Announcements

2002 Distinguished Achievement Award Recipients Named

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has named the second group of Distinguished Achievement Award recipients. The awards are intended to honor scholars who have made significant contributions to the humanities and to enable them to teach and do research under especially favorable conditions while also enlarging opportunities for scholarship offered by their academic institutions.

The Distinguished Achievement Awards aim to underscore the decisive contributions the humanities make to the nation’s intellectual life. Amounting to as much as $1.5 million each, the awards will provide the recipients and their institutions with resources to deepen and extend humanistic research. In contrast to other notable academic award programs that benefit the individual scholar exclusively, the Distinguished Achievement Awards are designed to recognize the interdependence of scholars and their institutions. Accordingly, while this grant program recognizes the achievements of individuals, the grants themselves will support specific programs of activities that will enhance scholarship and teaching more broadly at the institutions with which the recipients are affiliated.

Five scholars were selected this year:

Michael Cook, Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Widely viewed as the most outstanding Islamicist in America today, Professor Cook has made major contributions to the intellectual history of the medieval Islamic world. His works on Muhammad and early Islamic theology have become classics. His recently published pioneering study of the interaction between morality and authority in Islamic belief and thought has garnered praise throughout the field and beyond. Professor Cook’s meticulous scholarship draws upon a remarkable range of medieval and modern legal, literary, and philosophical sources from across the lands and languages of the Islamic world. He has opened up important new avenues of scholarly inquiry for the study of Islamic civilization, and in the process has sensitized his readers to the general relevance of ethical questions in the study of history and society. Professor Cook is known as a conscientious teacher and mentor.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago. A versatile and influential historian of twentieth-century Russia, Professor Fitzpatrick has made major contributions to cultural, social, and political history. Observing Russian society in all its complexity, and drawing deeply on Russian sources, her scholarship embraces the concerns and calculations of the political elite as well as the perceptions, hopes, and fears of ordinary citizens. Her studies of the Russian Revolution, of the Soviet “cultural revolution,” and of everyday life under Stalinism—even when they evoke disagreement—have set the standard for the field. The exemplary depth and rigor of her scholarship are matched by her strong commitment to her students, a number of whom have gone on to become significant historians in their own right.

Michael McCormick, Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History at Harvard University. Professor McCormick’s scholarship brings both a rare level of erudition and enormous reach to the study of the early middle ages. Like few others in this field, he covers both the Latin West and Byzantium as he moves with ease from Constantinople to Toledo and from Nicaea to Aachen and Iona. His is a truly world-wide vision of a crucial half millennium. His most recent book which treats the evolution and the interaction of the economies of Western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean in the late antique and early medieval periods is a tour de force. In this massive study, he draws on a wide range of sources to trace the flows of people, goods, and ideas between East and West, thereby overturning the prevailing view that in this period these geographic spheres were largely unconnected. Alongside his exemplary and provocative scholarship, Professor McCormick is a teacher of great energy and enthusiasm.

Jerome McGann, John Stewart Bryan Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Among the most important literary scholars of recent decades, Professor McGann has had a major impact on humanistic scholarship in his own field and others. In numerous monographs, essays, and scholarly editions, his work has covered a range that includes the Romantic-era writers, Victorian literature, Modernism, the language poets, and women’s poetry. He has also made significant contributions to literary theory and the understanding and practice of textual scholarship. Professor McGann is a pioneer in the use of digital tools to expand traditional ideas about scholarship and teaching, most notably through the Rossetti Archive developed under the auspices of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, which he co-founded. Throughout his career, Professor McGann has also distinguished himself as a generous and influential teacher and colleague.

Susan Wolf, Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Regarded by many as one of the most original and distinguished philosophers of her generation, Professor Wolf is known for a set of provocative and highly original theses on the relationships among free will, moral responsibility, and objective values. Most recently, Professor Wolf has been endeavoring to reinstate “What is the meaning of life?” as a philosophical question of central importance. Her widely read and much discussed works have influenced both contemporary analytic philosophy and ethics, as well as fields outside philosophy such as law and psychology. In addition to her fresh and penetrating ideas, Professor Wolf is known for the clarity and elegance of her writing, as well as for her excellent teaching.

The award’s previous recipients were Peter Brown, Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University; Stephen Greenblatt, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University; Sabine MacCormack, Mary Ann and Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. Professor for the Study of Human Understanding, Professor of History, and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Alexander Nehamas, Edmund N. Carpenter II Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Princeton University; and Robert Pippin, Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor, Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. Previous awards are being used to bring co-workers and visiting scholars to the recipients’ institutions; to provide postdoctoral and graduate fellowships; to subsidize instruction in languages not taught by their institutions; and to support an array of scholarly projects including the preparation and translation of texts and ongoing archeological excavations.

The awards are for three years, with funds being granted to, and overseen by, the recipients’ institutions. Although the uses of funds differ in each case and reflect the wide range of scholarly interests and institutional settings, in general, the awards underwrite recipients’ salaries and research expenses, while also providing support for colleagues and students engaged in collaboration with the awardees. The recipients will be expected to spend at least two of the three years on their home campuses.

The recipients of the Awards were selected through an intensive process of nomination and review. Final selections were made by a panel of distinguished scholars led, this year as last, by the Foundation’s Chairman, Hanna H. Gray, President Emeritus and Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Chicago. The selection panel consisted also of Bernard Bailyn, Adams University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University; J. Paul Hunter, Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor Emeritus, Department of English Language and Literature and the College at the University of Chicago; Jerome B. Schneewind, Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University; John Shearman, Adams University Professor at Harvard University; and Patricia Meyer Spacks, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Recipients are chosen from such fields as classics, history, history of art, musicology, philosophy, religious studies, and all areas of literary studies, including the study of foreign literatures. Recipients of the awards must hold tenured appointments at US institutions of higher education.

Professor Gray observed that “The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has, from its inception, been dedicated to enabling first rate scholars and institutions to cultivate and to advance humanistic learning and understanding. These new awards are made in recognition of individuals who have excelled in that mission and whose work and influence continue to enrich the broader community of humanistic studies.”

Contact:
Martha Sullivan
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
(212) 838-8400

Further description of the Distinguished Achievement Awards, and the Foundation’s programs for research universities and humanistic scholarship is available here.