Resources For:

Four luminaries receive the 2009 Centennial Medal

Each year, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences celebrates the achievements of a select group of alumni by awarding the Centennial Medal, the highest honor that GSAS bestows. Medalists are alumni whose contributions to knowledge, to their disciplines, and to society at large have made a fundamental and lasting impact. The Centennial Medal has been given since 1989, the Graduate School’s 100th anniversary.

This year’s recipients: an art historian who encouraged viewers to simply look; a historian who explored the worldwide impact of slavery; an economist who pioneered game theory as an approach to conflict resolution; and an astronomer with a passion for pulsars.

Svetlana Leontief Alpers, AB ’57, PhD ’65, fine arts

Over the course of her career, Svetlana Alpers has carved a path as a singularly influential and galvanizing scholar whose impact on the discipline of art history has been both deep and wide. “From her first article,” says New York University art historian Mariët Westermann, “Alpers has surprised, delighted, and vexed her readers with novel readings and viewings of artists about whom, it would seem, we had said it all: Vasari, Bruegel, Rubens, Velazquez, Tiepolo, Rembrandt, Vermeer.” Alpers, the daughter of Harvard economist and Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief, is professor emerita of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, where she began teaching in the early sixties. Her books profoundly influenced the discipline of art history.  Indeed, her groundbreaking 1983 book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century reached beyond the discipline to stimulate new thinking across the humanities. Later books included Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988), which won the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in 1990; Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (1994), written with Michael Baxandall; and The Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others (2005), in which Alpers looks backward and forward in time to understand the Velazquez painting The Spinners.  

David Brion Davis, PhD ’56, history of American civilization

In an essay published this year in Reviews in American History, David Brion Davis traces his calling as a historian to “a year’s exposure to the rubble and suffering left from World War II.” But it wasn’t only the cruelties of war that affected him. On the boat to Europe shortly after the war ended, he saw that black soldiers were confined to the lowest hold in slave-ship–like conditions. In Germany, he witnessed violent conflicts between white and black American troops and heard racist speeches from commanding officers.  The experiences shaped him profoundly. Today, as the Sterling Professor of History, Emeritus, at Yale University, Davis is considered the foremost scholar of slavery and its role in shaping U.S. and world history. He broke ground with The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, published in 1966, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and has written or edited 17 other books, including The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975) and Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006).  “His erudition, moral probity, tempered wisdom, human generosity, and remarkable modesty have served as models for his colleagues, readers, and students,” says Nancy Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History.

Thomas Crombie Schelling, PhD ’51, economics

In a half-century of astonishingly broad-based work, Thomas Schelling has analyzed all manner of threats to humanity: nuclear arms, crime, and global warming, to name several. He found homes in both government service and academia, shaping policy and turning his early interest in bargaining strategy into a body of work on game theory, arms control, and conflict resolution that was recognized with the 2005 Nobel Prize in economics. Schelling is a Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Maryland and the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus, at Harvard. At the height of the nuclear arms race, his Strategy of Conflict (1960) laid out an approach to game theory with direct applications for military foreign policy and the prevention of war. He wrote two more books on the subject, Strategy and Arms Control (1961), with Morton Halperin, and Arms and Influence (1966). He’d worked on the Marshall Plan and at the White House in the early 1950s, and in the 1960s he advised the Kennedy administration on nuclear issues. A true social scientist, he later explored issues as diverse as addiction, segregation, and climate change, research that was published in Micromotives and Macrobehavior (1978), Choice and Consequence (1984), and Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays (2006).  

Joseph Taylor, PhD ’68, astronomy

As a boy, Joseph Taylor spent hours building ham radio transmitters and antennas at his family’s New Jersey farmhouse, once even shearing the chimney off the house with one of his creations. His parents probably had no inkling that those early adventures would lead to a groundbreaking career in astrophysics. Taylor, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Emeritus, developed an interest in pulsars — rapidly rotating neutron stars — soon after they were identified, in 1967. In 1974, while at the University of Massachusetts, he and graduate student Russell Hulse became the first to discover a pulsar in a binary system, thus providing the first proof of gravitational radiation and the strongest support yet for Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The discovery won Taylor and Hulse the Nobel Prize in physics in 1993. Taylor joined the faculty at Princeton in 1980. He has won many other awards, including the first Heineman Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the Carty Award for the Advancement of Science, and the Einstein Prize. He co-chaired a National Research Council panel whose report set U.S. priorities in astronomy and astrophysics for the period from 2000 to 2010.

Learn more:
At a celebratory luncheon on Class Day, June 3, 2009, Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature Richard Tarrant read citations that honored the accomplishments of each recipient. Read the full text of the citations here.