The Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities

Thanks to the generosity of Mary L. Cornille and Jack Cogan, Wellesley College is able to appoint each year the Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities. Cornille Professors are in residence either for a semester or a year, in the course of which they teach one faculty seminar and one undergraduate course and participate actively in the intellectual life of the community. The Cornille Professorship is administered jointly by the Office of the Dean and by the Newhouse Center for the Humanities, with which the Cornille Professor is automatically affiliated.

Previous Cornille Professors

Past holders of the Cornille Professorship include:

2008-2009: Laura Mulvey, Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, and one of the world's leading critics and theorists of flim. Ms. Mulvey is the author of the classic collection, Visual and Other Pleasures (1993), aas well as of Death Twenty-Four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2007), and numerous other monographs. Both an award winning critic and a film-maker, she is a former Director of the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies and a Fellow of the British Academy. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the Ohio State University, and New York University, as well as at many other institutions in the United States, Britain, and Europe. While at Wellesley, she taught an undergraduate course on "Women in Cinema," and directed a faculty seminar entitled "Cinema...in a word: emotion."

2007-08: Leslie Kurke, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (1991) and Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece (1999) and the winner both of a Macarthur Fellowship and UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award . During her year at Wellesley, she offered lectures on Greek literature and culture, taught a course on "Detective Fiction and Psychoanalysis," and led a faculty seminar on "Elvis Presley and Myths of America."

2006-07: Benjamin Bagby and Katarina Livljanic. Bagby is a vocalist, harpist and scholar who has been among the leading figures in medieval musical performance for 30 years. Livljanic, a singer and musicologist, is one of the principal international specialists in medieval chant performance. While at Wellesley they had performances and taught both an undergraduate course and a faculty seminar.

2005-06: Harvey Cox, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University, is a renowned scholar and a revered teacher whose work has won him both a high scholarly reputation and wide acclaim. Professor Cox taught “Fundamentalisms: A Comparative Approach,” in the Spring of 2006 and throughout the year led a faculty seminar on the problem of Evil in the twentieth century—its newly global reach and our increasingly impoverished vocabulary for explaining and describing it.

2004-05: Edward Ahearn, University Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown taught a faculty seminar entitled “Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Sciences” and an undergraduate course, “Literature and the City: Modern Interdisciplinary Contexts.

2003-04: Neil Hertz, Professor of English and Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, a literary theorist with special interests in Freud, George Eliot and the sublime. He taught a faculty seminar on aesthetic character and an undergraduate course on “The American City in Words and Images: Chicago.”

Wellesley College and the Newhouse Center for the Humanities are pleased to announce that the Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities for 2009-2010 will be Deborah Klimburg-Salter, University Professor for Asian Art History at the Institute of Art History of the University of Vienna. A specialist in the art history of South and Central Asia, Professor Klimburg-Salter is also Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Documentation of Inner and South Asia, and has previously served as visiting or affiliated professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford, and at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. She has done extensive written and field work on the art and archeology of Afghanistan, of Northern India, and of Tibet. Since 2003, she has served on the UNESCO International Coordination Committee for the safegaurding of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage. She will be in residence at Wellesley in the fall semesters of 2009 and 2010 and, in addition to a faculty seminar on "The role of the museum between Nationalism and Globalization," will teach two undergraduate courses, one on "The Buddha's Biography: Buddhist Narrative Art in India," in the fall of 2009, and another on the Indo-Tibetan Temple in the fall of 2010.

The Mary J. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professorship in the Humanities was established in 2002 by a generous gift from Mary Cornille (DS) and Jack Cogan.   Past holders of the Cornille Professorship include Laura Mulvey, Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, Martin Klein, Professor of History at the University of Toronto; Neil Hertz, Professor of English and Humanities at Johns Hopkins University; Edward Ahearn, Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University; Harvey Cox, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University; Benjamin Bagby and Katarina Livljanic of the Sorbonne, scholars and performers of early music; and Leslie Kurke, Professor Classics at the University of California, Berkeley.