ATHENS -- The University of Georgia has a genius in its midst.
Associate History Professor Eve Troutt Powell has received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Commonly referred to as the "genius award," it comes with a $500,000 no-strings-attached grant.
Powell, 42, is the first person from UGA to receive the award, and only the fourth from Georgia since the first grants were announced in 1981. This year, she is the only one of 24 recipients who is from the Southeast.
"They called me on my cellphone, and the only people who call my cellphone are my sister and my husband," Powell said during an interview in her LeConte Hall office. "I said, 'You're kidding, you're kidding.' "
As news of the award trickled across campus, administrators said it was an example of the success they have had in recent years in bringing in top faculty and gaining national recognition.
"This is confirmation of what everyone's been telling us," said History Department Chairman Ed Larson, a 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner. "We are creating a faculty of world-class caliber here."
Considered by many to be among the most coveted U.S.-based award, the MacArthur Fellowship is cloaked in secrecy. An anonymous panel meets annually to discuss candidates, selected for the originality and creativity of their work. Nominees cannot apply for the grant and are not interviewed as part of the awards process. Winners do not know they were considered until they get the call from the foundation president telling them they have won.
Unlike other grants and fellowships, the MacArthur comes with no restrictions. Winners can use the money any way they choose and do not have to file any reports with the foundation. The foundation considers the stipend an expression of confidence in the winner's ability to make the best use of the money.
Powell, who has been on the UGA faculty since 1995, said she plans to use the money to continue her research on the Middle East, with an emphasis on Egypt and Sudan. Powell's second book, "A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan," was published by the University of California Press in May.
Next, she wants to research the history of former slaves from Sudan, including St. Josephine Bakhita, who was kidnapped by slave traders at age 9. Bakhita, who died in 1947, was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000 for her service to the poor after she escaped to Italy in 1890.
"I'm really interested in how they tell the story," Powell said of the Sudanese people.
Powell, born in Detroit, but raised in New York City's Washington Heights community, is the daughter of high-achieving parents. Her father, who died when she was 14, was a management consultant, her mother, a psychoanalyst.
Powell said her mother was her first role model. It was her mother who pushed her academically, getting her into prep school and on track to attend Harvard University. Raised in a Kentucky coal-mining family, Powell's mother had pushed herself to earn four master's degrees while raising three children. She died five years ago.
Powell got her bachelor's degree in history from Harvard and returned several years later to earn her master's and doctorate.
After completing her undergraduate work, she visited Egypt as an intern with American University in Cairo in 1983 and fell in love with the country.
"That changed my life completely," she said. "I came back on a crusade to change the way Americans think about the Middle East."
Enthralled by contemporary Egypt and the Middle East, she decided to pursue graduate studies in those areas, instead of in French history as she had planned. She also met her husband, Timothy -- now an English professor at UGA -- during that first stay in Cairo. They were married in 1986.
When she completed her Ph.D. in 1995, she began looking for teaching positions and interviewed at UGA. The school offered her and her husband positions, and they left Cambridge for Athens.
UGA history professor John Morrow, who was on the committee that interviewed Powell, said the department knew immediately it had found a rising star. "She swept the interview process hands down," said Morrow, who has since become good friends with the Powells. "She is one of those folks, as the MacArthur confirms, you would absolutely want to have."
Powell brought diversity to the department at a time when it leaned heavily toward American and European history, both Morrow and Larson said. "She brought a deepening and enriching of our curriculum that we simply had not had," Larson said. "She looks at sources people haven't looked at before, in different ways. That's the mark of a good historian."
She's also a favorite with students, who routinely give her outstanding marks on faculty surveys, Larson said.
"The vast majority of her evals are over the top. I don't know of any other teacher who gets those kinds of comments," he said.
Powell said she plans to keep teaching, at least for now, and will use some of the grant money to pay for her family to live in Egypt next summer while she continues her research.
As for being a genius, she just laughs.
"Anyone who knows me will go 'Ha!' " she said