| | 501 | Name: | Dr. Peter Schäfer | | | Institution: | Princeton University & Freie Universität, Berlin | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Peter Schäfer is the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University and concurrently holds the chair of Jewish Studies at the Free University of Berlin. He was a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Oxford, Jerusalem and Yale, at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In addition to the American Philosophical Society, he is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and holds an honorary degree (Dr. theol.) from the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. In 1994 he was awarded the Leibniz Prize of 1.5 Million German Mark, the highest award for German scholars. In 2013 he received Princeton University's Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.
Peter Schäfer has published extensively about rabbinic literature and history, early Jewish mysticism, and Wissenschaft des Judentums. He edited the corpus of Hekhalot literature, the Talmud Yerushalmi and (with Sh. Shaked) magical texts from the Cairo Geniza. His most recent books are Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World, Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 1997 (paperback edition 1998), Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002 (paperback 2004) and (as editor) The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2003. | |
| 502 | Name: | Dr. Meyer Schapiro | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 1969 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | 3/3/96 | | | | |
| 503 | Name: | Felix E. Schelling | | | Year Elected: | 1902 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1858 | | | Death Date: | 12/15/45 | | | | |
| 504 | Name: | Dr. Eva Schlotheuber | | | Institution: | Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf; German Historical Association | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404a | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | | | |
Eva Schlotheuber's enthusiasm for medieval manuscripts, art and literature started at Göttingen, studying with Hartmut Hoffmann, one of the leading scholars of manuscript and archival studies. A year abroad in Copenhagen reading anthropology and experimental archaeology added to this the material side of history and environmental studies. Working at the intersection of these disciplines has never ceased to fascinate her and she has continued working on little known primary material and hidden archival sources from an interdisciplinary perspective. A particular focus has been how religious orders structure and communicate knowledge, particularly looking at how religious women staked out their claim in medieval society; she has worked closely with colleagues around the world, among them Jeffrey Hamburger (Art History, Harvard) and Margot Fassler (Musicology/Liturgy, Notre Dame). Currently, she is editing together with Henrike Lähnemann (German Studies, Oxford) what is probably the largest corpus of medieval writing by women, 1.800 letters collected in a Northern German convent (The Nuns' Network). A second area of research revolves round the influence which poets and humanists such as Dante and Petrarch had on political theory and governance structure in the 14th century, and how new collective norms are formed in times of crisis. The critical evaluation and contextualisation of sources of all kind is a particular strength of medieval studies which is crucial in understanding how systems of knowledge are changing. We can build upon this highly developed source critizism for meeting the challenges of our networked digital age. This is a challenge which can only be met by working together across the Humanities and Sciences and jointly developing a vision for the future which is collaborative. Eva Schlotheuber was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 505 | Name: | Dr. Sabine Schmidtke | | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1964 | | | | | | |
Sabine Schmidtke is a dynamic, wide-ranging, and highly productive scholar of early Islam and its theology. Her command of Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian, together with exceptional facility in modern languages (German, French, and English) allows her to open up new perspectives on early Muslim intellectual life and sectarian debates. As the recipient of a generous Advanced Grant from the European Research Council she was able to set up a major program in Berlin on what she called the Islamicate world. Her organizational skills have become ever more apparent since her move to the United States, where she has planned conferences and launched new programs, including one on a digital database for Ottoman texts. She works directly from manuscripts, in search of which she has traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East. She is a formidable scholar who wears her learning lightly. In 2019, she was elected to the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. | |
| 506 | Name: | Dr. Ruth Scodel | | | Institution: | University of Michigan | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | |
| 507 | Name: | Dr. John R. Searle | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | | | | |
Intellectual Autobiography of John R. Searle
This will be mainly concerned with my intellectual development. I mention other biographical facts only insofar as they bear on intellectual life. I was born in Denver, Colorado on July 31st, 1932. My mother was a medical doctor, my father an electrical engineer employed by the telephone company. During the war, in 1944, my father transferred to the head office of ATT in New York City.
