| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Hans Aarsleff | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1925 | | | | | | |
Hans Aarsleff was born near Copenhagen, Denmark in 1925. He attended local schools and graduated cum laude from nearby state Gymnasium in 1943 with concentrations in math and natural science. He matriculated from the University of Copenhagen in fall 1943, having studed English and French literatures and languages with emphasis on philosophy and linguistics. He studied Old Norse, Old and Middle English, Latin, Gothic, French and Sanskrit. During 1944-45, he was trained in underground resistance to the German Occupation, on duty four weeks after May 4, 1945. In fall 1948 Aarsleff was admitted on one-year scholarship to graduate study in English at the University of Minnesota, where the most memorable courses were Robert Penn Warren's on the theory of the novel and the theory of poetry. Aarsleff studied with John W. Clark and Harold B. Allen, taught courses in linguistics and history of the language as assistant to Allen; and studied Hittite with Donald Swanson. During the summers of 1949, 1950, and 1951 he sold ice cream and hot dogs with traveling amusement parks in some states in the Midwest and the West, a very rich and instructive experience. He was an instructor in freshman English at Minnesota from 1942-56 while also working as a busboy in the University Hospitals. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1960. His dissertation on "The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860", published revised under the same title in January of 1967 (with a re-issue in 1983), features innovative introduction on contextual method in the history of scholarship and linguistics, a form of history this book, by virtue of its method, was among the first to initiate. For important information related to the method, see his essay on Koerner's historiography of linguistics in Anthropological Linguistics, March 1973. Dr. Aarsleff joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1956 as an instructor in the Department of English. He became a professor in 1972 and emeritus in 1998. At Princeton, he has taught courses in Early English literature, Chaucer, Old English, Old Norse, history of the language, and the history of linguistic thought, in addition to the entire spectrum of English and largely also American literature as preceptor in many courses. He has published on issues in intellectual history from the 16th century to the 20th, including eight entries in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography and essays on, among others, Locke, Leibniz, Descartes, Herder, Condillac, Humboldt, Taine, Saussure and Joseph Bedier. Some of these essays were later included in a book in 1982. In 1988 came his interpretive introduction to a new translation of Wilhelm von Humboldt's final and chief work on language; in 2001, the Cambridge University Press published his translation with introduction of Condillac's Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. He has also contributed on the philosophy of language to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. In 1984, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and in 1994 he was elected to the APS and to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His chief motive has always been to try to open up fresh ways of looking at things, to question and often to undermine received opinion, and to establish his positions on the grounds of wide and solid knowledge, on well-argued interpretation, and not least, on close attention to context - thus spurning questions - begging claims about climate and opinion as a mode of understanding. For these reasons, his work has often proved controversial, even heretical. But this is a mark of our times. In his years, scholarship has become steadily more compliant, more of the donkey-follow-donkey variety, without circumspection. It is common to see stuff that in notes refers to a slew of "see also" titles that are given without page references, the "see also" category thus easily comprising 2,000 pages or more. Very often, some or all of those titles contain material which, had the author read it, would have forced radical change in the author's argument and in its foundations. He finds good if not cheerful sense in what Max Planck called a "remarkable" fact he once learned in his work, namely that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Meyer Howard Abrams | | | Institution: | Cornell University | | | Year Elected: | 1973 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402. Criticism: Arts and Letters | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1912 | | | Death Date: | April 21, 2015 | | | | | | |
Among America's most highly respected literary scholars, Meyer Howard (Mike) Abrams was best known for his analysis of the Romantic period in English literature. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey in 1912, Dr. Abrams received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1940. He joined the faculty of Cornell University in 1945, becoming a full professor in 1953, Whiton Professor of English in 1960 and professor emeritus in 1983. His two greatest books, The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism, are recognized as outstanding achievements. The former book ranked 25th in the Modern Library's list of the 100 best nonfiction books written in English during the past 100 years, and for the latter Dr. Abrams was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize by the Modern Language Association. In 1962, he conceived and edited The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and he continued as general editor through its seventh edition. Dr. Abrams was the recipient of the Award in Humanistic Studies from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Society and the Award for Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His book The Fourth Dimension of a Poem and Other Essays (2012) was released slightly before his 100th birthday. In 2014 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. Dr. Abrams died April 21, 2015, at age 102, in Ithaca, New York. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. James S. Ackerman | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2000 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404. History of the Arts, Literature, Religion and Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1919 | | | Death Date: | December 31, 2016 | | | | | | |
James Ackerman's first book, The Cortile del Belvedere (1954), brought clarity to the history of Bramante's largest palace commission through a balanced analysis of archival documents and drawings of the structure. The Architecture of Michelangelo (now in 3rd edition) marked a new stage in Michelangelo studies and has become the standard monograph both in English and Italian. His two volumes on Palladio have thoroughly revised our notions of the Venetian architect's work and provided a new understanding to the economic repertoire of villas built by Venetians on the mainland. Dr. Ackerman served as editor of the Art Bulletin of the College Art Association and of the Annali di Architettura of the Centro di Storia d'architettara in Vicenza. His early interest in the history of film led him to found the University Film Study Center for a consortium of universities in New England. His theoretical writings have made a substantial contribution to a non-Marxist social history of art. A professor at Harvard University since 1961, Dr. Ackerman held emeritus status since 1990. He has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley (1952-60), Cambridge University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University and New York University and has been honored with membership in the British Academy; the Royal Academy of Arts; the Accademia Olimpica; the Royal Academy of Uppsala; the Bavarian Academy of Sciences; and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was awarded the International Balzan Prize (2002) and the Leone d'oro prize of the Biennale of Architecture at Venice (2008) for career achievement in the history of architecture and urbanism and was named an Honorary Citizen of Padua in 2008. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2000. James Ackerman died December 31, 2016, at the age of 97, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. | |
| 4 | Name: | Joseph Q. Adams | | | Year Elected: | 1940 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1881 | | | Death Date: | 11/10/46 | | | | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Robert McC. Adams | | | Institution: | University of California, San Diego & Smithsonian Institution & University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 1974 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1926 | | | Death Date: | January 27, 2018 | | | | | | |
Robert Adams was an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at San Diego at the time of his death on January 27, 2018, at age 91. He was also Director Emeritus of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution. Educated at the University of Chicago, he had a long-standing interest in the environmental, agricultural and urban history of the Middle East.
Dr. Adams' conducted extensive field research from the mid-1950s through the late 1970s in southern Iraq, southwestern Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. This work, on which he has published extensively, sought to identify long-term patterns of change extending over the last six millennia. Another field of research interest and publication involves the contexts and history of technological change, concentrating on the last five centuries or so in western Europe and the United States. In 1996 he wrote Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry Into Western Technology, which deals with how technology comes about and why or why not it has an impact on mankind. Dr. Adams served as Editor of Trends in American and German Higher Education (2002), which stems from his involvement in a comparison of graduate education and research in the United States and Germany.
Robert Adams was the recipient of the 1996 Distinguished Service Award from the Society for American Archaeology, the 2000 Lucy Wharton Drexel Medal from the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the 2002 Gold Medal from the American Institute of Archaeology, and the 2003 Field Museum Award of Merit. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1974. | |
| 6 | Name: | Cyrus Adler | | | Year Elected: | 1900 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1864 | | | Death Date: | 4/7/40 | | | | |
| 7 | Name: | William F. Albright | | | Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | | | Year Elected: | 1929 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1891 | | | Death Date: | 9/19/71 | | | | |
| 8 | Name: | Don Cameron Allen | | | Year Elected: | 1958 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | 8/4/72 | | | | |
| 9 | Name: | Dr. Paul Alpers | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley; Smith College | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402. Criticism: Arts and Letters | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | Death Date: | May 19, 2013 | | | | | | |
Paul Alpers was a distinguished literary historian and classicist, a master of the English, European and classical traditions, and an academic of the first rank. In his first book, The Poetry of the Faerie Queene, he showed himself to be "a learned and sensitive reader of Elizabethan poetry." He developed an original reading of Spenser's rhetorical modes, to which he returned in an important series of articles on narration. He next, as an extension of his work on Spenser, began to study the pastoral traditions. This resulted in an analysis and translation of Virgil's Eclogues and then What is Pastoral?, winner of the Christian Gauss Award. As Dr. Alpers traces the evolution of pastoral poetry from Theocritus and Virgil, through its great incarnations in the Renaissance, to its flowerings in modern literature, he has written what is arguably the definitive study of the subject, a work of exhaustive scholarship and literary intelligence. Dr. Alpers taught at the University of California, Berkeley beginning in 1961 and became Class of 1942 Professor of English Emeritus in 2000. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2004. Paul Alpers died May 19, 2013, at the age of 80 in Northampton, Massachusetts. | |
| 10 | Name: | Dr. Svetlana Alpers | | | Institution: | New York University; University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 2011 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | | | | |
Svetlana Alpers is an art historian, critic, and artist. She was born in Cambridge, Mass., studied History and Literature at Radcliffe, turning from text to image for a PhD. In Fine Arts. She studied briefly with Richard Krautheimer at the IFA in New York, then formatively with the visiting E.H. Gombrich at Harvard and taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1962-94. She published on Flemish art before turning to Dutch art with The Art of Describing, with books on Rembrandt, Rubens, Tiepolo (with Michael Baxandall) and on the Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others. She was a founding editor of Representations. A group of photographic prints after Tiepolo from the series "Painting then for now" (with James Hyde and Barney Kulok) is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. | |
| 11 | Name: | Dr. Robert Alter | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1935 | | | | | | |
A number of Robert Alter's twenty-two books have been translated into several languages. As a critic in both of his fields, Hebrew Literature of all ages and Modernism, he emphasizes the virtures of close reading and broad sympathies over ideological commitment, though in his work with students he has shown a tolerance which has produced some of the leading lights in the postmodern camp. Dr. Alter is fluent in French and Hebrew and reads a number of other languages. He is an exemplary academic citizen: a thoughtful and engaged colleague, willing to take on administrative chores; a popular teacher and director of a host of dissertations; an immensely productive scholar; a good friend to many; and absolutely without a shred of the diva in him. He is internationally known, with strong connections in Britain, France, and Israel. Since 1967 he has served on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he is Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature. His most recent book is a translation of the Hebrew Bible, entitled Ancient Israel. The Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. A Translation with Commentary. | |
| 12 | Name: | Dr. Milton V. Anastos | | | Institution: | University of California, Los Angles | | | Year Elected: | 1967 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1909 | | | Death Date: | 4/10/97 | | | | |
| 13 | Name: | Dr. Julia Annas | | | Institution: | University of Arizona | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Julia Annas is known for her work in ancient ethics and contemporary ethics, especially in the area of virtue ethics, where renewed interest in ancient ethics has stimulated many new developments. She studied the B.A. Literae Humaniores course at Oxford University (Greek and Latin language, literature, history and philosophy) and then received her Ph. D from Harvard University. She returned to Oxford and taught as a Lecturer and then Tutorial Fellow at St Hugh’s College for fifteen years, before becoming Professor (since 1995 Regents Professor) of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. She was the founding editor of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy and has been joint editor for many years of the Oxford Aristotle monographs series. She has been a Senior Fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies, President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association and a Getty Scholar. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, an Honorary Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford and an Honorary Doctor of the University of Uppsala. She has published many books and articles over a wide range of topics in ancient philosophy, with increasing focus on the areas of epistemology and ethics. Her 1993 The Morality of Happiness explored the structure of ancient ethical theories, starting from Aristotle and establishing the general outline of a kind of theory in which virtue and happiness are the central concepts (this is now often called eudaimonist virtue theory). Her 1999 Platonic Ethics Old and New carried the project backwards, looking at ethics in Plato, and forwards, to the more academic ethics of later Platonists. In the last two decades her work has integrated historical study of ancient texts and engagement with the resurgent field of virtue ethics. Her 2011 Intelligent Virtue presents an outline of a contemporary theory in which virtue and happiness are central, which can meet several different philosophical objections and serve as a promising model of ethical theory. She continues to work mainly on contemporary and historical theories of virtue and happiness. Julia Annas was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. | |
| 14 | Name: | Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah | | | Institution: | New York University | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1954 | | | | | | |
K. Anthony Appiah has written or edited a score of books: on race theory (where he is recognized as a leading thinker), on philosophy (where he has been called by reviewers "a pro's pro"), and even a series of detective fiction novels. His In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture has been translated into Portuguese and Japanese. It won the Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association for the best work published in English on Africa in 1993. Dr. Appiah taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard Universities before moving to Princeton University, where he was Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy. In January 2014 he moved to New York University where he has joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law. He has received many academic honors, published numerous articles and reviews, presented public lectures and papers, holds several editorial positions and is a member of professional associations and committees. In 2008 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Dr. Appiah also served as co-editor of Encarta Africana, the first electronic encyclopedia on Africa and people of African descent. His latest books are Experiments in Ethics (2008) and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010). He was awarded the 2011 National Humanities Medal by President Obama. | |
| 15 | Name: | Edward C. Armstrong | | | Year Elected: | 1932 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1872 | | | Death Date: | 3/5/44 | | | | |
| 16 | Name: | Frank Aydelotte | | | Year Elected: | 1923 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1880 | | | Death Date: | 12/17/56 | | | | |
| 17 | Name: | Dr. Roger S. Bagnall | | | Institution: | New York University; Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404a | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Roger Bagnall received his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 1972. He was assistant professor of classics at Florida State University for two years before moving in 1974 to Columbia University, where he served as professor of classics and history and as dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. In 2007 he became professor of ancient history and Leon Levy Director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, becoming Director Emeritus in 2016 and professor emeritus in 2017. Among the leading historians of Greek and Roman antiquity, Dr. Bagnall enjoys an immense reputation for his work on Roman and Late Antique Egypt, its economy, and its documents on papyri and potsherds. His technical expertise in papyrology is matched by a historical mind of great range. He has also been a pioneer in the application of computer technology to the humanities. Dr. Bagnall has written or edited more than sixty books and over 250 articles, including The Administration of the Ptolemaic Possessions Outside Egypt (1976); Currency and Inflation in Fourth-Century Egypt (1985); (co-author) Consuls of the Later Roman Empire (1987); Egypt in Late Antiquity (1993); (co-author) The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994); The Kellis Agricultural Account Book (1997); The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology (2009); Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East (2011); An Oasis City (2015); and Roman Egypt (2021). A brilliant and respected administrator as well as an internationally known scholar, Dr. Bagnall has served as director and president of the American Society of Papyrologists, president of the International Association of Papyrologists, and director and president of the American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies) and is a member of the American Numismatic Society, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the British Academy and l'Académie Royale de Belgique. In 2019 Dr. Bagnall was appointed Honorary President for Life of the American Society of Papyrologists and Honorary President of the International Association of Papyrologists. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2001and was elected its President in 2023. | |
| 18 | Name: | Dr. D. R. Shackleton Bailey | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1977 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1917 | | | Death Date: | November 28, 2005 | | | | |
| 19 | Name: | Dr. Carlos H. Baker | | | Year Elected: | 1982 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404. History of the Arts, Literature, Religion and Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1909 | | | Death Date: | 4/18/87 | | | | |
| 20 | Name: | Dr. John W. Baldwin | | | Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | Death Date: | February 8, 2015 | | | | | | |
John Baldwin was a leading American specialist on the history of medieval France. Like Charles Homer Haskins, he had worked on the institutional and intellectual history of the twelfth century. His early works on the "just price" and the schoolman Peter the Chanter opened new vistas of research on economic growth and the culture of power. His book on the government of Philip Augustus won major prizes in America and France. The recipient of major honors in France and the United States, Dr. Baldwin was a generous colleague, a venerated teacher, and a distinguished medievalist in the mode of C. H. Haskins and J. R. Strayer. He had been at Johns Hopkins University since 1986 as Charles Homer Haskins Professor of History and Professor of History Emeritus. He was awarded the Medieval Academy's Haskins Medal in 1990 and the Chevalier de l'Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur, France in 2001. He was a member of the Medieval Academy of America (president, 1996-97); the British Academy; and l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2004. | |
| |