American Philosophical Society
Member History

Results:  2 ItemsModify Search | New Search
Page: 1Reset Page
Residency
International (1)
Resident (1)
Class
Subdivision
303. History Since 1715[X]
1Name:  Dr. Alice Kessler-Harris
 Institution:  Columbia University
 Year Elected:  2012
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  303. History Since 1715
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1941
   
 
Alice Kessler-Harris is currently the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower at Columbia University.Born in England, she received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1968. She won the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University in 2001 and the Philip Taft Prize from Cornell University in 2001 and 2007. She is the author of: The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection, 1979; Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview, 1981; Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States, 1982; A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences, 1990; In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America, 2001; and Gendering Labor History, 2007. She is a member of the American Studies Association (president, 1992); Law and Working Class History Association (president, 2008); and the Organization of American Historians (president-elect, 2009). Alice Kessler-Harris is a pioneering historian of a labor history that embraces women as well as men and a writer who regularly engages the deep moral and political questions that have shaped American life. She is associated with devising the concept of "economic citizenship" and tracing its development through the course of the 20th century, challenging established understandings of Social Security and other federal policies that affect all citizens. Her two major books are each based on over a decade of archival research. She has written or edited nine more books and more than 60 essays and articles, some, like "Organizing the unorganizable" (1975), "Treating the male as other" (1993), and "Coalitions of the imagination" (2004) have become classics. Kessler-Harris is unusual among social historians for her attentiveness to the arts and to literature; she played a major role in introducing the Yiddish writer Anzia Yezierskia to the American public. She is now engaged in writing a biography of Lillian Hellman, which is forthcoming in 2012. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2012.
 
2Name:  Ms. Claire Tomalin
 Year Elected:  2012
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  303. History Since 1715
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1933
   
 
Claire Tomalin, nee Delavenay, was born in 1933 in London of a French father and an English mother, studied at Cambridge, worked in publishing and journalism as literary editor of the New Statesman, then the Sunday Times, while bringing up her children. In 1974 she published her first book The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the Whitbread First Book Prize. Since then she has researched and written Shelley and His World, 1980; Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, 1987; The Invisible Woman: the story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, 1991 [NCR, Hawthornden, James Tait Black prizes - now being filmed with Ralph Fiennes]; Mrs Jordan's Profession, 1994; Jane Austen: A Life, 1997; Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self, 2002 [Whitbread biography and Book of the Year prizes, Pepys Society Prize, Rose Crawshay Prize]. Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man appeared in 2006, after which she made a television film about Hardy, and published a selection of Hardy’s poems. Her Charles Dickens: A Life was published in 2011. She organized two exhibitions, about the Regency actress Mrs. Jordan at Kenwood in 1995, and about Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in 1997. She also edited and introduced Mary Shelley’s story for children, Maurice. A collection of her reviews, Several Strangers, appeared in 1999. She has served on the Committee of the London Library and as a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and the Wordsworth Trust. She is a Vice-President of the Royal Literary Fund, of the Royal Society of Literature and of English PEN. She enjoys walking, gardening, travelling, being with her children and grandchildren, and listening to classical music and opera. She lives in London and is married to the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.
 
Election Year
2012[X]