From News of the National Humanities Center, Autumn/Winter 2005
Kudos  A sampling of good news from our Trustees and Fellows
Tista Bagchi (Robert F. and Margaret S. Goheen Fellow 2001-02) has been named to a three-year term as a member of the Indian Council of Social Science Research. She teaches at the University of Delhi, where in 2003 she became a full professor in the Department of Linguistics. She has recently been coeditor of a volume of conference proceedings published in India from a multidisciplinary conference she helped organize in April 2004 on the theme "The Construction of Knowledge."

Harlan Beckley (Jessie Ball DuPont Fellow 1995-96) has been named acting president of Washington and Lee University for the 2005-06 academic year. Beckley, who has taught at Washington and Lee for more than thirty years, will serve in the interim position as the university searches for a new president.

Leslie M. (Bud) Baker, Jr. has become interim president of Old Salem, the restored 18th-century Moravian village at the original site of Salem, North Carolina.

Christopher Celenza (Burkhardt Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies 2003-04) has been awarded the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize for 2005 by the Renaissance Society of America for the book he worked on during his fellowship, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin's Legacy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

Lewis Dabney (GlaxoSmithKline Senior Fellow 2001-02) received a page one review in the New York Times Book Review of his new book Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature. Louis Menand wrote about it in the New Yorker, as did James Wood in the New Republic. Although he spent twenty years on his life of Wilson, Dabney is not done with the great man yet; next he plans to edit a collection of Wilson's work for the Library of America. For the text of the interview Dabney gave to the News of the National Humanities Center in 2002, visit nationalhumanitiescenter.org/newsletter2002/
dabney.pdf.

 Denis Donoghue (Mellon Fellow 1991-92; Distinguished Visitor, 1995-96, '96-97, '98-99; Trustee) has published The American Classics: A Personal Essay (Yale University Press, 2005).

Jean Bethke Elshtain (Lilly Fellow in Religion and the Humanities 2000-01; Trustee Emerita) joined the National Council on the Humanities, for the remainder of a six-year term expiring Jan. 26, 2010. The Council advises the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Stanley Fish (Fellow 1991-92) has signed a five-year contract to teach in the young law school at Florida International University. Fish retired last year as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Monika Fludernik (Mellon Fellow 1990-91) has recently edited two publications, Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments (Cross/Cultures 66, Rodopi, 2003) and, with Greta Olson, In the Grip of the Law: Trials, Prisons and the Space Between (Peter Lang, 2004).

Brad Inwood (Josephus Daniels Fellow* 1995-96) won the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2004, for his book The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics.

Jonathan Levin (NEH Fellow 1998-99) has been appointed dean of the School of Humanities at Purchase College, part of the State University of New York. Levin is currently completing the book he worked on as a fellow, Cultivating Nature: Essays in American Literary Ecology.

Steven Marcus (Fellow 1980-81, '81-82; Trustee) was the guest of honor at "The Long Nineteenth Century," a symposium in his honor at Columbia University on October 14, 2005. Speakers with a National Humanities Center connection included Andrew Delbanco, James Olney, Jonah Siegel, and Patricia Meyer Spacks.

 Michael Peletz (Mellon Fellow 1999-2000) is spending the 2005-06 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, completing work on a book project titled Diversity, Legitimacy, and Inequality: Gender Pluralism in Muslim and Buddhist Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times, which was one of the projects he was pursuing during his year at the Center. Also at the Institute are Louise McReynolds (NEH Fellow 1995-96; 1999-2000), Jeremy Popkin (Delta Delta Delta Fellow 2000-01), and Muhammad Zaman (Lilly Endowment Fellow in Religion and the Humanities 2000-01). Once he completes his fellowship, Peletz will be leaving Colgate University to join the Department of Anthropology at Emory University.

Piotr Sommer (Hurford Family Fellow 2004-05) received a glowing review of his book Continued in the Guardian (September 17, 2005), in which Mark Ford writes that Sommer "is increasingly coming to be seen as one of Poland's most exciting and influential poets." To hear Sommer read—in both English and Polish—visit:
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/newsletter2005/
nhcnewsspr2005sommer. htm.

Mary C. Sturgeon (NEH Fellow 1982-83) has published a new book, Corinth IX.3: The Assemblage from the Theater (The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2004).

Charlotte Sussman (Burkhardt Fellow of the American Council on Learned Societies 2003-04) and her husband Jeremy Green are both spending 2005-06 as visiting professors in the Duke University Department of English. They have also welcomed a new family member—Jacob Walter Green, who was born June 14, 2005.

Maureen Warner-Lewis (Benjamin N. Duke Fellow* 1993-94) has won three prizes for her book Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures (University of the West Indies Press, 2003): the 2004 Caribbean Studies Association Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award; Best Academic Publication in 2003 by the Book Industry Association of Jamaica; and Best Publication in the Faculty of Humanities and Education of the University of the West Indies, 2004.
*Endowed by the Research Triangle Foundation



From News of the National Humanities Center, Autumn/Winter 2005
National Humanities Center
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Revised: January 2006
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