American Philosophical Society
Member History

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1Name:  Professor Michael A. Cook
 Institution:  Princeton University
 Year Elected:  2001
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404b
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1940
   
 
Michael Cook is the Class of 1943 Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He was educated at Cambridge, studying English and European History as well as learning Turkish and Persian. From Cambridge he went on to the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, where his work focused on Ottoman population history in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He taught Middle Eastern history at the School until 1986 when he left to join the faculty at Princeton. A prolific author, Professor Cook's publications include Early Muslim Dogma: A Source-Critical Study (1981), The Koran (2000), Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (2000), A Brief History of the Human Race (2003), and Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective (2014). His current areas of interest include the formation of Islamic civilization and the role played by religious values in that process. He has been the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Holberg Prize in 2014, the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching (awarded at Princeton's 2016 Commencement), the Balzan Prize for Islamic Studies in 2019, and the Middle East Medievalists Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. In 2018 he was named Honorary Fellow at King's College London. Michael Cook was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 2001.
 
2Name:  Dr. Ira M. Lapidus
 Institution:  University of California, Berkeley
 Year Elected:  1994
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404b
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1937
   
 
A versatile scholar whose 1967 book revolutionized the study of Muslim cities, Ira Lapidus then generated a spate of follow-up investigations on the structure of medieval societies. In over 40 years of scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is Professor Emeritus of History, Dr. Lapidus has proved exceptionally well versed in the scholarship of both western and eastern medieval studies. The author of works such as the aforementioned Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (1967) and A History of Islamic Societies (1988), Dr. Lapidus possesses an acute sense of how to express complex phenomena in simple terms. The longtime chair of Berkeley's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, he remains, through his scholarship and teaching, one of the most influential and creative interpreters of medieval Islam.
 
3Name:  Dr. Piotr Michalowski
 Institution:  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
 Year Elected:  1999
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404b
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1948
   
 
Piotr Michalowski is George G. Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations at the University of Michigan. Educated at Warsaw and Yale Universities, he then went on to do research and teach at Harvard, UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Michalowski's work concentrates on the literatures, religion, history, historiography, and languages of ancient Mesopotamia, with special attention to the early periods. Dr. Michalowski is currently working on a number of projects, including an edition of a major collection of Sumerian magical texts and an anthology of Sumerian poetry. His most recent publications include work on Sumerian goddesses, a study of the ideology of Nabonidus, the last independent king of Babylon, and a grammatical sketch of the Sumerian language. Also, for the last decade, he has been editor of the Journal of Cuneiform Studies. In light of recent world events, Dr. Michalowski organized and continues to guide the American Coordinating Committee for Iraqi Cultural Heritage. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1999, was elected President of the International Association of Assyriologists in 2009, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.
 
4Name:  Dr. Francesca Rochberg
 Institution:  University of California, Berkeley
 Year Elected:  2008
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404b
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1952
   
 
Francesca Rochberg is Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Office for the History of Science and Technology, and a member of the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her B.A. in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. from the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, where she also worked on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. At the age of 30 she received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. In 1987 she joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame in the Department of History and the Program in History and Philosophy of Science. Her research focuses on ancient Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman traditions in the celestial sciences and their interrelation with religion. She has produced first editions of cuneiform texts and has published widely on Babylonian celestial sciences, setting the cuneiform material in various contexts, from cultural to cognitive history. She has introduced the evidence of ancient cuneiform science into the philosophy of science through investigations of empiricism, prediction, logic and reasoning. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Visiting Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. She won the John Frederick Lewis Award from the American Philosophical Society in 1999 for her monograph Babylonian Horoscopes. Francesca Rochberg was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008.
 
5Name:  Dr. Sabine Schmidtke
 Institution:  Institute for Advanced Study
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404b
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1964
   
 
Sabine Schmidtke is a dynamic, wide-ranging, and highly productive scholar of early Islam and its theology. Her command of Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian, together with exceptional facility in modern languages (German, French, and English) allows her to open up new perspectives on early Muslim intellectual life and sectarian debates. As the recipient of a generous Advanced Grant from the European Research Council she was able to set up a major program in Berlin on what she called the Islamicate world. Her organizational skills have become ever more apparent since her move to the United States, where she has planned conferences and launched new programs, including one on a digital database for Ottoman texts. She works directly from manuscripts, in search of which she has traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East. She is a formidable scholar who wears her learning lightly. In 2019, she was elected to the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
 
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