Following the publication of his acclaimed Book of Honor, Ted Gup will take a two-year sabbatical from his CWRU Shirley Wormser Professorship in Journalism to return to a writer's life and work on a second book of nonfiction.

Gup learned support for researching and writing the new book will come from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award and a fellowship from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

He is one of 184 selected artists, scholars and scientists among the 2003 Guggenheim Fellows. He was chosen from 3,200 applicants, who will share $6.75 million in awards.

Gup will join five domestic and international journalists in a one-semester research and residency fellowship at Harvard as a Shorenstein Fellow. He will examine how the press covers the CIA.

Previous Shorenstein Fellows have included journalists Connie Chung, Jason DeParle from the New York Times, the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times and Sylvia Poggioli of National Public Radio and author Tim Wicker.

According to the Shorenstein's objectives, the fellowship offers practicing journalists and scholars of the press the opportunity to discuss and reflect upon their discipline. Gup will receive a stipend and spend the semester at Harvard.

But is his new book another look at the Central Intelligence Agency like Book of Honor, which chronicled the CIA's covert operatives who died during operations in the field?

Gup, a former Washington Post and Time investigative reporter, says he is keeping it a secret for now. All he's willing to disclose is that the new book "is about an institution."

Even the title of his Guggenheim application reveals little. His project is simply, called "America's Culture of Secrecy." How fitting.