| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Rachel Bowlby | | | Institution: | University College, London | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1957 | | | | | | |
Rachel Bowlby is Professor of Comparative Literature at University College London, Emeritus since 2023. She was previously (2004-14) Lord Northcliffe Professor of English, also at UCL, and held posts before that at the universities of York, Oxford and Sussex. Beginning with a Yale PhD dissertation (in Comparative Literature) on novels about department stores, a principal focus of her research has been the history of consumer culture. Books on this subject include Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreisuer, Gissing and Zola (1985), Shopping with Freud (1993), Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (2000) (on the history of supermarkets), and Back to the Shops: The High Street in History and the Future (2022). Other work has focused on connections between feminism, literary theory and psychoanalysis: Still Crazy after All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (1992); Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities (2007). She has also written about everyday life, including the history of parenthood and reproductive technologies: A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories (2013); Everyday Stories (2016). Two authors have been the subject of monographs. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (1997) extended a previous book on Woolf, while Zola: Writing Modern Life (2025) returns to one of the three authorial subjects of Bowlby’s first book, Just Looking. Talking Walking: Essays in Cultural Criticism (2018) brought together a selection of essays in the various fields of her interest; it is joined by another collection of essays, Unexpected Items: Shopping, Parenthood, Changing Feminist Stories (2024); this book is part of Edinburgh University Press’s Feminist Library series. Rachel Bowlby has also translated a number of works of contemporary French philosophy, including two books by Jacques Derrida. She has held visiting positions or fellowships at Cornell University (1990-91) and at the universities of Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle) (2007) and Otago (New Zealand) (2006), and delivered the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton University (2008). She has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2007. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Carol J. Oja | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | | |
Carol J. Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music and American Studies at Harvard and Faculty Director of the Humanities at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is a cultural historian of music with a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on American music and culture, with an emphasis on interracial history and social justice. Her most recent book is Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century, edited with Charles Hiroshi Garrett (University of Michigan Press, 2021). Her Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War (Oxford University Press, 2014) won the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society. Her Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (Oxford 2000) won the Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Book Award, and her Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds (Smithsonian 1990) also won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. Oja’s coauthored article "Marian Anderson's 1953 Concert Tour of Japan: A Transnational History," written with Katie Callam, Makiko Kimoto, and Misako Ohta and published in American Music (2019), won the Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music. She was co-director of the digital humanities exhibit Eileen Southern and “The Music of Black Americans,” together with Christina Linklater, and she is author or editor of six other books.
Oja is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; she was inducted into the Collegium of Scholars of the Martin Luther King, Jr. College of Ministers and Laity at Morehouse College; she has served as Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence with the New York Philharmonic; she has twice chaired the Pulitzer Prize committee in music; and she was a Visiting Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for American Music, and she is a past president of that organization. She has held fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks, the Radcliffe Institute, ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College, the Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her current book-in-progress is Jim Crow in the Concert Hall: Revisiting Marian Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial Concert and the Racist History that Made it a Flash Point | |
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