The Ralph Waldo Emerson Award is a non-fiction literary award given by the Phi Beta Kappa society, the oldest academic society of the United States, for books that have made the most significant contributions to the humanities. Albert William Levi won the first of these awards, in 1960. [1]
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity. Friedrich Nietzsche thought he was "the most gifted of the Americans," and Walt Whitman called Emerson his "master".
Transcendentalism is a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday. Transcendentalists saw physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather than discrete entities.
The Phi Beta Kappa Society (ΦΒΚ) is the oldest academic honor society in the United States. It was founded at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, in December 1776. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal arts and sciences, and to induct outstanding students of arts and sciences at select American colleges and universities. Since its inception, its inducted members include 17 United States presidents, 42 United States Supreme Court justices, and 136 Nobel laureates.
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.
"The American Scholar" was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College at the First Parish in Cambridge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to regard the world. Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country's history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping "from under its iron lids" and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity.
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.
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.
Joel Miles Porte was an American literary scholar, who was an internationally renowned authority on the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Eloise Quiñones Keber was Professor Emeritus of Art History at Baruch College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she specialized in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Latin American art. She earned her Ph.D from Columbia University in 1984.
David S. Reynolds is an American literary critic, biographer, and historian who has written about American literature and culture. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, on the Civil War era—including figures such as Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Lippard, and John Brown. Reynolds has been awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, the Christian Gauss Award, the Ambassador Book Award, the Gustavus Myers Book Award, the John Hope Franklin Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a regular reviewer for The New York Review of Books..
The Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science is given annually by the Phi Beta Kappa Society to authors of significant books in the fields of science and mathematics. The award was first given in 1959 to anthropologist Loren Eiseley.
Jill Lepore is an American historian and journalist. She is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics.
Melissa Lane is an American academic and professor at Princeton University, where she holds the Class of 1943 professorship in the Department of Politics. She graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1989 with a degree in Social Studies and later earned a M.Phil and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge University, where she also served as a lecturer. Lane joined Princeton's faculty in 2009. Throughout her career, she has received numerous honors, including a Marshall Scholarship, Truman Scholarship, Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012, and the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize in 2015.
Martin Puchner is a literary critic and philosopher. He now is the Byron and Anita Wien Chair of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the founding director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University.
Laura Dassow Walls is an American professor emerita of English at the University of Notre Dame.
Jennifer Summit is an American scholar of medieval and Renaissance English literature and was a professor of English at Stanford University, where she was chair of the English department between 2008 and 2011. In 2013, Summit became dean of undergraduate studies at San Francisco State University. Summit is currently the provost at San Francisco State University.
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World is a book by American cultural and intellectual historian David Brion Davis, published by Oxford University Press in 2006. It recounts the history of slavery in a global context. It was praised widely as a full and comprehensive rendering of the subject and won the 2007 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award.
Scott Sowerby is a Canadian historian and Associate Professor in the Department of History, Northwestern University.
E. M. Rose is a historian of medieval and early modern England and a journalist, and the inaugural visiting scholar in the Program in Medieval Studies at Harvard University, best known for the book The Murder of William of Norwich. Rose worked as a producer at CNN for a decade prior to beginning a career as a historian. She has taught at Princeton University, Johns Hopkins, Villanova, and Baruch College.
Richard M. Capobianco is an American philosophy professor and one of the leading commentators on the thought of the 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger. His four books, Engaging Heidegger, Heidegger's Way of Being, Heidegger's Being: The Shimmering Unfolding, and In Heidegger's Vineyard: Reflections and Mystical Vignettes have led the way to a renewed appreciation of Heidegger's core concern with Being as temporal radiant emergence or manifestation. He has also brought Heidegger into closer proximity with American authors such as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and E. E. Cummings, and with English poets such as William Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins.