| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Jacques Barzun | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404. History of the Arts, Literature, Religion and Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1907 | | | Death Date: | October 25, 2012 | | | | | | |
Jacques Barzun was born in France in 1907. He grew up in Paris and, at twelve years old, was sent by his father to the United States to receive an American university education. In 1923 he entered Columbia College and graduated four years later at the top of his class, having been a prize-winning president of the prestigious Philolexian Society. He went on to lecture at Columbia, where he earned his Ph.D in 1932, became a full professor in 1945, and later became Dean of the Graduate School, Dean of Faculties, and Provost. In 1967 he resigned from his administrative duties to focus on teaching and writing until his retirement in 1975.
Over seven decades, Barzun had written and edited more than forty books touching on an unusually broad range of subjects, including science and medicine; psychiatry from Robert Burton through William James to modern methods; art; and classical music - he was one of the all-time authorities on Hector Berlioz. After a period of poor health, he was advised that he had several years of life ahead, and this encouraged him to complete his last and largest book, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000), which became an unexpected bestseller and critically acclaimed success. Dr. Barzun was widely known in America and in Europe as a trenchant critic of modern trends in education, music and the arts, and he is also a specialist in musical history. Among his many commendations, he had been featured on the cover of Time magazine (1956); he was awarded the Gold Medal for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which society he was elected in 1952 and twice served as its president; and he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003 and he was awarded the 2010 National Humanities Medal by President Obama.
Jacques Barzun died October 25, 2012, at the age of 104 in San Antonio, Texas. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Kurt Bittel | | | Institution: | German Archaeological Institute | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402. Criticism: Arts and Letters | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1907 | | | Death Date: | 1/30/91 | | | | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. George A. Kennedy | | | Institution: | University of North Carolina | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | Death Date: | July 28, 2022 | | | | | | |
George A. Kennedy taught classics and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill for thirty years. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1954 and taught at Harvard, Haverford College and the University of Pittsburgh before being named Paddison Professor of Classics (now Emeritus) at UNC in 1972. Dr. Kennedy is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and has served as a member of the National Humanities Council and as president of the American Philological Association and the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. He is author of 13 books on the history of rhetoric and literary criticism, including The Art of Persuasion in Greece (1963), Art and Rhetoric in the Roman World (1972) and Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition (1980). He is a widely recognized authority on the arts of persuasion in the classical world and on the style of Greek, Latin and early Christian literature. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Gordon Randolph Willey | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1913 | | | Death Date: | April 28, 2002 | | | | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Theodore J. Ziolkowski | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404. History of the Arts, Literature, Religion and Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | Death Date: | December 5, 2020 | | | | | | |
Theodore Ziolkowski was the Class of 1900 Professor of German and Comparative Literature Emeritus and former Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton University. He has been affiliated with the university since 1964, before which time he taught at Yale University (1956-62) and Columbia University (1962-64). A fascinating and elegant writer on literary subjects, he has a broad and respected knowledge of German and European literature of recent centuries. The editor of collections of letters and critical essays by Hermann Hesse, Dr. Ziolkowski is also the author of works such as Novels of Hermann Hesse (1965); Dimensions of the Modern Novel (1969); Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (1972); Disenchanted Images (1977); The Classical German Elegy (1980); The Institutions of German Romanticism (1990); The Mirror of Justice (1997); The Sin of Knowledge: Ancient Themes and Modern Variations (2000); Ovid and the Moderns (2004); Modes of Faith (2007); Minos and the Moderns: Cretan Myth in Twentieth Century Literature and Art (2008); Gilgamesh among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic (2012), and five volumes in German on German Romanticism. He died on December 5, 2020 in Bethlehem, PA. | |
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