PNNOnline.org

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has named three scholars for this year’s Distinguished Achievement Awards. 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.

The Board of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has approved the selection of this year’s recipients of the Distinguished Achievement Award. The awards are intended 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 honor scholars who have made significant contributions to humanistic inquiry and enable them to teach and do research under especially favorable conditions while enlarging opportunities for scholarship and teaching at the academic institutions with which they are affiliated.

In contrast to other notable awards that benefit individual recipients exclusively, the Distinguished Achievement Awards are designed to recognize the interdependence of scholars and their institutions. Accordingly, while these grants honor the achievements of individuals, the funds that accompany them support institutional activities that will enhance both research and teaching and permit the recipients to deepen and extend their own scholarship.

Three scholars were selected this year:

• Joseph Leo Koerner, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Professor Koerner is an art historian specializing in German painting of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Romantic period within the wider frame of European cultural history.
• Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor, Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Lear is a philosopher and psychoanalyst who studies imagination and its connections to virtue and meaning.
• Edward Muir, the Clarence L. Ver Steeg Professor in the Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. Muir is a leading historian of early modern Italy who introduced social scientific perspectives into the study of Renaissance history.

Each award is for a three year term, with funds being granted to, and overseen by, the recipients’ institutions. Although the recipients’ 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 their salaries and their research expenses, while also providing support for colleagues and students engaged in collaboration with the awardees who are 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 award recipients are chosen through an intensive process of nomination and review. Final selections were made by a panel of distinguished scholars led by Heinrich von Staden, Professor, School of Historical Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. 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; Stephen Greenblatt, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University; and 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, and 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.