Two faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences – Martha Haynes, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Astronomy emerita, and Caroline Levine, the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities – have been named to the American Philosophical Society (APS), the oldest learned society in America, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743.
They will be inducted during a ceremony in November among 42 members from diverse fields chosen to join the society this year.
“Election to the American Philosophical Society honors extraordinary accomplishments in all fields spanning STEM and the humanities,” the APS said in a press release. “New inductees are nominated by existing Members and join an active cohort of some of the world’s most innovative minds.”
Haynes studies the large-scale distribution of galaxies in the local universe, focusing on how local environment influences galaxy formation and evolution. She is a leader and advocate for the development of instruments to expand our ability to probe the radio universe.
“I am entirely surprised and truly honored to be offered membership in the American Philosophical Society and look forward to expanding my personal universe through its programs and member gatherings,” she said.
As Chair of the Board of Directors of the Cornell-led CCAT Observatory, Inc. collaboration, Haynes has played a pivotal role in developing the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope, launched in April in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Earlier, she was instrumental in the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey (ALFALFA), leading the ALFALFA Team in its search for gas-bearing galaxies in the local universe.
Haynes received the 2019 Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal for lifetime achievement from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and the Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and has been appointed as a distinguished lecturer at many institutions, including Princeton University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Levine, the author of four books, has spent her career asking how and why the humanities and the arts matter, especially in democratic societies. She is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Her most recent book, “The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis” (Princeton University Press 2023), grows out of the theoretical work of her 2015 book “Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network,” which won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. She won the Perkins Prize for the best work in narrative studies for “The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt” (2003). Her work has been translated into Polish, Chinese, Turkish and Korean.
Lately, Levine has been rethinking foundational assumptions in the humanities, including the longstanding split between thought and action. She will spend next year at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute exploring theories of power and agency in an age of climate change.
Haynes and Levine join a legacy of Cornell faculty members in the APS, many of them in the College of Arts and Sciences, including: astronomer Carl Sagan; Mary Beth Norton, the Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emerita of American History; literary scholar Jonathan Culler, the Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus; political economist Peter J. Katzenstein, the Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies; and Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann, the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor Emeritus of chemistry and chemical biology.
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