Announcements

2003 Distinguished Achievement Award Recipients Named

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has named the third group of recipients of its Distinguished Achievement Awards. Intended to underscore the decisive contributions the humanities make to the nation’s intellectual life, the awards honor scholars who have made significant contributions to humanistic inquiry and enable them to teach and do research under especially favorable conditions. At the same time, the awards enlarge opportunities for scholarship offered by the academic institutions with which the recipients are affiliated.

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 scholarship. 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 honors the achievements of individuals, the grants themselves will support specific institutional programs of activities that will enhance both research and teaching.

Four scholars were selected this year:

Roger S. Bagnall, Professor of Classics and History at Columbia University. An internationally respected and prolific historian of the Graeco-Roman world, Professor Bagnall has particular expertise in interpreting papyrus documents from Egypt during the period of Greek and Roman rule. Noted for his mastery of the technical skills which papryological research requires, his scholarship goes well beyond deciphering and elucidating the difficult texts he studies. His diverse contributions have shed important new light on the entire civilization of Greek and Roman Egypt by providing original and revealing accounts of the religion, language, art, literature, bureaucracy, and demography of that civilization. Professor Bagnall has played a central role in putting his subject at the forefront of classical studies while also being an exemplary academic citizen. He is a dedicated teacher, a vigorous promoter of the uses of computer technology in humanistic inquiry, and has served his field and his university to great effect.

Robert B. Brandom, Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Brandom is widely regarded as one of the most creative philosophers of language and mind working today. Studied intensively in America and Europe, especially Germany, and appealing to both the Anglo-American and Continental schools of philosophical thought, his writings offer a rare combination of detailed and precise argumentation with a broader and more synthetic view. Making it Explicit, his first book, is regarded as a leading contribution to understanding the nature of norms, rules, and commitments in thought and action—one of the most pressing problems in philosophy and in the social sciences—and has been compared to landmark works from the previous generation of philosophers. A forthcoming major work on Hegel is much anticipated, not least for its promise to offer a comprehensive analytic reading of a markedly non-analytic philosopher. Professor Brandom’s teaching and supervision of graduate students manifest the same quality and rigor of his own scholarly work.

Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. In numerous deeply learned studies on the classical tradition, the history of the book and of reading, the history of scholarship, and the history of science, Professor Grafton has enlarged our understanding of the many different ways in which Renaissance humanism sustained and transformed European cultural and intellectual life. Through emphasizing the close links between science and the humanities in the pre-modern world, his writings and teaching have changed the way Renaissance scholars in a number of disciplines see their fields. As meticulous in execution as their ideas are fresh, his works have also been pivotal in the field of intellectual history by bringing to the foreground of research the context and conditions of intellectual change, and by focusing on the previously neglected history of methodologies of learning such as textual criticism, historical chronology, and source documentation. It is notable, too, that Professor Grafton has combined his great intellectual distinction with an enthusiasm for communicating his contributions to humanistic scholarship to broad audiences without condescension.

Christopher Ricks, Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. Once described by W. H. Auden as “exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding,” Professor Ricks is known for his powers of observation, analytic acuity, scholarly ingenuity, and eloquence. Deeply immersed in multiple literary traditions, his extensive and influential critical writings have reached across centuries and genres to provide powerful interpretations of major poets and other writers, including Milton, Tennyson, Keats, Eliot, Beckett, and even, recently, Bob Dylan. In addition, he has an unsurpassed reputation as an editor of poetic texts. A humanistic scholar of international standing, Professor Ricks has trained generations of students and, through his generous mentoring of younger scholars, his influence has reached even further. He has also established an Editorial Institute at Boston University which is devoted to teaching this important aspect of literary and historical scholarship, now largely neglected in graduate programs. As a writer, editor, and teacher, Professor Ricks embodies the central importance of direct encounter with language in its most artful arrangements.

Distinguished Achievement Awards were first made in 2001 to 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, then at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, currently Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C, College of Arts and Letters Professor of History and Classics at the University of Notre Dame; 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.

The award’s second group of recipients, selected in 2002, consists of Michael Cook, Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago; Michael McCormick, Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History at Harvard University; Jerome McGann, John Stewart Bryan Professor of English at the University of Virginia; and Susan Wolf, Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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 a wide range of scholarly interests and institutional settings, in general, the awards underwrite a portion of recipients’ salaries and their 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. Previous years’ 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 areas not offered by their institutions; and to support an array of scholarly projects including the preparation and editing of texts, the development of electronic scholarly tools, seminars and meetings to explore promising new directions in the relevant fields, and ongoing archeological excavations.

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 by Patricia Meyer Spacks, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. 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; and Heinrich von Staden, Professor, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study. John Shearman, Adams University Professor at Harvard University, a panel member in the program’s first two years, participated in the early stages of this year’s selection before his untimely death in August. 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.

William G. Bowen, the Foundation’s president, stated: “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 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

For more information about The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, see http://www.mellon.org.
Further description of the Distinguished Achievement Awards, and the Foundation’s programs for research universities and humanistic scholarship is available here.