| 1 | Name: | Dr. Mary J. Carruthers | | Institution: | New York University; All Souls College, Oxford | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 402b | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | Mary Carruthers-- biographical sketch
I am a historian of the European Middle Ages, concerned especially with late classical and medieval ideas about human psychology, including rhetoric and meditation. My focus now is on Latin materials, but I began as a scholar of medieval English language and literature, interests that have never left me. Having been born and raised first in India and only later in North America, embedding myself in languages and cultures very different from those of the modern West feels natural to me. My scholarly approaches engage historical questions of linguistics and reasoning, as well as the material culture of the book. My work in Latin rhetoric began by examining its logical structures of remembering, some work which has brought me into fruitful contact with psychologists who are also interested in learning and memory, and with some interested in computer-enabled archival design. More recently, my work has concerned medieval aesthetic values and their rootedness, via theories of the bodily humours, in various medical as well as religious ideas. My current research is on the methods learned for Invention and composing, including the various logics implied in diagrams. This engages medieval ideas not only about human creativity and artistic design, but the fundamental concepts of harmony and geometry that were basic equally for Augustine and Quintilian and in medieval practices of meditation and visionary contemplation. They are also basic to medieval understanding of the cosmological physics of the Six Days described in the Genesis Creation myth. | |
2 | Name: | Dr. Didier Fassin | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | Didier Fassin is a French anthropologist and sociologist. He is James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études in Paris. He has recently been elected at the Collège de France to a permanent Chair named “Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies”.
Initially trained as a physician in Paris, he practiced internal medicine as an infectious disease specialist at the Hospital Pitié-Salpétrière and taught public health at the University Pierre et Marie Curie. He also worked as a medical doctor in India and Tunisia. Later shifting to social science, he received his M.A. in anthropology from La Sorbonne, and his PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, writing his thesis on power relations and health inequalities in Senegal.
After having been granted a fellowship by the French Institute for Andean Studies to investigate maternal mortality and living conditions among Indian women in Ecuador, he became assistant professor of sociology in 1991 at the University of Paris North. There, he created CRESP, the Center for Research on Social and Health Issues, working on several public health problems such as the history of child lead poisoning in France and the politics of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Appointed as Professor of sociology at the University of Paris North in 1997, he was elected two years later as Director of studies in anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. In 2007, he founded IRIS, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for Social Sciences, in an effort to bring together anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists and legal scholars around contemporary political and social issues. He himself developed a long-term program exploring the multiple facets of humanitarianism in local and international policies, especially towards the poor, immigrant and refugees, as well as victims of violence and epidemics. In parallel, he launched a research project on borders and boundaries in an attempt to articulate the issues around immigration and racialization.
In 2008, he received an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council for his program Towards a Critical Moral Anthropology, which he developed with a team of twelve anthropologists and sociologists. To reappraise theoretical issues in the analysis of morals and ethics, he himself conducted ethnographic research on police, justice and prison in France. In 2009, he succeeded Clifford Geertz at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, and became the first James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science. His inaugural public lecture was entitled “Critique of Humanitarian Reason”. In 2010, he became Visiting Professor at the Universities of Princeton and Hong Kong. A year later, he created a Summer Program in Social Science for earlier-career scholars from Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, on the basis of two-year sessions, the first one in Princeton, the second one in the Global South.
In France, he has been involved in the politics of science, as a member of the Scientific Council of INSERM, the National Institute for Health and Medical Research, of the Ethics Committee of INRA, the National Institute for Agronomic Research, and of the Scientific Council of the City of Paris. In 2006, he became the chair of the Committee for Humanities and Social Science in the French National Agency for Research. In the United States, as a member of the Committee of World Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association appointed in 2010, he was committed to the global circulation of knowledge and the reduction of the gap between the North and the South in the development of social science. And as a guest advisor of the New Jersey Criminal Sentencing and Disposition Commission, he has contributed since 2018 to the reform of the state penal and penitentiary system.