Intellectually, in the period when I lived in the New York area, the most important thing that happened to me was that in 1945 at the age of 13, I enrolled in the 9th grade of an experimental school run by Columbia University Teachers College, the Horace Mann-Lincoln School (since abolished for financial reasons). It was among the most intense intellectual experiences I have had in my life. The students were selected competitively. The John Dewey theory on which the school was run, that the students decide on what they wanted to study, though hopeless for ordinary schools, worked fine for Horace Mann-Lincoln. The students were both extraordinarily intelligent and intensely motivated. Other private schools had social standing, but we thought we were intellectually the best. (Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech, both public schools, were in intellectual competition, but we had the best chess team.)
After the war in 1946 my father was transferred to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I attended a suburban high school in Shorewood, graduating at the age of 16 in 1949. That Fall I enrolled in the University of Wisconsin. I was lucky in that the university at that time had a very intense program called "Integrated Liberal Studies," which gave me a solid foundation for subsequent intellectual work. Like Horace Mann-Lincoln, ILS had a weak underlying theory, but strong intellectual execution. The theory was that we would in two years receive a unified conception of the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, with a solid understanding of how they developed from the foundations laid by Greek and Roman civilization. The actual execution gave us the best professors in the university, a high quality student body, and an understanding of the relationships among various intellectual endeavors. I do not think I could have received a better first two years of college anywhere in the country at that time.
In the summer of 1951, after my sophomore year in Madison at the age of 18, I had a life-changing experience. Along with some friends, I travelled free to Europe by getting a part time job on a ship crossing the Atlantic chartered by the Council on Student Travel. I spent the summer travelling around Europe, mostly by hitchhiking. I spent the first month in Paris, and then travelled through France, Germany, Austria (through the Soviet Occupation Zone to Vienna), Italy, as far south as Rome, and back up through Italy to the Riviera, and then to Belgium, Holland and England. This was a life-changing experience for me because I became convinced that my education required study in Europe. At that time, Europe in general, and European universities in particular had an intellectual prestige and élan that seemed lacking in the United States and in American universities. Rightly or wrongly, I thought that the great European universities were better than any American universities, and this view was widely held at the time. When I got back to Madison, I tried to find funding that would take me to Europe to complete my undergraduate studies, but discovered that as a 19 year old junior, I was ineligible to apply for sources of funding such as the Fulbright Scholarship. The only thing I was eligible for was the Rhodes Scholarship, and I was told that at my age I was unlikely to get it. I may have been helped by the fact that I was student body president, raced on the ski team, and had a straight A average. In any case, I won a Rhodes, and went to Oxford. I again got a job working my way to Europe, and travelled around Europe in the summer before matriculating in Oxford as an undergraduate in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in October of 1952.
My first year in Oxford was something of a disappointment and it seemed to me that the intellectual level was no better than the University of Wisconsin, and perhaps not as good. But in my second and third year, all of that changed, and I fell in with a group of fellow undergraduates who were passionately interested in philosophy. I was especially influenced by Frank Cioffi, Nigel Lawson, and Robin Farquharson. Oxford was at that time the world leader in Philosophy and many of the teachers were first rate. I attended lectures and was taught by Peter Strawson, J.L. Austin, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Michael Dummett, David Pears, Elizabeth Anscombe and Bernard Williams among others. The chief influences on me were Austin and Strawson. There is a certain irony in my relation to Austin, because when I first went to Austin's lectures on speech acts, I found them boring. Later I began to appreciate his qualities and we discussed philosophical arguments frequently. Once we argued so long after class that we were locked up in the building - until the janitors rescued us. The fact that I initially found his work boring is ironic because my first book, Speech Acts (1969), and much of second book, Expression and Meaning (1979), were directed to problems that were initiated by Austin, and I thought of myself, as many other people did, as carrying on his work. Another life-changing experience was that in my final years as an undergraduate, I was, only for a few weeks, tutored by Peter Strawson. More than anybody else, he taught me how to do philosophy.
