| 1 | Name: | Dr. Vartan Gregorian | |
| Institution: | Carnegie Corporation of New York & Brown University | ||
| Year Elected: | 1985 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1934 | ||
| Death Date: | April 15, 2021 | ||
A scholar of Armenian, Caucasian and cognate history, Vartan Gregorian served as the twelfth president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a grant-making institution founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1911. Prior to this position, which he assumed in 1997, Dr. Gregorian served for nine years as the sixteenth president of Brown University. Born in Tabriz, Iran of Armenian parents, he received his elementary education in Iran and his secondary education in Lebanon. He graduated with honors from Stanford University in 1958 and was awarded a Ph.D. in history and humanities from Stanford in 1964. Dr. Gregorian has subsequently taught European and Middle Eastern history at San Francisco State College, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Austin. In 1972 he joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty and was appointed Tarzian Professor of History and professor of South Asian history. He was founding dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and four years later became its twenty-third provost until 1981. From 1981-1989, Dr. Gregorian served as a president of the New York Public Library, an institution with a network of four research libraries and eighty-three circulating libraries. In 1989 he was appointed president of Brown University. Vartan Gregorian is the author of works such as The Road To Home: My Life And Times, Islam: A Mosaic, Not A Monolith, and The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 1880-1946. A Phi Beta Kappa and a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Training Fellow, he is a recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and the American Philosophical Society. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and in 1969 he received the Danforth Foundation's E.H. Harbison Distinguished Teaching Award. Dr. Gregorian was the 2008 recipient of the James L. Fisher Award for Distinguished Service to Education from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and recently received the Distinguished Service Award from the Council on Foundations. He has been decorated by the French (Chevalier of Legion of Honor), Italian, Austrian, Portuguese and Armenian governments and received the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton in 1998. In 2004, President Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civil award. He died on April 15, 2021. | |||