Keith Michael Baker (born 7 August 1938) is a British-born historian.
Baker received his bachelor's and master's degrees at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and completed a doctorate at University College London. [1] He began his academic career in the United States as a history instructor at Reed College and joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1965. While at Chicago, Baker was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978. He left Chicago for Stanford University in 1988, the same year the government of France named him a Knight of the Order of Academic Palms. Baker was elected to membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Philosophical Society in 1991 and 1997 respectively. [2] [3] He served as president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2000. [4] At Stanford, Baker has held the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professorship in the Humanities as well as the Anthony P. Meier Family Professorship in the Humanities. [5] He was one of three recipients of the American Historical Association's 2014 Award for Scholarly Distinction. [6]
Baker was co-editor of The Journal of Modern History between 1980 and 1989, and has served on the editorial boards of History of European Ideas (2007–2012), French Historical Studies (1976–1979), and Ethics (1979–1980). [4]
Baker is the father of Felix and Julian Baker, the accomplished biotech investors behind Baker Brothers Advisors.
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture, including certain fundamental questions asked by humans. During the Renaissance, the term "humanities" referred to the study of classical literature and language, as opposed to the study of religion, or "divinity". The study of the humanities was a key part of the secular curriculum in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more frequently defined as any fields of study outside of natural sciences, social sciences, formal sciences, and applied sciences. They use methods that are primarily critical, speculative, or interpretative and have a significant historical element—as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of science.
Gerhard Casper is a political scientist who is a former president of Stanford University from 1992 to 2000, a former Dean of the University of Chicago Law School from 1979 to 1987, and a former provost of the University of Chicago from 1989 to 1992. Casper was president of the American Academy in Berlin from July 2015 through July 2016; from August 2019 to January 24, 2020, he served as the institution's trustee-in-residence.
Stanley Louis Cavell was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.
Donald Kennedy was an American scientist, public administrator, and academic. He served as Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (1977–1979), President of Stanford University (1980–1992), and Editor-in-Chief of Science (2000–2008). Following this, he was named president emeritus of Stanford University; Bing Professor of Environmental Science and Policy, emeritus; and senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Sir David Nicholas Cannadine is a British author and historian who specialises in modern history, Britain and the history of business and philanthropy. He is currently the Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, a visiting professor of history at Oxford University, and the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He was president of the British Academy between 2017 and 2021, the UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. He also serves as the chairman of the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in London and vice-chair of the editorial board of Past & Present.
Don Michael Randel is an American musicologist, specializing in the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Spain and France. He is currently the chair of the board of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation, and a member of the Encyclopædia Britannica editorial board, and has previously served as the fifth president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, twelfth president of the University of Chicago, Provost of Cornell University, and Dean of Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences. He has served as editor of the third and fourth editions of the Harvard Dictionary of Music, the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, and the Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2002.
Gerald Graff is a professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Chicago in 1959 and his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1963. He has taught at the University of New Mexico, Northwestern University, the University of California at Irvine and at Berkeley, as well as Ohio State University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Chicago. He has been teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 2000.
Keith Gilbert Robbins was a British historian and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales, Lampeter. Professor Robbins was educated at Bristol Grammar School, Magdalen, and St Antony's College, Oxford.
Walter Eugene Massey is an American educator, physicist, and executive. President Emeritus of both the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and of Morehouse College, he is chairman of the board overseeing construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope. During his long career, Massey has served as head of the National Science Foundation, director of Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), chairman of Bank of America, and as trustee chair of the City Colleges of Chicago. He has also served in professorial and administrative posts at the University of California, University of Chicago, Brown University, and the University of Illinois.
Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt was an Israeli sociologist and writer. In 1959 he was appointed to a teaching post in the sociology department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. From 1990 until his death in September 2010 he was professor emeritus. He held countless guest professorships, at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the University of Zurich, the University of Vienna, the University of Bern, Stanford and the University of Heidelberg, among others. Eisenstadt received a number of prizes, including the Balzan prize and the Max-Planck research prize. He was also the 2006 winner of the Holberg International Memorial Prize. He was a member of many academies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History Journal. His daughter Irit Meir was a noted scholar of Israeli sign language.
Gordon Wright was an American historian. He focused on modern European history and was the pre-eminent historian on modern French history. He has been recognized nationally and internationally for his work and his method of teaching.
Michael Ellis Fisher was an English physicist, as well as chemist and mathematician, known for his many seminal contributions to statistical physics, including but not restricted to the theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena. He was the Horace White Professor of Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics at Cornell University. Later he moved to the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, where he was University System of Maryland Regents Professor, a Distinguished University Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.
Sir John Hamilton Baker is an English legal historian. He was Downing Professor of the Laws of England at the University of Cambridge from 1998 to 2011.
William Hardy McNeill was an American historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West (1963). He was the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987. In 1980-81 he held the George Eastman Professorship at the University of Oxford.
Charles Oscar Hucker was an American historian and Sinologist who was a professor of Chinese language and history at the University of Michigan. He was regarded as one of the foremost historians of Ming dynasty China and a leading figure in the promotion of academic programs in Asian Studies during the 1950s and 1960s.
Svetlana Leontief Alpers is an American art historian, also a professor, writer and critic. Her specialty is Dutch Golden Age painting, a field she revolutionized with her 1984 book The Art of Describing. She has also written on Tiepolo, Rubens, Bruegel, and Velázquez, among others.
Seth Lerer is an American scholar and Professor of English. He specializes in historical analyses of the English language, and in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he served as the Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014. He previously held the Avalon Foundation Professorship in Humanities at Stanford University. Lerer won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Children’s Literature: A Readers’ History from Aesop to Harry Potter.
David Leigh Donoho is an American statistician. He is a professor of statistics at Stanford University, where he is also the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the Humanities and Sciences. His work includes the development of effective methods for the construction of low-dimensional representations for high-dimensional data problems, development of wavelets for denoising and compressed sensing. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
Philip H. Knight endowed chairs and professorships were established at the University of Oregon in 1996, when Penny and Phil Knight donated US$15 million for 27 endowed chairs and professorships, "to provide academic areas with a source of funds for recruiting and retaining faculty of superior academic quality". Chairs and professorships must be awarded on merit only, not longevity. Collectively, the Knight endowed chairs and professorships receive over US$325,000 in bonuses per year. The award for a Knight Chair is US$50,000, and US$25,000 for a Knight Professorship.