| | 561 | Name: | Lynn Thorndike | | | Year Elected: | 1939 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1882 | | | Death Date: | 12/28/65 | | | | |
| 562 | Name: | Dr. Samuel E. Thorne | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1959 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | [405] | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1907 | | | Death Date: | 4/7/94 | | | | |
| 563 | Name: | Dr. James Thorpe | | | Institution: | Huntington Library, Art Gallery, & Botanical Gardens | | | Year Elected: | 1982 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402. Criticism: Arts and Letters | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1915 | | | Death Date: | January 4, 2009 | | | | | | |
James Thorpe is a distinguished scholar and former director of the Huntington Library, Art Gallery, and Botanical Gardens, which he led from 1966-83. Throughout his tenure he balanced leadership responsibilities with distinguished contributions to literary-historical methodology and to textual criticism. A professor of English at Princeton University for many years, Dr. Thorpe has written numerous lively works on authors from Chaucer to Milton to Wallace Stevens and has edited publications such as Relations of Literary Study and Principles of Textual Criticism. He served as Senior Research Associate at the Huntington from 1983-99 and is now Director Emeritus. | |
| 564 | Name: | Dr. Brian Tierney | | | Institution: | Cornell University | | | Year Elected: | 1990 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1922 | | | Death Date: | November 30, 2019 | | | | | | |
Internationally recognized as a leading scholar of medieval canon law, Brian Tierney was among the most distinguished intellectual historians of the Middle Ages. After serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II, Dr. Tierney received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Cambridge University. He taught at Catholic University and at Cornell University, where was the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus. He was the recipient of Guggenheim Fellowships and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was awarded the honorary degrees of Doctor of Theology from Uppsala University, Sweden, and Doctor of Humane Letters from Catholic University. He was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and in 1994 he received the Award for Academic Distinction of the American Historical Association. Dr. Tierney authored many articles and several books, including Foundations of the Conciliar Theory (1955), Medieval Poor Law (1959), The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300 (1964), Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150-1350 (1972) Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150-1650 (1981), and The Idea of Natural Rights, Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law, 1150-1625. Brian Tierney died November 30, 2019 in Syracuse, New York at the age of 97. | |
| 565 | Name: | Dr. Tzvetan Todorov | | | Institution: | CNRS, Paris | | | Year Elected: | 1998 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402. Criticism: Arts and Letters | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1939 | | | Death Date: | February 7, 2017 | | | | | | |
Tzvetan Todorov was a Bulgarian born historian, cultural critic and essayist who lived in France from 1963 until his death February 7, 2017, in Paris at age 77. After his pioneering early work on literary theory, he chose to explore issues of human diversity, of universalism vs. relativism and of human behavior in extreme situations. He did this with erudition, balance, and a sense of compassion - not to mention extraordinary productivity. Dr. Todorov published more than 30 books, including The Poetics of Prose (1971), Introduction to Poetics (1981), The Conquest of America (1982), Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (1984), Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1991), On Human Diversity (1993), Hope and Memory (2000), and Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism (2002). He was a member of the Conseil National des Programmes au Ministère de l'Education Nationale and has served as visiting professor at several universities, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia and the University of California, Berkeley. His honors include the prizes Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1991), Charles Veillon (1998), Nonino (2002), Spinoza (2004), Grinzane Cavour (2007) and Prince of Asturias (2008); he also was an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He was a Doctor honoris causa of the Universities of Sofia, Liège, Mannheim and the American University in Paris, a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Dr. Todorov held the title of Directeur de recherches honoraire at CNRS, Paris at the time of his death. | |
| 566 | Name: | Professor David Tracy | | | Institution: | University of Chicago Divinity School and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1939 | | | | | | |
David Tracy is the Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies, and Professor Emeritus of Theology and the Philosophy of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought.
A noted teacher, scholar, philosopher of religion and theologian, Tracy earned his doctorate in 1969 at the Gregorian University in Rome. He taught at the Catholic University of America from 1967 to 1969, when he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He was also a member of the Committee on Social Thought. His courses focused on a wide variety of courses in philosophy, in historical and contemporary theology, in philosophical systematic and constructive theology and hermeneutics, and on issues and persons in religion and modern thought—and as well as other courses on Greek and modern tragedy in the university’s Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. He was one of the founding editors of Religious Studies Review and for many years on the editorial board of Concilium.
