Friday, May 2, 2014

Legal Historians Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has elected this year's new members, and they include John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School) and Peter S. Onuf (University of Virginia/Thomas Jefferson Foundation).

An excerpt from Yale's announcement:
John Fabian Witt ’99 is Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His most recent book, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History, was awarded the 2013 Bancroft Prize, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was selected for the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book for 2012. Previous writing includes Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2007), and the prizewinning book, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2004), as well as articles in the American Historical Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, The Yale Law Journal, and other scholarly journals. He has written for The New York Times, Slate, and the Washington Post. In 2010 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for his project on the laws of war in American history. Professor Witt is a graduate of Yale Law School and Yale College and he holds a Ph.D. in history from Yale. Before returning to Yale, he was the George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History at Columbia University. He served as law clerk to Judge Pierre N. Leval on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
UVA issued it's own proud announcement, excerpted here:
Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor Emeritus of History, is a leading scholar of Thomas Jefferson and the early American republic. He just finished teaching a massive open online course, “Age of Jefferson,” this semester.
Onuf also has become well known as one of the three co-hosts of the weekly public radio program and podcast, “Backstory with the American History Guys,” produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. In each episode, U.Va. history professor Brian Balogh, University of Richmond President Edward Ayers and Onuf “tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths,” as the website says.
The show is currently broadcast by 36 primary public radio stations, serving 72 communities in 20 states and Washington, D.C. More than 40 other public stations, many in major markets, regularly air “BackStory” episodes as specials.
Among the dozen books Onuf has written or edited are “The Mind of Thomas Jefferson” (2007); “The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race and the New Republic” (2002), with James Horn and Jan Ellen Lewis; “Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood” (2001); and “Jeffersonian Legacies” (1993).
Onuf is a senior research fellow at Monticello’s Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. He was the 2008-09 Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at the University of Oxford.
The full list is here. Congratulations to all!