Caroline Walker Bynum, FBA (born May 10, 1941, in Atlanta, Georgia) [1] [2] is a Medieval scholar from the United States. She is a University Professor emerita at Columbia University and Professor emerita of Western Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She was the first woman to be appointed University Professor at Columbia. She is former Dean of Columbia's School of General Studies, [2] served as president of the American Historical Association in 1996, and President of the Medieval Academy of America in 1997–1998. [3]
Bynum attended Radcliffe College before completing a bachelor's degree with high honors in history at the University of Michigan in 1962, [4] and master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University in 1969. [2] Her honors include the Jefferson Lecture, a MacArthur Fellowship, and fourteen honorary degrees [2] including degrees from the University of Chicago in 1992, [5] Harvard University in 2005, [6] the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. [7] She taught at Harvard University from 1969 to 1976, the University of Washington from 1976 to 1988, Columbia University from 1988 to 2003, and the Institute for Advanced Study from 2003 to 2011. [8] In 2015, she was the Robert Janson-La Palme Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. [9]
Bynum's work has focused on the way medieval people, especially women, understood the nature of the human body and its physicality in the context of larger theological questions and spiritual pursuits. Bynum's work centers around late-medieval Europe. [10] Her focus on female piety has brought increased attention to the role of women in medieval Europe. [11]
In 2016 Bynum was elected a Fellow of the Ecclesiastical History Society. [23] In July 2017, Bynum was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. [24]
Jacques Martin Barzun was a French-born American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history. He wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and classical music, and was also known as a philosopher of education. In the book Teacher in America (1945), Barzun influenced the training of schoolteachers in the United States.
Anthony Thomas Grafton is an American historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he is also the Director the Program in European Cultural Studies. He is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Balzan Prize. From January 2011 to January 2012, he served as the President of the American Historical Association. From 2006 to 2020, Grafton was co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.
The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania—commonly called the Katz Center—is a postdoctoral research center devoted to the study of Jewish history and civilization.
David Brion Davis was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and founder and director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
Elliot R. Wolfson is a scholar of Jewish studies.
Thomas Francis Madden is an American historian, a former chair of the history department at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, and director of Saint Louis University's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Jeffrey F. Hamburger is an American art historian specializing in medieval religious art and illuminated manuscripts. In 2000 he joined the faculty of Harvard University, where in 2008 he was appointed the Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture. Hamburger received his B.A., M.A and Ph.D from Yale and has previously held professorships at Oberlin College and the University of Toronto. Elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy in 2001, he has won numerous awards for his publications, among them: the Charles Rufus Morey Prize of the College Art Association (1999), the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize in Art & Music (1999), the Otto Gründler Prize of the International Congress on Medieval Studies (1999), the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society (1998), the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America (1994), and the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities of the American Council of Graduate Schools (1991). His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2009 Hamburger was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2010, of the American Philosophical Society. In 2015 he was awarded an Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2022 he was awarded the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Mainz and the Internationale Gutenberg-Gesellschaft.
Michèle Lamont is a Canadian sociologist who is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and a professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is a contributor to the study of culture, inequality, racism and anti-racism, the sociology of morality, evaluation and higher education, and the study of cultural and social change. She is the recipient of the Gutenberg Award and the Erasmus award, for her "devoted contribution to social science research into the relationship between knowledge, power, and diversity." She has received honorary degrees from five countries. and been elected to the British Academy, Royal Society of Canada, Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques, and the Sociological Research Association. She served as president of the American Sociological Association from 2016 to 2017.
Alexander Lubotzky is an Israeli mathematician and former politician who is currently a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science and an adjunct professor at Yale University. He served as a member of the Knesset for The Third Way party between 1996 and 1999. In 2018 he won the Israel Prize for his accomplishments in mathematics and computer science.
James Simpson is an Australian-British-American medievalist currently serving as the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University.
James Hankins is an American intellectual historian specializing in the Italian Renaissance. He is the General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library and the Associate Editor of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum. He is a professor in the History Department of Harvard University. In Spring 2018, he is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.
Barbara Jane Newman is an American medievalist, literary critic, religious historian, and author. She is Professor of English and Religion, and John Evans Professor of Latin, at Northwestern University. Newman was elected in 2017 to the American Philosophical Society.
Monica H. Green is an author and a historian who was a professor of history at Arizona State University. She is an expert in the history of women's health care in premodern Europe, medicine and gender, and she specialises in the history of infectious diseases in the pre-modern period.
Caroline Jane Goodson is an archaeologist and historian at the University of Cambridge, previously at Birkbeck College, University of London. In 2003 she won the Rome Prize for medieval studies of the American Academy in Rome. In archaeological work, Goodson is most closely associated with the Villa Magna site in Italy where she has been field director since 2006.
Morton W. Bloomfield was an American Medievalist. He was the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of English at Harvard University. He is best known for his scholarly work, teaching and mentoring on Medieval literature, language, as well as contributions to intellectual history, literary criticism and theory. He also was one of the founders of the first U.S. national center for the humanities, the National Humanities Center.
Beatrice Gründler is a German Arabist and Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Free University of Berlin and President of the American Oriental Society. She was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize 2017 of the German Research Foundation.
Elizabeth Ann Clark was a professor of the John Carlisle Kilgo professorship of religion at Duke University. She was notable for her work in the field of Patristics, and the teaching of ancient Christianity in US higher education. Clark expanded the study of early Christianity and was a strong advocate for women, pioneering the application of modern theories such as feminist theory, social network theory, and literary criticism to ancient sources.
William Caferro is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History & Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University. His expertise is in medieval and Renaissance European history. His publications synthesize economic, military, social, literary, and historical trends.
Francesca Trivellato is an Italian historian, focusing on cultural, economic and social history in the early modern period. Her publications have covered Italian history, Jewish history and trade and cultural networks. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Geraldine Heng is Mildred Hajek Vacek and John Roman Vacek Chair in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where, as of November 2022, she was also affiliated with Middle Eastern studies, Women’s studies, Jewish Studies, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Social Justice. Heng's work focuses on literary, social and cultural encounters between societies in the period 500–1500 CE. She is noted as a key figure in the development of postcolonial approaches to the European Middle Ages, premodern critical race studies, and critical early global studies.