I completed my degree in Oxford in 1955, and accepted a senior scholarship at St. Anthony's College, which enabled me to continue graduate studies in Oxford. In 1956, I became a Research Lecturer at Christ Church, and I stayed on for three more years in Oxford as Research Lecturer and Tutorial Lecturer. In that time I finished my D.Phil. thesis. On Christmas Eve in 1958, I married Dagmar Carboch, and we have now been married nearly 52 years. We have two grown sons, Thomas and Mark, and two granddaughters, Grace and Bianca. My Oxford thesis was about problems in the philosophy of language, specifically connected with the notions of sense and reference. My work on speech acts eventually grew out of early work on reference, and speech acts was the subject of my first book, published in 1969.
In the Fall of 1959, I accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley. In Berkeley I continued to work primarily in the philosophy of language, especially a theory of speech acts. I have published two books on that subject, Speech Acts and Expression and Meaning, as well as a number of articles.
The speech act approach to language inspired by Austin, but also heavily influenced by Wittgenstein, Strawson and Grice, is to think of speaking a language as a form of intentional human activity. Speaking is acting. On this approach, you think not of words as referring to objects, making statements, etc., but rather you think of speakers as using words to refer to objects, and intentionally making statements, etc. To think of speaking language as a form of human activity recasts a rather large number of traditional philosophical disputes, and I continue to believe that it is the correct approach to the philosophy of language.
In the Fall of 1964, I had nearly completed Speech Acts, but my researches were interrupted by my participation and active involvement in the Free Speech Movement, a protest movement directed against the policies of the then university administration, which on one occasion included preventing me, a local professor, from giving a special lecture on campus. This activity, though it seemed definitely a sideline for me initially, occupied the center of my attention for the next three years, and really continuing on through most of the 60's. After the success of the FSM and the failure of the administration, I served two years in the new university administration as Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Student Affairs. I also spent some time in Washington DC as a member of the Heard Commission, advising the national administration on the problems of the universities. The main intellectual result for me of this whole experience of student unrest was that in 1971 I published "The Campus War," a book about the university upheavals of the period.
In my work on the philosophy of language, I had used free use of "intentionalistic" notions such as "belief", "desire", and "intention", and I felt like this was borrowing money from the bank and I would one day have to pay it back by writing a book about intentionality. I began work on that in the middle 70's, but it was not until the 1980's that it was finally published, Intentionality (1983). It was the hardest book I ever wrote, and there is a sense in which it is a foundation for all of my other work, both before and afterward. In philosophy, by the way, one typically constructs the foundations of the structure after the structure is built, so it is not surprising that in 1983 I published the foundation of work that I had done in the late 60's. The claims that I would lay for my account of intentionality in that book are two: first, it is a comprehensive account of the functioning of intentional states that includes not just beliefs and desires, but perceptions, intentional actions, memories, and embeds them in a holistic account of how our mental life is structured not in atomistic units but in networks of mental phenomena that I call the "Network," and against a background of human capacitites and dispositions that I call the "Background." The second claim that I would make is that my account of intentionality is completely naturalistic in that intentionality, with all of its intrinsic irreducibly first-person mode of existence, is seen as a natural biological phenomena, as much a part of biology as digestion or photosynthesis.
In the course of writing Intentionality I read a lot of the material in the contemporary philosophy of mind, and taught courses in the subject. I discovered to my horror that views that I regarded as false to the point of preposterousness - such as behaviorism, or various forms of materialism such as the computational theory of the mind, as well as old-fashioned dualism - were still quite common, and indeed, widely accepted by otherwise competent professionals in the philosophy of mind. So I wrote some more critical, indeed polemical, works attacking these views. Among the most famous of these was an article I published in 1983, presenting what was called "The Chinese Room Argument," refuting the idea that the mind is just a computer program implemented in the brain ("Minds, Brains, and Programs," The Behavioral Brain Sciences). I also published a book length discussion of the nature of mind and the study of the mind (The Rediscovery of the Mind, 1992). I continued to publish fairly extensively on problems of the mind, and brought out my Reith Lectures, "Mind, Brains, and Science," in 1984. In this middle period, if I may so describe it, I was not working primarily on problems in the philosophy of language, but on problems in the philosophy of mind, and I was very active in both the foundation of, and the continuous activity of, the Berkeley Cognitive Science Group. My work in the philosophy of mind differs from mainstream philosophy in its combination of an anti-reductionist and yet naturalistic bent. I think that intentionality and consciousness are not reducible to behavior, computer programs, or any rest of the materialist candidates. But at the same time, they are a part of nature, and I have baptized my approach to these questions as "biological naturalism." Eventually I felt that I had said most of what I had to say about the pure philosophical aspects of cognition, but the ground had now been prepared for further neurobiological studies. Specifically, in 1995, I published an article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, "Counsciousness," where I described what I thought a proper scientific study of consciousness should be like.
