| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Robert Axelrod | | | Institution: | University of Michigan | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
First trained in mathematics, Robert Axelrod shifted to political science to study conflicts of interest. His path-breaking work on the elusive optimal strategy for the famous "Prisoner's Dilemma" problem in Game Theory attracted the collaboration of noted biologist William D. Hamilton in a landmark paper. It was also a central ingredient, much expanded, in his book The Evolution of Cooperation, a classic which has stimulated an international cottage industry under the rubric "Cooperation Theory." Further contributions have involved work on coalitions in electoral politics and papers in international relations, involving both formal theory and such applications as a recent proposal for practical reform of the United Nations Security Council, taking account of the welter of strong conflicts of interest present. Dr. Axelrod is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He has been a professor at the University of Michigan since 1980. In 2014 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Gordon H. Bower | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | Death Date: | June 17, 2020 | | | | | | |
After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1959, Gordon H. Bower was associated with Stanford University as an assistant, associate and full professor of psychology, chair of the psychology department and associate dean of humanities and science. He had been Albert Ray Long Professor of Psychology since 1975. Dr. Bower's career centered on memory, its nature and manipulation. He began with animal learning but soon moved to mathematical modeling and human experiments, where he successfully championed all-or-none learning models. Next came studies of the key role of linguistic chunking in creating and storing memories, which led into a series of foci including the nature of associative memory, the role of memory structures both in facilitating and distorting memory, the impact of emotional states on memories, and most recently on the narrative organization of memory. His contributions have been most significant and influential, in part through many first-rate students. Dr. Bower was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973 and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1975. He recently received the nation's highest honor in science: the 2005 National Medal of Science. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Noam Chomsky | | | Institution: | University of Arizona | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | | | | |
Noam Chomsky is currently Laureate Professor of Linguistics, Agnese Nelms Haury Chair at the University of Arizona, having moved from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall of 2017. He has created a theory of generative grammar that unites formal analysis of natural language with the search for explanatory models in linguistics, and has adapted that theory to the description of individual languages. Dr. Chomsky holds that grammar represents the speaker's tacit knowledge of the language and so must be part of the mind/brain structure. He has argued that children learning a first language do not receive sufficient information to account for the knowledge they come to have; hence some knowledge of language must be genetically determined as part of a species-universal faculty of mind he calls Universal Grammar. For over 50 years Dr. Chomsky served on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he has held the title of Institute Professor since 1976. When he left, he held the title of Institute Professor Emeritus and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus and had just won the 2016 Peace Abbey Foundation Courage of Conscience Award. He is the author of numerous works, including Syntactic Structures (1957); Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964); Language and Mind (1968); Linguistic Theory (1975); Knowledge of Language (1986); The Minimalist Program (1995); and On Nature and Language (2002). Dr. Chomsky is also well known for his political activism, from his 1967 essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" to more recent explorations of media control, terrorism, anarchism and democracy. His 2003 book Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance received considerable attention following a recommendation from Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez during his 2006 speech at the United Nations. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, between 1980 and 1992 Dr. Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar, and the eighth most cited scholar overall. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Drew Gilpin Faust took office as Harvard University's 28th president on July 1, 2007. A historian of the U.S. Civil War and the American South, Faust is also the Lincoln Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She previously served as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2001-2007). During her tenure, Faust led Radcliffe's transformation from a college into one of the country's foremost scholarly institutes. Before coming to Radcliffe, Faust was the Annenberg Professor of History and director of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of six books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996), for which she won the Francis Parkman Prize in 1997. Her lastest book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), chronicles the impact of the Civil War's enormous death toll on the lives of nineteenth-century Americans; it was recently the subject to a PBS documentary. Faust has served as a trustee of Bryn Mawr College, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the National Humanities Center, and she is a member of the educational advisory board of the Guggenheim Foundation. She has been president of the Southern Historical Association, vice president of the American Historical Assocation, and executive board member of the Organization of American Historians and the Society of American Historians. She has served on numerous editorial boards and selection committees, including the Pulitzer Prize history jury in 1986, 1990, and 2004. Faust's honors include awards in 1982 and 1996 for distinguished teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and the 2011 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1994, the Society of American Historians in 1993, and the American Philosophical Society in 2004. She received her bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr in 1968, magna cum laude with honors in history, and master's (1971) and doctoral (1975) degrees in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2013 she won the Ruth Ratner Miller Award for Excellence in American History. Faust left her role as President in 2017 and become a University Professor at Harvard in January 2019. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Christopher Jencks | | | Institution: | Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | | | | |
For decades, Christopher Jencks has studied such controversial subjects as economic inequality, race, education and social mobility, and homelessness. His work is meticulously researched, methodologically ingenious, relentlessly logical, and consistently dispassionate. One of the world's most eminent social scientists engaged in policy research, he is perceptive in identifying the causes of social problems and adept in connecting evidence and policy choices. Recently, he has dealt with "paradoxes of welfare reform," the intractability of the black-white test score gap, the contributions of conservative and liberal policies to homelessness and why the United States generates so many low wage jobs. Whatever one's political predispositions, his studies are always illuminating and persuasive. Currently the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, Jencks has also taught at Northwestern University (1980-96), and from 1961-63 he served as associate editor of The New Republic. His published works include Inequality (1972); Who Gets Ahead? (1979); Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty and the Underclass (1992); The Homeless (1994); and (with M. Phillips) The Black White Test Score Gap (1998). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1997). | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Daniel Kahneman | | | Institution: | School of Public & International Affairs, Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1934 | | | Death Date: | March 27, 2024 | | | | | | |
Daniel Kahneman's initial research on perception and attention shifted to decision making, his Nobel prize work, with A. Tversky. It has continued with others since Tversky's death. Ingenious experiments and novel concepts have focused on how the decision outcome is sharply affected by their framing and by the roles of heuristics, such as availability, and biases. They have cast severe doubt on the standard rationality assumption of economics. Prospect theory, a continuing well-spring for research, captured some of the discoveries theoretically. Important applications are to economic theory, finance, law, and medicine. Born in Israel in 1934, Dr. Kahneman holds a Ph.D. from the University of California (1961). He has taught at the Hebrew University (1961-78), the University of British Columbia (1978-86), the University of California, Berkeley (1986-94) and Princeton University, where he has been Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Professor of Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School since 1993. In 2007 he received the American Psychological Association's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology and in 2011 he was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Sciences' Talcott Parsons Prize. His most recent book is Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). He was awarded the 2013 Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Ira Katznelson | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | | | | |
Ira Katznelson ranks with the best political scientists of his generation. His works on race, class, and urban politics - all soundly grounded in empirical reality - have set the scholarly and political agenda in the decades since their publication. He is further recognized for the historical and comparative dimensions of his studies while his theoretical explorations have established him in the ranks of contemporary political theorists. Beyond those reaches Dr. Katznelson is an intellectual par excellence and an insightful commentator on the political trends in our civilization. Finally, as a generous and effective teacher and colleague, he has inspired a generation of students to carry forward and expand the scholarly tradition he has created. A graduate of Cambridge University (Ph.D., 1969), Dr. Katznelson has taught at Columbia University, where he is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, since 1983. In September 2012 he became President of the Social Science Research Council. His published works include Black Men, White Cities: Race, Politics and Migration in the United States, 1900-1930, and Britain, 1948-1968 (1973); City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (1981); (with M. Weir) Schooling for All: Race, Class, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (1985); Marxism and the City (1992); Liberalism's Crooked Circle: Letters to Adam Michnik (1996); Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (2003); Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013), which won the 2014 Bancroft Prize; and When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (2016). | |
| 8 | Name: | Dr. Bruce Kuklick | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
Bruce Kuklick is primarily an intellectual historian, although he has also written about the American presidency, the partition of Germany in 1945, and a Philadelphia baseball stadium. In two of his finest books he analyzes American intellectual life between 1880 and 1930. The Rise of American Philosophy presents a group portrait of Harvard philosophers in the golden age of Josiah Royce and William James, while Puritans in Babylon studies the cultural and institutional impact of the first American archaeological explorations of the ancient Near East. In A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000, which received a rave review in the Times Literary Supplement, he focuses with great acuity on the 300-year conflict between religious and secular values in American intellectual life. His more recent published work focuses on the role of academics in the political world (Intellectuals and War: From Kennan to Kissinger, 2006), and at the present time he is engaged in writing an international history of great power intervention in the Congo in 1960-61 and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1968) and a member of the faculty since 1972, Dr. Kuklick has served as Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History since 1996. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2004. In 2015 he was awarded the Henry Allen Moe Prize from the American Philosophical Society for his paper "Killing Lumumba" presented at the Society’s April Meeting in 2012, and published in the June 2014 Proceedings. | |
| 9 | Name: | Dr. Willem J. M. Levelt | | | Institution: | Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Nijmegen University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | | | | |
Willem "Pim" Levelt's own research and his strong intellectual leadership of the Max Planck Institute made it the leading center in the world for psycholinguistic research. He served at its Director 1980-2006. Dr. Levelt's work on lexical access in speech production and related topics is outstanding. His 1989 book, Speaking, and his many research articles on all aspects of speech production have brought him recognition as one of the world's leading psycholinguists. He has, in addition, played a broad and important role in the organization and development of Dutch social sciences. Recognition of this fact is evident in his election as president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences, which he served 2002-2005. | |
| 10 | Name: | Dr. Massimo Livi-Bacci | | | Institution: | University of Florence | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | | | | |
Massimo Livi-Bacci is a leading demographic historian. He has written the fundamental demographic histories of both Italy and Portugal, using province-level records of vital statistics and censuses. In The Population of Europe: A History he has produced a masterful synthesis of European demographic history, one that emphasizes the exogenous role of disease. His Concise History of World Population encapsulates the vast sweep of human demographic history in a graceful way that does justice to the subject's complexity. Dr. Livi-Bacci has contributed important analytic papers on the social reaction to mortality crises in Italy, the demographic response to Columbus' arrival in Hispaniola, and other subjects. Since 1984 he has been Professor of Demography, Faculty of Political Science "Cesare Alfieri," at the University of Florence. | |
| 11 | Name: | Dr. Douglas S. Massey | | | Institution: | Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Douglas S. Massey served as the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, becoming Emeritus in 2023. Formerly he was the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-author of American Apartheid (Harvard University Press, 1993), which won the Distinguished Publication Award of the American Sociological Association. More recently he co-authored The Source of the River (2003, the first analysis of minority achievement in selective colleges and universities based on a representative sample, as well as the follow up book Taming the River (2009), which examined the determinants of persistence and grade achievement through the first two years of college (both from Princeton University Press.
Massey has also published extensively on Mexican immigration, including the books Return to Aztlan (University of California Press, 1987) and Miracles on the Border (University of Arizona Press, 1995), which won a 1996 Southwest Book Award. His latest two books on immigration are Beyond Smoke and Mirrors (Russell Sage, 2002), which won the 2004 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for the best book in social demography, and Brokered Boundaries: Constructing Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times (Russell Sage 2010). In 2017 he was awarded the Henry Allen Moe Prize of the American Philosophical Society for his paper " The Mexican-U.S. Border in the American Imagination" presented to the Society at its April 2015 Meeting and published in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, volume 160, no. 2, June 2016.
Massey has also served on the faculty of the University of Chicago where he directed its Latin American Studies Center and Population Research Center. He is also formerly a director of the University of Pennsylvania's Population Studies Center and chair of its Graduate Group in Demography. During 1979 and 1980 he undertook postdoctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley and Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1978. Massey is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is Past-President of the Population Association of America and the American Sociological Association and current President of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He was recently elected to the Council of the National Academy of Science. | |
| 12 | Name: | Mr. David McCullough | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1933 | | | Death Date: | August 7, 2022 | | | | | | |
David McCullough has been called "a master of the art of narrative history." Born in Pennsylvania in 1933, he earned his B.A. from Yale University and went on to craft a brilliant career as an author, editor, essayist, teacher and television narrator. He is the author of seven distinguished books: The Johnstown Flood (1968); The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (1972); The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 (1977); Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt (1981); Brave Companions (1991); Truman (1992); John Adams (2001); and The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (2011). A master of his craft, Mr. McCullough has consistently reached a wide audience with his historical narratives on dramatic themes. Combining scrupulous scholarship with literary distinction. Mr. McCullough's writing has been recognized with multiple Pulitzer Prizes (1993, 2002), National Book Awards (1978, 1993) and Francis Parkman Prizes as well as the National Humanities Medal, among other honors. He is a member of the Society of American Historians (past president) and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was named a Library of Congress "Living Legend" in 2008. | |
| |