| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Wai-yee Li | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Stephen Owen | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Stephen Owen is widely viewed as the most important scholar-critic of Chinese literature in the West. He is the James Bryant Conant University Professor and former Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, he was the first specialist in his field to be made a University Professor at Harvard. At a time when understanding China is a major priority for the United States, Dr. Owen has, in a long series of distinguished books and articles, opened the door for Westerners to a new understanding of Chinese literature and culture. Though his specialty is the T'ang Dynasty (618-906 A.D.), he has impressive mastery of the range of Chinese literature over its 2,500 years. His work has been informed by recent Western work in literary theory and by a comparatist perspective. He has paid attention in new ways to Chinese literary theory, for example in Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics. His work shows a remarkable combination of learning, literary sensitivity, and elegance of style, as in the admirable readings of Chinese poetry in Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature. His magisterial An Anthology of Chinese Literature is an amazing poetic and scholarly accomplishment; almost all of the translations are by Dr. Owen himself, and they bring the translation of Chinese poetry, stories, plays, and essays to a new level of lucidity and literary distinction. His translations and annotations show how Chinese poetry is a genuine tradition, for example in its subtle use, in later poems, of allusions to earlier poems. Though his books are written in English and primarily for Western readers, they have such general importance that many of them have been translated into Chinese and published in China. He has a working knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish. Without a doubt Dr. Owen has brought Chinese literature within the domain of the comparative study of literature. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Richard J. Tarrant | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | | | | |
Richard Tarrant was born in Brooklyn, NY and received his BA from Fordham University in 1966. He pursued graduate study at Oxford (Corpus Christi College) with support from Marshall and Danforth Scholarships, and obtained his D.Phil. In 1972. While at Corpus he was appointed to the P. S. Allen Junior Research Fellowship. In 1970 he took up a position at University College, Toronto, where he remained until moving to Harvard University in 1982. At Harvard he has been successively Professor of Greek and Latin, Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Roman Civilization, and Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature. He was Acting Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1995-96 and Interim Dean in 2012. In 1991-92 he was Visiting Mellon Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Visiting Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 2008 he delivered the Comparetti Lectures at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. His interests lie mainly in Latin literature, specifically Senecan drama and Augustan poetry, and in the transmission and editing of Latin texts; he has also explored the reception of classical literature in art and music. His books include editions with commentary of Seneca's Agamemnon (Cambridge UP 1977) and Thyestes (Scholars Press 1985), a critical edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Oxford Classical Texts series (2004), and a commentary on Virgil Aeneid Book XII for Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics (2012); the last of these received the 2013 Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the American Philological Association. He is also one of the main contributors to the volume Texts and Transmission: A Guide to the Latin Classics, edited by L. D. Reynolds (Oxford 1983). He is currently completing a book entitled Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism (to be published by Cambridge UP), is at work on a book on Horace's Odes for Oxford University Press, and is preparing a new critical edition of Horace for Oxford Classical Texts. He has been the editor of Phoenix (the journal of the Classical Association of Canada) and of Harvard Studies in Classical Philology; he has served as the Vice-President for Publications of the American Philological Association; and he is a member of the editorial boards of Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries, Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici, and Toronto Medieval Latin Texts. His teaching at Harvard has been recognized with the Levenson Prize for Undergraduate Teaching, appointment as a Harvard College Professor, and the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He has twice been named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for contributions to scholarship. Since 1968 he has been married to Jacqueline Brown. His outside interests include baroque and classical music, choral singing, and all things Italian. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Jan Ziolkowski | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1956 | | | | | | |
Jan Ziolkowski (A.B. Princeton University, Ph.D. University of Cambridge) has focused his research and teaching on the literature of the Latin Middle Ages. Within medieval literature his special interests have included such areas as the classical tradition, the grammatical and rhetorical tradition, the appropriation of folktales into Latin, and Germanic epic in Latin language. More comparatively, he has developed broad interests in medieval revivalism down to the present day. At Harvard he has chaired the Department of Comparative Literature and the Committee on Medieval Studies, in addition to (fleetingly) the Department of the Classics. He founded the Medieval Studies Seminar, which continues to hold regular meetings in the Barker Center that are open to the public. In his teaching he offers courses mainly in Classics (Medieval Latin) and in Medieval Studies. Currently he also directs Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, a Harvard center in Washington, D.C., with programs in Byzantine studies, Pre-Columbian studies, and Garden and Landscape studies. Author: The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity (2018) published in six volumes. Jan Ziolkowski was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017. | |
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