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982 and has lectured in universities and colleges in the United States and around the world, including Scotland, where he delivered the prestigious Gifford lectures which were established to promote and diffuse the study of natural theology.
His publications include Blessed Rage for Order (1979), The Analogical Imagination (1981), Plurality and Ambiguity (1987), Dialogue with the Other: The Inter-religious Dialogue (1990), On Naming the Present: Reflections on God, Hermeneutics, and Church (1994) and two books of his essays - Fragments: the Existential Situation of Our Time (2020) and Filaments: Theological Profiles (2020). He is currently writing a book based on his Gifford lectures, "Infinity and Naming God."
David Tracy was elected a member of the Americn Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 567 | Name: | Eric Turner | | | Year Elected: | 1977 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1911 | | | Death Date: | 4/20/83 | | | | |
| 568 | Name: | Dr. Kirk Varnedoe | | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study & The Museum of Modern Art | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404. History of the Arts, Literature, Religion and Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | Death Date: | August 14, 2003 | | | | |
| 569 | Name: | Dr. Helen Hennessy Vendler | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1992 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402a | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1933 | | | Death Date: | April 23, 2024 | | | | | | |
Helen Vendler was awarded the Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities for her paper presented to the Society at its joint meeting with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Entitled "Seamus Heaney and the Oresteia: 'Mycenae Lookout' and the Usefulness of Tradition," it is a masterful analysis, not only of the content of the poem, but of the structure of the poetry and how line and meter reflect the emotion the poet seeks to convey. Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she received her Ph.D. in English and American Literature in 1960 (after doing an undergraduate degree in chemistry at Emmanuel College, Boston). Before coming to Harvard, she taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University. She has been a frequent lecturer at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo. She has held many fellowships (Guggenheim, Wilson, APS, NEH, etc.) and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Modern Language Association (of which she was president in 1980). She holds twenty four honorary degrees from universities and colleges here and in Norway (University of Oslo), England (Cambridge) and Ireland (National University of Ireland and Trinity College). Dr. Vendler is the author of Yeats's Vision and the Later Plays (1963), On Extended Wings: The Longer Poems of Wallace Stevens (1969), The Poetry of George Herbert (1975), The Odes of John Keats (1983), Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (1986), The Music of What Happens: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1988), Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (1995), The Given and the Made: Lowell, Berryman, Dove, Graham (1995), The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (1995), Poems, Poets, Poetry (1996), The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997), Seamus Heaney (1998) Coming of Age As a Poet (2003), Poets Thinking (2004), Invisible Listeners (2005), and Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007). She also has reviewed contemporary poetry for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, and other journals, and lectures widely both in the United States and abroad. She delivered the 56th A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in 2007. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1992. | |
| 570 | Name: | Dr. Emily Townsend Vermeule | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1972 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | Death Date: | February 6, 2001 | | | | |
| 571 | Name: | Dr. Gregory Vlastos | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 1989 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1907 | | | Death Date: | 10/12/91 | | | | |
| 572 | Name: | Dr. Evon Zartman Vogt | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1999 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 403. Cultural Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1918 | | | Death Date: | May 13, 2004 | | | | |
| 573 | Name: | Dr. Speros Vryonis | | | Institution: | New York University | | | Year Elected: | 1974 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | Death Date: | March 11, 2019 | | | | | | |
Speros Vryonis, Jr., was one of the most eminent Byzantinists of his generation. After a distinguished career at UCLA, he became the founding director of the Alexander S. Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies at New York University, from which he retired as Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Civilization Emeritus. Dr. Vryonis's extensive work on the history and culture of the Greeks from Homer to the present, and on their relations with the Slavic, Islamic, and New Worlds, includes the seminal The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century; Byzantium and Europe; Studies on Byzantium, Seljuks and Ottomans; Byzantium: Its Internal History and Relations with the Islamic World; and Studies in Byzantine Institutions and Society. He also edited, among other volumes, Aspects of the Balkans: Continuity and Change (with Henrik Birnbaum); Essays on the Slavic World and the Eleventh Century; Islam and Cultural Change in the Middle Ages; Individualism and Conformity in Classical Islam (with Amin Banani); and Islam's Understanding of Itself (with Richard G. Hovannisian). A graduate of Harvard University (Ph.D., 1956), Dr. Vryonis was a Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Scholar as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Medieval Academy of America. Toward the end of his life he directed the Speros Basil Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism. Speros Vryonis died March 11, 2019 in Sacramento California at the age of 90. | |
