The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) has elected seven New York University faculty as fellows.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) has elected seven New York University faculty as fellows: Gérard Ben Arous, director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences; John Freccero, a professor in the Department of Italian Studies; David Garland, a professor in the NYU School of Law and Department of Sociology; Lewis Kornhauser, a professor in the NYU School of Law; Tim Maudlin, a professor in the Department of Philosophy; James McBride, Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute; and David Stasavage, a professor in NYU’s Wilf Family Department of Politics.
Other AAAS fellows selected this year include the following: actors Audra McDonald and Christopher Plummer; Terry Gross, host and executive producer of “Fresh Air”; Janet Napolitano, president of University of California System and former U.S. secretary of homeland security; singer-songwriter Judy Collins; and Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation.
“We are honored to elect a new class of extraordinary women and men to join our distinguished membership,” said Don Randel, chair of the Academy’s Board of Directors. “Each new member is a leader in his or her field and has made a distinct contribution to the nation and the world. We look forward to engaging them in the intellectual life of this vibrant institution.”
Ben Arous, also Vice Provost for Science and Engineering Development and a professor of mathematics, is an expert on probability theory and its connections with other domains of mathematics, physics, and industrial applications.
Freccero, who also has an appointment in NYU’s Department of Comparative Literature and is viewed as the most authoritative Dante scholar in the United States, has authored In Dante's Wake: Reading from Medieval to Modern in the Augustinian Tradition (forthcoming) and Dante: The Poetics of Conversion as well as Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays, an edited volume of essays that examine The Divine Comedy.
Garland, Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and considered one of the world’s leading sociologists of crime and punishment, has authored Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies; Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory; The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society; and Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition.
Kornhauser, Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law, applies microeconomic analysis to legal and political institutions as well as to a diverse set of subjects that has ranged from fundamental aspects of jurisprudence to corporate law.
Maudlin, whose scholarship is focused on the foundations of physics, metaphysics, and logic, has authored Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity; Truth and Paradox; The Metaphysics Within Physics; Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time; and New Foundations for Physical Geometry, among other works.
McBride has penned The Good Lord Bird, which won the National Book Award for Fiction, The Color of Water and Miracle at St. Anna, which Spike Lee turned into a film of the same title, as well as Song Yet Sung.
Stasavage, who chairs the Wilf Family Department of Politics, is co-author of the forthcoming Taxing the Rich: Fairness and Fiscal Sacrifice Over Two Centuries. He has also authored States of Credit: Size, Power, and the Development of European Polities and Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain 1688-1789.
The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 10, 2015, at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Since its founding in 1780, the Academy has elected leading “thinkers and doers” from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Margaret Meade and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 20th. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.