| | 421 | Name: | Henry E. Sigerist | | | Year Elected: | 1945 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1892 | | | Death Date: | 3/17/57 | | | | |
| 422 | Name: | Dr. Michael Silverstein | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2008 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | Death Date: | July 17, 2020 | | | | | | |
Michael Silverstein (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1972) was Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Psychology, and was in the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, at the University of Chicago. He studied language structure and its functional contextualization, language history and prehistory, the anthropology of language use, sociolinguistics, semiotics, language and cognition (and their development), and history of linguistic and ethnographic studies. His fieldwork in northwestern North America and northwestern Australia has been the basis of various descriptive, theoretical and generalizing contributions. He was also investigating language use and textuality as sites of contestation and transformation of cultural value in contemporary American society, reconceptualizing sociocultural and rhetorical practices in light of the semiotic anthropology of communication. Michael Silverstein was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. | |
| 423 | Name: | Dr. William Kelly Simpson | | | Institution: | Yale University & Museum of Fine Arts, Boston | | | Year Elected: | 1983 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | Death Date: | March 24, 2017 | | | | | | |
William Kelly Simpson (B.A. Yale, 1947, M.A. 1948, Ph.D. 1954) was appointed to the Yale faculty in 1958, and as Professor of Egyptology in 1965. He embraced nearly every aspect of the subject, including history, literature, art and archaeology. His numerous books include publications of the Pennsylvania-Yale Expedition to Egypt, Giza mastabas, several volumes of papyri and other Egyptian writings; a standard history of Egypt; and an anthology of Egyptian literature in translation. He was the author of nearly 150 articles in the field and was also former editor of the Yale Egyptological Studies. Furthermore, Dr. Simpson served for many years as Curator of Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. William Kelly Simpson died March 24, 2017, at the age of 89. | |
| 424 | Name: | Edgar A. Singer | | | Year Elected: | 1925 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1874 | | | Death Date: | 4/3/55 | | | | |
| 425 | Name: | Charles S. Singleton | | | Year Elected: | 1962 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1909 | | | Death Date: | 10/10/85 | | | | |
| 426 | Name: | Dr. Nancy Siraisi | | | Institution: | City University of New York | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404c | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | | | | |
Nancy Siraisi is a MacArthur Fellow (2008) and Professor Emerita of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she has served on the faculty since 1970. Her work spans six centuries of medical history, beginning with a distinguished study of the medieval university of Padua and continuing through the theory and practice of medicine in medieval and Renaissance Italy, a domain she has made her own. Her many books and articles are based on massive excavation of manuscripts and early printed sources and distinguished by their clarity of thought, elegance of argument and lucidity of style; more than half a millennium later, they have illuminated the theories and practices, the works and the lives of learned doctors from the beginning of modern learned medicine in Salerno to the great age of the high Renaissance anatomists. No historian has done more over the last thirty years to prove the vitality, the complexity or the lively interest of pre-modern Europe's traditions of Latin learning. | |
| 427 | Name: | Dr. Åke W. Sjöberg | | | Institution: | The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 1980 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404. History of the Arts, Literature, Religion and Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1924 | | | Death Date: | August 8, 2014 | | | | | | |
Of great eminence in the highly specialized field of Sumerian literature and history, Ake W. Sjöberg became the Clark Research Professor of Assyriology Emeritus and Curator-in-Charge Emeritus at the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, in 1996. He had been affiliated with the university since 1966 as a professor and as curator of its Tablets Collections. As the founder of the Pennsylvanian Sumerian Dictionary Project, he continued the tradition of painstaking scholarship established by his predecessor, Dr. Samuel Kramer, as he and others worked to unlock the secrets of an ancient language and civilization that flourished five millennia ago. A native of Sweden, Dr. Sjoberg held a Fil.Dr. degree (1960) and T,eol. Dr. W.C. (1984) from the University of Uppsala. He served as a docent there (1960-63) as well as as a lecturer, assistant and associate professor at the Oriental Institute of Chicago (1963-66) prior to arriving at Penn. He returned to Sweden after his retirement and died August 8, 2014, at age 90, in Uppsala, Sweden. | |
| 428 | Name: | Dr. Henry Nash Smith | | | Year Elected: | 1981 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404. History of the Arts, Literature, Religion and Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1906 | | | Death Date: | 5/30/86 | | | | |
| 429 | Name: | Dr. Craig Hugh Smyth | | | Institution: | Harvard University & New York University | | | Year Elected: | 1979 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404. History of the Arts, Literature, Religion and Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1915 | | | Death Date: | December 22, 2006 | | | | |
| 430 | Name: | Dr. Frederich Solmsen | | | Institution: | University of Wisconsin | | | Year Elected: | 1966 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404. History of the Arts, Literature, Religion and Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | 1/30/89 | | | | |
| 431 | Name: | Dr. Patricia Meyer Spacks | | | Institution: | University of Virginia | | | Year Elected: | 1996 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402a | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | | | | |
Combining groundbreaking feminist theory with historical research, Patricia Meyer Spacks has published some 20 highly regarded books and 60 scholarly essays. Her works include "The Female Imagination", for which she received a National Book Award nomination; "Poetry of Vision," "Imagining a Self," "Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth Century Novels," "Gossip" and "Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind." Dr. Spacks is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, of which she was president from 2000 to 2006, and the American Society for 18th Century Studies. Since 1976 she has held numerous positions in the Modern Language Association, including president in 1994. She is Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. Professor of English Emerita at the University of Virginia. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1996. She won Phi Beta Kappa's Award for Distinguished Serivce to the Humanities in 2012. | |
| 432 | Name: | Ephraim A. Speiser | | | Year Elected: | 1941 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1902 | | | Death Date: | 6/15/65 | | | | |
| 433 | Name: | Edward H. Spicer | | | Year Elected: | 1974 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1906 | | | Death Date: | 4/5/83 | | | | |
| 434 | Name: | Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University. A founder of postcolonialism, an important subdiscipline in literary and cultural studies, she translated Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, which introduced Derrida to the English speaking world. Her early essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" has had world-wide influence, as have her other books and essays. She has been visiting professor, or held fellowships, or has given lectures all over the world. Her books and essays have been translated into many languages. A distinguished scholar in an adjacent field has said of Professor Spivak that "her influence on Third World feminism, Continental feminist theory, Marxist theory, subaltern studies and the philosophy of alterity is unparalleled by any living scholar; she has changed the academic terrain of each of these fields by her acute and brilliant contributions; her critical interrogation of the political status quo in its global dimensions has reached tens of thousands of activists and scholars." She was awarded the 2012 Kyoto Prize of the Inamori Foundation for Arts and Philosophy (Thought and Ethics), the 2013 Padma Bhushan from the Government of India, and the 2017 Lifetime Scholarly Achievement from the Modern Language Association of America. | |
| 435 | Name: | Dr. Heinrich von Staden | | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404c | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1939 | | | | | | |
Heinrich von Staden received his Dr. phil. at Universität Tübingen. A professor at Yale University in the Departments of Classics and Comparative Studies for more than thirty years, he is currently Professor of Classics and History of Science Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is the recipient of the Charles Goodwin Award of Merit of the American Philological Association, Best Teacher in the Humanities at Yale University, and the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine. Dr. von Staden is the author of Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria (1989, second edition, 1994); "Nietzsche and Marx on Greek Art and Literature" (Daedalus, 1976); "Incurability and Hopelessness: The Hippocratic Corpus" (in La maladie et les maladies dans la Collection hippocratique, 1990); and "Body and Machine: Interactions between medicine, mechanisms, and philosophy in early Alexandria" (Alexandria and Alexandrianism, 1995). Heinrich von Staden is a humanistic scholar of extraordinary range and depth, equally at home in literary criticism and in Greek and Latin literature. Internationally, he is recognized as an authority on ancient science and medicine. With his magisterial edition of Herophilus, he established himself as one of no more than three leading scholars in the field. His election to the British Academy and to the Presidency of the Society for Ancient Medicine are but two distinctions that attest to his standing. A teacher in two departments while at Yale, Dr. von Staden has been honored with the endowment of a graduate fellowship and an annual lectureship in his name. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1997. | |
| 436 | Name: | Professor Peter Stallybrass | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 408 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Peter Stallybrass is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. For the last thirteen years, he has directed the seminar on the History of Material Texts, and he co-edits the Material Texts series for the University of Pennsylvania Press. While training as a mortician in England after leaving school, he started to read obsessively the novels of Dostoevsky and, with the mistaken impression that one would have more time to read at university, applied to the University of Sussex. Peter was an undergraduate, a graduate, and finally a lecturer at Sussex, where he directed the graduate program in Renaissance Studies and the faculty/graduate seminar in Critical Theory. In 1984, he was a co-founder of the Popular Literature Group at the Centre for Social History in Oxford, organizing conferences on Romance and on Detective Fiction. In 1978, he visited the United States for the first time to teach for a year at Smith College, where he met his wife, Ann Rosalind Jones, Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor of Comparative Literature. After eight years of commuting across the Atlantic, he moved to Dartmouth College in 1986 and, in 1988, to the University of Pennsylvania, with visiting positions at King's College, University of London, and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He has received fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and he has been the Mellon Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Moses Aaron Dropsie Fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies,. He has also served as Samuel Wannamaker Fellow at the Globe Theatre in London. In 1999, he was chair of the English Institute at Harvard University, and he has been a Trustee of the Institute since 2002. At Penn, he has been awarded both the Ira Abrams Award and the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. Most of Peter's early work was on literary and cultural theory, and he published The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, co-written with Allon White, in 1986. His continuing interest in this field has led to a book on Marx, materiality, and memory, published in Brazil in 1999 under the title O Casaco de Marx: Roupas, Memória, Dor. His interest in material culture took a new turn after the death of Allon White and the particular problems of disposing of his friend's clothes. As a memorial lecture for Allon, he wrote "Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things," which led him to a collaboration with Ann Rosalind Jones on Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, published by Cambridge University Press and awarded the James Russell Lowell prize by the MLA in 2001. In 1994, Peter founded the seminar on the History of Material Texts at the University of Pennsylvania, which has been meeting weekly ever since, and has brought together academics, librarians, writers, artists, and anyone interested in books and other cultural technologies. Peter's interest in the history of books began after reading Magreta de Grazia's Shakespeare Verbatim, and, drawing upon many of the ideas in her book, he wrote with her The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text (Shakespeare Quarterly 1993). He also began to teach a graduate class that met in and drew upon the wealth of Philadelphia's libraries, including the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Rosenbach Library, and the Free Library, in addition to the University's libraries. Since Roger Chartier was appointed to the History Department at Penn in 2000, he and Peter have been teaching an undergraduate seminar on Reading, Writing, and Printing. Teaching Hamlet, they discovered the material basis of Hamlet's erasable "tables of the mind" in the Folger Shakespeare Library and, together with Frank Mowery (the Folger's Head of Conservation) and Heather Wolfe (the Folger's Curator of Manuscripts), wrote "Hamlet's Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England" (Shakespeare Quarterly 2004). Peter's work at the Library Company of Philadelphia led him to collaborate with Jim Green, the Librarian, to curate exhibitions on Material Texts and on Benjamin Franklin (for which Jim and he wrote Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer, co-published by Oak Knoll, the Library Company and the British Library in 2006). In 2006, he also co-curated with Heather Wolfe and Michael Mendle an exhibition on Technologies of Writing at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. The same year, Peter gave the A. S. W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania on Printing for Manuscript, which will be published in 2008. | |
| 437 | Name: | Dr. Frank H. Stewart | | | Institution: | The Hebrew University | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