| 574 | Name: | Dr. Anthony F. C. Wallace | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 1969 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 403. Cultural Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1923 | | | Death Date: | October 5, 2015 | | | | | | |
Anthony F.C. Wallace embarked on an anthropological career at a young age as a research assistant to his father, ethnologist and historian Paul A.W. Wallace in the 1930s. After briefly studying at Lebanon Valley College, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, which assigned him to the 14th Armored Division which, in 1945, participated in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. After his discharge, Dr. Wallace began a lifelong association with the University of Pennsylvania's anthropology department, of which he eventually became chair. Bringing to the discipline a unique blend of ethnology and history influenced by the social, behavioral and biological sciences, he became one of the pioneers in the development of ethnohistory as a distinct field. Dr. Wallace made important contributions to our knowledge of Native American personality, kinship studies, the effects of stress, and religious cults and movements and developed new insights into the ways in which indigenous peoples react to the pressures of modern Western civilization. Among his many projects, he spent nearly 20 years researching a detailed study of Seneca Indian society, and he had written multiple books exploring native-white relations in America, particularly government policy towards Native Americans. Throughout his career, Dr. Wallace also conducted a number of studies of the psychological effects of disasters and of modern social behaviors, from watching television to inhabiting a high-rise building. His many publications include Culture and Personality (1961), Religion: An Anthropological View (1966), Death and Rebirth (1970) and Thomas Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (1999). In combining social and psychological processes toward the understanding of personality, religion and modern and indigenous societies, Dr. Wallace was without peer. He became University Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, but he remained an active and influential scholar, frequently lecturing on the benefits and limitations of local history. Documents from his professional and personal life, including drafts, correspondence, research notes and photographs, comprise a large part of the Wallace Family Collection, which is housed in the American Philosophical Society Library. He had been elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1969. Anthony Wallace died October 5, 2015, at the age of 92. | |
| 575 | Name: | John B. Ward-Perkins | | | Institution: | British School in Rome | | | Year Elected: | 1981 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1912 | | | Death Date: | 5/28/81 | | | | |
| 576 | Name: | Dr. Calvert Watkins | | | Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles & Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1975 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1933 | | | Death Date: | March 20, 2013 | | | | | | |
Calvert Watkins was Victor S. Thomas Professor of Linguistics and the Classics, Emeritus at Harvard University and Professor-in-Residence, Department of Classics and Program in Indo-European Studies, at the University of California, Los Angeles at the time of his death on March 20, 2013 at the age of 80. He was interested in the linguistics and the poetics of all the earlier Indo-European languges and societies, particularly Greek, Latin and Italic, Celtic (especially Early Irish), Anatolian (especially Hittite and Luvian), Vedic Indic, and Old Iranian; historical linguistic theory and method; and Indo-European genetic comparative literature. His last book, which treats all these interests, is How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (1995), which was awarded the Goodwin Prize in 1998. Dr. Watkins's other works include Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb I. The Sigmatic Aorist (1962); The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (1985, revised 2000); and the "Historical linguistics and culture history," "Indo-European languages," and "Stylistic reconstruction" entries in the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. He also served as editor of Studies in Memory of Warren Cowgill (1987) and has written over 150 articles and reviews, 53 of which are reprinted in the two volumes of his Selected Writings, edited by Lisi Oliver (1994), ranging from "Indo-European metrics and Archaic Irish verse" to "The language of the Trojans". Dr. Watkins served as president of the Linguistic Society of America (1988) and as chair of Harvard University's Department of Linguistics for eleven years from 1985-91. He was an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy (1968), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1973) and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (1987) and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. | |
