Detlef elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Other new members this year include Michelle Obama & gender theorist Judith Butler
Detlef has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This year, more than 200 individuals with compelling achievements in academia, business, government, and public affairs have been elected to the Academy.
The Academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good. The Academy’s dual mission remains essentially the same 239 years later with honorees from increasingly diverse fields and with the work now focused on the arts, democracy, education, global affairs, and science.
The 2019 class includes poet and foundation president Elizabeth Alexander (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), gender theorist Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley), author Jonathan Franzen, and author and former First Lady Michelle L. R. Obama. The 239th class of new members is available at this link.
“While the work of this class includes work never imagined in 1780 – such as cultural studies, cybersecurity, disease ecology, nanotechnology, paleoclimatology, and superconductivity – these members embody the founders’ vision of cultivating knowledge that advances, in their words, a ‘free, virtuous, and independent people,’” said Nancy C. Andrews, the Chair of the Board of the American Academy.
The new class will be inducted at a ceremony in October 2019 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and join the Academy members who came before them, including Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton in the eighteenth century; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Maria Mitchell, and Charles Darwin in the nineteenth; Albert Einstein, Margaret Mead, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the twentieth. Other notable living members are Daniel Barenboim, Judith Dench, Norman Foster, Bill Gates, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Herbie Hancock, Yo-Yo Ma, Toni Morrison, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Barack Obama, Martin Scorsese, Twyla Tharp, and Denzel Washington.
