List of Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 1939
Sixty-nine Guggenheim Fellowships were awarded in 1939.
1939 U.S. and Canadian Fellows
| Category | Field of Study | Fellow | Institutional association | Research topic | Notes | Ref |
| Creative Arts | Fiction | Harold Augustus Sinclair | Writing | |||
| Creative Arts | Fiction | Robert Penn Warren | Louisiana State University | Writing | Also won in 1947 | |
| Creative Arts | Fiction | Richard Wright | Federal Writers' Project | Writing | ||
| Creative Arts | Fine Arts | Janet de Coux | Sculpture | Also won in 1938 | ||
| Creative Arts | Fine Arts | Adolf Dehn | Painting | Also won in 1951 | ||
| Creative Arts | Fine Arts | David Fredenthal | Cranbrook Academy of Art | Painting | Also won in 1938 | |
| Creative Arts | Fine Arts | Josette Hébert-Coëffin | Also won in 1937 | |||
| Creative Arts | Fine Arts | John McCrady | Federal Art Project | Painting: Faith and lives of African Americans in the South | ||
| Creative Arts | Fine Arts | Eugene Trentham | Painting | |||
| Creative Arts | Fine Arts | Harry Wickey | Sculpture: Depictions of New York people | Also won in 1940 | ||
| Creative Arts | Music Composition | Ernst Bacon | Converse College | Composition | Also won in 1942, 1964 | |
| Creative Arts | Music Composition | Paul Creston | St. Malachy Roman Catholic Church | Composition | Also won in 1938 | |
| Creative Arts | Music Composition | Anis Fuleihan | G. Shirmer, Inc. | Composition | ||
| Creative Arts | Music Composition | William Howard Schuman | Sarah Lawrence College | Composition | Also won 1940 | |
| Creative Arts | Poetry | Asher Brynes | Writing | Also won in 1938, 1944 | ||
| Creative Arts | Poetry | Kenneth Fearing | Writing | Also won in 1936 | ||
| Creative Arts | Theatre Arts | William Smith Clark II | University of Cincinnati | History of the stage in Ireland | ||
| Humanities | American Literature | Charles John Olson | Harvard University | Critical history of the growth of Herman Melville through a study of his writing and reading | Also won in 1948 | |
| Humanities | Biography | Arthur McCandless Wilson | Dartmouth College | Also won in 1956 | ||
| Humanities | Classics | Michael Ginsburg | University of Nebraska | Ancient Rome's New Deal | Also won in 1942 | |
| Humanities | Classics | Richard Mansfield Haywood | Johns Hopkins University | Cities of Roman Africa, their political and economic organization, and their relations with the surrounding country and with each other | ||
| Humanities | Fine Arts Research | Marvin Chauncey Ross | Walters Art Gallery | Corpus of all known Byzantine enamels, including a catalogue and an introduction giving the history and classification of Byzantine enamels | Also won in 1938, 1948, 1952 | |
| Humanities | Fine Arts Research | Meyer Schapiro | Columbia University | Corpus of paintings, drawings, and ornament in manuscripts of southern France from the 10th to the end of the 12th century, with an analysis and interpretation of these works | Also won in 1942 | |
| Humanities | Fine Arts Research | Carl Zigrosser | Weyhe Gallery | Also won in 1940 | ||
| Humanities | French History | Leo Gershoy | Sarah Lawrence College | Enlightened despotism | Also won in 1936, 1946, 1959 | |
| Humanities | General Nonfiction | Herschel Brickell | History of Natchez, Mississippi | |||
| Humanities | General Nonfiction | John Dos Passos | Essays on American conceptions of freedom of thought | Also won in 1940, 1942 | ||
| Humanities | General Nonfiction | John Joseph Mathews | Conflicting expressions of the American Indian and the invading European | |||
| Humanities | German and East European History | O. Fritiof Ander | Augustana College | History of Sweden since 1815 | Also won in 1938 | |
| Humanities | Iberian and Latin American History | University of California, Berkeley | Also won in 1939 | |||
| Humanities | Intellectual History | Ernest Campbell Mossner | Syracuse University | David Hume | Also won in 1945 | |
| Humanities | Linguistics | Zellig Sabbettai Harris | University of Pennsylvania | |||
| Humanities | Linguistics | Allen Walker Read | University of Chicago | Dictionary of "Briticisms" | Also won in 1938 | |
| Humanities | Linguistics | Harold Whitehall | University of Wisconsin | |||
| Humanities | Literary Criticism | Herbert Joseph Muller | Purdue University | |||
| Humanities | Literary Criticism | Edmund Wilson | Writing | Also won in 1935 | ||
| Humanities | Medieval History | University of Wisconsin, Madison | History of the relations of the Papacy and learning in the later Middle Ages | Also won in 1955 | ||
| Humanities | Medieval Literature | Charles W. Jones | Cornell University | History of physical sciences in the early Middle Ages | Also won in 1945 | |