In the early 90's, I began to work on and explore problems in the nature of social ontology. There is a question that had always bothered me, and that is, How is it that there can be an objective reality of money, property, government, and marriage, when that reality only exists because we think it exists? It is an objective fact that this is a twenty dollar bill, and yet such facts exist not on the paper as such, but in the minds of the people who produce and use the bills. How does that work? It is an odd weakness in intellectual history that this problem of social ontology was not adequately solved by the great founders of sociology, but the reason for their failure is clear. They did not have an adequate theory of language. The answer I give to this question is essentially an application of my theory of speech acts. All of objective institutional reality including not just money, property, government, and marriage, but cocktail parties, summer vacations, universities, and certified public accountants are created by the use of language. In general, the features that we think of as characteristic of the institutional parts of human civilization, are created in their initial existence and maintained in existence by speech acts that have a certain specific logical form.
The basic idea is to connect the fundamental concepts that underlie human civilization. Humans have an ability to assign functions that people and objects can perform, where the function is performed not in virtue of the physical structure, but in terms of the assignment of a certain status, and the function is performed in virtue of that status. Thus, knives have a function performed in virtue of their physical structure, but twenty dollar bills have a function performed in virtue of an assigned status. I call these "status functions." All specifically institutional facts are status functions, and status functions are important because they embody a certain class of powers, what I call "deontic powers" - rights, duties, obligations, etc. - and these deontic powers are the glue that holds human civilization together because they create desire independent reasons for action. I have expounded and explained these ideas in considerable length in two books, The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Making the Social World (2010).
After I had been doing philosophy professionally for decades, it eventually dawned on me that I was really answering a single question. It is this: Granted that the world we inhabit is entirely composed of mindless, meaningless, physical particles, how can there be a meaningful human reality that includes consciousness, intentionality, free will, rationality, language, society, ethics, aesthetics, economics, and politics? That is the question I have been addressing in all of these various books and articles. So the question of language is how do we get from the physics - from the acoustic blasts or the marks on paper - the the meaningful speech act? The question for the mind is how is it possible for "physical" structures in the brain, such as neurons with their synapses, to cause and sustain a mental reality? How is it possible in a world of physical particles for there to be an objective reality of money, property, and other social institutions? Most of my subsequent ideas were already contained in an implicit form in Speech Acts. In a sense then, all of my books have been part of one large book, and that work continues.
