A professor of English and human sciences was selected as a prestigious Guggenheim Fellow, one of 180 selected this year.

The competition, in its 87th year running, grants fellowships to artists, scientists and scholars with demonstrated accomplishments in their fields. Jeffrey Cohen was selected from a pool of 3,000 in 2011.

Cohen is the director of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies within the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. He was chosen as a humanities and medieval literature fellow.

Cohen was also awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2011. The council awards peer-reviewed fellowships with the goal of furthering studies in the humanities and social sciences.

“These fellowships are among the highest honors a humanities scholar can obtain. I am very excited – and profoundly grateful – to have been awarded them,” Cohen said.

Using the funds from the fellowship, Cohen plans to take the year off to work on his upcoming book, “Stories of Stone: Dreaming the Prehistoric in the Middle Ages.”

The fellowships will allow Cohen to travel to England, conduct archival research in London and visit Stonehenge.

“My book is about how people in Middle Ages responded to messages they found in stones, how they responded to them and what they do to try to send messages into the future,” Cohen said.

Cohen hopes the book will be released in 2013 or 2014.

“I also would like to emphasize that these awards show how proud GW should be of its strengths in humanities research. I’ve benefited immensely from the resources the University has made available to me, as well as the inspiration I receive from my excellent colleagues and students,” Cohen said.