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An Associate Professor at Yale Divinity School is one of this year’s prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship winners. Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded to exceptional artists, scholars and scientists.  

Jaime Lara teaches religion and the visual arts at Yale Divinity School. He studies, what he calls, “first contacts” – the moment when different cultures meet.   Lara says you can see how they begin to understand one another by exploring their art and architecture.  His current research is the first contact between European Christian missionaries and the Incan civilization of Peru.  He says you can find symbolic bridges between the two cultures in the earliest Christian churches built in the Andes, "that allow the sun to come into the building at a particular angle on a particular day of the year to shine on a particular object within the church.  And it’s this bridge between the sun worshippers of the Incas and late medieval Catholicism." 

 
Lara will use his Guggenheim award to return to Peru for further research.  But he won’t return to Yale next year. The University has denied his tenure. A Yale spokesman said details on the denial of tenure were unavailable.