| | 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. Gerhard H. Bowering | | | Institution: | Yale University | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1939 | | | | | | |
Gerhard Böwering is Professor of Islamic Studies at Yale University. He was born and educated in Germany. After philosophical studies at Munich, he received a Diploma in Islamic Studies from Panjab University in Lahore, Pakistan and also studied Arabic in Cairo, Egypt. Following theological studies in Montreal, Dr. Böwering studied Islam at McGill University where he earned a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies in 1975. From 1975-84 he was first assistant and then associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1984, Dr. Böwering became Professor of Islamic Studies at Yale. He is the author of The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam (1980) and a critical Arabic edition of a Commentary on the Qur'an (1995 and 1997). He is presently preparing a monograph on the "Idea of Time in Islam" as well as a book entitled Wie die Muslime denken. His scholarly publications also include numerous articles and contributions to major reference books. Dr. Böwering was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1994. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Prudence Oliver Harper | | | Institution: | Metropolitan Museum of Art | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1933 | | | | | | |
Curator Emerita Prudence Oliver Harper joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of the Ancient Near East in 1958. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1977 and became curator and head of the Department of Ancient Near East in 1982. Over the course of her career, Dr. Harper led the installation of the museum's Ancient Near Eastern Art galleries, published the results of a major archaeological enterprise (Sasanian Remains from Qasr-i Abu Nasr, 1973) and compiled a thoughtful exhibition on an iconographic and ideological theme with a very important catalog (The Royal Hunter, 1978). The first volume of her Sasanian Silver Vessels (1981), together with a large set of articles, is the standard study of royal images in Late Antique Sasanian art. Her articles on Anatolian ivories and Neo-Babylonian clay scultpures also demonstrate the breadth of her knowledge. Dr. Harper has also been instrumental in maintaining and fostering continuous contacts with scholars in Russia, especially during difficult times. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Dr. Harper has also served as chair of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Curatorial Forum and on the editorial board of the Metropolitan Museum Journal. | |
| 4 | Name: | 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. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Martin E. Marty | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | | | | |
Martin E. Marty, born in Nebraska in 1928, holds two degrees in theology and a Ph.D. in American intellectual and religious history. He served ten years as a Lutheran parish minister and thirty-five years as a professor in the Divinity School, the (Humanities) Committee on the History of Culture, and the History Department from 1963-98. His specialty is American religious history, particularly in the national founding period, the late 18th century, and the 20th century, about which he wrote the three-volume Modern American Religion. Since 1998 he has also specialized in comparative studies of militant religious movements, fundamentalism and ethno-nationalisms, and he directed the Fundamentalism projects for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a project that resulted in a five-volume publication by the University of Chicago Press. Alongside his scholarly work, Dr. Marty has also been a journalist, identified since 1956 with the ecumenical The Christian Century and many other publications. He was also co-editor of Church History (1963-98), the journal of the American Society of Church History, of which he has been president. He was also president of the American Catholic Historical Association and the American Academy of Religion. He is the author of over fifty books, one of which, Righteous Empire, won the National Book Award. An elected member of the American Academy of Religion, he is also an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal and over seventy honorary doctoral degrees. In 2017 he was honored by the Newberry Library with their Newberry Library Award. He lives in Riverside, IL with his wife, musician Harriet Marty, and the two enjoy nine grandchildren and three great grandchildren. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. John G. A. Pocock | | | Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404a | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1924 | | | | | | |
J.G.A. Pocock grew up in New Zealand and holds his first degrees and an honorary doctorate from that country's university system. He earned his Ph.D. (1952) from Cambridge University, where he studied with Herbert Butterfield, J.H. Plumb and Peter Laslett. He has taught at the Universities of Canterbury and Otago in New Zealand, and in the United States at Washington University in St. Louis and at the Johns Hopkins University since 1974, becoming a professor emeritus in 1994. Since 1984 he has been convenor of the Steering Committee of the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. His publications include: The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957, 1987, French, 2000); Politics, Language and Time, Essays on Political Thought and History (1971, 1989); The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975, Italian, 1980, French, 1997, Spanish, 2002/2003, Japanese, 2008); an edition of The Political Works of James Harrington (1997); Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (1985, Japanese, 1990, French, 1998); an edition, with Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer, of The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800 (1993); Barbarism and Religion, volume I: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, volume II: Narratives of Civil Government (1999), volume III: The First Decline and Fall (2003), volume IV: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (2005); and The Discovery of Islands: Essays on British History (2005) . Barbarism and Religion was the 2000 recipient of the APS's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History. Selections of his essays have been published in Italian, German, Hungarian, Spanish and Portuguese. He is currently about to publish Political Thought as History: Essays on Theory and Method, and completing Barbarism and Religion, volume V: Religion: The First Triumph. J.G.A. Pocock was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1994. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. He holds an honorary doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University. | |
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