Five on faculty join American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has selected as fellows five University faculty members: Arjun Appadurai, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Shutsung Liao, Sidney Nagel and Richard Shweder. They are among 151 new fellows elected to the academy, bringing the total number of Chicago faculty members who belong to the academy to 130.

Appadurai, Professor in Anthropology and South Asian Languages & Civilizations, is an expert on the ways world cultures influence each other. As the Director of the Globalization Project, funded by the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, he studies how multinational corporations bring Western culture to the far reaches of the globe and how the West, in turn, is affected by the contact. The former director of the Chicago Humanities Institute, Appadurai is the author of several books, including Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996) and The Social Life of Things (1986).

Csikszentmihalyi, Professor in Psychology and an expert on creativity, is the originator of the theory of "flow." His theory contends that people gain happiness by being challenged to use their full mental and physical capacities doing something they enjoy. He is the author or co-author of 10 books, including Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (1996), Talented Teens: A Longitudinal Study of Their Development (1993), and Finding Flow (1997).

Liao, Professor in the Ben May Institute for Cancer Research and the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, is a leading researcher in the molecular action of male hormones and their role in cancer progression and treatment. He discovered the testosterone activation pathway that became the target of the drug finasteride, a half-billion-dollar drug that is used to treat benign prostate growth and is being evaluated as a prostate cancer preventive and as a baldness remedy. He also discovered male hormone receptor, cloned its gene, and identified mutations as the cause of male hormone insensitivity in men. He is a member of the National Academy in Taiwan.

Nagel, Professor in Physics, actively pursues research in three areas of materials science: granular materials, liquid-solid phase transitions and hydrodynamics (the behavior of water drops). A winner of the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching last spring, Nagel was recently appointed Master of the Physical Sciences Collegiate Division and Associate Dean of the Physical Sciences Division and the College. He is a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Shweder, Professor and Chairman of the Committee on Human Development, is a leading researcher in psychological anthropology, ethnopsychology and cultural psychology. Shweder has done extensive field work in India. His current research work includes comparative studies of emotions and explanations for illness, an examination of life-course images in India and the United States, the study of cross-cultural variations of the concept of person, and an analysis of the moral basis of customary practice from the "native point of view." He is the author of Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology (1991) and the editor of several works, including Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion (1984).

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams and other leaders of the young American republic. Today the academy includes more than 4,000 fellows and foreign honorary members from a broad range of geographic, professional and cultural backgrounds. Among its fellows are 160 Nobel laureates and 64 Pulitzer Prize winners.