| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Thomas Noel Bisson | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1975 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404a | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | | | | |
Historian Thomas Bisson has been affiliated with Harvard University since 1986. Prior to becoming Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History there, he taught for twenty years at the University of California, Berkeley and held positions at Swarthmore College, Brown University and Amherst College. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Dr. Bisson's work covers an extraordinary range geographically, from medieval Catalonia and Aragon to Languedoc and northern France and Germany, and topically, from political theory and parliamentary institutions to numismatics and economic history. His many honors include the Creu de Sant Jordi, awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2001 for contributions to the knowledge of Catalan and Occitan history, and election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is also a past president of the Medieval Academy of America, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Among his recent published works are Medieval France and her Pyrenean Neighbors: Studies in Early Institutional History, Tormented Voices: Power, Crisis and Humanity in Rural Catalonia, 1140-1200, and Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe. His latest books include The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Landship, and the Origins of European Government (2008) and The Chronography of Robert of Torigni (2020). | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Ann M. Blair | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404a | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1961 | | | | | | |
Ann Blair is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University and a specialist of early modern European intellectual and cultural history. Her interests include the history of science, especially traditional natural philosophy and the relations between science and religion (e.g. in The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science, Princeton University Press, 1997), and the history of education, the history of the book and of methods of working. Her articles include discussions of the methods of note-taking and of responses to overload in early modern Europe (e.g. in Critical Inquiry 2004, and the Journal of the History of Ideas 2003). In her forthcoming book with Yale University Press she examines the role and nature of Latin reference books 1450-1700, in light of earlier models and sources as well as the new resources and challenges that resulted from printing. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Kathleen Mary Coleman | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404a | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | | |
Kathleen Coleman specializes in Latin literature and the social history and material culture of the early Roman empire. She was born in what is now Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1953. After taking degrees at the University of Cape Town and the University of Rhodesia (now the University of Zimbabwe), she received her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1979. She then returned to the University of Cape Town to join the faculty, before taking up the Chair of Latin (1870) at Trinity College Dublin in 1993. In 1998 she moved to Harvard University, where she was named the James Loeb Professor of the Classics in 2010. She has published editions, with commentary, of Book 4 of the Siluae of Statius and the Liber spectaculorum of Martial, both with Oxford University Press. In tackling the latter project, she undertook an extensive investigation of Roman spectacle and punishment, for which much of the evidence survives in inscriptions and artefacts, rather than in literary sources. The result has been a long series of articles on various aspects of the culture and mentality that fueled the displays of the Roman amphitheatre. The combination of literature, epigraphy, and material culture has become a major focus of her research, leading her to such diverse topics as the ancient schoolroom, Roman mosaics, and the gardens of the Mediterranean world. She has also published articles on sociolinguistic features of Latin texts - specifically on parenthetical remarks in poems composed by Statius to honor his patrons and on bureaucratic language in official correspondence between the younger Pliny and the emperor Trajan - and she has published several studies of classical resonances in the work of the twentieth-century South African poet, Douglas Livingstone. She has delivered lectures on five continents, including the Jerome Lectures at the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (2010), and memorial lectures in honor of Sir Ronald Syme in Wellington, New Zealand (2008) and Oxford (2018). She has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (1987-88, 1992), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2013-14), and the Institute for Advanced Study (2017-18). In 2012 she was elected a Corresponding Member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften and in 2020 a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 2011 she served as the President of the American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies) and in 2020 she was elected President of the Internationale Thesaurus-Kommission, the international committee that oversees the publication of the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, which was begun in 1894 and comprises the most comprehensive lexicon of the Latin language ever undertaken. At Harvard, she has received multiple awards for teaching and mentoring: a Harvard College Professorship (2003-08); the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Prize for Senior Faculty, awarded by the Undergraduate Council (2005); the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2019); and the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Graduate Student Council (2020). Her greatest ambition is to visit every Roman province. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Christopher P. Jones | | | Institution: | Harvard University; Institute for Advanced Study | | | Year Elected: | 1996 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404a | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Christopher Jones was born in Chislehurst, Kent, England, in 1940, and was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he took his B. A. in Literae Humaniores ("Greats") in 1962. He came to the USA on a Henry Fellowship in 1962 and went on to do his Ph. D. at Harvard under Herbert Bloch and Glen Bowersock. He graduated in 1965 and was appointed to the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto, where he remained until 1992. In that year he returned to Harvard with a joint appointment in the Departments of Classics and History, and was named George Martin Lane Professor in 1997. He became emeritus in 2010. His research interests include the literature and history of the Roman imperial and Late Antique periods, and Greek epigraphy. He is the author of several books, most recently Kinship Diplomacy in the Ancient World (1999) and Philostratus, Life of Apollonius (3 vols., 2005-06). His hobbies include music, the nineteenth-century novel, and travel. In 2011 he was elected to the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris as a correspondant etranger, and in 2017 he was elected as associe etranger to the same. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Michael McCormick | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2003 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404a | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1951 | | | | | | |
Michael McCormick received his Doctorate at the Université Catholique de Louvain in 1979. He joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University later that year and was a research associate at Dumbarton Oaks from 1979-87. He moved to Harvard University in 1991, where he is currently Goelet Professor of Medieval History. Michael McCormick is among the most original and productive medieval historians active in the United States and Europe today. His early work was on 11th- and 12th-century historiography. He then published an important book on rulership in Late Antiquity. Meanwhile, he discovered five hundred previously-unknown dry-point glosses in the celebrated Palatine manuscript of Virgil. Most recently he published an impressive volume - the most important contribution to the subject since Pirenne's Mohammed and Charlemagne - on East-West communications and commerce in the early Middle Ages. Dr. McCormick is the author of Les annales du haut moyen âge (1975); (with P. Fransen) Index scriptorum operumque latino-belgicorum medii aevi. Nouveau répertoire des oeuvres médiolatines belges, III partie, vol. I: XII siècle, Oeuvres hagiographiques (1977); Index scriptorum operumque latino-belgicorum medii aevi. Nouveau répertoire des oeuvres médiolatines belges, III partie, vol. II: XII siècle, Oeuvres non hagiographiques (1979); Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West (1986); Five Hundred Unknown Glosses from the Palatine Virgil (Vat. Pal. Lat. 1631) (1992); and Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300-900 (2001). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2003. | |
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