Patricia Cline Cohen, professor of history, is one of 187 American and Canadian artists, scholars, and scientists selected from almost 3,000 applicants to receive prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships this year.

Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

Cohen, a member of the UC Santa Barbara history faculty since 1977, will use her fellowship to continue her research for a biography of Mary Gove and Thomas L. Nichols, two health reformers who gained notoriety in the mid-1800s for a radical critique of marriage that advocated women’s self-sovereignty.

“Their ideas about marriage reform provide a historical perspective on modern-day debates about the purposes and duration of marriage, and the role of the state in regulating intimate unions,” Cohen says.

Earlier this year, Cohen became a fellow of the Society of American Historians “in recognition of the literary and scholarly distinction” of her historical work.