Four Harvard affiliates were among the 184 recipients of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, an annual award recognizing exceptional scholarly and artistic achievement, the Guggenheim Foundation announced Thursday. The award’s mission, according to the Foundation, is to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since the Foundation’s establishment in 1925, it has received around 3,000 applications for its fellowship competition each year. This year’s recipients span fields as vast as Fiction, Music Composition, and Engineering. From Harvard, the awardees hail from the departments of English and History, as well as the Radcliffe Institute fellowship program.