American Philosophical Society
Member History

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Resident[X]
Class
4. Humanities (12)
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402a[X]
1Name:  Dr. Andrew Delbanco
 Institution:  Teagle Foundation; Columbia University
 Year Elected:  2013
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402a
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1952
   
 
Andrew Delbanco is Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University. He was awarded the 2011 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama "for his writing that spans the literature of Melville and Emerson to contemporary issues in higher education." In 2001, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and named by Time Magazine as "America’s Best Social Critic." In 2003, he was named New York State Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities. In 2006, he received the "Great Teacher Award" from the Society of Columbia Graduates. Professor Delbanco is the author of many books, including, recently, College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton University Press, 2012), and The Abolitionist Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2012). Melville: His World and Work (2005) was published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, in Britain under the Picador imprint, and has appeared in German and Spanish translation. Melville was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography, and appeared on "best books" lists in the Washington Post, Independent (London), Dallas Morning News, and TLS. It was awarded the Lionel Trilling Award by Columbia University. Other books include The Death of Satan (1995), Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now (1997), and The Real American Dream (1999), which were named notable books by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. The Puritan Ordeal (1989) also won the Lionel Trilling Award. He has edited Writing New England (2001), The Portable Abraham Lincoln (1992, 2009), volume two of The Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson (with Teresa Toulouse), and, with Alan Heimert, The Puritans in America (1985). His most recent book is The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for American's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (2018). Andrew Delbanco’s essays appear regularly in The New York Review of Books, New Republic, New York Times Magazine, and other journals, on topics ranging from. American literary and religious history to contemporary issues in higher education. Mr. Delbanco has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was a member of the inaugural class of fellows at the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is a trustee of the Library of America and trustee emeritus of the National Humanities Center. He has served as Vice President of PEN American Center, and as a trustee of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. He became President of the Teagle Foundation in 2018. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013.
 
2Name:  Dr. John V. Fleming
 Institution:  Princeton University
 Year Elected:  2015
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402a
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1936
   
 
John Fleming’s main contributions to scholarship have been in three areas—Romance (Old French) literature, the interaction of literary tropes and iconography in medieval painting and sculpture, especially associated with Franciscan spirituality, and Chaucer. His study of the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose is regarded as a classic exegesis of this multi-layered text and also as a piece of exemplary scholarly prose. The same may be said of his study of Franciscan hermeneutics, From Bonaventure to Bellini, which was a pathbreaking interdisciplinary study. Fleming has also been an indefatigable editor, translator and commentator on medieval Franciscan texts (see his Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages) and texts, like the Two Poems Attributed to Joachim of Fiore, which were regarded in the thirteenth and fourteenth century as bearing upon the Franciscan experience. Along the way he has made fundamental contributions to literary scholars’ and historians’ understanding and appreciation of matters as diverse as Chaucer’s classical sources and the mental universe of Christopher Columbus. Fleming has regularly, productively and with great wit challenged many of the stultifying orthodoxies regnant for so long in medieval scholarship, not least the concept of ‘courtly love’. Added to his scholarly impact through his published works one must include Fleming’s influence on the field through his teaching. Indeed his reputation as a teacher both of graduate students and undergraduates is legendary.
 
3Name:  Dr. Sandra M. Gilbert
 Institution:  University of California, Davis
 Year Elected:  2005
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402a
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1936
   
 
Sandra Gilbert is known both as a critic and as a poet. Her most important critical works have been written in collaboration with Susan Gubar. The first of these collaborative works, The Madwoman in the Attic, originally published in 1979, still retains its status as one of the most important documents of feminist literary criticism. In conjunction with the succeeding three-volume No Man's Land, which extends the critical enterprise from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, The Madwoman in the Attic stands as a monumental work. Sandra Gilbert has published numerous volumes of poetry throughout her career, culminating in a collection selected from thirty years of productivity. In addition, she has published a memoir, Wrongful Death (1995), and a literary/cultural study, Death's Door (2006). She has distinguished herself also as a reader of poetry. Dr. Gilbert has also been active in service to the profession, most notably as an officer of the Modern Language Association, in which she served successfully as second vice-president, vice-president, and president. Presently Professor of English Emerita at the University of California, Davis (1989-), Dr. Gilbert has also taught at California State University, Indiana University and Princeton University. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1968.
 
4Name:  Dr. Stephen J. Greenblatt
 Institution:  Harvard University
 Year Elected:  2007
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402a
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1943
   
 
Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. His areas of specialization include Shakespeare, 16th and 17th century English literature, the literature of travel and exploration, and literary theory. Dr. Greenblatt's publications include the following books: Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Modern Culture; Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England; Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare; Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles; Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve; Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics; and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern - for which he won both the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award. In 2012 he edited and annotated new editions of Thomas Browne's Urne-Buriall and Religio Medici with his wife Ramie Targoff. In addition he is the General Editor of The Norton Shakespeare and the General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He is also (with Charles Mee) the author of a play, Cardenio. He serves on the editorial or advisory boards of numerous journals and is an editor and cofounder of Representations. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim, Fulbright, Howard and Kyoto University Foundations, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has received the James Russell Lowell Prize of the MLA, the British Council Prize in the Humanities, and the Mellon Distinguished Humanist Award. He is an Honorary Corresponding Fellow of The English Association, U.K. For Will in the World he received the 2004 Will Award from The Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, DC, and the 2005 Independent Publisher Book Award for Biography; the book was a finalist for the National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the National Book Critic Circle Awards, the Quills, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize of the Boston Author's Club. Dr. Greenblatt has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Letters, is a permanent fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, and has served as president of the Modern Language Association of America. He has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, lectured widely and held numerous visiting professorships. His named lecture series include the Lionel Trilling Seminar at Columbia, the Theo Crosby Memorial Lecture, Globe Theatre, London, the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford, the Carpenter Lecturers at the University of Chicago, and the University Lectures at Princeton. He received his B.A. (summa cum laude) from Yale University, a second B.A. from Cambridge University, and his Ph.D. from Yale. He was born in Boston and has three sons. In 2016 he was awarded the Holberg Prize by the government of Norway.
 
5Name:  Dr. Jerome J. McGann
 Institution:  University of Virginia; University of California, Berkeley
 Year Elected:  2014
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402a
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1937
   
 
Jerome McGann is John Stewart Bryan Professor in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. Ph.D., Yale University, 1966. He was Assistant Professor, University of Chicago, 1966-75; Professor, Johns Hopkins University, 1975-80; Dreyfuss Professor of the Humanities at the California Institute of Technology, 1980-86; Commonwealth Professor, University of Virginia, 1986-93; Thomas Holloway Professor of Victorian Studies, Royal Holloway College, University of London, 1999-2002. He has been Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley since 2007. No one has done as much to guarantee the future of digital Humanities as Jerome McGann. He was President of the Society for Textual Scholarship (1995-97). Dr. McGann is co-founder of the University of Virginia Speculative Computing Laboratory (SPECLAB), Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES), and The Ivanhoe Project. His first monumental book on textual theory, in which he developed the idea that one has to treat texts as socialized, came out of his work on the poetry of Byron. His interests rapidly moved in the direction of digital presentation of sources. His Dante Gabriele Rossetti archive at Virginia has been a model as to what it is possible to accomplish, and since setting that up he has been actively involved in all kinds of on-line procedures, of which his NINES project is only the latest manifestation. McGann has been the most important person in this entire area. Whereas others could simply have derived a new perspective from his Byron experience, McGann has used it as a way to rethink the entire editorial enterprise in terms of the web and on-line possibilities. This turns out to be particularly important for writers who were also engaged in art, such as Rossetti or Blake. He is the author of many books, including: A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983); The Beauty of Inflections, Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (1985); Social Values and Poetic Acts (1987); The Textual Condition, 1991; Byron and Romanticism, (2002); Radiant Textuality, Literature since the World Wide Web (2004); The Scholar’s Art, Literary Studies in a Managed World (2006); The Poet Edgar Allen Poe: Alien Angel (2014); and A New Republic of Letters: Humanities Scholarship in an Age of Digital Reproduction (2014). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1994. Jerome McGann has been the recipient of many prizes, including the Richard W. Lyman Award for Distinguished Contribution to Humanities Computing, the James Russell Lowell Award from The Modern Language Association, a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a Thomas Jefferson Award from the University of Virginia. Jerome McGann was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014.
 
6Name:  Dr. Edward Mendelson
 Institution:  Columbia University
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402a
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1946
   
 
Edward Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the Literary Executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden. He has also taught at Yale and Harvard. His books include Early Auden, Later Auden, The Things that Matter, and Moral Agents, and he has edited many volumes of work by W. H. Auden as well as novels by Anthony Trollope, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Arnold Bennett. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and has also published in The New York Times Book Review, TLS, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He has been a contributing editor of PC Magazine since 1987.
 
7Name:  Dr. Marjorie Perloff
 Institution:  Stanford University; University of Southern California
 Year Elected:  2012
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402a
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1931
   
 
Marjorie Perloff is Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita at Stanford University and Florence Scott Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is the author of many books on Twentieth and Twenty-First Century poetries and poetics. Perloff has been a frequent reviewer for periodicals from TLS and The Washington Post to all the major scholarly journals, and she has lectured at most major universities in the U.S. and at European, Asian, and Latin American universities and festivals. She was recently the Weidenfeld Professor of European Literature at Oxford University and the Kelly Writers House Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Perloff has held Guggenheim, NEH, and Huntington fellowships, served on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2014 she was awarded the Washington University International Humanities Medal. She was President of the American Comparative Literature Association from 1993-95 and of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 2006. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recently was named Honorary Foreign Professor at the Beijing Modern Languages University. She received an Honorary Degree, Doctor of Letters, from Bard College in May 2008. A native of Vienna, Austria, who grew up in New York City, Marjorie lives in Los Angeles, where her late husband, Dr. Joseph K. Perloff, was American Heart Association Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Pediatrics. Her works include Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats (1970), The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (1973); Poet Among Painters (1977; new edition 1997); The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981); The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition, 1994); Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1992); Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996, 1998 paperback; translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Slovenian, and French); The Vienna Paradox (2004, German 2012); Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (2010); Poetics in a New Key: Interviews and Essays (2014); Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (2016); Circling the Canon: Selected Book Reviews (2019); Infrathin: an Experiment in Micropoetics (2021); Wittgenstein's Private Notebooks 1914-1916 (2022).
 
8Name:  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.
 
9Name:  Dr. Arnold Rampersad
 Institution:  Stanford University
 Year Elected:  1995
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402a
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1941
   
 
Arnold Rampersad is the leading scholar of his generation in the field of African-American literature. His work on such major figures as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois is widely recognized as scholarship of the highest order, marked as it is by impeccable research and an elegant prose style. Dr. Rampersad's two-volume biography The Life of Langston Hughes (1986-88) is widely praised as a masterpiece of literary/historical narrative, and his mastery of this form was also evident in Days of Grace (1993), a memoir written with the assistance of the late Arthur Ashe. His latest work is Visible Man, a biography of Ralph Ellison. Currently Professor of English, Senior Associate Dean and the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, Dr. Rampersad has also served on the faculties of the University of Virginia and Rutgers, Columbia and Princeton Universities. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, he has also edited several other works, including Slavery and the Literary Imagination and Race and American Culture. Perhaps more than any other scholar, Dr. Rampersad has made the study of African-American culture an integral part of intellectual life. He was awarded the 2010 National Humanities Medal by President Obama. He won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2012 and was awarded the Centennial Medal of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University in 2013.
 
10Name:  Dr. Patricia Meyer Spacks
 Institution:  University of Virginia
 Year Elected:  1996
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402a
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1929
   
 
Combining groundbreaking feminist theory with historical research, Patricia Meyer Spacks has published some 20 highly regarded books and 60 scholarly essays. Her works include "The Female Imagination", for which she received a National Book Award nomination; "Poetry of Vision," "Imagining a Self," "Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth Century Novels," "Gossip" and "Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind." Dr. Spacks is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, of which she was president from 2000 to 2006, and the American Society for 18th Century Studies. Since 1976 she has held numerous positions in the Modern Language Association, including president in 1994. She is Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. Professor of English Emerita at the University of Virginia. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1996. She won Phi Beta Kappa's Award for Distinguished Serivce to the Humanities in 2012.
 
11Name:  Dr. Helen Hennessy Vendler
 Institution:  Harvard University
 Year Elected:  1992
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402a
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1933
   
 
Helen Vendler was awarded the Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities for her paper presented to the Society at its joint meeting with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Entitled "Seamus Heaney and the Oresteia: 'Mycenae Lookout' and the Usefulness of Tradition," it is a masterful analysis, not only of the content of the poem, but of the structure of the poetry and how line and meter reflect the emotion the poet seeks to convey. Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she received her Ph.D. in English and American Literature in 1960 (after doing an undergraduate degree in chemistry at Emmanuel College, Boston). Before coming to Harvard, she taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University. She has been a frequent lecturer at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo. She has held many fellowships (Guggenheim, Wilson, APS, NEH, etc.) and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Modern Language Association (of which she was president in 1980). She holds twenty four honorary degrees from universities and colleges here and in Norway (University of Oslo), England (Cambridge) and Ireland (National University of Ireland and Trinity College). Dr. Vendler is the author of Yeats's Vision and the Later Plays (1963), On Extended Wings: The Longer Poems of Wallace Stevens (1969), The Poetry of George Herbert (1975), The Odes of John Keats (1983), Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (1986), The Music of What Happens: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1988), Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (1995), The Given and the Made: Lowell, Berryman, Dove, Graham (1995), The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (1995), Poems, Poets, Poetry (1996), The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997), Seamus Heaney (1998) Coming of Age As a Poet (2003), Poets Thinking (2004), Invisible Listeners (2005), and Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007). She also has reviewed contemporary poetry for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, and other journals, and lectures widely both in the United States and abroad. She delivered the 56th A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in 2007. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1992.
 
12Name:  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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