His research on punishment was the matter of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California, Berkeley, and his reflection on life was the topic of his Adorno Lectures, at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. He also gave the inaugural Lemkin Lecture at Rutgers University on resentment and ressentiment, the Tumin Lecture at Princeton University on the life of things, the Eric Wolf Lecture at the University of Vienna on conspiracy theories, and the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia on crisis. He developed a theoretical analysis of the public presence of the social sciences, which he presented in his recipient lecture for the Gold Medal in anthropology at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award he has been granted has allowed him to conduct a multi-sited research exploring the ubiquitous notion of crisis and its multiple meanings from a global perspective. Appointed in 2019 at the Annual Chair in Public Health at the Collège de France he gave his inaugural lecture on the inequality of lives. In 2021, he was elected at the Academia Europaea and received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Liège.
Apart from his academic career, he has participated in various solidarity non-governmental organizations in France, in particular as Administrator and later Vice-president of MSF, Doctors Without Borders, from 1999 to 2003, and as President of COMEDE, the Medical Committee for the Exiles since 2006. Following the publication of his book on urban policing, he was requested to testify as amicus curiae in the first French lawsuit against racial discrimination in law enforcement. He is a frequent contributor to various media, in France to national radio programs, newspapers and magazines, such as France Culture, Le Monde, Libération and Alternatives économiques, and occasionally writes for the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, among others.
His publications include: as editor, Contemporary States of Emergency. The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (with Mariella Pandolfi, Zone Books, 2010), Moral Anthropology. A Companion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), Moral Anthropology; A Critical Reader (Routledge, 2014), Writing the World of Policing. The Difference Ethnography Makes (The University of Chicago Press, 2017), If Truth Be Told. The Politics of Public Ethnography (Duke University Press, 2017), A Time for Critique (with Bernard Harcourt, Columbia University Press, 2018), Deepening Divides. How Physical Borders and Social Boundaries Delineates our World (Pluto Press, 2020), Words and Worlds. A Lexicon for Dark Times (with Veena Das, Duke University Press, 2021), Pandemic Exposures. Economy and Society in the Time of Coronavirus (with Marion Fourcade, Hau Books, 2021), Crisis Under Critique. How People Assess, Transform and Respond to Critical Situations (with Axel Honneth, Columbia University Press, 2022), and La Société qui vient (Seuil, 2022); as author, When Bodies Remember. Politics and Experience of AIDS in South Africa (University of California Press, 2007), The Empire of Trauma. An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (with Richard Rechtman, Princeton University Press, 2009), Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present (University of California Press, 2011), Enforcing Order. An Ethnography of Urban Policing (Polity, 2013), At the Heart of the State. The Moral World of Institutions (with Yasmine Bouagga et al., Pluto, 2015), Four Lectures on Ethics. Anthropological Perspectives (with Michael Lambek, Veena Das & Webb Keane, Hau Books, 2015), Prison Worlds. An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition (Polity, 2016), Life. A Critical User’s Manual (Polity, 2018), The Will to Punish (Oxford University Press, 2018), Policing the City. An Ethno-Graphic (with Frédéric Debomy and Jake Raynal, Other Press, 2021), Death of a Traveller. A Counter Investigation (Polity, 2021), Les Mondes de la santé publique. Excursions anthropologiques. Cours au Collège de France (Seuil, 2021). His books have been translated into eight languages. | |
3 | Name: | Dr. Tanya Marie Luhrmann | | Institution: | Stanford University | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | | Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Psychology. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic. She uses a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences, the way they are shaped by ideas about minds and persons, and what we can learn from this social shaping that can help us to help those whose voices are distressing. At the heart of the work is the sense of being called, and its possibilities and burden.
