The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University.

The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers.

Comment on this article

Honored
January/February 2005

The John W. Kluge Prize in the Human Sciences may be the most important award you’ve never heard of. Established last year by the Library of Congress, the prize honors “lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences” with a Nobel-sized $1 million annual award. Sterling Professor Emeritus of History Jaroslav Pelikan, 74, shared the 2004 prize with French philosopher Paul Ricouer (who taught briefly at Yale in the 1970s); they were presented the award on December 8 in Washington, D.C.

Pelikan, who was dean of the Graduate School from 1973 to 1978, has studied Christianity from its beginnings. His five-volume history The Christian Tradition traced the religion’s doctrine from 100 CE to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. He has written more than 30 books on topics ranging from education (The Idea of the University) to music (Bach among the Theologians).

Pelikan has done much to focus historical attention on the Orthodox Christian tradition, which largely had been ignored in the West. In that quest, his scholarly and personal religious lives intersected. Born a Lutheran, he joined the Orthodox Church in America in 1998, calling the move the “logical culmination of a development in my mind and spirit that has been going on for decades.”

Vincent Scully '40, '49PhD, was awarded the 2004 National Medal of Arts on November 17. President George W. Bush '68 conferred the nation’s most prestigious honor for artists and art patrons on the 84-year-old professor in a White House ceremony. Scully, the Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, has taught architecture and art history at Yale since 1947. Noted architect Philip Johnson called him “the most influential architecture teacher ever.” He was one of seven people to receive the medal this year, including author Ray Bradbury and dancer Twyla Tharp.

Edward H. Kaplan, the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management Sciences and a professor of public health at the School of Medicine, has been elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. Kaplan, one of 65 new members of the institute this year, is best known for award-winning research that evaluates the effectiveness of HIV prevention programs, including New Haven’s pioneering needle exchange program.

Daniel Clemens '05 of Redlands, California, and catherine frieman '05 of Westwood, Massachusetts, will cross the Atlantic next year as Rhodes Scholars. Clemens is a varsity tennis player who founded a preventive health care program for children while at Yale. Frieman, an archeology major, has participated in excavations abroad. Yale students and graduates have won 210 Rhodes Scholarships in the program’s 102-year history.

Three Yale faculty members have been elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Ronald Breaker, professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology; Andrew D. Hamilton, Yale provost and the Benjamin Silliman Professor of Chemistry and a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry; and Karl Ulrich Mayer, professor of sociology, were selected for the world’s largest general scientific society because of scientifically and socially distinguished efforts to advance science and its applications.

Remembered

Beekman Cannon '34, '39PhD, professor emeritus of music and former master of Jonathan Edwards College, died in his home on October 19. He was 92 years old. Cannon, who joined the Yale faculty in 1939 and retired in 1982, was known for helping to guide and support the development of musical life in both Yale and New Haven. As master of JE from 1961 to 1974, he helped bring music to undergraduate life and established the precedent that the residential colleges could have endowment funds of their own. His best-known scholarly work was Johann Mattheson, Spectator in Music (1968).

Robert Lange, an associate clinical professor of diagnostic radiology, died on October 6 in New Haven at age 69. Lange, who joined the Yale faculty in 1969 and served as clinical director of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Center for many years, was a pioneer in MRI technology. He was also a strong advocate for the protection of human subjects.

©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu