George Marsden
George Marsden, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, has been elected a member of the 2016 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). He will be formally inducted at a ceremony at the AAAS headquarters Oct. 8 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Marsden is one of 213 members elected to the AAAS 236th class, which includes novelist Colm Tóibín, La Opinión publisher and CEO Monica Lozano, the jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter, former Botswanan President Festus Mogae, and Temple Grandin, the author and spokesperson on autism.
A member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1992, Marsden holds degrees from Haverford College and Westminster Theological Seminary and a doctorate from Yale. His historical scholarship concerns the interaction between Christianity and American culture, and particularly Christianity in American higher education. In addition to an award-winning biography of the New England clergyman and theological writer Jonathan Edwards, he has written or edited more than a dozen books including “Fundamentalism in American Culture,” “The Soul of the American University,” and, most recently, “The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief.”
Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and others, the AAAS is one of the nation’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers. Convening leaders from the academic, business and government sectors to respond to the challenges facing the nation and the world, AAAS research concerns higher education, the humanities, and the arts; science and technology policy; global security and energy; and American institutions and the public good. AAAS has elected leading “thinkers and doers” from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th.
Marsden joins 23 other AAAS members on Notre Dame’s faculty including Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C.; Karl Ameriks, McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy; R. Scott Appleby, Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs; Scott Mainwaring, Eugene and Helen Conley Professor of Political Science; and Jean Porter, John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology.
Originally published by Michael O. Garvey at news.nd.edu on April 21, 2016.