| 1 | Name: | Dr. Yve-Alain Bois | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | Yve-Alain Bois is one of the most original and active critics of 20th century art working today. A pupil of Roland Barthes, he is equally at home in the theory and the history of the visual arts. In 2015 he published the first of four volumes of his monumental catalog of the American painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly, and is about to publish a 900-page catalog of the works by Matisse (including the famous wall-paintings) in the Barnes Collection. At the Society’s April 2015 meeting, he gave a memorable paper, “Can a Genuine Picasso be a Fake?” In addition to his many books, he has written twelve exhibition catalogs, about fifty articles with titles as surprising and diverse as “The Meteorite in the Garden” and “Painting as Trauma,” and numerous exhibition- and book-reviews. One of his current projects is the modern history of axonometric projection. | |
2 | Name: | Dr. Ellen T. Harris | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | | | Ellen T. Harris, Class of 1949 Professor Emeritus at MIT, is a musicologist whose work focuses on Handel, Baroque opera, and vocal performance practice. She has taught at Columbia University; the University of Chicago, where she served as department chair; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was the first Associate Provsot for the Arts. She has served as the President of the American Handel Society and is currently President of the American Musicological Society.
Her most recent book, George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends (W. W. Norton, 2014), detailing the place of Handel and his music in eighteenth-century London, received the Nicolas Slonimsky Award (ASCAP/Deems Taylor) for Outstanding Musical Biography. Her previous book, Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (Harvard University Press, 2001) received the 2002 Otto Kindeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the 2002-03 Louis Gottschalk Prize from the Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Her earlier publications include an edition of cantatas for alto voice (Oxford University Press, 2001), a critical facsimile edition of Handel’s opera librettos in 13 vols. (Garland, 1989), Henry Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ (Oxford, 1987, of which a 30th-anniversary edition is now in preparation), an edition (with Edward Dent) of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (Oxford, 1987), and Handel and the Pastoral Tradition (Oxford, 1980). Articles and reviews by Professor Harris have appeared in numerous publications including Journal of the American Musicological Society, Händel Jahrbuch, Notes, and The New York Times. Her article "Handel the Investor" (Music & Letters, 2004), based on her research in the Bank of England, received the 2004 Westrup Prize.
Harris has enjoyed residencies at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College in Harvard University (1995-96) and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2004), and in 2005 won the Gyorgy Kepes Prize for her contributions to the arts at MIT. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998) and made an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society (2011). For the 2013-14 academic year, she was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and in 2016 a Visiting Professor at The Juilliard School. In her role as a musicologist-singer, Harris served as consultant to Renée Fleming on her recording of Handel arias and to the Santa Fe Opera on their production of Mozart’s Mitridate. She also served as musicological advisor to the complete recording of Handel’s Italian instrumental cantatas by the Italian early music group La Risonanza and has given joint presentations with its musical director Fabio Bonizzoni. She has performed twice with John Williams and the Boston Pops and sung the National Anthem at Fenway Park. | |
3 | Name: | Dr. Irene J. Winter | | Institution: | Harvard University | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | Born in New York City, Irene Winter received her AB in Anthropology from Barnard College (1960), her MA in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of Chicago (1967), and her PhD from Columbia University in the History of Art and Archaeology (1973). She taught at Queens College, CUNY, from 1971-1976, at the University of Pennsylvania from 1976-1988, and is presently Boardman Professor of Fine Arts Emerita at Harvard University, having served on the faculty from 1988 to 2009, and as Department Chair from 1993-1996. In 1996-97 she was Slade Professor at Cambridge University, delivering the Slade Lectures in the Spring of 1997. She subsequently delivered the Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College in 1999, and in the Spring of 2005 presented the Andrew H. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, DC.
Professor Winter has participated in archaeological excavations at Godin Tepe and Hasanlu, Iran, and at Tell Sakhariyeh, Iraq, with additional comparative fieldwork in India. Her awards include a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship (1983-88), along with an Olivia James travel Grant of the Archaeological Institute of America, and a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Fellowship. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1999, was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2003-04, was named a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, in 2005, received the Medal of Distinction from Barnard College in 2009, and was designated an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2013.
She has served on the Board of the College Art Association, several editorial and grants boards, and the Scientific Committee of the International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East since its inception in 1988. She has also been a member of the Iraq Task Force of the Archaeological Institute of America.
Her principal work has been devoted to the art and archaeology of the Ancient Near East, writing on topics ranging from ivory carving and cylinder seals to royal sculpture. Throughout her career, her stress has been on the relationship between the visual arts, language, history and culture in an attempt to join empirical data with theory in an inter-disciplinary context. Two volumes of collected essays, published by Brill, appeared in 2010, entitled On Art in the Ancient Near East. The Mellon lectures will be published as Visual Affect: Aesthetic Experience and Ancient Mesopotamia. | |
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