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CHESTNUT HILL, MA -- Three Boston College faculty members have been elected as 2003 Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation's oldest and most illustrious learned society.
Based in Cambridge, Mass., the Academy -- which honors intellectual achievement, leadership and creativity in all fields -- was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin and John Hancock, and has elected as Fellows "the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation."
BC Professors Larry Wolff of Cambridge, a member of the History Department faculty; Kay Lehman Schlozman of Brookline, chair of BC's Political Science Department and J. Joseph Moakley Professor, and Anne Ferry of Boston, a retired professor and literary critic, will be inducted during an October ceremony for new members at the Academy's headquarters
"It's a huge honor. I'm humbled and gratified," said Schlozman, who noted that she is being inducted along with her long-time co-author Henry Brady of University of California at Berkeley. "It also is a very special pleasure to be elected with [BC History Professor] Larry Wolff, one of BC's gems."
Last year, Schlozman was named the inaugural holder of BC's J. Joseph Moakley Endowed Chair in Political Science, which honors the legacy of the late John Joseph Moakley -- a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1972 until his death in 2001-- who relentlessly pursued justice following the 1989 murders of six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter at the University of Central America in El Salvador.
A BC faculty member since 1974, Schlozman specializes in American politics and her areas of research interest include political activism; interest groups; parties and elections; voting behavior and public opinion. Schlozman is co-author of the books Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics; Organized Interests and American Democracy, and Injury to Insult: Unemployment, Class and Political Response. She also is editor of the book Elections in America; and author of numerous articles on activism, unemployment, gender issues in politics and citizen participation, and the Equal Rights Amendment.
She was co-winner of the American Political Science Association's 2002 Victoria Schuck Award for the best book published on women and politics for her most recent co-authored book, The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation.
"I feel tremendously honored to have been elected to the American Academy," Wolff said. "Looking over the list of the historians who are members, I see the names of many of my long-time models and heroes, and I'm deeply honored to be in their company. At the same time, I'm very excited about the many disciplines encompassed in the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in that regard I'm truly delighted to have been elected together with my good friend and colleague in political science at Boston College, Kay Schlozman.
"Because my research has largely focused on the eighteenth century," he added, "I'm especially thrilled to have been invited to join an academy created back then in the age of Enlightenment. It's hard to study the Enlightenment, as I do, without becoming, to some extent, entranced by the philosophical fantasy of a Republic of Letters, so pervasive at that time, an ideal of precisely the sort of intellectual dialogue and correspondence that the American Academy has represented since its founding."
Wolff's fields of interest include Eastern Europe, the Enlightenment, Poland, the Habsburg monarchy, early modern Rome and Venice, and history of childhood. He teaches courses in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe, focusing especially on Eastern Europe and the age of Enlightenment.
His recent research projects have focused on the French Enlightenment and Russia, the Venetian Enlightenment and Dalmatia, and Enlightenment perspectives on the Orthodox world in Eastern Europe. Wolff is the author of books including: Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, The Vatican and Poland in the Age of the Partitions: Diplomatic and Cultural Encounters at the Warsaw Nunciature, and Postcards from the End of the World: Child Abuse in Freud's Vienna.
He also studies and teaches the history of Poland and the Habsburg monarchy, and in 2002 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for a research project on the history of Galicia (Habsburg Poland). Wolff won student accolades with an annual Teaching Award voted by students of the BC chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 2001, and was a recipient of a Distinguished Faculty Award for research in the 2000-2001 academic year.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Academy members have included George Washington and Ben Franklin, named in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson, named in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill, named in the twentieth. The current membership includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. The Academy's 2003 class of 187 Fellows and 29 Foreign Honorary Members includes four college presidents, three Nobel Prize winners, and four Pulitzer Prize winners. According to the Academy, members "participate in studies and projects focusing on advancing intellectual thought and constructive action."
The BC professors elected this year join previous Boston College representatives: Monan Professor of Theology Lisa Sowle Cahill; Drucker Professor of Management Sciences Alicia Munnell, director of the University's Center for Retirement Research, and Sociology Professor William Gamson.
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