Arts and Sciences Professor Christopher Ricks received a 2004 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, recognizing his contributions as a writer, editor, and teacher. This award for humanities scholars carries a three-year grant of approximately $1.5 million.

	Christopher Ricks with Core Curriculum students Laura Jane Swan and Abe Friedman (both CAS'03). Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Ricks is BU's William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities, a Core Curriculum professor, and codirector of the University's Editorial Institute. He plans to use the grant to compile and edit the works of Victorian legal thinker James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894) and to support educational and research programs at the institute, which offers a graduate training program in literary editing. The research will probably include work by Archie Burnett, a CAS Core Curriculum professor, who is editing the collected poems of Philip Larkin. Burnett is codirector of the Editorial Institute with Ricks and University Professor Geoffrey Hill. The grant will also fund postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and graduate students who assist with the Larkin and Stephen projects, and will allow Ricks, Burnett, and others to travel to conduct research. Also as part of the grant, Ricks plans to organize a conference on Stephen and to take a sabbatical leave for two of the next six semesters. He says the Stephen project will involve researchers from the School of Law, the Arts and Sciences history department, and other universities.

Considered one of the most important contemporary critics of English language poetry, Ricks has written influential analyses of John Milton, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Keats, T. S. Eliot-and Bob Dylan, and has edited works of Tennyson, Robert Browning, and A. E. Housman. His critical writings include Allusion to the Poets, Essays in Appreciation, Beckett's Dying Words, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, Keats and Embarrassment, and Dylan's Visions of Sin. He has taught at BU since 1986.

Also receiving a 2004 Distinguished Achievement Award were Columbia University historian Roger Bagnall, University of Pittsburgh philosopher Robert Brandom, and Princeton historian Anthony Grafton.