| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Jonathan Culler | | | Institution: | Cornell University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | | | | |
Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He received his D. Phil. from St. John's College, Oxford University in 1972 and served on the faculties of Cambridge and Oxford Universities prior to joining the Cornell University faculty in 1977. Dr. Culler also directed Cornell's Society for Humanities for ten years and served as senior associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2000-03. An expert on French literature, Jonathan Culler is the author of the classic Flaubert study The Uses of Uncertainty (1974). His most visible contribution, however, has been the interpretation to the English-speaking world of the French critical tradition of structuralism from de Saussure to Derrida. Where others have lost themselves, and their readers, in a thicket of obfuscations and misunderstood concepts, Dr. Culler has maintained an exemplary clarity. His writing has the limpid elegance of a Mozart piano sonata. He has probably done more than anyone else in the United States to keep comparative literature and literary criticism both accessible to new ideas and readable to wider audiences. Jonathan Culler lives and works in France, England, and the United States. His other published works include Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (1975); Ferdinand de Saussure (1976); The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction; (1981); On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (1982); Roland Barthes (1983); Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (1988); Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (1997); and The Literary in Theory (2007). Cornell University Press issued the 25th anniversary edition of On Deconstruction in 2008. Dr. Culler is the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship (1966-69) and the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association of America (1975). He was appointed as a member of the board of directors of the New York State Council for the Humanities in 2007. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2001, the American Philosophical Society in 2006, and the British Academy in 2020. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Evelyn Fox Keller | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404c | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | Death Date: | September 22, 2023 | | | | | | |
Evelyn Fox Keller received her Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Harvard University, worked for a number of years at the interface of physics and biology, and is now Professor of History and Philosophy of Science in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of many articles and books, including: A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock; Reflections on Gender and Science; Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science; Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth Century Biology; The Century of the Gene; and Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines. A new book, The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture, is forthcoming. Between Jan, 2006 and July, 2007, she held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris at REHSEIS. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Alasdair MacIntyre | | | Institution: | London Metropolitan University; University of Notre Dame | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | | | | |
Alasdair MacIntyre was born in Scotland in 1929. Although his roots are in the North of Ireland and the West of Scotland, he was largely educated in England, doing his undergraduate work in classics at Queen Mary College (University of London) - of which he is now a Fellow - and his graduate work in philosophy at the University of Manchester. He taught at various British universities, including Oxford and Essex, until 1970, when he emigrated to the United States. In 1966, he published A Short History of Ethics and in 1967 Secularization and Moral Change, his Riddell lectures at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne. Since 1970, he has taught at a number of American universities, including Duke University, where from 1995-2000 he was Arts and Sciences Professor of Philosophy, and the University of Notre Dame to which he returned in the Fall of 2000 as a Research Professor. Among his books are After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues (1990), his Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University in 1990, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1988, and Dependent Rational Animals (1999). In 1984, he was the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. He has received honorary degrees from Swarthmore College, the Queen's University of Belfast, the University of Essex, Williams College, the New School for Social Research, Marquette University, the University of Aberdeen, and St. Patrick's University, Maynooth. He is an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Thomas Nagel | | | Institution: | New York University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | | |
Thomas Nagel was born in Yugoslavia in 1937. After earning his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1963, he served on the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and New York University, where he is currently Professor of Philosophy and Law and University Professor. He was awarded the Balzan Prize for Moral Philosophy in 2008. Among his writings in philosophy of mind, Dr. Nagel's 1974 essay "What is it like to be a bat?" defended an antireductionist position about the problem of consciousness. He is one of the half dozen most respected moral philosophers in the world. While defending the possibility of objective reasoning about value, he has never ignored the role of subjective reasons, and, with the late Bernard Williams, he pioneered the discussion of "moral luck." He is simultaneously a humanistic and an analytic philosopher, and he shows that there is no contradiction involved in being both. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Stephen Owen | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Stephen Owen is widely viewed as the most important scholar-critic of Chinese literature in the West. He is the James Bryant Conant University Professor and former Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, he was the first specialist in his field to be made a University Professor at Harvard. At a time when understanding China is a major priority for the United States, Dr. Owen has, in a long series of distinguished books and articles, opened the door for Westerners to a new understanding of Chinese literature and culture. Though his specialty is the T'ang Dynasty (618-906 A.D.), he has impressive mastery of the range of Chinese literature over its 2,500 years. His work has been informed by recent Western work in literary theory and by a comparatist perspective. He has paid attention in new ways to Chinese literary theory, for example in Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics. His work shows a remarkable combination of learning, literary sensitivity, and elegance of style, as in the admirable readings of Chinese poetry in Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature. His magisterial An Anthology of Chinese Literature is an amazing poetic and scholarly accomplishment; almost all of the translations are by Dr. Owen himself, and they bring the translation of Chinese poetry, stories, plays, and essays to a new level of lucidity and literary distinction. His translations and annotations show how Chinese poetry is a genuine tradition, for example in its subtle use, in later poems, of allusions to earlier poems. Though his books are written in English and primarily for Western readers, they have such general importance that many of them have been translated into Chinese and published in China. He has a working knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish. Without a doubt Dr. Owen has brought Chinese literature within the domain of the comparative study of literature. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick | | | Institution: | City University of New York Graduate Center | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402. Criticism: Arts and Letters | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1950 | | | Death Date: | April 12, 2009 | | | | | | |
