| | 581 | Name: | Dr. Martin Litchfield West | | | Institution: | All Souls College, University of Oxford | | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | Death Date: | July 13, 2015 | | | | | | |
Martin Litchfield West wrote the following biography in 2010, the year he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. He died July 13, 2015, at the age of 77.
I was born in London on 23 September 1937, the first child of Maurice Charles West, Civil Engineer, and his wife Catherine. We lived through the Second World War at Hampton, Middlesex, far enough out of London to receive only occasional bombs in the neighborhood, though the house was damaged one night.
The first seven years of my education were spent at a local primary school. Then I was put into the more challenging and stimulating milieu of Colet Court, the junior school attached to one of the major British independent schools, St. Paul's, and after three years I graduated to the main school. There was a strong emphasis there on Latin and Greek, which suited my growing interest in languages, and I had some excellent teachers. In 1955 I went with a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, to pursue the four-year Literae Humaniores course. Among those who taught and influenced me there were Gordon Williams (my college tutor), E. R. Dodds, and Eduard Fraenkel, whose famous seminars were a daunting test-bed for fledgling scholars.
In 1959 I embarked on graduate work, choosing Hesiod as my area of study and Hugh Lloyd-Jones as my supervisor. He did me a great service by arranging for me to spend the next summer semester in Germany under Reinhold Merkelbach. Besides raising my German to a state of fluency, those months opened my eyes to different approaches, and I made the acquaintance of such powerful scholars as Walter Burkert, Rudolf Kassel, and Winfried Bühler, who were to remain lifelong friends.
Before leaving for Germany I had been elected to a three-year Junior Research Fellowship at St. John's College, Oxford, which I took up on my return. On the last day of 1960 I married my wife Stephanie, whom I had met at Fraenkel's seminars; she was now also doing graduate work and was to establish herself as a scholar in her own right. In 1963, following several unsuccessful applications for permanent positions in universities, I had the good fortune to be offered a Fellowship in Oxford at University College. The same summer we had our first child and I completed my doctoral thesis, a commentary on Hesiod's Theogony (augmented with a critical text and published in 1966).
I taught at University College for eleven years, while continuing to publish. In the fall of 1967 I spent a sabbatical term at Harvard as a visiting lecturer - my first experience of the USA. In 1974 I was asked whether I would be interested in the chair in Greek at Bedford College, London; it was intimated that I could continue to live in Oxford, where Stephanie was now employed and where our children were at school. I accepted the offer and began a new life of travelling up to London for a few days each week.
The London University scene, initially tranquil, became turbulent in the early eighties. There was official pressure for 'rationalization,' for mergers of colleges and departments, and after strenuous discussions it came about that Bedford merged with Royal Holloway College. This meant that my workplace was transferred from central London to a site out in Surrey, a little closer to Oxford but more awkward to reach by public transport. This forced me, at the age of 47, to learn to drive a car, something I had never before needed to do but much enjoyed doing once I mastered it.
During my London period I had two further memorable extended stays abroad: in 1980 a month in Japan as a guest of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and in 1986 a quarter as Visiting Professor at UCLA.
In 1991 I was successful with an application for a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College Oxford, as desirable a position as any in the academic world, and one that freed me from the regular commuting to Surrey and from increasingly tiresome administrative chores. It gave me the leisure to apply myself to learning Akkadian and some other Semitic languages, which I wanted to do in order to write a book on West Asiatic elements in early Greek poetry (The East Face of Helicon, 1997). I believe it is valuable for a classicist to learn other ancient languages besides Greek and Latin, and as a result of doing so I have been able, since 1994, to publish half a dozen articles on Mesopotamian and Iranian topics, and recently to complete a translation of Zoroaster's Gathas (to appear in August 2010). In 2000 my work received a wholly unexpected tribute in the form of the international Balzan Prize for Classical Antiquity.
I reached the statutory age of retirement in 2004, and my status at All Souls changed to that of Emeritus Fellow. I remain active in research and publication, and take pleasure in the tokens of recognition that continue to descend on me from time to time, such as the Festschrift produced for my 70th birthday in 2007, the honorary doctorate conferred by the University of Cyprus in 2008 (which came with a splendiferous robe and hat), and most recently my election to the American Philosophical Society.
