| | 61 | Name: | Dr. Sarah Stroumsa | | | Institution: | Hebrew University of Jerusalem | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1950 | | | | | | |
Sarah Stroumsa is the Alice and Jack Ormut Professor Emerita of Arabic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her academic education at the Hebrew University, as well as at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. She taught in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature and the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she served as Vice-Rector and then as Rector. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, as well as of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. She is a laureate of the Humboldt Research Award, a holder of the Italian Order of Merit, and a recipient of the Leopold Lucas Prize.
Her academic focus is the history of philosophical and theological thought in Arabic in the early Islamic Middle Ages, and the medieval Judaeo-Arabic philosophical literature. She strives to offer a multifocal approach to the study of intellectual history, an approach she used in her publications as well as in the Intellectual Encounters of the Islamicate World, a master’s program she initiated with her colleagues Sabine Schmidtke and Sari Nusseibeh. Among her published books in English: Freethinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Rāwaādī, Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, and Their Impact on Islamic Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Maimonides in his World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton: Princeton University, 2010); Dāwūd al-Muqammaṣ, Twenty Chapters (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2016); and Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). Her current work focuses on methodological questions in the study of medieval intellectual history (e.g. linear and non-linear tracing of influences, the reliability of unique sources, and the reconstruction of unwritten elements of the texts, such as mimic and tone). | |
| 62 | Name: | Dr. Joan Thirsk | | | Institution: | University of Oxford | | | Year Elected: | 1982 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1922 | | | Death Date: | October 3, 2013 | | | | | | |
A scholar of agrarian history, Joan Thirsk was Reader in Economic History at the University of Oxford from 1965 to 1983. No one did more to emphasise the significance of the land in early modern England than Dr. Thirsk, whose writings represent an important contribution to the national history while also pointing the way for future research. Dr. Thirsk's many authoritative works include English Peasant Farming (1957); Tudor Enclosures (1959); The Agrarian History of England Wales, IV, 1500-1640 (1967), V, 1640-1760 (1984); The Restoration (1976); Economic Policy and Projects (1978); Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day (1997); Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions, 1500-1760 (2007); and Hadlow: Life, Land and People in a Wealden Paris, 1460-1600 (2007). She also served as the editor of Agricultural History Review (1964-72). She was an honorary fellow of St. Hilda's College and Kellogg College and had also taught at the London School of Economics. Joan Thirsk was elected an International member of the American Philosophical Society in 1982. She died October 3, 2013, at the age of 91 in Kent, England. | |
| 63 | Name: | Dr. Samuel E. Thorne | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1959 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | [405] | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1907 | | | Death Date: | 4/7/94 | | | | |
| 64 | Name: | Dr. Brian Tierney | | | Institution: | Cornell University | | | Year Elected: | 1990 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1922 | | | Death Date: | November 30, 2019 | | | | | | |
Internationally recognized as a leading scholar of medieval canon law, Brian Tierney was among the most distinguished intellectual historians of the Middle Ages. After serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II, Dr. Tierney received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Cambridge University. He taught at Catholic University and at Cornell University, where was the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus. He was the recipient of Guggenheim Fellowships and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was awarded the honorary degrees of Doctor of Theology from Uppsala University, Sweden, and Doctor of Humane Letters from Catholic University. He was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and in 1994 he received the Award for Academic Distinction of the American Historical Association. Dr. Tierney authored many articles and several books, including Foundations of the Conciliar Theory (1955), Medieval Poor Law (1959), The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300 (1964), Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150-1350 (1972) Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150-1650 (1981), and The Idea of Natural Rights, Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law, 1150-1625. Brian Tierney died November 30, 2019 in Syracuse, New York at the age of 97. | |
| 65 | Name: | Professor David Tracy | | | Institution: | University of Chicago Divinity School and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1939 | | | | | | |
David Tracy is the Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies, and Professor Emeritus of Theology and the Philosophy of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought.
A noted teacher, scholar, philosopher of religion and theologian, Tracy earned his doctorate in 1969 at the Gregorian University in Rome. He taught at the Catholic University of America from 1967 to 1969, when he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He was also a member of the Committee on Social Thought. His courses focused on a wide variety of courses in philosophy, in historical and contemporary theology, in philosophical systematic and constructive theology and hermeneutics, and on issues and persons in religion and modern thought—and as well as other courses on Greek and modern tragedy in the university’s Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. He was one of the founding editors of Religious Studies Review and for many years on the editorial board of Concilium.
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982 and has lectured in universities and colleges in the United States and around the world, including Scotland, where he delivered the prestigious Gifford lectures which were established to promote and diffuse the study of natural theology.
His publications include Blessed Rage for Order (1979), The Analogical Imagination (1981), Plurality and Ambiguity (1987), Dialogue with the Other: The Inter-religious Dialogue (1990), On Naming the Present: Reflections on God, Hermeneutics, and Church (1994) and two books of his essays - Fragments: the Existential Situation of Our Time (2020) and Filaments: Theological Profiles (2020). He is currently writing a book based on his Gifford lectures, "Infinity and Naming God."
David Tracy was elected a member of the Americn Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 66 | Name: | Dr. Speros Vryonis | | | Institution: | New York University | | | Year Elected: | 1974 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | Death Date: | March 11, 2019 | | | | | | |
Speros Vryonis, Jr., was one of the most eminent Byzantinists of his generation. After a distinguished career at UCLA, he became the founding director of the Alexander S. Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies at New York University, from which he retired as Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Civilization Emeritus. Dr. Vryonis's extensive work on the history and culture of the Greeks from Homer to the present, and on their relations with the Slavic, Islamic, and New Worlds, includes the seminal The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century; Byzantium and Europe; Studies on Byzantium, Seljuks and Ottomans; Byzantium: Its Internal History and Relations with the Islamic World; and Studies in Byzantine Institutions and Society. He also edited, among other volumes, Aspects of the Balkans: Continuity and Change (with Henrik Birnbaum); Essays on the Slavic World and the Eleventh Century; Islam and Cultural Change in the Middle Ages; Individualism and Conformity in Classical Islam (with Amin Banani); and Islam's Understanding of Itself (with Richard G. Hovannisian). A graduate of Harvard University (Ph.D., 1956), Dr. Vryonis was a Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Scholar as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Medieval Academy of America. Toward the end of his life he directed the Speros Basil Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism. Speros Vryonis died March 11, 2019 in Sacramento California at the age of 90. | |
| 67 | Name: | Dr. Rene Wellek | | | Institution: | Yale University | | | Year Elected: | 1969 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | [405] | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1903 | | | Death Date: | 11/10/95 | | | | |
| 68 | Name: | Dr. Martin Litchfield West | | | Institution: | All Souls College, University of Oxford | | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | Death Date: | July 13, 2015 | | | | | | |
Martin Litchfield West wrote the following biography in 2010, the year he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. He died July 13, 2015, at the age of 77.
I was born in London on 23 September 1937, the first child of Maurice Charles West, Civil Engineer, and his wife Catherine. We lived through the Second World War at Hampton, Middlesex, far enough out of London to receive only occasional bombs in the neighborhood, though the house was damaged one night.
The first seven years of my education were spent at a local primary school. Then I was put into the more challenging and stimulating milieu of Colet Court, the junior school attached to one of the major British independent schools, St. Paul's, and after three years I graduated to the main school. There was a strong emphasis there on Latin and Greek, which suited my growing interest in languages, and I had some excellent teachers. In 1955 I went with a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, to pursue the four-year Literae Humaniores course. Among those who taught and influenced me there were Gordon Williams (my college tutor), E. R. Dodds, and Eduard Fraenkel, whose famous seminars were a daunting test-bed for fledgling scholars.
In 1959 I embarked on graduate work, choosing Hesiod as my area of study and Hugh Lloyd-Jones as my supervisor. He did me a great service by arranging for me to spend the next summer semester in Germany under Reinhold Merkelbach. Besides raising my German to a state of fluency, those months opened my eyes to different approaches, and I made the acquaintance of such powerful scholars as Walter Burkert, Rudolf Kassel, and Winfried Bühler, who were to remain lifelong friends.
Before leaving for Germany I had been elected to a three-year Junior Research Fellowship at St. John's College, Oxford, which I took up on my return. On the last day of 1960 I married my wife Stephanie, whom I had met at Fraenkel's seminars; she was now also doing graduate work and was to establish herself as a scholar in her own right. In 1963, following several unsuccessful applications for permanent positions in universities, I had the good fortune to be offered a Fellowship in Oxford at University College. The same summer we had our first child and I completed my doctoral thesis, a commentary on Hesiod's Theogony (augmented with a critical text and published in 1966).
I taught at University College for eleven years, while continuing to publish. In the fall of 1967 I spent a sabbatical term at Harvard as a visiting lecturer - my first experience of the USA. In 1974 I was asked whether I would be interested in the chair in Greek at Bedford College, London; it was intimated that I could continue to live in Oxford, where Stephanie was now employed and where our children were at school. I accepted the offer and began a new life of travelling up to London for a few days each week.
The London University scene, initially tranquil, became turbulent in the early eighties. There was official pressure for 'rationalization,' for mergers of colleges and departments, and after strenuous discussions it came about that Bedford merged with Royal Holloway College. This meant that my workplace was transferred from central London to a site out in Surrey, a little closer to Oxford but more awkward to reach by public transport. This forced me, at the age of 47, to learn to drive a car, something I had never before needed to do but much enjoyed doing once I mastered it.
During my London period I had two further memorable extended stays abroad: in 1980 a month in Japan as a guest of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and in 1986 a quarter as Visiting Professor at UCLA.
In 1991 I was successful with an application for a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College Oxford, as desirable a position as any in the academic world, and one that freed me from the regular commuting to Surrey and from increasingly tiresome administrative chores. It gave me the leisure to apply myself to learning Akkadian and some other Semitic languages, which I wanted to do in order to write a book on West Asiatic elements in early Greek poetry (The East Face of Helicon, 1997). I believe it is valuable for a classicist to learn other ancient languages besides Greek and Latin, and as a result of doing so I have been able, since 1994, to publish half a dozen articles on Mesopotamian and Iranian topics, and recently to complete a translation of Zoroaster's Gathas (to appear in August 2010). In 2000 my work received a wholly unexpected tribute in the form of the international Balzan Prize for Classical Antiquity.
I reached the statutory age of retirement in 2004, and my status at All Souls changed to that of Emeritus Fellow. I remain active in research and publication, and take pleasure in the tokens of recognition that continue to descend on me from time to time, such as the Festschrift produced for my 70th birthday in 2007, the honorary doctorate conferred by the University of Cyprus in 2008 (which came with a splendiferous robe and hat), and most recently my election to the American Philosophical Society.
Martin West | |
| 69 | Name: | Dr. Ronald G. Witt | | | Institution: | Duke University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | Death Date: | March 15, 2017 | | | | | | |
Ronald Witt was a distinguished scholar of Renaissance humanism with an extensive publication record. His book In the Footsteps of the Ancients is considered the most important book on the medieval origins of Renaissance humanism in the past fifty years, and it has gained widespread international recognition as a ground-breaking contribution to the early history of the humanist movement in Italy. He is a recipient of the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History and of the American Historical Society's Marraro Prize, given for the best book in Italian studies. His election as vice president (with automatic succession to the office of president) of the Renaissance Society of America was further testimony to his leadership in the field of Renaissance studies. At the time of his death on March 15, 2017, at age 84, he was William B. Hamilton Professor of History Emeritus at Duke University, where he had taught since 1971, Dr. Witt received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (1965). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2004. | |
| 70 | Name: | Dr. Ying-shih Yu | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1930 | | | Death Date: | August 1, 2021 | | | | | | |
An influential teacher and prolific author, Ying-shih Yu has long earned international recognition as the pre-eminent scholar of Chinese history. The breadth of his research, ranging from views of life and death in first and second-century China, through intellectual history and political culture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to eighteenth through twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history, is staggering. In his work he combines close and subtle scrutiny of fresh source materials to broad generalization about main themes in Chinese history and culture. His research on a merchant ethos in Chinese society from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, for example, has been influential in articulating the belief in a Confucian work ethic in modern East Asian countries. In May 2001 a group of his former students gathered in Princeton for an unusually stimulating two-day conference on topics ranging over more than two thousand years of Chinese history. Born in China in 1930, Dr. Yu received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1962 and served as assistant professor there from 1969-77 before moving to Yale University as Charles Seymour Professor of History. In 1987 he joined the faculty of Princeton University as Professor of Chinese Studies and History and became Gordon Wu '58 Professor of Chinese Studies Emeritus in 2001. Dr. Yu's many written works include Views of Life and Death in Late Han China (1962); Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations (1967); Fang I-chih wan chieh k'ao (The Death of Fang I-chih), 1611-1671 (1972); "Intellectual Breakthroughs in the Tang-Sung Tradition"; "'O Soul, Come Back!' A Study in the Changing Conceptions of the Soul and Afterlife in Pre-Buddhist China"; Intellectual History in Late Imperial China: Modern Interpretations (1984); Shih yu Chung-kuo wen-hua (History of Chinese Culture) (1987); and The Radicalization of China in the Twentieth Century. With fellow APS member John Hope Franklin, Dr.Yu shared the 2006 John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity. He was elected a member of the Academia Sinica, Taiwan in 1974 and of the American Philosophical Society in 2004. He died on August 1, 2021 in Princeton, NJ. | |
| |