Woodrow Wilson News & Publications
FOR RELEASE: Monday, November 13, 2006
CONTACT: Beverly Sanford, (609) 452-7007 x181
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THREE WOODROW WILSON FELLOWS RECEIVE NATIONAL MEDALS IN WHITE HOUSE CEREMONY
PRINCETON, NJ –An unprecedented three awards among the ten National Humanities Medals conferred last week by President George W. Bush were presented to Woodrow Wilson Fellows: Greek translator Robert Fagles WF ’55, classicist Mary Lefkowitz WF ’57, and historian of religion Mark Noll WF ’68.
Dr. Fagles, the Arthur Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton University, is a noted translator of Greek classics, including recent bestselling versions of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. After doctoral work at Yale University, he joined the faculty in English at Princeton, where he continued to teach until assuming emeritus status in 2002.
Dr. Lefkowitz is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Classical Studies Emerita at Wellesley College. A Woodrow Wilson Fellow during her Ph.D. work at Radcliffe, she is the author of nine books, including Greek Gods, Human Lives, which reemphasizes the centrality of divinity to Greek narrative and philosophy, and Not Out of Africa, in which she took issue with some scholars’ contention that Greek culture was derived from ancient Egypt.
Dr. Noll, the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, studies Christianity in 18th- and 19th-century American culture. Co-founder of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicalism, he was named one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential evangelicals. His books include The Civil War as a Theological Crisis and A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada.
The three 2006 medalists bring to nine the total number of fellows from Woodrow Wilson programs who have received the National Humanities Medal, one of the United States’ top cultural honors. First awarded in 1989 as the Charles Frankel Prize, the medal honors individuals and organizations whose work has deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities, broadened citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand America’s access to important humanities resources.
Awarded from 1945 through the early 1970s, the original Woodrow Wilson Fellowships, designed to attract the best and brightest undergraduates across a range of fields into college teaching, offered full support for doctoral studies to as many as 1,000 Fellows annually at the height of the program.
Today the alumni of the original Fellows program include 13 Nobel Laureates, one Fields Medalist in mathematics, two U.S. Poets Laureate, one recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, eight Pulitzer Prize recipients, 30 MacArthur Fellows, one Academy Award winner, and thousands of leading scholars and intellectuals, as well as leaders in business, the nonprofit sector, government, journalism, and the arts.
A partial list of some of the many distinguished Fellows from various Woodrow Wilson programs is available on the Woodrow Wilson Web site at http://www.woodrow.org/fellowships/about_fellows. Contact Beverly Sanford at (609) 452-7007, ext. 181 or sanford@woodrow.org for additional information.
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The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has its origins in a now-famous fellowship program, begun in 1945, which helped the United States create a great generation of college teachers and intellectual leaders. Today’s Woodrow Wilson continues to cultivate excellence in teaching and learning at every level of education, putting the arts and sciences at the service of democracy.
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