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Faculty Awards and Honors
Ricks named Oxford’s new Professor of Poetry
Eminent literary critic Christopher Ricks will succeed poet and academic Paul Muldoon as the University of Oxford’s new Professor of Poetry, a prestigious position that has previously been filled by Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden, and Seamus Heaney. Ricks, who has taught at BU since 1986, is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities, a Core Curriculum professor, and codirector of the University’s Editorial Institute. In 2003, he received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award for his work as a writer, editor, and teacher. He will remain on the BU faculty while assuming this fall the duties of the Oxford professorship, which include, according to the university, “giving a public lecture each term and the Creweian Oration at the University’s honorary degree ceremony every other year, setting the theme for, and judging, the Newdigate Prize and the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize, judging the prize for an English poem on a sacred subject, and generally encouraging the art of poetry in the University.”
The Professorship of Poetry was established in 1708 and its term is five years. Candidates must be nominated by at least 12 members of the university’s graduate body, Convocation. Ricks, an Oxford-educated scholar and a Fellow of the British Academy, is considered one of the most important critics of English language poetry. He has written influential interpretations of John Milton, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Keats, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and even Bob Dylan. His critical writings, which include Allusion to the Poets, Essays in Appreciation, Beckett’s Dying Words, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, and Keats and Embarrassment, are known for their wide range of literary reference and for spanning centuries and genres. He is also the editor of two major anthologies, The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse and The Oxford Book of English Verse, and has edited the work of Tennyson, Robert Browning, A. E. Housman, and James Henry.
H. Eugene Stanley elected to NAS
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently elected as a member H. Eugene Stanley, a CAS professor of physics and director of the Center for Polymer Studies. Stanley has extensively researched physical phenomena, producing new theories — one explaining the spontaneous self-stratification of granular mixtures, for instance — and new models, such as a percolation model for water linking the degree to which changes in the physical characteristics of liquid water result from local changes in its physical structure. In addition to his contributions to physics, Stanley has applied statistical physics to other fields, shedding light on heart-rate fluctuations and the nature of Alzheimer’s disease and creating statistical models of how stock market fluctuations mimic those found in physical phenomena such as earthquakes.
Established by Congress in 1893, the NAS is a private, nonprofit society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research and the application of such research for the general welfare. It also advises the federal government on scientific and technical matters. Election recognizes distinguished and continuing achievements in original research and is considered one of the highest honors given to a U.S. scientist or engineer.
Guggenheim fellowship to support CAS prof’s book on Chinese soldier and artist
Qianshen Bai, a CAS assistant professor of art history and the director of undergraduate studies, has received a Guggenheim fellowship to write the first comprehensive, book-length account of Wu Dacheng, a preeminent cultural and political figure in the waning days of Imperial China. Bai, who was one of 185 artists, scholars, and scientists chosen from more than 3,200 applicants for a 2004 Guggenheim fellowship, will spend part of next year in Asia researching and writing about Wu. As a politician and soldier, Wu led Chinese armies defending China’s northern border during the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 and 1895 and then was stripped of his official titles after China was defeated and Taiwan was ceded to Japan. Subsequently, he established one of the earliest painting societies in modern China and assembled a massive collection of art and antiquities. “Based on an investigation of the art and collections of Wu Dacheng and his friends, I will attempt to unfold and flesh out the relationships that prevailed between art and politics in 19th-century China,” says Bai, who has been studying the life and times of Wu for more than a decade. He says the Guggenheim grant makes his new book project possible and recognizes his earlier works, including Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century as well as three art books published in Chinese.
Art award given to John Walker
One of this year’s five Academy Awards in Art, given annually by the American Academy of Arts and Letters to honor exceptional accomplishment, went to John Walker, a CFA professor in the school of visual arts. Walker, with an international reputation as one of the leading abstract painters of the 1970s and 1980s, began in the 1990s painting landscapes praised by critics as some of his strongest work. In 2003, he won BU’s annual Kahn Award for Changing Light, a sequence of paintings meditating on light and space in the tidal pools and mud flats in a cove near his home in Seal Point, Maine. Walker, who has taught at CFA since 1993, has also received a Benjamin Altman Prize in Painting from the National Academy of Design, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, a Harkness fellowship, and a Gregory fellowship in painting from the University of Leeds, England.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1898 to “foster, assist, and sustain an interest in literature, music, and the fine arts,” and each year honors more than 50 artists, architects, writers, and composers with cash awards. Walker’s award is $7,500.
Cathal Nolan to serve as an FDD fellow
Cathal Nolan, a CAS associate professor and the executive director of the International History Institute, has been accepted as a 2004–2005 academic fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). As part of his fellowship, Nolan will participate in an educational program about terrorism and how democratic states combat the threat, to be held in Israel from May 29 through June 8. The program includes lectures by academics, diplomats, and military officials from India, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, and the United States as well as field trips to military, police, and immigration facilities throughout Israel. The FDD is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. It conducts research on, and seeks to educate about, the war on terrorism and explores, through independent analysis, the historical, cultural, philosophical, and ideological factors that drive terrorism and threaten individual freedoms.
PEN to Pinsky
This year’s PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, given in even-numbered years to “an American poet at the height of his or her powers,” was awarded to Robert Pinsky, a CAS professor of English and a former U.S. poet laureate. The poet chosen for the $5,000 award “is one for whom the exceptional promise seen in earlier work has been fulfilled, and who continues to mature with each successive volume of poetry.” Pinsky is the author of six collections of poems, including The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966–1996, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and coeditor of Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology. He has also written four books of criticism, including The Sounds of Poetry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. One of his two books of translation, The Inferno of Dante, received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. His many honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award.
Ha Jin to be first VCCA award recipient
Ha Jin (GRS’94), a CAS professor of creative writing and winner of the 1999 National Book Award for his novel Waiting, has been named the inaugural recipient of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) Award for Excellence in the Arts. The award, to be given annually to a prominent writer, visual artist, or composer whose significant achievement in the arts is widely recognized, includes a paid, one-month residency at the VCCA, an honorarium, and a travel stipend. Jin’s residence is in July. “Ha Jin, more than any other fiction writer, understands that place where mind and spirit intersect,” says Janet Neipris, chair of the VCCA Fellows Council. “He is incisive and insightful in his haunting portraits of life in China, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. In the tradition of Chekov, he knows the territory of the human heart, and has the courage to see and tell the truth.” The VCCA is a year-round working retreat providing meals, rooms, and studios to selected professional artists from around the world. Since 1971, it has hosted more than 3,000 writers, visual arts, and composers.
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May 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations