| | 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. Lothar von Falkenhausen | | | Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 403. Cultural Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | | | |
Lothar von Falkenhausen is the leading archaeologist of China of his generation. A polyglot like few others, he has taught—each time in the local language—as Visiting Professor in Beijing, Münster, Hong Kong, Kyoto, Paris, and Heidelberg. His most recent book Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (2006), by now translated into Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, is the definitive social history of bronze age China. His vast list of publications ranges from antiquarianism to ancient musical instruments, and further on to ancient salt production, empire and urban studies, questions of literacy and orality in the Chinese canon, philosophical perspectives in Chinese ritual, religious mortuary practices, and social ranking in tombs. His work is as transnational as it is interdisciplinary, ranging across continents and centuries, and combining archaeology with intellectual, social, technological, and economic history. | |
| 3 | 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. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Alexander Nehamas | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Nehamas writes beautifully on a wide range of topics from the most technical issues in ancient philosophy and the philosophy of Nietzsche to questions about painting, poetry, television, and friendship that speak to both the professional philosopher and the educated lay reader. He combines a scrupulous attention to philology and textual criticism with a rare capacity to address the kinds of big questions about what it is to live a virtuous life that have engaged the best of the western philosophical tradition since Plato. His Gifford Lectures, now expanded into a forthcoming book on friendship, are in the tradition of James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (the first Gifford lectures), in that both address the most fundamental of human interests. Nehamas has been widely recognized for his distinction. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dame Marilyn Strathern | | | Institution: | University of Cambridge | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
Marilyn Strathern describes herself as a conventional social anthropologist. A product of the Cambridge School of Social Anthropology at its heyday in the 1960s, she carried out fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, her texts reflecting issues largely within the discipline rather than outside it (Mary Douglas once called her -- not altogether flatteringly -- ‘an anthropologist’s anthropologist’). These days she has an interdisciplinary audience.
Strathern’s interests have been fairly consistently divided between Melanesian and British ethnography. She is probably most well known for The gender of the gift (1988), a critique of anthropological theories of society and gender relations applied to Melanesia, which she herself pairs with After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century (1992), a comment on the cultural revolution at home. Her most experimental work is an exercise on the comparative method called Partial connections (1991). Projects over the last twenty five years are reflected in publications on reproductive technologies, intellectual and cultural property rights and interdisciplinarity, although it is her brief work on regimes of audit and accountability that has attracted most widespread attention. Some of these themes are brought together in Kinship, law and the unexpected (2005). Papua New Guinea is never far from her concerns, her most recent visit to Mt Hagen being in 2015.
Her first departmental position was at the University of Manchester, UK. Now an emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Strathern retired from the Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology in 2008 and from being head of Cambridge’s Girton College in 2009. A fellow of the British Academy since 1987, she received a national honour (DBE) in 2001, and is currently (hon.) Life President of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth. | |
| 6 | 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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