| | 1 | Name: | Dr. John V. Fleming | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402a | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | | | | |
John Fleming’s main contributions to scholarship have been in three areas—Romance (Old French) literature, the interaction of literary tropes and iconography in medieval painting and sculpture, especially associated with Franciscan spirituality, and Chaucer. His study of the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose is regarded as a classic exegesis of this multi-layered text and also as a piece of exemplary scholarly prose. The same may be said of his study of Franciscan hermeneutics, From Bonaventure to Bellini, which was a pathbreaking interdisciplinary study. Fleming has also been an indefatigable editor, translator and commentator on medieval Franciscan texts (see his Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages) and texts, like the Two Poems Attributed to Joachim of Fiore, which were regarded in the thirteenth and fourteenth century as bearing upon the Franciscan experience. Along the way he has made fundamental contributions to literary scholars’ and historians’ understanding and appreciation of matters as diverse as Chaucer’s classical sources and the mental universe of Christopher Columbus. Fleming has regularly, productively and with great wit challenged many of the stultifying orthodoxies regnant for so long in medieval scholarship, not least the concept of ‘courtly love’. Added to his scholarly impact through his published works one must include Fleming’s influence on the field through his teaching. Indeed his reputation as a teacher both of graduate students and undergraduates is legendary. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Martin Kern | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1962 | | | | | | |
Martin Kern is the inaugural Greg (’84) and Joanna (P13) Zeluck Professor in Asian Studies at Princeton University. Born and educated in Germany, he received his Dr. Phil. In Sinology, German Literature, and Art History from Cologne University in 1996. He taught at the University of Washington and Columbia University before moving to Princeton in 2000. He held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies (2002-03), the American Council of Learned Societies (2006-07), the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (2006-07), and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (2010-11) and was appointed Astor Visiting Lecturer and Fellow Commoner of The Queen’s College, Oxford University (2013), the inaugural Annual M.I. Rostovtzeff Lecturer, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University (2010), and Distinguished Professor at the Research Center for Comparative Literature and World Literature, Shanghai Normal University (2014-16). He was awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Among other functions in Europe, China, and the United States, Kern is co-editor of the pre-eminent sinological journal T’oung Pao (since 2010); founding managing editor of Studies in the History of Chinese Texts (2006); co-editor of Handbook of Oriental Studies, academic board member of the International Center for Studies of Chinese Civilization, Fudan University (Shanghai; 2012); and Executive Council member at the Annual World Conference on Sinology, Renmin University (Beijing; 2014).
Kern’s research cuts broadly across the fields of literature, philology, history, religion, and art in ancient and medieval China, with a dual focus on poetry and the formation of ancient Chinese textuality and cultural memory. The author and editor of nine books and some eighty book chapters and articles (as of 2015), he studies the composition, reception, and canonization of early Chinese texts, including through the analysis of recently excavated manuscripts and from comparative perspectives. He publishes on a wide range of topics, including the history of Chinese literature; the performance of texts in political and religious ritual; authorship as a historical and theoretical problem; issues of writing and orality; the early development of Chinese literary thought; style and rhetoric in philosophy and historiography; the rise of Chinese political philosophy; calligraphy; and the history and current issues of Sinology as a global field. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Glenn W. Most | | | Institution: | Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa; University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
I studied Classics and Comparative Literature in Europe and the United States, and have taught at the Universities of Yale, Princeton, Michigan, Siena, Innsbruck, and Heidelberg. Since 1996 I have been a recurrent Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and since 2001 simultaneously Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa; since 2010 I have been an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. I have published books on Classics (The Measures of Praise: Structure and Function in Pindar's Second Pythian and Seventh Nemean Odes = Hypomnemata 83, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1985; Theophrastus, Metaphysics, ed. with A. Laks, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1993; Studies on the Derveni Papyrus, ed. with A. Laks, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997; the new Loeb edition of Hesiod, in two volumes, 2006-7), on the history and methodology of Classical studies (F.A. Wolf: Prolegomena to Homer, ed. with A.T. Grafton and J.E.G. Zetzel, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985; Aporemata 1-6, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1997ff.; an English translation of Sebastiano Timpanaro’s study of the genesis of the method of Lachmann, 2005), on comparative literature, cultural studies, and the history of religion (Doubting Thomas, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2005; The Classical Tradition, co-edited with A.T. Grafton and S. Settis, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2010), on literary theory (The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. with W.W. Stowe, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) and on the history of art (Raffael, Die Schule von Athen. Über das Lesen der Bilder, Frankfurt a.M., Fischer Verlag, 1999; Italian translation 2001), and I have published numerous articles, reviews, and translations in these fields and also on modern philosophy and literature. I was the editor in charge of ancient Greek literature for Der Neue Pauly and directed and co-edited a three-volume selection of the works of Arnaldo Momigliano in German and a new revised edition of the leading American translation of all the surviving Greek tragedies. I am on the editorial board of a number of scholarly journals in Classical studies, philosophy, and other fields. Currently I am finishing a new co-edited Loeb edition of the Presocratic philosophers, a bilingual edition of the ancient and medieval scholia and commentary to Hesiod’s Theogony, and co-edited volumes on the suicide of Ajax in Sophocles’ tragedy and on philological methods in a variety of canonical written traditions.
During my career on both sides of the Atlantic I have tried to combine work in the traditional disciplines of Classical (especially Greek) philology at the highest level of excellence I could attain with research on related disciplines to which Classics could make a significant contribution and from which a significant contribution could be made to scholarship in Classics. This intellectual movement between various foci has enriched and stimulated my work both inside my discipline and outside. To this end I completed two doctorates, one in traditional Classical philology (Greek) in Tübingen, and another in more theoretically and post-classically oriented Comparative Literature at Yale; and my teaching and research have been directed towards both foci. Within the field of ancient Greek I have worked primarily on Greek poetry and philosophy of the Archaic and Classical periods (Hesiod, lyric, tragedy; Presocratics, Plato). My non-Classical activities were directed in the first part of my career primarily to reception studies, Comparative Literature, the history and methodology of Classical scholarship, art history, Biblical studies, and ancient philosophy, and these have continued to be central to my research agenda. In recent years my long-standing interest in the history and methodology of Classical scholarship has developed into an intense commitment to a history of science approach to the comparative study of philological procedures as they have been practiced in various canonical textual traditions, not only Greco-Roman, but also such other ones as Mesopotamian, Jewish, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese. My interest in inter-disciplinarity as providing enrichment and context for my commitment to the discipline of Classical studies is paralleled by a broad network of international collaborations with scholars and institutions throughout Europe and North America (and, more recently, with China as well). | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Anne Walters Robertson | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1956 | | | | | | |
Anne Walters Robertson is a music historian who writes on subjects ranging from the plainchant of the early church to the Latin and vernacular polyphony of the late middle ages. She is currently Dean of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. In her work, liturgical and secular music, and often the interactions of the two, mirror theological and courtly ideas and shape the development of medieval spirituality and personal devotion, architecture, institutional identity, and politics. The theme of French royal culture also winds its way through Robertson’s books, which focus on the history of music at the cathedral of Reims, where the kings of France were crowned, and the music and liturgy of the abbey of St-Denis of Paris, where the kings were buried. Her research on fourteenth-century polyphony points to the fundamental roles of local musical dialect in understanding Philippe de Vitry’s life and music, and of mystical theology in illuminating the compositions of Guillaume de Machaut. More recently, she has studied the symbolic and folkloric aspects of the seminal masses and motets of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as the title of her 2006 article, "The Savior, the Woman, and the Head of the Dragon in the Caput Masses and Motet," suggests. She has taught at the University of Chicago since 1984, where, throughout her career, she has been involved in the work of the broader University and the professional organizations, serving as Deputy Provost for Research and Education (2001-4) and Chair of the Music Department (1992-98, 2008, 2014-17), and as Co-Chair of the OPUS Campaign of the American Musicological Society (2005-9) and President of the AMS (2011-2012).
Robertson studied piano at the University of Houston (B.Mus., August 1974, summa cum laude and valedictorian; M.Mus. 1976) and music theory at the Shepherd School of Music, Rice University (M.Mus. 1979) before taking the Ph.D. in musicology at Yale University (1984). She is the first scholar to win all three awards of the Medieval Academy of America: the Haskins Medal (2006) for her book Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works (Cambridge University Press, 2002), the John Nicholas Brown Prize (1995) for The Service Books of the Royal Abbey of Saint Denis: Images of Ritual and Music in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), and the Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize (1987). Another trio of prizes, bestowed by the AMS, includes the H. Colin Slim Award (2007), the Otto Kinkeldey Award (2003), and the Alfred Einstein Award (1989). In 2007, the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association presented her with the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal. She has received grants and fellowships from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation (1996-97), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1992), the American Philosophical Society (1990), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1990, 1986-87, 1985), the American Council of Learned Societies (1988, 1986), the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music (1982 83), the Fulbright Program (France, 1981 82), and the American Association of University Women (honorary, 1982). Robertson became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2015. | |
| 5 | 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). | |
| |