The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) has elected five New York University faculty as fellows: School of Medicine Professor Alexandra Leigh Joyner; filmmaker Spike Lee, the artistic director of the Kanbar Institute’s Graduate Film Division at the Tisch School of the Arts; Richard Revesz, dean of the School of Law; Stephen Schiffer, chair of the Philosophy Department; and Richard Sieburth, a professor of French and Comparative Literature.
The five are among 203 new Fellows and 24 new foreign honorary members elected by AAAS. Other new fellows include the following: former Vice President Albert Gore, Jr.; former Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; and Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt.
AAAS will welcome this year’s fellows at an induction ceremony on Oct. 6 at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Joyner, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, studies genetic and cellular events that orchestrate development and patterning of the central nervous system in mammals. She has co-authored, with John M. Sedivy, Gene Targeting (1995) and edited Gene Targeting: A Practical Approach (2000).
Lee, who holds an MFA from the Tisch School of the Arts, has directed numerous highly acclaimed films, including “She’s Gotta Have It (1986), “Do the Right Thing” (1989), “Malcolm X” (1992), and “He Got Game” (1993). He has been a member of the Tisch faculty since 2002 and has been nominated for two Academy Awards.
Revesz, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, has been dean of NYU’s School of Law since 2002. His work has been in the fields of environmental and regulatory law and policy, focusing on five distinct areas: federalism and environmental regulation, design of liability regimes for environmental protection, positive political economy analysis of environmental regulation, analytical foundations of environmental law, and the use of cost-benefit analysis in administrative regulation.
Schiffer works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. He is the author of several articles and of three books: Meaning (1972), Remnants of Meaning (1987), and The Things We Mean (2003).
Sieburth, who holds a joint appointment in NYU’s Departments of French and Comparative Literature, is an Ezra Pound scholar. His publications include Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont (1978), Signs in Action (1987), and an edition of Pound’s Pisan Cantos (2003). As a translator and editor, he has published English versions of several works, including Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary (1986), Michel Leiris’s Nights As Day, Days As Night (1988), and George Buchner’s Lenz (2004).
Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and others, AAAS has elected as fellows and foreign honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th.