Such, in a very brief and compact form, is a summary of my intellectual trajectory. As far as the bare curriculum vitae aspects of my life are concerned, I have now spent 51 years as a fulltime faculty member in Berkeley. As there is no longer compulsory retirement, I have not been forced to retire, and have chosen not to do so. I have been a Visiting Professor in a large number of universities, including the University of Michigan, the University of Colorado and Rutgers University. In Europe and South America, I have been a visiting faculty member in Oxford, for one year, and for shorter periods in Berlin, Paris, Frankfurt, Aarhus, Graz, Venice, Florence, Rome Campinas, and Palermo. I have lectured extensively in China, Japan and South Korea and am an honorary Visiting Professor at universities in Beijing and Shanghai. I have published twenty books, over two hundred articles and the works have been translated into twenty three languages. | |
| 508 | Name: | Dr. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick | | | Institution: | City University of New York Graduate Center | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402. Criticism: Arts and Letters | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1950 | | | Death Date: | April 12, 2009 | | | | | | |
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was one of the most influential figures in gender studies, and more specifically in the burgeoning area of queer theory; indeed, she was a major founder of the field. Her first book, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, has been extensively cited and used by feminist critics and queer theorists alike. Not long after, her second crucial work, Epistemology of the Closet, had a similarly powerful impact on the increasingly complex field of gender studies and earned an honorable mention from the committee awarding the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize. Tendencies, a collection of essays, further extended both the literary and the cultural insights that Dr. Sedgwick brilliantly formulated in her first two books, while Dialogue on Love, published in the same year, is an ambitiously introspective memoir recounting the author's struggle with breast cancer along with her quest to comprehend her own sexuality in contexts she herself has significantly investigated in her key contributions to cultural studies. A poet as well as a critic, Dr. Sedgwick also published a volume of verse, Fat Art, Thin Art, and most recently Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, a series of essays expanding her work on queer theory and her analyses of the experience of illness into discussions of current theoretical perspectives on pedagogy and performativity. Dr. Sedgwick also edited several collections of essays, including Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (coedited with Adam Frank, 1995), a selection of key works by the radical psychologist Silvan Tomkins, and Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997), a series of works reexamining the history of the novel using the framework of queer theory that she has herself so powerfully established. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York. She also taught at Hamilton College, Boston University, Amherst College, Dartmouth College and Duke University. She earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1975. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died on April 12, 2009, in New York, NY, at the age of 58. | |
| 509 | Name: | Charles Coleman Sellers | | | Year Elected: | 1979 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | 1/30/80 | | | | |
| 510 | Name: | Dr. Salvatore Settis | | | Institution: | Scuola Normale Superiore | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
Salvatore Settis has been Director of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (1994-1999) and of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (1999-2010), where he also taught Classical Archaeology and Art History. He has been Visiting Professor in several universities; moreover, he delivered the Isaia Berlin Lectures at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the Lectures of the Catedra del Museo del Prado in Madrid. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome, of the Institut de France, of the Istituto Veneto, and of the Academies of Sciences in Berlin, Munich, Brussells, and Turin.
His research interests include ancient and Renaissance art history. Among his books: Saggio sull'Afrodite Urania di Fidia , Pisa 1966; La «Tempesta» interpretata. Giorgione, i committenti, il soggetto , Turin 1978 [English: Giorgione's Tempest. Interpreting the Hidden Subject , Cambridge 1990] ; La Colonna Traiana , Turin 1988; Laocoonte. Fama e stile , Rome 1999; Italia S.p.A. L’assalto al patrimonio culturale , Turin 2002; Futuro del Classico, Turin 2004 [English: The Future of the Classical, Oxford 2006]; Battaglie senza eroi. I beni culturali fra istituzioni e profitto, Milan 2005; Artisti e committenti fra Quattro e Cinquecento, Turin 2010; Paesaggio Costituzione cemento. La battaglia per l’ambiente contro il degrado civile, Turin 2011. He was editor of Memoria dell'Antico nell'arte italiana, vols. 1-3, Turin 1984-86, of I Greci. Storia, arte, cultura, società, vols. 1-6, Turin 1995-2002, and of The Classical Tradition , Harvard University Press 2010 (with A. Grafton and G. W. Most), and is the general editor of the series Mirabilia Italiae.
