purpose of the Guggenheim Fellowship program is to help provide fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible. Fellows may spend their grant funds in any manner they deem necessary to their work.

Kern is one of 184 scholars, scientists and artists in the United States and Canada selected as 2002 Guggenheim Fellows from nearly 3,000 applicants. The fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

Kern "richly deserves" the award, said George Spencer, NIU history department chair. "He has a special talent for developing new and exciting themes to investigate, and he brings multidisciplinary perspectives to bear on his work," Spencer said.

In 1988, NIU honored Kern with the Presidential Research Professorship. He is a renowned expert in European cultural history and is the author of four previous books, including "The Culture of Time and Space," which is in its tenth paperback printing and has been assigned in classes at more than 200 U.S. institutions.

For the forthcoming book on causality, Kern said he wanted to examine the historical relationship between culture and crime, or more specifically, how philosophical and scientific knowledge shapes perceptions of crime.

"Ten years ago, I hit on the idea of focusing on murder novels because the act of murder in any culture is very vivid and very important," Kern said. "There are lots of professionals who are concerned with figuring out why people kill."

Kern has studied about 100 novels in his research, including such well-known works as "Crime and Punishment," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," "An American Tragedy" and "Lolita." Literature is a reflection of culture, the historian said.

"The way novelists explain the murderer is historically typed. In literature, for example, no 19^th-century murderers kill because they were victims of childhood sexual assault. Instead, novelists of that period depict killers as people who were neglected, were trained to be evil or had a murderous streak `in their blood.'

"In the 20^th century, Freud had more of an impact on the murder novel than any other intellectual," Kern added. "You have people who kill because of some Freudian-type sexual trauma. The most famous fictional serial killer is ("Silence of the Lamb's") Hannibal Lecter."

One larger argument in Kern's book-in-progress has to do with the nature of causal knowledge.

"The more we know about the causes of human nature, the more we realize how many more causes there are to know and how little we understand those we thought we knew," he said.