| | 1 | Name: | 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. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Maribel Fierro | | | Institution: | CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404b | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1956 | | | | | | |
Maribel Fierro is Research Professor at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean (ILC) at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC = Higher Council for Scientific Research) in Spain. She has taught at the Universidad Complutense and Universidad Autónoma (Madrid), and at the Universities of Stanford, Chicago, Exeter and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris).
She was trained in Semitic Philology (with an interest in Arabic) at the Universidad Complutense where she submitted her PhD Thesis in 1985 after carrying out part of her doctoral research at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She was then Lecturer at the Universidad Complutense (Madrid) and in 1987 moved to the CSIC.
Her interests are the political, religious and intellectual history of the pre-modern Islamic West (al-Andalus and North Africa), Islamic law, the construction of orthodoxy, violence and its representation in Medieval Arabic sources, and the edition and translation of Medieval Arabic texts. Among her publications: Abd al-Rahman III: The first Cordoban caliph (2005) and The Almohad revolution: Politics and religion in the Islamic West during the twelfth-thirteenth centuries (2012). She is the editor of volume 2 The Western Islamic world, eleventh-eighteenth centuries of the The New Cambridge History of Islam (2010), Orthodoxy and heresy in Islam: Critical Concepts in Religious Studies (2013) and the The Routledge Handbook on Muslim Iberia (2020). She has co-edited El cuerpo derrotado: cómo trataban musulmanes y cristianos a los enemigos vencidos (Península Ibérica, ss. VIII-XIII) (The defeated body: how Muslims and Christians treated the vanquished. Iberian Peninsula 8th-13th centuries) (2008), The legal status of dimmi-s in the Islamic West (2013) and Accusations of unbelief in Islam: A diachronic perspective on takfir (2015). She is presently preparing a monograph on Abd al-Mu,min, the first Almohad caliph and on The turban in al-Andalus, and co-editing Rulers as authors in Islamic societies.
https://digital.csic.es/cris/rp/rp04381
http://csic.academia.edu/maribelfierro | |
| 3 | 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. | |
| 4 | Name: | 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. | |
| 5 | Name: | 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. | |
| 6 | Name: | 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. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Moshe Sharon | | | Institution: | The Hebrew University of Jerusalem | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404b | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | | |
Moshe Sharon, M.A., PhD was born in Haifa Israel on December 18, 1937 and received his higher education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the SOAS University of London. He is a professor (Emeritus) of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and Chair in Bahá’í Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in which he initiated the scholarly independent study of the Bahá’í Faith (in a non Bahá’í context, and within the wider study of modern religions and religious movements). Asked in 1984 to develop Jewish Studies at the University of the Witwaterstrand Johannesburg, South Africa, he established the Chair and Centre of Jewish Studies there and headed and directed it until 1993.
Since 1968 Professor Sharon has been documenting and studying in depth the Arabic Inscriptions of the Holy Land and publishing them in multi-volume opus: Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae (CIAP, six books) concurrent with his many scholarly publications on Islamic history and civilization. Among these are Black Banners from the East in 2 volumes, by now classic on the earliest revolutionary movement in Islam; Judaism Christianity and Islam, Interaction and Conflict; Judaism in the Context of Diverse Civilizations; Studies in Modern Religions and Religious Movements (ed.); The Bahá’í Religion and its Most Holy Book and many more. Professor Sharon is one of foremost authorities on early ‘Abbasid history, History of the Holy Land under Islam, and a world expert on Arabic Epigraphy.
In the field of public activity he served as Prime Minister Begin Advisor on Arab Affairs (1978-1980) and participated in the initial stages of the Israeli-Egyptian peace process. Later he was the Head of the Department of Arab Affairs in the IDF Central Command, advisor to the Minister of Defense, and special envoy to the Shi‘ites in Lebanon. More than a year ago he was appointed by a unanimous decision of the Government of Israel as Chairman of the Place-Name Committee responsible for the official fixing of all place names on the map of the country. | |
| 8 | Name: | Dr. Romila Thapar | | | Institution: | Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404b | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | | | | |
Romila Thapar is Emeritus Professor of History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where she was Professor of Ancient Indian History from 1970 to 1991. She was General President of the Indian History Congress in 1983. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and holds an Honorary D.Litt. each from Calcutta, Oxford, and Chicago Universities, among others. She is an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, and of St. Anthony's College, Oxford, and of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. In 2008 Professor Thapar was awarded the prestigious Kluge Prize of the United States Library of Congress, which honours lifetime achievement in studies such as history that are not covered by the Nobel Prize. | |
| 9 | Name: | Dr. Pierre-Étienne Will | | | Institution: | Collège de France | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404b | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | | | | |
Pierre-Étienne Will retired in 2014 from the chair of History of Modern China at the Collège de France, which he had held since 1992 concurrently with a position of Directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is specializing in the socio-economic and political history of late-imperial and early republican China. He has published Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China (Stan¬ford, 1990; original French edition Paris, 1980; Korean translation, 1995; Chinese translation, 2002), Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650-1850 (Ann Arbor, 1991, with R. Bin Wong), Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China: A Descriptive and Critical Bibliography (Leiden, 2020, 2 vol.), several edited volumes, including China, Democracy, and Law: A Historical and Contemporary Approach (Leiden, 2012, with Mireille Delmas-Marty; original French edition Paris, 2007), and numerous articles on Chinese economy, society, politics, bureaucracy, law, water management, and more. He has been co-editor of the journal T’oung Pao from 1992 to 2016. | |
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