16 elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Sixteen Harvard faculty are among the 261 American Academy of Arts and Sciences newly elected members, the academy  announced Thursday.

“We are celebrating a depth of achievements in a breadth of areas,” said David Oxtoby, president of the American Academy. “These individuals excel in ways that excite us and inspire us at a time when recognizing excellence, commending expertise, and working toward the common good is absolutely essential to realizing a better future.”

The Harvard inductees include:

Carolyn Abbate
Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor Historical Musicology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Sven Beckert
Laird Bell Professor of History, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Eve Blau
Adjunct Professor of the History and Theory of Urban Form and Design; Director of Research, Graduate School of Design

Suzanne Preston Blier
Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies; Visiting Professor, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Guy-Uriel E. Charles
Charles Ogletree, Jr. Professor of Law; Faculty Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute, Harvard Law School

Erica Chenoweth
Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment; Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor; Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Radcliffe Institute

Susan M. Dynarski
Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education

Gordon J. Freeman
Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Claudine Gay
Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows, ex officio; Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African American Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Chenghua Gu
Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School

Mark Kisin
Perkins Professor of Mathematics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Matthew L. Meyerson
Professor of Genetics; Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Marsha A. Moses
Julia Dyckman Andrus Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital

Andrew G. Myers
Amory Houghton Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Elie Tamer
Louis Berkman Professor of Economics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Leslie G. Valiant
Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and advance the public good.

The new members join a distinguished group of individuals elected to the academy before them, including Benjamin Franklin (elected 1781) and Alexander Hamilton (1791) in the eighteenth century; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1864), Maria Mitchell (1848), and Charles Darwin (1874) in the nineteenth; Albert Einstein (1924), Robert Frost (1931), Margaret Mead (1948), Milton Friedman (1959), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966), Stephen Hawking (1984), and Condoleezza Rice (1997) in the twentieth; and more recently Jennifer Doudna (2003), Bryan Stevenson (2014), M. Temple Grandin (2016), John Legend (2017), Viet Thanh Nguyen (2018), James Fallows (2019), Joan Baez (2020), and Sanjay Gupta (2021).