By discipline an anthropologist, Frank Stewart is a creative and rigorous thinker in Middle Eastern studies. He was Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University 1994 to 2009. Stewart's two volumes of texts on Sinai Bedouin law are the first installments of an exceptionally deep study of a customary (non-Shari'a) legal system that is unlikely to last much longer, and they are also a significant contribution to Arabic linguistics. No other researcher has been able to study a legal system based on unwritten law in such depth. In addition to his core work on the Middle East, he has also written on the historical anthropology of North American Indians, on age-group systems across the world (also of interest to some economists), and on the concept of honor (also of interest to philosophers - the book was reviewed in Mind). The article on Schuld and Haftung is a contribution to comparative law published in the leading journal of German legal history. | |
| 438 | Name: | Dr. Susan Stewart | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities Emerita, Professor of English Emerita, and member of the Associated Faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University is a poet, critic, and translator. She has taught at Princeton for nineteen years. She served as the Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts from 2009 to 2017 and edited the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets from 2013 to 2023.
Born in York, Pennsylvania in 1952, she completed her B.A. from 1970-1973 at Dickinson College, majoring in English with minors in Anthropology and Fine Arts. She went on to the University of Pennsylvania, completing her Ph.D. in Folklore & Folklife Studies in 1978 after five years of study interleaved with an M.A. in poetry from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, in 1974-75. In 1978 she joined the faculty of the English Department at Temple University, where she helped found the creative writing program and annual Rome seminars in aesthetics. She returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, where she was Regan Professor of English. At Princeton, she was Annan Professor of English from 2004 to 2010 before assuming the Avalon chair.
Her degrees, in English, poetry, art history, and folklore, are reflected in the range of her publications ever since. She has alternated books of criticism and of poetry: as of 2023, there are seven of each. Her first book of criticism, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), brings a curiosity shaped by structuralist anthropology to the senses of senseless speech, across writing from nursery rhymes to the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Her second, On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), translated now into several languages, has been an ongoing resource for visual artists inspired by its attention to feelings about objects. (Collaboration with artists, including Ann Hamilton, William Kentridge, and Eve Aschheim, continues to inform her work across all of her genres, as it has informed her teaching.) The next book was Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Duke University Press, 1994), and then came Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which won both the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism and the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa.
Four books of poems appeared over these years, Yellow Stars and Ice (Princeton University Press, 1981), The Hive (University of Georgia Press, 1987 and 2008), The Forest (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Columbarium (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have engaged not only visual artists, but also musicians, with many set by her frequent collaborator the composer James Primosch. Their work included the song cycles "Songs for Adam," commissioned by the Chicago Symphony, and "A Sibyl," commissioned by Collage New Music in 2015 and performed by the Juilliard Orchestra at MOMA in the summer of 2017.
At Princeton, Susan continued her practice of alternating books. Her books of poems have included Red Rover (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Cinder: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2017). Translations and co-translations have regularly interrupted the pattern, including volumes of poems by Alda Merini, Milo de Angelis, Antonella Anedda, and Marcel Proust. Chicago also published a collection of her writing on art, The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (2005), along with The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making (2011), and, most recently, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Her public honors and invitations have included a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997. She has been a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (2014), a visiting writer at the American Academy in Rome (2001), a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2005-2011), and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005-present), among many residencies, visiting positions, and memberships. Princeton gave her its Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities in 2014, and in 2023 she is delivering Oxford’s Clarendon Lectures. | |
| 439 | Name: | Prof. Lawrence Stone | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 1970 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1919 | | | Death Date: | 6/16/99 | | | | |
| 440 | Name: | Dr. Joseph R. Strayer | | | Year Elected: | 1959 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | 7/2/87 | | | | |
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