Rotella in his study, with daughters: “It’s okay to get a thin envelope.” Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

The Fender Telecaster, its color classified as orange sunburst, is a diversion and also an inspiration. The guitar stands next to the desk where Carlo Rotella does his writing, at home, on a quiet street near campus. Rotella, a professor of English and director of the American studies program at BC, has had three books published; the one he is working on now is about the place of music in the lives of people who play, and the writing will be supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship.

“This is a gift of a kind I haven’t gotten before,” said Rotella, who learned in April that he was one of 187 U.S. and Canadian artists, scholars, and scientists selected for the fellowship, from nearly 3,000 applicants. “They sent a thin envelope,” Rotella recalled. “It’s okay to get a thin envelope.”

The fellowships have been awarded since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, in consultation with outside scholars, to applicants who have “demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts,” according to the foundation. In 2006 the awards averaged $40,107. Starting September 1, Boston College will free Rotella from his academic responsibilities for a year and pay him the difference between the Guggenheim grant and his regular salary.

Rotella, 41, is a native of Chicago and earned his Ph.D. at Yale University. He reflected on his award the other day a few feet from that guitar in the sunny second-floor study he shares with his wife, Christina Klein, an associate professor of English at BC. Their two young daughters played nearby.

A prolific and versatile writer, Rotella had just finished some fact-checking for an article on a Mattapan minister for Boston magazine. Next would come a profile of a boxer for the New York Times Magazine and a piece on a quotation book editor for the Yale Alumni Magazine. He was clearing the decks for the next book, working title “Playing in Time: A Suite of Musical Lives.” Rotella is writing about musicians—ranging from professional to dabbler—who pursue their music within some kind of constraint. At one point, Rotella wrote in a prospectus for the book, he had assumed that music was “the freest and purest of the arts, the least constrained by circumstance.” But his research has convinced him that “for both amateurs and professionals, the meaning of music derives in great part from the limitations placed on music-making—by everything from one’s parents’ expectations to the need to earn a living to the aptitudes and failings of the body and mind.” Rotella doesn’t have a publisher yet; with books, he prefers to write first and then decide whether the market is general or academic. His previous books include Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt (U. California, 2002) and Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

The new book took root with a piece he wrote for the Washington Post Magazine in the summer of 2002 on a jazz fantasy camp, where the participants get to indulge “their secret life” one week a year. (Campers were taught: “The music you want to play is inside the music you play now. The way you get to it is by stripping notes, not adding more.”) Rotella is planning a chapter on a blues singer and guitarist who is known for his inconsistent performances and has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The book will also recount the diverging paths of members of a rock band formed at Harvard in the 1980s, the challenges faced by two female blues “guitar heroes,” and the stereotype of the cello-playing high school valedictorian.

Rotella allows that he is no virtuoso on the guitar, though in graduate school he played in “one of the few bands that broke up because the lead guitar player didn’t get tenure.” Nowadays, he will pick up the Fender every couple of hours, “when I’m working or reading, and just play.”

Michael Molyneux is a freelance writer based in Sharon, Massachusetts.

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