Professors Brown, Nehamas receive new Mellon foundation award

University professors Peter Brown and Alexander Nehamas were among the first five recipients of the Andrew Mellon Foundation's new Distinguished Achievement Awards for scholars in the humanities.

The Distinguished Achievement Awards provide up to as much as $1.5 million over three years for deep and extensive research in the humanities by the recipient, and more broadly, their institution and field of specialty.

"The awards are intended for those who have made major contributions to their own disciplines, whose influence may well have extended more broadly to other fields and whose current work promises to make significant new advances through both teaching and research," according to the foundation's website.

The University will administer the funds, which go toward paying for salaries, research expenditures and support for researchers collaborating with the recipients.

Brown, the Philip and Beu-lah Rollins Pro-fessor of History, said he was "absolutely stunned" upon learning he had won the fellowship. "It came as a total surprise to me," he said.

..Humanities, philosophy and comparative literature professor Nehamas agreed, saying that winning the award left him speechless.

Nehamas, who has been at the University since 1990 and the chair of the hu-manities council since 1994, said that the award will provide him with opportunities "to consider the general direction of my thinking, to follow paths I have not taken before, sometimes in the company of others who may share my interests, to reconsider my teaching and the ways in which my work can affect a broader public."

At the University since 1983, Brown specializes in the study of late antiquity. He is the foremost English language scholar in the field and has been one of its leading voices since his landmark biography of St. Augustine was published more than 30 years ago.

Brown has also explored such topics as the rise of Christendom in the Middle Ages, the cult of saints, conceptions of the body and rhetoric and power.

History departmental chair Robert Tignor called Brown, "one of the department's most admired teachers and researchers."

Nehamas, the Edmund N. Carpenter II Professor in the Humanities, has contributed to the study of classics and ancient philosophy and written on Nietzsche, Foucault and the aesthetics of popular culture.

"I plan to take immediate advantage of the greatest opportunity the Mellon Award provides: not to hurry," said Nehamas. "I intend to teach my regular courses next year, and think carefully about how I can use this great honor in the best possible way during the three years that follow."