| Humanities | Music Research | R. D. Darrell | The Gramophone Shop | Book making possible for the listener a new approach to musical experience by use of mechanical media: phonograph, radio, and sound film | ||
| Humanities | Philosophy | University of Washington | Metaphysical foundations of formal logic; construction of a system of intensional logic and the application thereof to the problems of logic and logistic | |||
| Humanities | Philosophy | Eliseo Vivas | University of Wisconsin | |||
| Humanities | Renaissance History | New York University | Histories and historical interpretations of the Renaissance written from the 15th century to the present | |||
| Humanities | United States History | Elmer Ellis | University of Missouri | Biographical study of Finley Peter Dunne and the influence of his writings, especially his Mr. Dooley essays, upon contemporary politics and political discussion | ||
| Humanities | United States History | Howard Wolf | Cleveland News | History of American news services | Also won in 1940 | |
| Natural Sciences | Astronomy-Astrophysics | Louis George Henyey | University of Chicago | Theory of the formation of stellar absorption lines | ||
| Natural Sciences | Biochemistry | Isidore Gersh | Johns Hopkins Medical School | Intracellular distribution of certain organic compounds | ||
| Natural Sciences | Biology | Gregory Pincus | Clark University | Developmental physiology of mammalian eggs and embryos | Also won in 1940 | |
| Natural Sciences | Chemistry | Rose C. Slater | Newcomb College, Tulane University | Structure of crystals by methods of x-ray analysis | ||
| Natural Sciences | Chemistry | Harold R. Snyder | University of Illinois | Configuration of nitrogen in organic compounds | Fellowship postponed until 1951 | |
| Natural Sciences | Chemistry | Melville Lawrence Wolfrom | Ohio State University | General methods of investigating the organic structure of the natural products as carried on in several European laboratories | ||
| Natural Sciences | Earth Science | Maurice Ewing | Lehigh University | Deep-sea investigations by gravitational and seismic methods | Also won in 1938, 1953 | |
| Natural Sciences | Earth Science | Earl Hamlet Myers | Compton Junior College | Life cycles of the Foraminifera, with special reference to the role of these organisms in the sea and their significance in geological formations | Also won in 1938 | |
| Natural Sciences | Earth Science | Chester Stock | California Institute of Technology | Vertebrate paleontological reconnaissance of Mexico | Also won in 1940 | |
| Natural Sciences | Mathematics | Oscar Zariski | Johns Hopkins University | Theory of algebraic varieties from the standpoint of modern algebra | ||
| Natural Sciences | Molecular and Cellular Biology | Alfred George Marshak | Mechanism of chromosome division, especially the nature of the chromosome structure as revealed by response to neutron bombardment in a cyclotron | Also won in 1938 | ||
| Natural Sciences | Molecular and Cellular Biology | Leland S. McClung | University of California | Certain disease-producing and food-spoiling bacteria | ||
| Natural Sciences | Molecular and Cellular Biology | Emil L. Smith | Columbia University | Kinetics and mechanism of photosynthesis | Also won in 1938 | |
| Natural Sciences | Organismic Biology and Ecology | Adriaan Joseph van Rossem | California Institute of Technology | European ornithological collections with a view to establishing a permanent nomenclature for American birds | ||
| Natural Sciences | Physics | Hubert Maxwell James | Purdue University | Application of wave mechanics to the computation of intensities in band spectra | ||
| Natural Sciences | Plant Science | Lawrence Rogers Blinks | Stanford University | Relations of metabolism to the bio-electric properties of large plant cells | Also won in 1948, 1957 | |
| Natural Sciences | Plant Science | Earl Martin Hildebrand | Cornell University | Transmission of fruit plant diseases | ||
| Natural Sciences | Plant Science | Hilda F. Rosene | University of Texas | Forces and structures involved in the absorption and transport of water by plants | ||
| Social Sciences | Economics | Karl Richard Bopp | University of Missouri | |||
| Social Sciences | Economics | Mary Barnett Gilson | University of Chicago | |||
| Social Sciences | Economics | Elmer Wood | University of Missouri | Policy of the Bank of England, 1847-1873 | ||
| Social Sciences | Political Science | Karl Loewenstein | Amherst College | Research in South America | ||
| Social Sciences | Political Science | Walter Rice Sharp | University of Wisconsin, Madison | Functional study of the administrative process at the international level | ||
| Social Sciences | Psychology | Robert Tryon | University of California | Inheritance of ability to learn, based upon data derived from a series of experiments on the ability for successive generations of rats to learn their way through complicated mazes |