For his interest in the preservation of landscape and cultural heritage, he has been Chair of Italy’s High Council for Cultural Heritage and Landscape (“Consiglio Superiore dei Beni Culturali e Paesaggistici”) and was awarded two honorary degrees in Law, by the universities of Padua (2007) and Rome-Tor Vergata (2008). | |
| 511 | Name: | Dr. Kenneth M. Setton | | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study | | | Year Elected: | 1952 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1914 | | | Death Date: | 2/18/95 | | | | |
| 512 | Name: | Dr. Ihor Sevcenko | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1978 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1922 | | | Death Date: | December 26, 2009 | | | | | | |
Ihor Sevcenko was educated in Classics and Byzantine Studies in Warsaw, Prague, Louvain and Brussels. He specializes in Byzantine cultural history, hagiography, Byzantine text editions, Byzantino-Slavic cultural relations, Byzantine epigraphy and Greek palaeography. Among his early publications in the field is Études sur la polémique entre Théodore Métochite et Nicéphore Choumnos (1962). His collections of essays include Society and Intellectual Life in Late Byzantium (1981), Ideology, Letters and Culture in the Byzantine World (1982) and Byzantium and the Slavs in Letters and Culture (1991). His recent work includes Ukraine between East and West (1996, Ukrainian ed., 2001). Extracurricular publication: translation of George Orwell's Animal Farm into Ukrainian (1946, publ. 1947). He is a former Visiting Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1956), former Visiting Fellow at All Souls and Wolfson Colleges, Oxford (1979-80 and 1987 and 1993 respectively); Visiting Professor at the Collège de France (1985), Universities of Munich (1969), Cologne (1992, 1996) and at the Central European University of Budapest (1996, 1997); Guggenheim Fellow (1963); Guest of the Rector of Collegium Budapest (1998); Onassis Foundation Fellow (2002) recipient of Festschriften Okeanos (1984) and Chrysai Pylai (2002), of the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (1985), of honorary doctorates from the Universities of Cologne (1994), Warsaw (2001), and Lublin (Catholic, 2005) of the M. Hrusevs'kyj Medal of the Scientific Sevcenko Society (L'viv) (1996) and Laureate of the Antonovych Literary Prize for 1999 (awarded in Kiev in 2000); member of a number of learned societies, among them the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Medieval Academy of America (Fellow), l'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, l'Accademia di Palermo, l'Accademia Pontaniana (Naples), the Christian Archaeological Society (Athens), the British Academy, the Oesterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna), the Academy of Humanities Research (Moscow), the National Academy of Ukraine (Kiev) and the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (Krakow, 2007). He has served as President of the Assocation Internationale des Études Byzantines as well as Honorary President of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S. (2003). His hobby is trout fishing. | |
| 513 | Name: | Dr. Moshe Sharon | | | Institution: | The Hebrew University of Jerusalem | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404b | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | | |
Moshe Sharon, M.A., PhD was born in Haifa Israel on December 18, 1937 and received his higher education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the SOAS University of London. He is a professor (Emeritus) of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and Chair in Bahá’í Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in which he initiated the scholarly independent study of the Bahá’í Faith (in a non Bahá’í context, and within the wider study of modern religions and religious movements). Asked in 1984 to develop Jewish Studies at the University of the Witwaterstrand Johannesburg, South Africa, he established the Chair and Centre of Jewish Studies there and headed and directed it until 1993.
Since 1968 Professor Sharon has been documenting and studying in depth the Arabic Inscriptions of the Holy Land and publishing them in multi-volume opus: Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae (CIAP, six books) concurrent with his many scholarly publications on Islamic history and civilization. Among these are Black Banners from the East in 2 volumes, by now classic on the earliest revolutionary movement in Islam; Judaism Christianity and Islam, Interaction and Conflict; Judaism in the Context of Diverse Civilizations; Studies in Modern Religions and Religious Movements (ed.); The Bahá’í Religion and its Most Holy Book and many more. Professor Sharon is one of foremost authorities on early ‘Abbasid history, History of the Holy Land under Islam, and a world expert on Arabic Epigraphy.
In the field of public activity he served as Prime Minister Begin Advisor on Arab Affairs (1978-1980) and participated in the initial stages of the Israeli-Egyptian peace process. Later he was the Head of the Department of Arab Affairs in the IDF Central Command, advisor to the Minister of Defense, and special envoy to the Shi‘ites in Lebanon. More than a year ago he was appointed by a unanimous decision of the Government of Israel as Chairman of the Place-Name Committee responsible for the official fixing of all place names on the map of the country. | |
| 514 | Name: | Dr. Brent D. Shaw | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404a | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
For advanced research work in Classics I went to Cambridge University in 1973 where I completed my doctoral dissertation research on pastoral nomadism and state regulation in the Roman empire under the aegis of Joyce Reynolds. After serving some of my first years in academia in the University of Birmingham and then at undergraduate institutions in Canada, I moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 1996, following a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study and a year as Visiting Professor of Classics at Princeton University. I then went to Princeton University in 2004, where I am currently the Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics and Chair of the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity.
My principal areas of research have included the regional history of the Roman world with special emphasis on the African provinces of the empire; the demographic and social history of the Roman family; problems of violence and social order, beginning with studies on banditry in the mid 1980s, but shifting to problems of sectarian violence to which my current large work, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge University Press 2011) is devoted. My current research is split between a major collective project on global history, entitled "Worlds Together, Worlds Apart," shared with other faculty in the Department of History at Princeton, and my own current work on the problem of economic activity and metaphorical representation. | |
| 515 | Name: | Dr. Kay Kaufman Shelemay | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | | |
Kay Kaufman Shelemay is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. An ethnomusicologist who received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan (1977), Shelemay has carried out ethnographic and historical research in Ethiopia and among a cross-section of musical communities in the United States. Shelemay’s first book, Music, Ritual, and Falasha History (1986), won both the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 1987 and the Prize of the International Musicological Society in 1988. Among her other books are A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey (1991); Ethiopian Christian Chant: An Anthology (3 vols., 1993-97), co-authored with Peter Jeffery; Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews (1998); Sing and Sing On. Sentinel Musicians and the Making of the Ethiopian American Diaspora (2022) and the textbook Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World (3rd ed., 2015). Shelemay has also edited a seven-volume series of readings in ethnomusicology and other collections of essays, including Pain and Its Transformations: The Interface of Biology and Culture (2007, co-edited with Sarah Coakley) and Creating the Ethiopian Diaspora, a special double volume of Diaspora, A Journal of Transnational Studies (2011, co-edited with Steven Kaplan). Among her numerous articles, "The Power of Silent Voices. Women in the Syrian Jewish Musical Tradition" won the Society of Ethnomusicology’s 2010 Jaap Kunst for best article of the year. Shelemay has been awarded fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. A Past-President of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Shelemay was a Congressional appointee to the Board of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress from 1999-2012. In 2000, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2004, a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Shelemay was named the Chair for Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress during 2007-2008, and served as the Phi Beta Kappa/Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar during 2010-2011. Kay Kaufman Shelemay was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. | |
| 516 | Name: | Dr. David Dean Shulman | | | Institution: | Hebrew University | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
I was born in Waterloo, Iowa (1949) and grew up among the fields, and under the vast open skies, of the Midwest. In 1967 I moved to Israel because I had fallen in love with the Hebrew language and wanted to live where it is spoken. In the course of my B.A. years I fell in love with another language, Persian, and with its classical poetry. I went on pilgrimage to the graves of Sa'di and Hafez in Shiraz. From Iran I drifted, without premeditation, eastward to India.
At SOAS I was trained in Tamil by my guru, John Ralston Marr, and in South Asian studies generally and in Sanskrit by Wendy Doniger, Peter Khoroche, J. E. B. Gray, and Tuvia Gelblum. My dissertation focused on the mythology of the great Tamil temples as embodied in a large literature of classical sthalapurāṇas. Since 1976 I have been teaching Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, and South Asian cultural and religious history at the Hebrew University.
Ever restless, I wanted to learn another south Indian language and was drawn into the magnetic field of force of Velcheru Narayana Rao, the doyen of Telugu studies in this generation. In 1982-1983 I studied with him at the University of Wisconsin. Slowly Telugu became the center of my work, and Andhra, a second home. Narayana Rao and I have collaborated on many books on Telugu literature and the cultural history of Andhra Pradesh. I have also worked closely with Sanjay Subrahmanyam together with Narayana Rao (Symbols of Substance, 1992 and Textures of Time, 2002) and with my colleague in Jerusalem, Don Handelman (two books on south Indian Śaivism and fieldwork on the goddess Gangamma at Tirupati and the Golden Goddess, Paiditalli, in Vizianagaram).
Of the various books I have written, I am most proud of the monograph documenting the seventeenth-century ceiling paintings at the Tiruvarur temple in Tamil Nadu, since these paintings were in grave danger of being lost through neglect and erosion (they have now been carefully conserved through the last-minute intervention of a team lead by Ranvir Shah of Chennai). The book offers a complete photographic record of these masterpieces, by V. K. Rajamani, the finest art photographer in South India.
My enduring passion is for Indian classical music, both in the northern Hindustani-Dhrupad style, which I have studied with Osnat Elkabir, and in the south Indian Carnatic tradition. I am working on a series of essays on Carnatic compositions.
In recent years I have become fascinated with Kūṭiyāṭṭam, the last living tradition of Sanskrit drama and one of the classical performing arts of Kerala. Together with my Sanskrit and Malayalam students and with colleagues from Germany, particularly Heike Moser of Tuebingen, I have had the privilege of watching full-scale performances - ranging from 12 hours to 150 hours - of the main repertoire of major troupes in Mūḻikkuḷam and Kiḷḷimangalam, in central Kerala. I hope to complete a book on these performances sometime soon.
I am also a grass-roots peace activist in Israel-Palestine, concentrating mostly on the area of the south Hebron hills, where we have been able to make a difference in the lives of the Palestinian farmers and herders living under the harsh conditions of the Israeli Occupation. My experiences there are recorded in Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine (University of Chicago Press, 2007). | |
| 517 | Name: | Henry E. Sigerist | | | Year Elected: | 1945 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1892 | | | Death Date: | 3/17/57 | | | | |
| 518 | Name: | Dr. Michael Silverstein | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2008 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | Death Date: | July 17, 2020 | | | | | | |
Michael Silverstein (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1972) was Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Psychology, and was in the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, at the University of Chicago. He studied language structure and its functional contextualization, language history and prehistory, the anthropology of language use, sociolinguistics, semiotics, language and cognition (and their development), and history of linguistic and ethnographic studies. His fieldwork in northwestern North America and northwestern Australia has been the basis of various descriptive, theoretical and generalizing contributions. He was also investigating language use and textuality as sites of contestation and transformation of cultural value in contemporary American society, reconceptualizing sociocultural and rhetorical practices in light of the semiotic anthropology of communication. Michael Silverstein was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. | |
| 519 | Name: | Professor Erika Simon | | | Institution: | University of Würzburg | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1927 | | | Death Date: | February 15, 2019 | | | | | | |
Erika Simon was born in Ludwigshafen (then in the suburb Rheingönheim), and from 1930 she lived in Aschaffenburg/Main (not far from Frankfurt) where she attended high school. Then from 1947 on she was a student at Heidelberg University and Munich University. From 1953-59 she was an assistant at Mainz University, and from 1959-63 she was a Docent at Heidelberg University. She had a visiting position from 1961-62 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. From 1964-94 she was Professor of Classical Archaeology at Würzburg University and Director of the Antiquities in Martin-von-Wagner Museum. She has been professor emerita since 1994. Dr. Simon is the author of Die Götter der Griechen (1969); Das antike Theater (1972); Pergamon und Hesiod (1975); Festivals of Attica, An Archaeological Commentary (1983); Die konstantinischen Deckengemälde in Trier (1986); Die Götter der Römer (1990); and Ausgewahlte Schriften I/II (1998). She is a member of the German Archaeological Institute and has honorary doctorates at Athens and Thessaloniki Universities. | |
| 520 | Name: | Dr. William Kelly Simpson | | | Institution: | Yale University & Museum of Fine Arts, Boston | | | Year Elected: | 1983 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | Death Date: | March 24, 2017 | | | | | | |
William Kelly Simpson (B.A. Yale, 1947, M.A. 1948, Ph.D. 1954) was appointed to the Yale faculty in 1958, and as Professor of Egyptology in 1965. He embraced nearly every aspect of the subject, including history, literature, art and archaeology. His numerous books include publications of the Pennsylvania-Yale Expedition to Egypt, Giza mastabas, several volumes of papyri and other Egyptian writings; a standard history of Egypt; and an anthology of Egyptian literature in translation. He was the author of nearly 150 articles in the field and was also former editor of the Yale Egyptological Studies. Furthermore, Dr. Simpson served for many years as Curator of Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. William Kelly Simpson died March 24, 2017, at the age of 89. | |
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