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| Vol. 24, No. 8 | October 30, 1998 |
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| Vol. 24, No. 8 | October 30, 1998 |
SHE IS FIRST WOMAN AT COLUMBIA TO RECEIVE THE HONOR
By Hannah Fairfield
Caroline Walker Bynum, a scholar of cultural and religious history, has been named University Professor, the highest faculty distinction at Columbia.
She is the first woman to receive the honor, which was given by the University Trustees earlier this month. In making the appointment, the Trustees increased the number of University Professors from seven to eight.
Bynum joined Columbia in 1988, after teaching at Harvard and the University of Washington. She has held the Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Chair in History since 1990. She has taught undergraduate and graduate classes in all aspects of late antique and medieval history, church history from the early church through the Reformation and intellectual history from Plato to the 17th century. She also served as the dean of General Studies and associate vice-president of Arts and Sciences for Undergraduate Education in 1993-94.
"I am very pleased and honored," Bynum said. "A University Professorship moves me beyond any specific department and allows me to teach wherever in the University I wish. That's an attractive possibility, because I have always done work that is thought of as interdisciplinary and have drawn students from many disciplines, such as religion, art history, philosophy, comparative literature and anthropology."
Bynum was a MacArthur Fellow from 1986-1991 and holds honorary degrees from six American universities. She was elected to the Medieval Academy of America in 1989, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993 and to the American Philosophical Society in 1995. In addition to awards for her scholarship, she was also recognized for her excellence in teaching when Columbia awarded her the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching in 1997.
"Caroline's teaching and scholarship exhibit an enormous range in both method and subject matter," President George Rupp said. "At the same time, her work is impressively rigorous and thorough. I am delighted that she will continue to exercise this double set of strengths as she joins the distinguished ranks of our University Professors."
Several of the 10 books she has authored or edited have won prestigious awards. Holy Feast and Holy Fast received the Governor's Award of the State of Washington and the Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History. Fragmentation and Redemption won the Trilling Prize for the best book by a Columbia faculty member and the American Academy of Religion's Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion. The Resurrection of the Body won the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize and the Barzun Prize of the American Philosophical Society for the best work in cultural history.
"When we try to think of the great historians working today, the name Caroline Bynum comes immediately to mind," Provost Jonathan R. Cole said. "With consummate skill, incredible erudition and scholarly depth, along with an innovative point of view, Caroline has opened up entirely new areas of medieval history. A great and demanding teacher, a colleague whose interests range across many disciplines, Caroline Bynum exemplifies all the qualities of mind that we look for in our University Professors. I am delighted that we can honor her with an appointment to the University's highest rank."
Martha Howell, chair of Columbia's History Department said, "Professor Bynum is indisputably the most influential American medievalist of her generation, honored not just for her learning and scholarly production, but for her insights into the nature of medieval religious experience, medieval philosophy, and the medieval social imagination. Her meticulous and imaginative exploration of the texts and artworks that have come down to us from these centuries has changed the way scholars, students and general readers alike understand the age."
As University Professor, she joins the small circle of the prestigious faculty scholars who are renowned in their fields. Columbia's other University Professors are: Ronald C.D. Breslow, organic chemistry; R. Kent Greenawalt, jurisprudence and constitutional law; Eric R. Kandel, neurobiology, behavior and learning; Tsung-Dao Lee, theoretical physics; Michael Riffaterre, semiotics, theory of literature and French literature; Edward Said, comparative literature, literary theory and cultural studies, and Simon Schama, European cultural and environmental history, and history of art.