DeKALB | An NIU history professor has earned a prestigious honor.

Heide Fehrenbach , who has authored two books and co-edited a third, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2007. Individuals are honored by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and criteria is based on distinguished achievement in the past, as well as the promise for future accomplishments. Fehrenbach is among 189 artists, scholars and scientists selected from a pool of nearly 2,800 applicants, and was named in a full-page ad in Friday’s New York Times.

The purpose of the award is to provide recipients the time to work with as much creative freedom as possible. Fellows are allowed to spend their grant funds, which collectively total $7.6 million, in any manner they deem necessary for their work.

“This is wonderful,” Fehrenbach said in a press release. “I had applied, but thought this would be the first of many applications.”

Fehrenbach’s books on the cultural and social effects of World War II on post-war Germany are being taught at universities worldwide, and her authorship has led to invites to lecture at several prestigious institutions throughout America, as well as Ireland, Germany and Canada.

The fellowship will allow Fehrenbach to take time off from teaching to work toward completing her next book, tentatively titled “From War Children to Our Children: How World War II Remade the Family and Children’s Rights.” Fehrenbach’s most recent book, “Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America,” was released in 2005.