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was one of the most influential figures in gender studies, and more specifically in the burgeoning area of queer theory; indeed, she was a major founder of the field. Her first book, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, has been extensively cited and used by feminist critics and queer theorists alike. Not long after, her second crucial work, Epistemology of the Closet, had a similarly powerful impact on the increasingly complex field of gender studies and earned an honorable mention from the committee awarding the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize. Tendencies, a collection of essays, further extended both the literary and the cultural insights that Dr. Sedgwick brilliantly formulated in her first two books, while Dialogue on Love, published in the same year, is an ambitiously introspective memoir recounting the author's struggle with breast cancer along with her quest to comprehend her own sexuality in contexts she herself has significantly investigated in her key contributions to cultural studies. A poet as well as a critic, Dr. Sedgwick also published a volume of verse, Fat Art, Thin Art, and most recently Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, a series of essays expanding her work on queer theory and her analyses of the experience of illness into discussions of current theoretical perspectives on pedagogy and performativity. Dr. Sedgwick also edited several collections of essays, including Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (coedited with Adam Frank, 1995), a selection of key works by the radical psychologist Silvan Tomkins, and Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997), a series of works reexamining the history of the novel using the framework of queer theory that she has herself so powerfully established. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York. She also taught at Hamilton College, Boston University, Amherst College, Dartmouth College and Duke University. She earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1975. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died on April 12, 2009, in New York, NY, at the age of 58. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. John Wilmerding | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | | | | |
John Wilmerding is Sarofim Professor in American Art Emeritus in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, and former visiting curator in the Department of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a trustee of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and a commissioner of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. He was formerly Senior Curator of American Art and Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where he organized the landmark exhibition "American Light: The Luminist Movement" in 1980. In 2002, he was reappointed by President George W. Bush to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. Professor Wilmerding is the author of many books and catalogs on American art, including American Marine Painting, American Views, and The Artist's Mount Desert as well as studies of Robert Salmon, Fitz H. Lane, John F. Peto, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Richard Estes, Robert Indiana, and Tom Wesselmann. An exhibition of his collection, "American Masters from Bingham to Eakins", was held at the National Gallery of Art in 2004, at which time he announced the gift of the collection to the Gallery. | |
| 8 | Name: | Dr. Susan Wolf | | | Institution: | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Susan Wolf is the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her B.A. in math and philosophy from Yale University in 1974 and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1978. She taught at Harvard University, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University before joining the University of North Carolina faculty in 2002. She has held visiting fellowships at the Australian National University and the University College, Oxford, as well as the Visiting Belle van Zuylen Chair at the University of Utrecht. She has also held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women and the Guggenheim Foundation. Recently she received the Mellon Foundation's award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. Dr. Wolf is the author of Freedom Within Reason (1990), a book on free will and moral responsibility, and has written numerous articles on ethics and the philosophy of mind. These include Morality and Partiality, Two Levels of Pluralism, Self-Interest and Interest in Selves, Moral Saints, and Asymmetrical Freedom. Her current research focuses on the relations among happiness, morality, and meaningfulness in life. | |
| 9 | Name: | Dr. Pauline Yu | | | Institution: | American Council of Learned Societies | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Pauline Yu, Former President of the American Council of Learned Societies, is a former Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Dean of Humanities in the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her B.A. in history and literature from Harvard University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University. Dr. Yu is the author or editor of five books and dozens of articles on classical Chinese poetry, literary theory, comparative poetics, and issues in the humanities and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, and NEH. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, she is on the Board of Trustees of the National Humanities Center, the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, the Board of Directors of the Teagle Foundation and the Senate of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In addition, she is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Asian Cultural Council, the Board of Governors of the Hong Kong-America Center, and the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Berlin. Dr. Yu is also an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Visiting Professor in East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. She was awarded the MLA's William Riley Parker Prize in December 2007. | |
| 10 | Name: | Dr. Larzer Ziff | | | Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402a | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1927 | | | | | | |
Larzer Ziff is the author of a number of books on American literary culture, has edited modern editions of major American authors, and contributed articles and reviews to a range of journals including Critical Inquiry, the TLS, the New Statesman, and the Raritan Review. He was the first person appointed to the English faculty of Oxford University (where he was a Fellow of Exeter College) for the purpose of institutionalizing the study of American literature, and he has lectured widely in universities in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The recipient of numerous fellowship awards, including a Guggenheim and a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he also won the Christian Gauss award for his book, The American 1890s, and is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, the Society of American Historians, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He has served as Graduate Chair of the English Department at Berkeley, and Chair of the English Department at Johns Hopkins. Presently Caroline Donovan Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins, he also holds the appointment of Research Professor. He divides his time between his homes in Baltimore and Western Massachusetts. | |
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