News & Events

Spring 2008

THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES DISTINGUISHED ACHIEVEMENT AWARD RECIPIENTS

            This year’s recipients of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Awards have been chosen.  The awards are intended to underscore the decisive contributions the humanities make to the nation’s intellectual life.  Amounting to as much as $1.5 million each, the awards honor scholars who have made significant contributions to humanistic inquiry and enable them to teach and do research under especially favorable conditions while enlarging opportunities for scholarship and teaching at the academic institutions with which they are affiliated.

            In contrast to other notable awards that benefit individual recipients exclusively, the Distinguished Achievement Awards are designed to recognize the interdependence of scholars and their institutions.  Accordingly, while these grants honor the achievements of individuals, the funds that accompany them support institutional activities that will enhance both research and teaching and permit the recipients to deepen and extend their own scholarship.

            One of the three scholars selected this year is:

            PETER BROOKS, Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University.  One of the leading literary critics of his generation, Brooks specializes in comparative literature with a focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and English fiction.  He has made major contributions to these fields while connecting the work of literary studies to broader scholarly contexts including psychiatry, psychoanalysis and the law.  Brooks’ work reveals in new ways the importance of narrative in a variety of domains, not only in fiction, but also in legal and medical settings.  At Yale and elsewhere, he has succeeded in extending the reach and connectedness of the humanities through serving as the founding director of Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center and as head of the program in law and the humanities at the University of Virginia.  Beyond his own writings, Brooks is known for his intellectual generosity, especially his encouragement of younger scholars.  More broadly, Brooks has done much to communicate the interest and importance of the study of literature and the humanities to the professions and to readers beyond the academic community.