Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright, essayist and screenwriter in the 20th-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955). He wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits (1961). The drama Death of a Salesman is considered one of the best American plays of the 20th century.
James Alan McPherson was an American essayist and short-story writer. He was the first African-American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was included among the first group of artists who received a MacArthur Fellowship. At the time of his death, McPherson was a professor emeritus of fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government by an act of the U.S. Congress, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 29, 1965. It is a sub-agency of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Charles Richard Johnson is a scholar and the author of novels, short stories, screen-and-teleplays, and essays, most often with a philosophical orientation. Johnson has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Dreamer and Middle Passage. Johnson was born in 1948 in Evanston, Illinois, and spent most of his career at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He published his translation of the Hebrew Bible in 2018.
James C. Scott is an American political scientist and anthropologist specializing in comparative politics. He is a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies, subaltern politics, and anarchism. His primary research has centered on peasants of Southeast Asia and their strategies of resistance to various forms of domination. The New York Times described his research as "highly influential and idiosyncratic".
John Van Seters is a Canadian scholar of the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East. Currently University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, he was formerly James A. Gray Professor of Biblical Literature at UNC. He took his Ph.D. at Yale University in Near Eastern Studies (1965) and a Th.D. h.c. from the University of Lausanne (1999). His honours and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH fellowship, an ACLS Fellowship, and research fellowships at Oxford, Cambridge, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and National Research Foundation of South Africa. His many publications include The Hyksos: A New Investigation (1966); Abraham in History and Tradition (1975); In Search of History ; The Edited Bible (2006); and The Biblical Saga of King David (2009).
Samuel Ward (1572–1643) was an English academic and a master at the University of Cambridge. He served as one of the delegates from the Church of England to the Synod of Dort.
Richard John Alexander Talbert is a British-American contemporary ancient historian and classicist on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of Ancient History and Classics. Talbert is a leading scholar of ancient geography and the idea of space in the ancient Mediterranean world.
Jean Strouse is an American biographer, cultural administrator, and critic. She is best known for her biographies of diarist Alice James and financier J. Pierpont Morgan.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. She has written ten books, both fiction and non-fiction. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University, and is sometimes grouped with novelists such as Richard Powers and Alan Lightman, who create fiction that is knowledgeable of, and sympathetic toward, science.
Arthur Lubow is a journalist who has written for national magazines since 1975 and is the author of Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer (2016).
The Institute for Citizens & Scholars is a nonpartisan, non-profit based in Princeton, New Jersey that aims to strengthen American democracy by “cultivating the talent, ideas, and networks that develop lifelong, effective citizens.” It administers programs that support civic education and engagement, leadership development, and organizational capacity in education and democracy.
Caroline Walker Bynum, FBA 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, served as president of the American Historical Association in 1996, and President of the Medieval Academy of America in 1997–1998.
Daniel Aaron was an American writer and academic who helped found the Library of America.
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is an American historian, philologist and essayist, noted in particular for his studies of the institution of Cantonism, his critique of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's controversial two volume-work about Jews in Russia, Two Hundred Years Together, as well as translations of Jorge Luis Borges' works into Russian. He is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in History Department at Northwestern University where he teaches Early Modern, Modern and East European Jewish history.
The Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities is an honorary lecture series established in 1972 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). According to the NEH, the Lecture is "the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities."
The W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (AIAR) is an archaeological research institution located in East Jerusalem. It is the oldest American research center for ancient Near Eastern studies in the Middle East. Founded in 1900 as the American School of Oriental Research, it was renamed in 1970 after its most distinguished director and the father of biblical archaeology, William F. Albright. Its mission is to develop and disseminate scholarly knowledge of the literature, history, and culture of the Near East, as well as the study of civilization from pre-history to the early Islamic period.
Rick Lowe is a Houston-based artist and community organizer, whose Project Row Houses is considered an important example of social-practice art. In 2014, he was among the 21 people awarded a MacArthur "genius" fellowship.
Susan Laura Mizruchi is professor of English literature and the William Arrowsmith Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, religion and culture, literary and social theory, literary history, history of the social sciences, and American and Global Film and TV. Since 2016, she has served as the director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities.
