Wendy Doniger
Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago
Doniger’s writing first drew praise in 1973, for Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva, and the twenty-something books she has written since include The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (1980); The Rig Veda: An Anthology (1982); Other People’s Myths: The Cave of Echoes (1995); The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (2005); The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was: Myths of Self-Imitation (2006), The Hindus: An Alternative History (2010) and The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (2010). She has taught at the University of Chicago since 1978, where she has been director of the Martin Marty Center, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, and a member of the Committee on Social Thought. Doniger has not one doctorate, but two, from Harvard and Oxford.
Benjamin M. Friedman
William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University
One of America’s leading experts on economic policy, Benjamin Friedman has helped to shape economic thinking at the highest levels through his scholarship and professional activities. His books include Day of Reckoning: The Consequences of Economic Policy Under Reagan and After, which won the George S. Eccles Prize from Columbia University and was a Book-of-the-Month Club first-alternate selection. His most recent book is The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. In addition to writing many books and articles, he has served as a director of the Private Export Funding Corporation, a trustee of the Standish Mellon Investment Trust, and an advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and in advisory positions with the National Bureau of Economic Research, the National Science Foundation Subcommittee on Economics, and the Congressional Budget Office. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity. Besides his extensive scholarly writing, Friedman contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books. He is a former chairman of Harvard’s economics department. Friedman holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Harvard and a master’s from King’s College, University of Cambridge.
Leslie H. Gelb
President Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations, & winner of the Pulitzer Prize
One of the foremost writers and thinkers on American foreign policy, Leslie Gelb is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. Before serving as the council’s president, he spent many years with The New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. At the Times he served as a columnist, deputy editor of the editorial page, editor of the op-ed page, and national security correspondent. Gelb was assistant secretary of state in the Jimmy Carter administration and director of policy planning and arms control for international security affairs at the Defense Department from 1967 to 1969, where he won the Distinguished Service Award, the Pentagon’s highest honor. Gelb holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Tufts University and a Ph.D. from Harvard. Before his career as a journalist, Gelb taught at Wesleyan University and was executive assistant to Senator Jacob Javits. His books include The Irony of Vietnam and Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy. He received the Father of the Year Award in 1993.
David Gelernter
Professor of Computer Science, Yale University
Gelernter’s many books include Mirror Worlds: or The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox . . . How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean (1991), which, according to Reuters “foresaw” the World Wide Web and was “one of the inspirations for Java.” His 1997 essay “Breaking Out of the Box” in the New York Times Magazine forecast the rise of aesthetically pleasing personal computers (Apple’s iMac was released the following year). His essays have been widely anthologized, and his other books include The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought (1994); the novel 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (1995); Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber (1997); Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion (2007); and Judaism: A Way of Being (2009).
Murray Gell-Mann
Nobel laureate; Professor Emeritus, California Institute of Technology; Distinguished Fellow, Sante Fe Institute
The recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1969, Murray Gell-Mann is a giant in his field, his work having revolutionized the way scientists understand elementary particles. His “Eightfold Way”—an analogy with Buddha’s Eightfold Path to Enlightenment and bliss—brought order to the chaos created by the discovery of some one hundred particles in the atom’s nucleus. He then discovered that all of those particles, including neutrons and protons, are composed of smaller, more fundamental building blocks. With others, he developed the quantum field theory called quantum chromodynamics, and, again demonstrating his ability to bridge culture and science, Gell-Mann suggested the name “quark” to refer to the fundamental particles, borrowing the term from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A child prodigy, Gell-Mann entered Yale University at age 15 and had his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the age of 22. He is the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, where he taught for many years, and he is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Sante Fe Institute. He has earned many honorary degrees and other awards besides the Nobel Prize, including the 1989 Erice “Science for Peace” Prize. His extensive writings include the popular book The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.
Vartan Gregorian
President, Carnegie Corporation of New York; former President, Brown University; former President, New York Public Library
Vartan Gregorian is a towering figure in American higher education and one of the foremost advocates for the nation’s intellectual life. He serves today as president of Carnegie Corporation of New York (a philanthropic foundation created in 1911 by Andrew Carnegie), having had distinguished tenures as president of the New York Public Library (1981-89) and Brown University (1989-97). Before those appointments, he was provost of the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a dean and a professor of history there and at several other universities. Gregorian was born in Iran, of Armenian parents, and got his basic schooling there and in Lebanon. He later came to the U.S., entered Stanford University in 1956, and earned a B.A. and a Ph.D. in history and the humanities. His books include The Road to Home: My Life and Times; Islam: A Mosaic, Not A Monolith; and The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 1880-1946. He has received countless awards and honors, including the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton in 1998 and the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, from President George W. Bush in 2004. Of Gregorian the American philanthropist Walter Annenberg once said, “Quite simply, I know of no one who is more brilliant and able.”
Lord Sutherland of Houndwood
Former president, Royal Society of Edinburgh; member, House of Lords
Lord Sutherland is a distinguished British scholar and public servant. He is former president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s National Academy of Science & Letters. He is also a member of the House of Lords. He was knighted in 1995, inducted into the Order of the Thistle in 2002, and raised to the peerage as Baron Sutherland of Houndwood in 2001. Lord Sutherland has served as principal of the University of Edinburgh, as well as in a number of other academic posts, including vice-chancellor of the University of London and Professor of History and Philosophy of Religion at King’s College, London. He holds a B.A. from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and an M.A. from the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the philosophy of religion. Sutherland has been active in a wide range of civic and educational affairs. He was formerly Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools in England; a member of the Board of the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the British government’s Council for Science and Technology. He chaired the Royal Commission on Long Term Care for the Elderly.
Lord Sutherland’s presence on Britannica’s editorial advisory board maintains the company’s historical link to Scotland, where it was founded in 1768.
Lord Weidenfeld of Chelsea
Publisher, public servant, long-time columnist
Born in Vienna, George Weidenfeld left Austria for England in 1938. During World War II he worked with the BBC Overseas Service and in 1948 founded the publishing firm of Weidenfeld & Nicolson with Nigel Nicolson. The firm published several notable works, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Pope John Paul II’s Memory and Identity. In 1985, he acquired Grove Press in the United States, which later merged with his previous company to form Grove Nicolson before merging with the Atlantic Monthly Press to form Grove/Atlantic, Inc. His writings have appeared in Die Welt, Welt am Sonntag, Bild am Sonntag, and the Huffington Post.
He has long been active in the social, cultural, and political spheres. A British citizen since 1946, Lord Weidenfeld was awarded a peerage in 1976. In 1949 he was Political Advisor and Chef de Cabinet in Israel to President Weizmann. From 1992 to 1994, he was Vice-Chairman of the University of Oxford Campaign and since 1994, Vice-President of the Oxford University Development Programme. His Institute for Strategic Dialogue, created in 2006, runs a number of political task forces and cultural and educational bridge-building initiatives. Also in 2006 he initiated the Weidenfeld Scholarships and Leadership Programme in Oxford. He was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) in 2011.
Recent Former Members
Rosalia Arteaga
Former president of Ecuador, environmentalist
David Baltimore
Nobel Prize-winning biologist; former president, Caltech and Rockefeller University
Nicholas Carr
Noted author and commentator on the digital revolution
Zaha Hadid
Pritzker Prize-winning architect
James McPherson
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, educator
Thomas Nagel
Leading philosopher, scholar, educator
Donald Norman
Cognitive scientist and noted commentator on digital design
Don Randel
President, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; former president, University of Chicago
Amartya Sen
Nobel Prize-winning economist, educator
Wole Soyinka
Nobel Prize-winning author, human-rights activist
Michael Wesch
Leading new media commentator, cultural anthropologist