She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007. When God Talks Back was named a NYT Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. It was awarded the $100,000 Grawemeyer Prize for Religion by the University of Louisville. She has published over thirty OpEds in The New York Times, and her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Science News, and many other publications. She is the author of Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, The Good Parsi, Of Two Minds, When God Talks Back, Our Most Troubling Madness, and How God Becomes Real and other books, and is currently at work on a book entitled Voices. | |
4 | Name: | Dr. Salikoko S. Mufwene | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and the College at the University of Chicago, where he also serves on the Committee of Evolutionary Biology, the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the Committee on African Studies. He was conferred the honorary title of Extraordinary Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa for 2018-2021. Mufwene refers to his research as evolutionary linguistics, in which he approaches language evolution from an ecological perspective, finding inspiration in macroecology and population genetics. The research focuses on the phylogenetic emergence of languages, language speciation, and language endangerment and loss (LEL). The interest in speciation started with the emergence of creoles, which he extended to that of other forms of the indigenization of European languages in the colonies. He conceives of languages as communication technologies developed through the exaptation of the hominin anatomy by the brain in response to especially changing population structures. The complexity of languages as technologies can be correlated with that of the mind that produces them and has arisen incrementally over the past half million years or so. The power of the mind itself is the outcome of how the brain itself has evolved concurrently with ongoing changes in the hominin anatomy. Human mental capacity accounts generally for the complexity of the cultures that have emerged in different populations, by contrast with what we know of the cultures of other animals.
Mufwene has published over 300 journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews. His many authored and (co-)edited books include: Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties – editor (the University of Georgia Press, 1993); African-American English: Structure, history and use, co- edited with John Rickford, Guy Bailey, & John Baugh (Routledge, included among the linguistics classics of the Publisher); The Ecology of Language Evolution (CUP, 2001—translated into Mandarin and included among the classics of the Commercial Press in linguistics, in China); Créoles, écologie sociale, évolution linguistique: cours donnés au Collège de France durant l’automne 2003 (L’Harmattan, 2005); Polymorphous linguistics: Jim McCawley’s legacy – co-edited with Elaine J. Francis and Rebecca S. Wheeler (MIT Press, 2005); Language Evolution: Contact, competition and change (Continuum Press, 2008); Globalization and language vitality: Perspectives from Africa, co-edited with Cécile B. Vigouroux (Continuum Press, 2008); Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America – editor (the University of Chicago Press, 2014); Colonisation, globalisation, vitalité du français – co-edited with Cécile B. Vigouroux (Odile Jacob, 2014); Complexity in language: Developmental and evolutionary perspectives – co-edited with Christophe Coupé & François Pellegrino (CUP, 2017); Bridging Linguistics and Economics – co-edited with Cécile B. Vigouroux (CUP, 2020); and The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, 2 volumes – co-edited with Anna María Escobar (June 2022). Mufwene is the founding editor of the book series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact (2001-) and has been invited to edit the book series Cambridge Elements in Language Contact (still in preparation).
Mufwene is a Native of the now Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly the Republic of Zaïre), where he completed his BA in English Philology at the Université Nationale du Zaïre at Lubumbashi, with Highest Honors, in 1973. He enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1974 for his graduate training and earned his PhD, with distinction, in 1979. His dissertation was in Generative Semantics, perhaps one of the last dissertations in this research paradigm. He went to work at the University of the West Indies, at Mona, Jamaica (Jan 1980 – July 1981); and there he retooled himself to do creole linguistics, focusing first on structures of these new vernaculars and then shifting gradually to the subject matter of their emergence. In September 1981, he moved to the University of Georgia, where, reading literature in both chaos theory and evolutionary biology, he started developing his ecological approach to the emergence of creoles and compared the case of English creoles with that of Indigenized Englishes in former British exploitation colonies of Africa and Asia. Since Dec. 1991, he has been teaching at the University of Chicago and chaired its Department of Linguistics from 1995 to 2001.
The growing linguistics interest in LEL prompted him to undertake research on globalization and language. This is an expansion of his ecological approach to language evolution. Focusing on language birth and death, he has questioned the claim that worldwide globalization has been the driver of these evolutionary processes. According to him, worldwide globalization provides remote causes; the real actuators of language speciation and the concurrent LEL are local, produced by the local population structures, including the relevant socioeconomic systems. The approach can explain why the linguistic effects of colonization of the world by Europeans have varied not only between the settlement and exploitation colonies but also from one polity to another, including territories colonized in the same style. In some places, one must also factor in layers of colonization of differing styles such as in South Africa. Mufwene is now revising a book typescript on the subject matter. He is an advocate of decolonial linguistics.
Mufwene was a visiting professor at the Université Jean-Moulin, Lyon, France (Fall 1989); the University of the West Indies at Mona (summer 2001); the National University of Singapore (fall 2001); Harvard University (spring 2002); le Collège de France (fall 2003); Université de Paris, Sorbonne (fall 2004); Institut Universitaire de France (April & May 2006); University of São Paulo (June 2009); and Nanyang Technological University (spring 2018); among a few other places. He was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Lyon, France (Oct. 2011 - June 2011), taught 4 times at the Summer Institute of Linguistic Society of America (1999, 2005, 2015, 2017); and was inducted Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018. In 2021 colleagues and friends from different disciplines celebrated his interdisciplinary scholarship with a Festschrift titled Variation rolls the dice: A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene, ed. by Enoch Oladé Aboh and Cécile B. Vigouroux (John Benjamins). | |
5 | Name: | Mr. Robert McCracken Peck | | Institution: | Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (Drexel University) | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 404c | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | Robert McCracken Peck, Senior Fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, is a writer, naturalist, and historian who has traveled extensively in North and South America, Africa, Asia and Europe. He served as Special Assistant to the Academy's President and Director of the Academy's Natural History Museum before being named Fellow of the Academy in 1983. In 2000 he assumed additional responsibilities as the Academy's Curator of Art and Artifacts and Editor of Scientific Publications. From 2003-2007 he served as Librarian of the Academy. In 2003 he was named Senior Fellow of the Academy.
Peck is the author of six books: The Natural History of Edward Lear (2016, 2018, and 2021), (Specimens of Hair (2018), Land of the Eagle: A Natural History of North America (1990), Headhunters and Hummingbirds: An Expedition into Ecuador (1987), A Celebration of Birds: The Life and Art of Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1982), and William Bartram's Travels (1980); the co-author of two: A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science (2012) and All In The Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (2008), and has written chapters for dozens of others. He has also written for a wide range of popular and scholarly magazines including: Audubon, Natural History, National Wildlife, International Wildlife, Nature, Arts, Antiques, Image, Terra, Explore, Landscope (Australia), The Journal for Maritime Research, Polar Record, The Explorers Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
His 1990 book, Land of the Eagle: A Natural History of North America, was the companion volume to an 8-part B.B.C./P.B.S. television series of the same title which dealt with the discovery and exploration of America from a natural history point of view. Within weeks of its appearance in Great Britain, Mr. Peck's book went onto the U.K. Best-Seller List, where it remained for nine weeks (reaching the #3 slot in April, 1990). The German edition, Im Land Des Adlers (1992) also achieved Best-Seller status. The book was selected by the New York Times for its list of notable books for the year.
An active member of the Explorers Club (whose Philadelphia chapter has recognized him its Explorers Award), Mr. Peck has developed a special interest in the history of exploration, retracing the travel routes of a number of 18th and 19th century naturalists including: William Bartram, John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau, Alexander Von Humboldt, John Burroughs and John Muir.
He has served as a natural history consultant to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Princeton University Library, Readers Digest Books,
David Attenborough and the British Broadcasting Corporation (B.B.C.).
In 1989 a new species of South American frog (one of three new species he discovered during an expedition to Ecuador) was named in his honor.
In 1991 Mr. Peck was honored by the Academy of Natural Sciences' Richard Hopper Day Medal for his work in interpreting natural history to the public. (Other recipients of the medal have included: Jacques Piccard, Louis Leakey, Ruth Patrick, David Attenborough, Lewis Thomas, Gerald Durrell, Stephen Ambrose, Sylvia Earle, and Elizabeth Kolbert.) He has also received Philadelphia’s Wyck-Strickland Award for outstanding contributions to the cultural life of Philadelphia and the Garden Club of America’s Sarah Chapman Francis Medal for environmental writing.
He has held fellowships at Harvard University’s Houghton Library (1994-1995 and 2010-2011), and at the Yale Center for British Art (1997); and has twice been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome (2014 and 2017).