| 577 | Name: | Dr. Patty Jo Watson | | | Institution: | Washington University; University of Montana | | | Year Elected: | 2000 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 403. Cultural Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | Death Date: | 08/01/2024 | | | | | | |
Patty Jo Watson received a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1959. At Washington University since 1969, she is currently Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology. She is the recipient of the Fryxell Medal from the Society for American Archaeology, the Distinguished Service Award from the American Anthropological Association, and the Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement from the Archaeological Institute of America. Dr. Watson is the author of The Prehistory of Salts Cave, Kentucky (1969); Archaeological Ethnography in Western Iran (1979); (with others) Man and Nature (1969); Explanation in Archaeology (1971); Archaeological Explanation (1984); Girikihaciyan - A Halafian Site in Southeastern Turkey; and Archaeology of the Middle Green River Region, Kentucky (2005). She was the editor, and author in part, of Archaeology of the Mammoth Cave Area (1974); editor (with others) Prehistoric Archaeology Along the Zagros Flanks (1983); and co-editor of The Origins of Agriculture (1991) and Of Caves and Shell Mounds (1996). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology (editor, American Antiquity, 1984-87), and she is an Honorary Life Member of the National Speleological Society. She has served on the governing board of the Archaeological Institute of America and the executive board of the Center for American Archeology, as well as on the editorial board of the Journal of Cave and Karst Sciences, and of Anthropology Today (Royal Anthropological Institute). In 2007 she received the Archaeological Institute of America's Pomerance Award for Scientific Contributions to Archaeology. Patty Jo Watson has made major contributions in archaeological theory, archaeological method, and archaeological practice in North America, Western Asia, and China. Explanation in Archaeology is a landmark in the EuroAmerican theory debates of the 1970s and is still current in discussions of archaeological theory. Her pioneering work in ethnoarchaeology in Iran, and later on flotation techniques for recovering plant remains are extremely influential contributions to archaeological practice in the Americas, Europe, and China. Her 35 years of research in Kentucky caves has provided crucial evidence about the pre-maize, indigenous agricultural complex developed in Eastern North America. The wide scope and the depth of these contributions make Patty Jo Watson one of the most preeminent archaeologists of her generation. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2000. | |
| 578 | Name: | Dr. Kurt Weitzmann | | | Institution: | Princeton University & Institute for Advanced Study | | | Year Elected: | 1964 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402. Criticism: Arts and Letters | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | 6/7/93 | | | | |
| 579 | Name: | Dr. David Wellbery | | | Institution: | Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Born in Cooperstown, New York in 1947, David Wellbery received his B.A. degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton (1969) and his Ph.D. from Yale University (1977). From 1975 to 1989, he was on the faculty in German Studies and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. From 1990 to 2001, he was the William Kurrelmeyer Professor of German at Johns Hopkins University. In 2001, he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he holds the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professorship in Germanic Studies and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought. At Chicago, Wellbery also directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture. He has held guest professorships at Princeton University, the Universities of Bonn and Copenhagen, and the State University of Rio de Janeiro. In 1989-90, he was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin; from 1994 to 1996, he was a regular Visiting Researcher at the Center for Literary Research in Berlin; in 2003-4, he was a Fellow at the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation in Munich. He has been a Corresponding Member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences since 2008. In 2009, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the German Academy for Language and Literature. In 2012, he became a member of the German National Academy of Science (Leopoldina). Wellbery holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Constance (2010). He is the recipient of the Research Prize of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation (2005), the Jacob-and-Wilhelm-Grimm Prize of the German Academic Exchange Service (2010), and the Golden Medaille of the Goethe Society in Weimar (2019). Since 1998, Wellbery has served as co-editor of the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 580 | Name: | Dr. Rene Wellek | | | Institution: | Yale University | | | Year Elected: | 1969 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | [405] | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1903 | | | Death Date: | 11/10/95 | | | | |
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