History Professor Alan Charles Kors Wins 2005 National Humanities Medal
November 2005 |
History professor Alan Charles Kors is among 12 recipients of the 2005 National Humanities Medal. Kors, the George H. Walker Endowed Term Chair, will receive the prize from President George W. Bush this month at a White House ceremony.
First awarded in 1989 as the Charles Frankel Prize, the National Humanities Medal honors individuals and organizations whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand America’s access to important humanities resources.
Kors has been teaching courses on European intellectual history at Penn for more than 35 years and has received numerous honors for his commitment to teaching excellence. In addition to being recognized with the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback and the Ira Abrams Memorial Distinguished Teaching Awards, he also received a faculty award from the Friars Senior Society.
He has published extensively on the conceptual revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was recently editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, an international project published in four volumes in 2002. This publication has been identified as a Best Reference Source by the Library Journal; was selected as a Booklist Editor’s Choice; and was named as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.
Kors was confirmed by the United States Senate in 1992 to the National Council on the Humanities, serving in that capacity for six years. He has served on the executive boards of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and The Historical Society, where he is on the Board of Governors.
Kors has been involved in the defense of academic freedom since his arrival at the University of Pennsylvania. His colleagues at Penn have elected him four times to University and School Committees on Academic Freedom and Responsibility, and since 1998 he has been chairman of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He writes and lectures widely on academic life. In 1998, he coauthored, with Harvey Silvergate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses.