May 03, 2005  Two members of the Watson Institute Board of Overseers and two Institute faculty affiliates have been elected as fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Board Chair John P. Birkelund, Board member Robert Legvold, and Watson affiliated-faculty Omer Bartov and David I. Kertzer are among the 213 leaders (fellows and foreign honorary members) in scholarship, business, arts, and public affairs named to AAAS's prestigious ranks in 2005. Notable inductees include Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Academy Award®-winning actor Sidney Poitier, sculptor and architect Maya Lin, and Time, Inc. CEO Ann Moore.

John Birkelund, LLD '02 (hon.) is a general partner with Sarasota Partners. He is a former senior advisor to UBS Warburg LLC and past chairman and chief executive officer of Dillon, Read and Co. Inc. He began his career as an investment banker in 1956 and is a past director of the New York Stock Exchange and the Securities Industry Association. He has served on many corporate boards, including N.M. Rothschild and Co., Barings Brothers, C. R. Bard, and Copperweld Corporation, and on the advisory boards of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and ORIX USA Corporation. He continues to be engaged in private investment activities and is particularly interested in Eastern Europe as the chairman of the Polish-American Enterprise Fund.

Robert H. Legvold is professor of political science at Columbia University and a member of the Executive Committee of Columbia's Harriman Institute. He received his PhD at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1967, specializing in Soviet foreign policy. His primary interest is in the international relations of the post-Soviet regions and their impact on the international politics of East Asia and Western Europe. From 1978 to 1984, Legvold served as director of Soviet Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and was then appointed as director of The Harriman Institute.

Omer Bartov is Brown University's John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and principal investigator of the Institute's Borderlands Project. Bartov is considered one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of genocide. He is the author of four books and the editor of three volumes; his work has been translated into several languages. Bartov's book Murder in Our Midst (1996) received the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. Another book, Mirrors of Destruction (2000), is an analysis of the relationship between total war and state-organized genocide and the emergence of modern identity. Other research has been for a work titled The "Jew" in Cinema: From the Golem to Don't Touch My Holocaust, and for a project on the history of interethnic relations and violence in the East Galician town of Buczacz. Bartov received his DPhil from Oxford University.

David I. Kertzer is Brown University's Paul Dupee University Professor of Social Science and the former director of the Institute's Politics, Culture, and Identity Program as well as principal investigator of the Census Projects. Kertzer, an anthropologist, is known internationally for his work, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (1997), a National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction in 1998, and The Popes against the Jews (2001), both of which have been published in many languages. Kertzer is an authority on political symbolism, Italian social politics, and anthropological demography. He edits the Journal of Modern Italian Studies and Cambridge University Press' book series New Perspectives on Anthropological and Social Demography. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University, he received his doctorate in anthropology from Brandeis University.

AAAS fellows and foreign honorary members are nominated and elected to the academy by its current membership. Because of the fellows' diverse backgrounds, which includes scholars and practitioners from all the disciplines as well as from public affairs and business, the academy is in a unique position to conduct a wide range of interdisciplinary studies and public policy research. The new fellows and foreign honorary members will be inducted into the academy at a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 8, 2005.

For more information about the 2005 AAAS inductees, visit the academy's website.

Photo: l–r: John P. Birkelund, chair of the Watson Institute's Board of Overseers and a new fellow in AAAS, and Thomas J. Biersteker, Institute director.