Announcements

2006 Distinguished Achievement Award Recipients Named

This year’s recipients of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Awards have been chosen. Intended to underscore the decisive contributions the humanities make to the nation’s intellectual life, the awards, amounting to as much as $1.5 million each, honor scholars who have made significant contributions to humanistic inquiry. They enable awardees to teach and do research under especially favorable conditions while enlarging opportunities for scholarship and teaching at the academic institutions with which the recipients are affiliated.

The awards will provide the recipients and their institutions with resources to deepen and extend humanistic studies. In contrast to other notable academic award programs that benefit individual scholars 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:

Ellen Rosand, Professor of Music History at Yale University. An inventive and influential musicologist, Rosand’s voluminous publications have resulted in important new ways of understanding 17th century music and opera. Her monumental studies of the Venetian opera have arguably reshaped the entire subject, and her recovery of the neglected composer and singer Barbara Strozzi has added a significant figure to the musical canon. Her forthcoming study of Monteverdi’s late operas also promises to break important new ground. Rosand’s scholarship combines deep investigation of the archival evidence with innovative examination of opera’s literary content and its dramatic and musical conventions and is a model of clarity and integrity. Her influence has been felt inside as well as outside of musicology. Numerous productions and recordings have been based on her scholarship. The doctoral students she has mentored have emerged leaders in the field, while her undergraduate Introduction to Opera has, it is said, turned several generations of Yale students into opera fanatics. Former undergraduates have gone on to occupy important positions in opera companies and artistic management organizations throughout the country.

Peter Schäfer, Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Widely considered among the foremost scholars of Judaism in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Schäfer has had a major impact, not only on specialists in Judaic studies, but also on a much broader range of scholars in humanistic and religious fields, including early Christianity, mysticism, Renaissance literature, and numerous other subjects. A meticulous scholar, he exemplifies traditional erudition of the highest order in tandem with openness to new questions and approaches. His works have covered both the central corpus of rabbinic literature, and significant but less-well-known works of Jewish mystical literature and related subjects produced in the same period. In addition to the great influence of his analytical and historical studies, Schäfer has brought his scholarly energy and vision to the creation of key resources for the field in scholarly editions of major primary source texts and related tools for critical study. Hailed as an exceptional teacher and colleague, Schäfer is credited with, among other things, fostering a revival of Jewish studies in Germany and, through his students who now occupy important academic posts in many countries, throughout Europe. 

Eric Sundquist, UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature at the University of California at Los Angeles. One of the most accomplished scholars of American literature, Sundquist has done ground-breaking work covering a swath of literary history from the antebellum era through the contemporary period. Much of his work has dealt in one way or another with literary representations of race in America and its relation to the nation’s social and political development. In particular, he has developed important ideas about the interdependence of dominant Anglo-European and “minority” literatures, particularly those produced by African-American and Jewish authors, and provided highly nuanced treatments of the larger imaginative themes of exodus, diaspora, and longing for redemption as expressed by these writers. His influence on American literary studies has been further extended by his editing of texts, anthologies, and volumes of critical essays. While continuing his scholarly contributions, Sundquist has rendered great service to the institutions with which he has been associated in senior academic administrative roles.

Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Stanford University. Ranging broadly in both regional and chronological terms, White’s work on Native American history, environmental history, and the history of the North American West is widely regarded by his fellow historians of the United States as transformative. In addition, his scholarship has spoken to an even wider array of fields – including Atlantic history, the history of empires and of nation-states, the history of cultural interaction and exchange – and has informed those who work on questions of social policy. White is now at work on reconceptualizing the history of railroads and their myriad consequences is in the works. He is a superb scholar who brings painstaking empirical research in a vast array of archives, conceptual daring, and imaginative argumentation to bear on understanding the complex historical interactions between culture, geography, and the material world. Among graduate students and young faculty members, he is known as an exacting, demanding, and inspiring supervisor.

The Mellon Foundation has conferred Distinguished Achievement Awards every year since 2001. Previous recipients have been:

2001: 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.

2002: 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.

2003: Roger S. Bagnall, Professor of Classics and History at Columbia University; Robert B. Brandom, Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh; Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University; and Christopher Ricks, Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University.

2004: John Dower, Ford International Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Michael Fried, James R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and Professor of the History of Art at the Johns Hopkins University; Philip Gossett, Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor of Music at the University of Chicago; and Christine Korsgaard, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University.

2005: Timothy J. Clark, George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair and Professor of Modern Art at the University of California at Berkeley; Thomas Nagel, University Professor at New York University; Stephen Owen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University; Joseph Roach, Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Theater and Professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University.

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 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; Elizabeth Cropper, Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; 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 Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University; and Heinrich von Staden, Professor, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study.

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.

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

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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.