Martin West | |
| 582 | Name: | William L. Westermann | | | Year Elected: | 1944 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1873 | | | Death Date: | 10/4/54 | | | | |
| 583 | Name: | Dr. Lynn T. White | | | Year Elected: | 1968 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404. History of the Arts, Literature, Religion and Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1907 | | | Death Date: | 3/30/87 | | | | |
| 584 | Name: | Dr. Morton G. White | | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study | | | Year Elected: | 1972 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1917 | | | Death Date: | May 27, 2016 | | | | | | |
Morton G. White was Philosophy and Intellectual History Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Historical Studies. In his philosophy of holistic pragmatism, Dr. White tried to bridge the positivistic gulf between analytic and synthetic truth as well as that between moral and scientific belief. He maintained that philosophy of science is not philosophy enough, thereby encouraging the examination of other aspects of civilized life, especially art, history, law, politics, religion, and their relations with science. His many books include Foundations of Historical Knowledge (1965); Science and Sentiment in America (1972); The Question of Free Will (1993); and A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism (2002). His book with the late Lucia Perry White, The Intellectual versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright, was first published in 1962. Dr. White received his Ph.D. from Columbia University (1942) and was honored with Columbia's Woodbridge Prize in Philosophy (1943), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1950-51) and membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Prior to joining the Institute for Advanced Study as a professor in 1970, he was a member of the institute from 1953-54, 1962-63 and 1968 and served as a professor at Harvard University from 1953-70. Morton White died May 27, 2016 at the age of 99 in Skillman, New Jersey. | |
| 585 | Name: | Dr. Pierre-Étienne Will | | | Institution: | Collège de France | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404b | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | | | | |
Pierre-Étienne Will retired in 2014 from the chair of History of Modern China at the Collège de France, which he had held since 1992 concurrently with a position of Directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is specializing in the socio-economic and political history of late-imperial and early republican China. He has published Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China (Stan¬ford, 1990; original French edition Paris, 1980; Korean translation, 1995; Chinese translation, 2002), Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650-1850 (Ann Arbor, 1991, with R. Bin Wong), Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China: A Descriptive and Critical Bibliography (Leiden, 2020, 2 vol.), several edited volumes, including China, Democracy, and Law: A Historical and Contemporary Approach (Leiden, 2012, with Mireille Delmas-Marty; original French edition Paris, 2007), and numerous articles on Chinese economy, society, politics, bureaucracy, law, water management, and more. He has been co-editor of the journal T’oung Pao from 1992 to 2016. | |
| 586 | Name: | Dr. Gordon Randolph Willey | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1913 | | | Death Date: | April 28, 2002 | | | | |
| 587 | Name: | Edwin B. Williams | | | Year Elected: | 1955 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1891 | | | Death Date: | 4/28/75 | | | | |
| 588 | Name: | Dr. John Wilmerding | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | Death Date: | June 6, 2024 | | | | | | |
John Wilmerding is Sarofim Professor in American Art Emeritus in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, and former visiting curator in the Department of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a trustee of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and a commissioner of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. He was formerly Senior Curator of American Art and Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where he organized the landmark exhibition "American Light: The Luminist Movement" in 1980. In 2002, he was reappointed by President George W. Bush to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. Professor Wilmerding is the author of many books and catalogs on American art, including American Marine Painting, American Views, and The Artist's Mount Desert as well as studies of Robert Salmon, Fitz H. Lane, John F. Peto, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Richard Estes, Robert Indiana, and Tom Wesselmann. An exhibition of his collection, "American Masters from Bingham to Eakins", was held at the National Gallery of Art in 2004, at which time he announced the gift of the collection to the Gallery. | |
| 589 | Name: | John A. Wilson | | | Year Elected: | 1954 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1899 | | | Death Date: | 8/30/76 | | | | |
| 590 | Name: | Herbert E. Winlock | | | Year Elected: | 1939 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1884 | | | Death Date: | 1/26/50 | | | | |
| 591 | Name: | Dr. Irene J. Winter | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Born in New York City, Irene Winter received her AB in Anthropology from Barnard College (1960), her MA in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of Chicago (1967), and her PhD from Columbia University in the History of Art and Archaeology (1973). She taught at Queens College, CUNY, from 1971-1976, at the University of Pennsylvania from 1976-1988, and is presently Boardman Professor of Fine Arts Emerita at Harvard University, having served on the faculty from 1988 to 2009, and as Department Chair from 1993-1996. In 1996-97 she was Slade Professor at Cambridge University, delivering the Slade Lectures in the Spring of 1997. She subsequently delivered the Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College in 1999, and in the Spring of 2005 presented the Andrew H. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, DC.
Professor Winter has participated in archaeological excavations at Godin Tepe and Hasanlu, Iran, and at Tell Sakhariyeh, Iraq, with additional comparative fieldwork in India. Her awards include a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship (1983-88), along with an Olivia James travel Grant of the Archaeological Institute of America, and a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Fellowship. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1999, was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2003-04, was named a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, in 2005, received the Medal of Distinction from Barnard College in 2009, and was designated an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2013.
She has served on the Board of the College Art Association, several editorial and grants boards, and the Scientific Committee of the International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East since its inception in 1988. She has also been a member of the Iraq Task Force of the Archaeological Institute of America.
Her principal work has been devoted to the art and archaeology of the Ancient Near East, writing on topics ranging from ivory carving and cylinder seals to royal sculpture. Throughout her career, her stress has been on the relationship between the visual arts, language, history and culture in an attempt to join empirical data with theory in an inter-disciplinary context. Two volumes of collected essays, published by Brill, appeared in 2010, entitled On Art in the Ancient Near East. The Mellon lectures will be published as Visual Affect: Aesthetic Experience and Ancient Mesopotamia. | |
| 592 | Name: | Owen Wister | | | Year Elected: | 1897 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1860 | | | Death Date: | 7/21/38 | | | | |
| 593 | Name: | Dr. Ronald G. Witt | | | Institution: | Duke University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | Death Date: | March 15, 2017 | | | | | | |
Ronald Witt was a distinguished scholar of Renaissance humanism with an extensive publication record. His book In the Footsteps of the Ancients is considered the most important book on the medieval origins of Renaissance humanism in the past fifty years, and it has gained widespread international recognition as a ground-breaking contribution to the early history of the humanist movement in Italy. He is a recipient of the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History and of the American Historical Society's Marraro Prize, given for the best book in Italian studies. His election as vice president (with automatic succession to the office of president) of the Renaissance Society of America was further testimony to his leadership in the field of Renaissance studies. At the time of his death on March 15, 2017, at age 84, he was William B. Hamilton Professor of History Emeritus at Duke University, where he had taught since 1971, Dr. Witt received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (1965). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2004. | |
| 594 | Name: | Mr. Edwin Wolf | | | Institution: | Library Company of Philadelphia | | | Year Elected: | 1974 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1911 | | | Death Date: | 2/20/91 | | | | |
| 595 | Name: | Dr. Susan Wolf | | | Institution: | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Susan Wolf is the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her B.A. in math and philosophy from Yale University in 1974 and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1978. She taught at Harvard University, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University before joining the University of North Carolina faculty in 2002. She has held visiting fellowships at the Australian National University and the University College, Oxford, as well as the Visiting Belle van Zuylen Chair at the University of Utrecht. She has also held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women and the Guggenheim Foundation. Recently she received the Mellon Foundation's award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. Dr. Wolf is the author of Freedom Within Reason (1990), a book on free will and moral responsibility, and has written numerous articles on ethics and the philosophy of mind. These include Morality and Partiality, Two Levels of Pluralism, Self-Interest and Interest in Selves, Moral Saints, and Asymmetrical Freedom. Her current research focuses on the relations among happiness, morality, and meaningfulness in life. | |
| 596 | Name: | Dr. Christoph Wolff | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Christoph Wolff received a Dr.Phil. at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen, in 1966, where he was an instructor at the Institute for Sacred Music (1963-65) and a lecturer in the Department of Music (1965-69). Later he served as an assistant professor of music at the University of Toronto and as professor of music at Columbia University before moving to Harvard University in 1976. He is currently the Adams University Professor at Harvard. Christoph Wolff is one of the foremost musicologists of our time, and without peer as a scholar of Johann Sebastian Bach. In addition to his work as editor and archivist, in 2000 he published a widely-praised biography of Bach aimed at a general audience, now in its fourth printing and translated into eight languages. His amazing discovery in 1999 of a trove of Bach family manuscripts in Kiev drew international attention. He has served widely on professional bodies and has also been a successful academic administrator at Harvard, where for eight years he was Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. His list of books include The Bach Family (principal author, 1983); Bach: Essays on His Life and Music (1991); Mozarts Requiem: Historical and Analytical Studies-Documents-Score (1994); and Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (2000). Dr. Wolff is the recipient of the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association, London (1978) and an Honorary Professor of the University of Freiburg since 1990. He currently serves on the board of directors of the the Packard Humanities Institute and chairs the executive board of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, Germany. Dr. Wolff is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Saxon Academy of Sciences at Leipzig. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002. | |
| 597 | Name: | Harry Austryn Wolfson | | | Year Elected: | 1956 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1887 | | | Death Date: | 9/19/74 | | | | |
| 598 | Name: | Dr. Michael Wood | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | | | | |
As the list of his publications suggests, Michael Wood is a critic of astonishing range, working with literature in several languages and from several periods. He has also written screenplays. His books have been enthusiastically reviewed, and many of them have won more than academic readership. He writes and speaks with perspicacity, wit and penetration, and he concerns himself with large issues (the importance of literature; the social and moral meanings of film; the need for knowledge of diverse cultures) as well as small ones (the texture of prose, the function of an image). Also brilliantly successful as a teacher and administrator, Dr. Wood has been the Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University since 1995. Born in England, he holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University (1961) and has also taught at Columbia and Exeter Universities. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Royal Society of Literature, he has authored many books, including Stendhal (1971); America in the Movies, or "Santa Maria, It had Slipped My Mind" (1989); Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1990); The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (1995); Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction (1998); and The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles (2003). | |
| 599 | Name: | Louis Booker Wright | | | Year Elected: | 1948 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1899 | | | Death Date: | 2/26/84 | | | | |
| 600 | Name: | Rodney Stuart Young | | | Year Elected: | 1965 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1907 | | | Death Date: | 10/25/74 | | | | |
| |