He was granted an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree by the University of Delaware in 2012.
His other honors have included an award for courage and integrity from the Philadelphia and St. Louis chapters of the Explorers Club, and the David S. Ingalls, Jr. Award for Excellence from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Founders Medal of the Society for the History of Natural History (2021), and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the Wagner Free Institute of Science (2019).
Mr. Peck has traveled widely on behalf of the Academy of Natural Sciences, accompanying research expeditions in Nepal (1983), Ecuador (1984, 1992, and 1998), Venezuela (1985 and 1987), South Africa (1993), Botswana, (1993), Namibia (1993), Siberia (1994), Guyana (1997), and Mongolia (seven expeditions, 1994-2011). He conducted research on the history of science in Russia in 2019.
In recognition of his deep knowledge of the cultural and natural history of Mongolia, Mr. Peck was invited by the White House and the U.S. State Department to represent the United States at ceremonies marking Mongolia’s 800th birthday in Ulaan Baatar in July 2006. The two-person presidential delegation consisted of Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns and Mr. Peck.
Mr, Peck’s photographs have been published in books, journals, and magazines and exhibited in museums across the U.S. His one-man photographic exhibition documenting nomadic life in Central Asia, has been shown at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Anthropology, the American Museum of Natural History (New York), the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Mongolian Embassy, Washington, D.C..
In 2008 Mr. Peck curated an exhibition and co-authored a book about the British artist and naturalist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1894), Charles Darwin’s illustrator and the first person to create life-sized sculptures of dinosaurs (at the Crystal Palace in London in 1854). The book was published in the summer of 2008 and was excerpted to serve as the lead story in Natural History magazine.
His book, The Natural History of Edward Lear, published by David R. Godine in the fall of 2016, grew out of an exhibition on the British writer, traveler, and artist that Mr. Peck guest-curated for Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Both the American and the British editions of the book sold out within a year. A Chinese edition, published in 2018, met with equal success. A revised and expanded edition of the book was published by Princeton University Press in 2021.
Mr. Peck’s book, Specimens of Hair, The Curious Collection of Peter A. Browne, was published by Blast Books in 2018. Enhanced by the spectacular photography of Rosamond Purcell, it is a book about an extraordinary collection of wool, fur and hair that was collected by a Philadelphia naturalist in the early 19th century in an effort to better understand the relationships – and commercial application – of these animal products and of humans in a pre- Darwinian world. The book was one of only four selected by Publishers Weekly as a recommended purchase for Christmas 2018 under a category the magazine called “slightly weird and very wonderful.” Favorably reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, it was featured in a blog in Atlas Obscura (reaching an audience of 5 million people), and in on-line articles for National Geographic and Time Magazine. The book stimulated a 20 minute interview with Mr. Peck about the Browne collection and the subject of hair on NPR’s popular “Science Friday” program. | |
6 | Name: | Dr. Jahan Ramazani | | Institution: | University of Virginia | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 402a | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1960 | | | | | Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He was educated at Virginia (BA, summa cum laude, 1981), Oxford (MPhil, 1983), and Yale (PhD, 1988). He is the author of many books and articles on modern and contemporary poetry. Some of his scholarship has focused on the elegy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as in his first two books, Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (1990) and Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also raised the profile of postcolonial poetry in English of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Black and Asian Britain in his books The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001) and in his Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017). Other of his books exploring the global and transnational dimensions of poetry include A Transnational Poetics (2009), winner of the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association for the best book in comparative literary history (2008 to 2010), and Poetry in a Global Age (2020). He has also sought to illuminate poetry’s dialogue with other discourses and genres, particularly in Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (2014). In addition, he is the editor of “Poetry and Race” (2019), a special issue of New Literary History, and co-editor of “Song” (2016) in the same journal; a co-editor of the most recent editions of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006, 2012, 2018); and an associate editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016, he is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, the William Riley Parker Prize of the MLA, and the Thomas Jefferson Award, the University of Virginia’s highest honor. | |
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