| | 101 | 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. | |
| 102 | Name: | Eric Turner | | | Year Elected: | 1977 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1911 | | | Death Date: | 4/20/83 | | | | |
| 103 | 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 | | | | |
| 104 | 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 | |
| 105 | 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. | |
| |