Six faculty members receive professorships of distinction

Three University faculty members, David Bevington, English Language & Literature; R.H. Helmholz, Law School; and James Redfield, Classical Languages & Literatures, have recently received distinguished service professorships.

In addition, three Chicago professors have received named professorships. They are James Chandler and Michael Murrin, English Language & Literature, and Bruce Lincoln, Divinity School.

Bevington, who was named the Phyllis Fay Horton Professor in the Humanities in 1985, is now the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor.

Widely acknowledged as one of the foremost Shakespearean scholars in the United States, Bevington is an expert on Great Britain’s drama and literature from the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Bevington, who was a Visiting Professor at the University in 1967 and permanently joined the faculty as a Professor in English Language & Literature in 1968, has published and lectured extensively in the United States and around the world.

His books include From “Mankind” To Marlowe (Harvard University Press, 1962), Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Harvard University Press, 1968) and Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Harvard University Press, 1984).

His articles, essays and reviews appear frequently in such journals as Modern Philology, Renaissance Quarterly, Shakespeare Quarterly and Comparative Drama. His work also has been featured in collections and anthologies, including Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays (Garland Press, 1995) and The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Bevington has edited numerous editions of Shakespeare’s works, including The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Addison Wesley and Longman), known in its field as the Bevington volume, and “The Bantam Shakespeare,” a paperback series published in 1988, which includes Shakespeare’s complete works in 29 volumes.

He is a member of the editorial board of The Internet Shakespeare Editions, a project that aims to make scholarly, fully annotated texts of Shakespeare’s plays available online, and serves on the editorial committees of such publications as Modern Philology and Shakespeare Quarterly.

Bevington has held visiting professorships at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand; Northwestern University; Harvard University; New York University; and the University of Hawaii.

A graduate of Harvard University, Bevington received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English.

Chandler, Professor in English Language & Literature, has been named the George M. Pullman Professor in English Language & Literature.

Chandler, whose research interests include 18th- and 19th-century literature, the historical novel, film, and relations between politics and literature, history and criticism, is most widely known for his work on the romantic movement in England.

Writing for the Indepen-dent, Terry Eagleton called Chandler’s latest book, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (University of Chicago Press, 1998), “a monumental work of scholarship.”

A prolific scholar whose research articles, essays and reviews have appeared in Critical Inquiry, English Literary History, The Journal of Modern History and Studies in the Novel, Chandler currently is working on two new books, Romantic Metropolis: Cultural Productions of the City, 1708-1850, co-edited with Kevin Gilmartin, and A Sympathetic Eye: Capra, Commerce, and the History of Sentiment, a project that aims to place the work of Frank Capra and other figures of Hollywood’s Golden Age in an expanded perspective of cultural and intellectual history.

He also is completing a commissioned work, The New Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2002.

Chandler, who first served for two years as an Instructor at the University, joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1978. He became an Associate Professor in 1984 and Professor in 1988.

As a visiting fellow, he conducted research at the Humanities Research Center at Australian National University in Canberra in the spring of 1998. In 1993, he was awarded two British Academy Grants to lecture at BARS conferences at the University of Strathclyde and the University of Durham. In 1985, Chandler was recognized with a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for independent research.

A graduate student of Chicago in English Language & Literature, Chandler was awarded his A.M. in 1972 and his Ph.D. in 1978. Prior to completing his undergraduate work at Notre Dame, he was presented with 1er degre francais for his studies in French language and literature at the University of Grenoble.

Helmholz, an expert on the history of Roman and canon law in England, has been named the Ruth Wyatt Rosenson Distinguished Service Professor of Law in the Law School.

Helmholz came to the University as a Visiting Professor in the fall of 1981 and permanently joined the faculty in 1982. He had been a professor of law and history at Washington University in St. Louis for the previous 10 years. He was named the Ruth Wyatt Rosenson Professor in 1984.

Helmholz has written several books, the most recent of which is titled The ius commune in England: Four Studies. Exploring four specific cases, Helmholz attempts to show Anglo-American legal historians the advantages of investigating Roman and canon laws, even in areas where these laws had no immediate influence on common law.

He completed undergraduate work in French and English literatures at Princeton, the basic law course at Harvard Law School and earned a Ph.D. in medieval history at the University of California, Berkeley. He spent one year as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Kent in Canterbury; a year as a visiting fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he held a Guggenheim fellowship; and two terms at the University of Tubingen, where he held a von Humboldt Research Prize.

Helmholz is a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a corresponding fellow of The British Academy. He will be the Arthur Goodhart visiting professor at Cambridge University during the 2000-01 academic year.

Lincoln, Professor in the Divinity School since 1993, is now the Caroline E. Haskell Professor in the Divinity School.

A scholar who emphasizes critical approaches to the study of religion, Lincoln is particularly interested in issues of discourse, practice, power, conflict and the construction of social borders.

His books, which have been translated into Chinese, Italian and Spanish, include Authority: Construction and Corrosion (University of Chicago Press, 1994), Death, War and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice (University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (Oxford University Press, 1989).

His most recent work, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology and Scholarship (University of Chicago Press, 1999), provides a critical genealogy of the category of myth, focusing on ancient Greece, German romanticism and the ways in which scholars since the late 18th century have used this linguistic marker to elevate or deride certain stories, particularly those told by people they view as others or their ancestors.

Since 1993, Lincoln has served as co-editor of the journal History of Religions. He also serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the Journal of Millennial Studies.

Lincoln taught at the University of Kbnhavn in Denmark as a visiting professor in the fall of 1998. During the 1980s and early 1990s, he held visiting professorships at universities in the U.S.S.R., Sweden and Italy.

He received his Ph.D. in history of religions from the University in 1976 and graduated from Haverford College in 1970 with a B.A. in religion.

Murrin, Professor in English Language & Literature, has been named the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor in the Humanities.

Murrin’s research has focused on the history of criticism and the study of the genres of romance and epic. He is the author of numerous articles, including “Newton’s Apocalypse,” published in an anthology of articles from the Newton and Religion conference held at Clark Library in 1996, and “The Language of Milton’s Heaven,” published in Modern Philology.

Murrin also has written three books, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric (University of Chicago Press, 1969), The Allegorical Epic: Essays in Its Rise and Decline (University of Chicago Press, 1980) and History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Currently, Murrin is working on Romance and Asian Trade in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, a project focused on the intertwined themes of the growth of Asia’s middle-class culture, its interest in aristocratic romance and the simultaneous development of trade across Asia.

After serving for two years as an Instructor, Murrin joined the Chicago faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1965. He became an Associate Professor in 1969 and Professor in 1977.

Murrin has received two short-term fellowships for his research, one from the Folger Library in 1997 and another from the Huntington Library in 1996. He was presented with a Guggenheim Foundation award in 1974 and received the University’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1967.

A graduate of Yale University, Murrin received his M.A. in 1961 and his Ph.D. in 1965. He completed his bachelor’s degree at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., in 1960.

Redfield, the Edward Olson Professor in Classical Languages &Literatures since 1997, is now the Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor.

A scholar of the language, literature and social history of ancient Greece, Redfield applies the insights of modern linguistics and anthropological theory to his research interests.

An expert on the writings of Homer, Redfield’s Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (University of Chicago Press, 1975) has been translated into French, Spanish and Modern Greek. The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy, his forthcoming book, is an inquiry into the culture and religiosity of Epizephyrian Locri in the classical age. Among his other works are numerous research articles and essays that have appeared with frequency in such publications as Arion and the Chicago Review.

Redfield has been recognized with prestigious awards for his work as both a scholar and an educator, including National Endowment for the Humanities research grants in 1970 and 1989 and the University’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1965 and 1987.

In addition to his scholarly achievements, Redfield is the author of numerous published and unpublished plays, poems and works of fiction. He works on a regular basis as an actor and director with University Theater.

After serving for two years as an Instructor for the Committee on Social Thought, Redfield joined the Chicago faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1962. He became an Associate Professor in 1965 and Professor in 1976.

Redfield received his A.B. in 1954 from the University, then studied as a Woodrow Wilson fellow and an advanced student at New College, Oxford. He later returned to Chicago, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1961.