Humanities Endowment's Advisory Board Adds Nine New Members

The U.S. Senate has confirmed nine nominees submitted by President George W. Bush to serve on the National Council on the Humanities, the 26-member advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

"This accomplished group of scholars and humanities leaders brings to the National Council decades of personal and professional commitment to excellence," said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. "Their counsel and wisdom will strengthen the Humanities Endowment's service to the American people."

The National Council on the Humanities meets four times a year to review grant applications and to advise the NEH chairman. New members will be sworn in during the Council's meeting in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 27-28. National Council members serve staggered six-year terms.

The following council members were confirmed by the Senate in November:

Herman Belz (College Park, Md.) is a professor of U.S. and Constitutional history at the University of Maryland in College Park. He has authored four monographs, edited another work, and co-authored a standard text in his field. He is the author of more than 56 articles or chapters in books and 19 essays. He has won grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the American Bar Foundation for Legal History, among others. His first book was awarded the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association. He has served as director of graduate studies in the history department and as member of both the Campus Senate Executive Committee and the Graduate Council.

Craig Haffner (Los Angeles, Calif.) is the founding partner of Greystone Television, an Emmy Award winning production company for major broadcast and cable networks. He has worked in the Los Angeles entertainment industry since 1974 in a variety of capacities that include writer-producer for both the CBS Television Network and the ABC Television Network and as program director for KABC-TV. His film credits include Wake Island: Alamo of the Pacific; The True Story of Seabiscuit; Civil War Combat: Battle of Chancellorsville; The Real West; Egypt Beyond the Pyramids; In Search of History: Egypt's Great Queen; The American Revolution; and D-Day: The Total Story. He has served as the co-chairman of the National Trust for Historic Gettysburg, co-chairman of the TV Responds/Academy of Television Arts and Science, and on the board for the LAPD Historical Society.

James Davison Hunter (Charlottesville, Va.) is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Hunter has written seven books and a wide range of essays, articles, and reviews all variously concerned with the problem of meaning and moral order in a time of political and cultural change in American life. In 1998 he received the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion for Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation. In 1991 he was the recipient of the Gustavus Myers Award for the Study of Human Rights for Articles of Faith: Articles of Peace. In recent years, much of Hunter's time has focused on establishing and overseeing the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, a university-based, interdisciplinary research center concerned with understanding contemporary cultural change and its impact on individuals, institutions, and society.

Tamar Jacoby (New York, N.Y.) is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and writes extensively on immigration, citizenship, ethnicity, and race. Her newest book, Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American, was published in February 2004. Jacoby also received a fellowship from the NEH to support the research and writing of her 1998 book Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration. Her articles and essays have been published in numerous national magazines, newspapers, and journals. Before joining the Manhattan Institute, Jacoby served as the senior writer and justice editor for Newsweek magazine, where she wrote weekly articles on criminal justice, the Supreme Court, and other law-related topics. Between 1981 and 1987, she was the deputy editor of The New York Times op-ed page. In 2002, she co-founded The New Americans Project, a bipartisan group devoted to encouraging immigrants to become citizens. Jacoby is a graduate of Yale University has taught at Yale, Cooper Union, and the New School University.

Harvey Klehr (Atlanta, Ga.) is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University. His awards include the Emory Williams Teaching Award (1983), Emory University Scholar-Teacher of the Year (1995), and the Thomas Jefferson Award (1999). Klehr has authored eight books, including The Secret World of American Communism and Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. His most recent publication is In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage. Three of Klehr's books have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes. He has led NEH summer seminars on the topics of "Intellectuals and Communism" and "Communism and American Life."

Thomas Lindsay (South Orange, N.J.) is the executive vice president and provost of Seton Hall University. Lindsay has worked in higher education for more than 23 years as both a professor and an administrator. Before arriving at Seton Hall, he served as provost and vice president of academic affairs for the University of Dallas' two campuses (Irving, Texas, and Rome, Italy), as well as dean of the graduate school and director of the Institute of Philosophical Studies at the University of Dallas. His research has focused largely on the relationship between democracy and education, and he has published articles in the leading journals of his field including American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, and the American Journal of Political Science.

Iris Cornelia Love (Lincoln, Vt.) is an archeologist, professor, art and music critic, and lecturer. As a field archaeologist she directed the dig at Knidos, Turkey, where she discovered the Temple of Aphrodite, considered lost for centuries. She has worked extensively at Samothrace and other sites in Greece and in Italy. In addition to the many classical discoveries, Love has published on a variety of academic and cultural subjects. She also has served as editor-at-large for Architectural Digest and Parade Magazine. Love did her graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and has several honorary degrees.

Thomas Mallon (Washington, D.C.) is an author and former professor of English at Vassar College. He has written six novels: Arts and Sciences, Aurora 7, Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Two Moons, Mrs. Paine's Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, and most recently, Bandbox. He also has written non-fiction books on diaries (A Book of One's Own) and plagiarism (Stolen Words), as well as two volumes of essays: Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact. His work frequently appears in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications. The recipient of Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships, he served in 1998 as chairman of the fiction judges for the National Book Awards.

Ricardo J. Quinones (Claremont, Calif.) is professor emeritus of comparative literature at Claremont McKenna College. He has authored six books, including The Renaissance Discovery of Time, Dante, The Changes of Cain, and most recently, Foundation Sacrifice in Dante's Commedia. Quinones has published and reviewed numerous articles and delivered national and international lectures. He has served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, chair of the MLA's executive committee on comparative literature, and member of the California Council for the Humanities. Quinones earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has held academic positions as professor or visiting professor at many prestigious colleges and universities.