Twelve FAS Faculty Members to Retire

By Andrea Early

Special to the Gazette

After full careers, the following faculty will take well-deserved retirement from their teaching duties: Charles Burnham, professor of mineralogy, Kwang-chih Chang, John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology, Arthur Edward Lilley, professor of astronomy, Muhsin Mahdi, James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic, Sally Falk Moore, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Anthropology, Masatoshi Nagatomi, professor of Buddhist studies, Ulrich Petersen, Harry C. Dudley Professor of Economic Geology, Richard Pipes, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of History, Abdelhamid Sabra, professor of the history of Arabic science, Jurij Striedter, Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Albert Szabo, professor of architecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), and Osgood Hooker Professor of Visual Arts at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Henry Rosovsky, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor.

Following are brief biographies of the retired faculty members:

Charles Burnham, professor of mineralogy, may be one of the only people in the world who can ski down a mountain and then proceed to tell you how it got there. Burnham has spent a lifetime enlightening Harvard's students on the power of glaciers, the physical and chemical properties of rocks and minerals, and the complex subtleties of atom patterns within crystals. He has also held ongoing, high-level positions with the New Hampshire Alpine Racing Association and the United States Ski Association.

Burnham, who served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force while earning his first degree, holds an S.B. from M.I.T. in business and engineering administration, an honorary A.M. from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in mineralogy and petrology from M.I.T. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1966. He was a staff petrologist in the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. (1963-66), where he also did his postdoctoral work.

The author of over 100 publications, Burnham has been a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union, and a fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America. He was also associate editor of the journal American Mineralogist (1974-76) and has been an active member of both the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) and the Mount Washington Observatory. He served as both president and vice president of the AMC and vice president and trustee at the Observatory.

At Harvard, Burnham dedicated much of his time to mentoring students. He was principal Ph.D. thesis adviser, advisory committee member and postdoctoral supervisor to numerous graduate students, and senior honors thesis adviser to several undergraduates. He also served as faculty associate of Eliot House, acting chairman of the Department of Geological Sciences, and chairman of the Harvard College Committee on Rights and Responsibilities.

Born in Peking, Kwang-chih Chang, John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology, is a world-renowned expert on the Shang Dynasty, the reign that ushered in China's Bronze Age. Many of the Shang's bronze casts bear inscriptions of China's earliest writings -- valuable clues about this learned dynasty.

A member of the Department of Anthropology since 1977, Chang served as the department's chair from 1981 to 1984 and as chair of the Council on East Asian Studies from 1986 to 1989. Chang has also maintained an ongoing relationship with the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, where he recently served as vice president for academic affairs. Before bringing his expertise to Harvard, Chang taught anthropology for 18 years at Yale University, where he was a professor, department chair, and chair of the Council on East Asian Studies.

Chang's work has gained wide acclaim including the Distinguished Service Award from the Association for Anthropological Diplomacy and the Lucy Wharton Drexel Medal from the University of Pennsylvania. He was also awarded an honorary Doctor of Social Science from Hong Kong's Chinese University and has held guest professorships at Xiamen and Peking universities.

Chang has also been a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

As of the end of last year, he had published over 250 articles and book reviews, many in Chinese. His works include in-depth studies of the archaeology of ancient China and an extensive survey of the Chinese Bronze age.

Arthur Edward Lilley, professor of astronomy, has made a career of seeing what the rest of the world can't. As an expert in radio astronomy, he has measured cosmic radio waves emitted by atoms and molecules in planetary atmospheres and in the interstellar medium, frequently invisible to the most powerful optical telescopes.

Lilley's work with the cutting-edge radio telescopes of the '50s and '60s shed significant light on the evolution of galaxies and the birth of stars -- discoveries that cleared the path for more recent astronomical advances.

His early work with the radio astronomy group at the Naval Research Laboratory led to the first distance determination of a radio star. These stars, which send off measurable radio waves, have contributed to a greater understanding of the life cycles of heavenly bodies.

While at Harvard, Lilley was the senior scientist responsible for sending radio telescopes to the planet Venus in 1962. The NASA Mariner probe was the first successful spacecraft sent to a planet in the solar system. Among the results, the radio telescopes proved the surface of Venus was too hot for human exploration. Later he contributed to the original detection of several exotic molecules in space, including methyl and ethyl alcohol.

Lilley began his career as an astronomer as a research assistant at Harvard and was part of the original group that launched the University's observatory into radio astronomy. From there he worked as a radio astronomer with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (1954-1957), and subsequently, as an associate professor of astronomy at Yale University (1957-1959). Lilley, a member of the Harvard faculty since 1959, has held positions in the Astronomy Department and at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He has also served as an executive director and trustee of the Northeast Radio Observatory Corp., and numerous advisory panels.

Lilley holds a B.A. and an M.S. from the University of Alabama and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Physical Society.

Muhsin Mahdi, James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic, is one of the few people of our times to truly understand how the deep-seated influences of the Middle East's tumultuous past have shaped this troubled region's current state of affairs.

Born in Iraq, Mahdi is one of the world's leading authorities on Arabic history, philology, and philosophy.

An expert in medieval Arabic political thought, Mahdi has been a professor of Arabic at Harvard since 1969. During his tenure, he served as the director of the University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies and helped institute and teach Foreign Cultures 14, a Core Curriculum course aimed at helping students understand the economic and cultural foundations of current political problems with emphasis on the Middle East.

Prior to coming to Harvard, Mahdi taught at the University of Baghdad (1947-1957). He was also a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Chicago (1958-1969), where he also held the title of chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Mahdi has researched Islamic civilization in Morocco as a Fulbright scholar and was a Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellow in Legal and Political Philosophy. He holds the distinction of serving as the first-ever corresponding member of Cairo's Academy of Arabic Language.

Mahdi has been a member of the Advisory Council of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, and a governing member of the American Research Center in Egypt. He has also sat on the editorial boards of Arabic Sciences and Philosophy: A Historical Journal, the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, and for publications of the Society for the Study of Islamic Philosophy and Science.

Mahdi earned a B.B.A. from the American University in Beirut and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He conducted postdoctoral study and research at the University of Paris and at the University of Freiburg and has held visiting professorships at Cairo's American University, the Central Institute of Islamic Research in Pakistan, and at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Sally Falk Moore, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Anthropology, has made her mark in law and anthropology.

A professor of anthropology at Harvard since 1981, she has also taught Anthropological Approaches to Law at Harvard Law School, served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1985-1989), and as Master of Dunster House (1984-1989). She was named the Victor S. Thomas Professor in 1991.

Moore holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an L.L.B. from Columbia Law School. A lawyer since 1945, she worked in a Wall Street Law firm and then at the Nuremberg Trials before returning to Columbia for her Ph.D. in anthropology.

Before joining the faculty at Harvard, Moore was a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (1977-1981). Prior to that, she developed and chaired the department of anthropology at the University of Southern California (USC) (1963-1977). While at USC, she began her ongoing, long-term study of the Chagga people of Kilimanjaro, a project supported by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. From 1965 to 1967, Moore was involved in the production of a 60-part television series on social anthropology. The programs were aired in Los Angeles.

Moore has been an honorary research fellow at University College in London, a visiting professor at Yale University, and research associate at the University of Dar es Salaam. She has received a number of awards including a Guggenheim (1995-96), USC's Dart Award for innovative teaching (1971), and Columbia University's Ansley Prize (1957). She is also a fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Moore has published many articles and several books including Law As Process (1978), Power and Property in Inca Peru (1958), and Anthropology and Africa: Changing Perspectives on a Changing Scene (1995). She has been on the editorial advisory boards of several journals and has held governing positions on the Social Science Research Council, and in the American Ethnological Society, and is currently the president of the Association of Africanist Anthropologists in the American Anthropological Association.

Masatoshi Nagatomi, professor of Buddhist studies in the departments of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Sanskrit and Indian Studies, has been consistently interested in, taught, and published in the field of Buddhism and other religious philosophical systems of India. Outside India, his activities have been in Classical Tibetan Buddhism, and Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. In his research he uses Sanskrit, Pali, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, and other languages related to Buddhism.

Nagatomi earned his B.A. in Indian philosophy and Buddhist studies from Japan's Kyoto University and holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indian studies from Harvard. He joined the faculty in 1958 as in instructor of Sanskrit. By 1969, he had been designated as Harvard's first professor of Buddhist studies. When Nagatomi first came to Harvard as a graduate student, Buddhist and Indian studies were largely confined to academia. But over the course of his tenure, Nagatomi's specialties became increasingly important with the rising visibility of Buddhism and Buddhist studies, which began to manifest in the West in the late 1960s. To date, he has overseen more than 30 dissertations on the subject of Buddhism and his former doctoral students hold leading positions at universities around the world.

One of Nagatomi's most significant contributions to Harvard was his role in establishing the Buddhist Studies Forum, an organization that explores various Buddhist philosophies through the work of scholars from the United States, Europe, Thailand, and Japan.

Nagatomi is a member of the American Oriental Society, the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Religion, and the International Association of Shin Buddhist Studies. He has been a senior fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies and received two fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies.

At Harvard, he served the Committee for the Study of Religion, the Committee for Asian and Altaic Studies, the Committee for Regional Studies-East Asia, and the Committee of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.

Nagatomi has published on topics encompassing the philosophical, institutional, and intercultural dimensions of the Buddhist tradition in four major cultural-linguistic areas: India, Tibet, China, and Japan. For his dissertation he translated and annotated the Pramanasiddhi Chapter of Dharmakirtis Pramanavarttika. He was also the co-editor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, a collection of essays in honor of Daniel H.H. Ingalls which included Nagatomi's essay, "Manasa-Pratyaksa: A Conundrum in the Buddhist Pramana System."

Ulrich Petersen, Harry C. Dudley Professor of Economic Geology, has spent a lifetime exploring the Andes -- one ore deposit at a time. An economic geologist born and reared in Peru, he has analyzed numerous samples and geological maps from all over the Andes in hopes of understanding how the 5,000-mile mountain chain was formed.

Petersen has taught courses in ore deposits and mining geology at Harvard since 1963 and has occupied the Harry C. Dudley chair since its inception in 1982. He was head tutor and chairman of the standing committee of the environmental science and public policy concentration, which started in 1993. Over the years, Petersen has watched the concentration grow from just a few students to its current enrollment of over 100.

A consultant with mining companies, governments, and international organizations throughout the world, Petersen has looked below the Earth's surface in Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Mexico, Canada, Argentina, Haiti, Namibia, Spain, Japan, Australia, Bolivia, Chile, and the United States.

Petersen holds a degree in mining engineering from the Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros in Lima, Peru, where he taught until 1951. His M.A. and Ph.D. are both from Harvard. He has been a visiting professor at Heidelberg University and the University of California.

Prior to his professorship at Harvard, Petersen worked at the Insituto Geologico del Peru and Insitituto Nacional de Investigacion y Fomento Mineros (1946-1951), and at the Cerro Pasco Corporation (1951-1963), where he progressed from assistant geologist to head geologist.

Petersen's long list of achievements includes the Peruvian government's Orden al Merito for his contributions to Peruvian geology and the discovery of ore deposits and the German government's Humboldt Foundation research award. He has also been a Mineralogical Society of America fellow, and the president of the Society of Economic Geologists.

Richard Pipes, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of History, might just have earned the distinction of being the one Russian historian to point out that the Emperor wasn't wearing any clothes. Throughout his career, the Polish-born Pipes has held firm to his belief that Communism was a sham. And, in the end, after years of criticism and hostility from colleagues and Soviets alike, it seems Pipes may have seen what everyone else couldn't. A member of the faculty since 1950, Pipes has been the Baird Jr. Professor of History since 1975. He has also been actively involved in the Russian Research Center throughout his career, having served as associate director (1962-1964) and director (1968-1973).

Pipes has also made quite a name for himself outside academia. His consulting dossier includes: chair, Government "Team B" to Review Strategic Intelligence Estimates (1976); executive committee member, Committee on the Present Danger (1977); member, Reagan Transition Team, Department of State (1980); director of East European and Soviet Affairs for the National Security Council (1981-1982), and chair, U.S.-Soviet Relations Task Force, Dole for President (1988).

He is the author of dozens of groundbreaking books and papers on Russian history including his soon-to-be published The Unknown Lenin (Yale University Press, fall 1996), and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. Pipes has also served on the editorial boards of numerous local and foreign publications including the International Journal of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence and the St. Petersburg-based Minuvshee.

Pipes has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named Harvard's Walter Channing Cabot fellow in the early 90s. A foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Pipes received the Commander's Cross of Merit from the Republic of Poland in 1996. He came to the U.S. from Poland in 1940, was naturalized in 1943, and earned an A.B. from Cornell University (1945) and a Ph.D. from Harvard (1950).

Abdelhamid Sabra, professor of the history of Arabic science in the Department of the History of Science, has distinguished himself as the only existing professor of the history of Arabic science in the United States. A renowned historian of optics in medieval Islam and in the early modern period, he joined the Harvard faculty in 1972.

Sabra began his academic training at the University of Alexandria, where he obtained a B.A. in philosophy before he went to London in 1949 on a six-year Egyptian scholarship to study the philosophy of science under Karl Popper. The work for his Ph.D. from the University of London, in 1955, was concerned with 17th-century optics. Sabra began his teaching career at Alexandria (1955-61), where his interests turned to Arabic geometry and optics. In 1962 he accepted a position at the University of London's Warburg Institute, where he became reader in the history of the classical tradition until his appointment at Harvard.

While at Harvard, Sabra's research and teaching in the departments of the history of science and Near Eastern languages and civilizations have focused mainly on Arabic/Islamic science and philosophy. The heart of Sabra's work is the study of Arabic optics and aspects of Arabic science in the context of Islamic civilization -- work largely supported with grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

The recipient of the 1987 Kuwait prize in the field of Islamic studies, Sabra has published scores of monographs, text-editions, and translations in subjects ranging from Euclid's postulates, Arabic astronomy and logic, to theories of light and vision from the 11th to the 17th centuries, to speculations on the cultural context of Arabic/Islamic science. He is currently working on completing his multi-volume edition and translation of the seven books of Ibn al-Haytham's Optics.

Sabra has served as editorial consultant or adviser to a score of international journals published in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, and as associate editor of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. He is a member of many academic societies and has been elected to several academies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academie Internationale des Sciences.

Jurij Striedter, Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature, knows the firsthand nuances of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and War and Peace, because he has read them in their original language.

Striedter joined Harvard's faculty in 1977, having held two previous visiting professorships at the University, one in 1964 and one in 1974. Prior to coming to Harvard, Striedter was professor of Slavic literatures at Berlin's Free University (1961-1966), where he was director of the Slavic Seminar and co-director of the Institute for Eastern European Research and Studies. He was also a professor of Literature at the University of Konstanz (1967-1976), where he was a member of the founding senate, the dean of the faculty, and the chair of the committee for student affairs.

Striedter has also been a visiting professor at such prestigious institutions as Yale University, Columbia University, and the University of Zurich.

Striedter received a Ph.D. in German literature and philosophy from the University of Heidelberg, studied Slavic languages and literatures at the Sorbonne, and was a postdoctoral fellow of the German Research Society at Free University.

He has been an active member of the Harvard faculty. Over the course of his career he has served as a senior fellow of the Society of Fellows, co-founder and chair of the Literature Concentration, co-founder and executive committee member for the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, director of graduate studies in the Slavic department, and the Master of Cabot House. Striedter has published numerous books and journal articles on Slavic and German literatures and literary theory.

Albert Szabo, professor of architecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), and Osgood Hooker Professor of Visual Arts at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, began art studies at Brooklyn College with architect Serge Chermayeff. During that period he apprenticed with noted Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer. Szabo next studied at the Institute of Design in Chicago, the "New Bauhaus," and subsequently earned his M.Arch. at Harvard's Department of Architecture, then chaired by Walter Gropius.

Following three years of teaching at the Institute of Design, he was invited to join the Faculty of Architecture at the GSD in 1954, working both with graduate and undergraduate students. In 1979 he created a seminar on indigenous architecture, the first of its kind at the GSD, where he further developed his theory regarding the relationship between culture, climate, and context as basic to the evolution of form and purpose in indigenous and contemporary architecture.

Szabo served as chair of the Department of Architectural Sciences, which has been established at the prompting of Gropius to introduce undergraduates to architectural thought and method. In 1968 he was co-founder, with Professor Eduard Sekler, of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, an expanded set of offerings in the visual arts housed in the Carpenter Center.

In addition to teaching, Szabo has been associated with architectural firms in Chicago and Cambridge, collaborated in architectural practice throughout his career with Brenda Dyer Szabo, M.Arch. '51, including a partnership for several years with Jerzy Soltan.

His book, Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture (1991), published in collaboration with Thomas Barfield, was cited by the American Library Association as one of the best academic books of 1992.

His retirement will conclude 42 years of service to Harvard, the longest continuous appointment at the GSD.

When Henry Rosovsky, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, retired from 11 years as the Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1984, he did so to a standing ovation. Lord only knows what will happen now that he's retiring from the University. Never one to do anything halfway, Rosovsky has made quite a name for himself as an outstanding scholar and economist. His list of achievements is lengthy.

Rosovsky holds some 15 honorary degrees from around the world and has received such accolades as the Schumpeter Prize in Economics, the Encyclopedia Britannica Achievement in Life Award, and University of California, Berkeley's Clark Kerr Medal for service to higher education. He was also named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French Government and the recipient of the Order of the Sacred Treasure (Star) by the Emperor of Japan. He has been a member of the American Philosophical Society.

A professor of economics at Harvard since 1965, Rosovsky has been a University Professor since 1984. During his tenure, Rosovsky served as the chair of the Economics Department (1969-1972), associate director of the East Asian Research Center (1967-1969), Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (1973-1984), and Walter S. Barker Professor of economics (1975-1984).

Rosovsky will continue to lend his leadership skills to the university as a member of the Harvard Corporation.

Before coming to Harvard, Rosovsky was assistant professor, associate professor, professor of economics and history, and chairman of the Center for Japanese and Korean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (1958-1965). He has also served as a visiting professor at Stanford University, Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Tokyo University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and as a consultant to the President's Commission on International Trade and Foreign Investment (1971) and to the Asian Development Bank (1977-78).

Rosovsky is the author of numerous books and articles on the subject of economics and academics, including The University Owner's Manual, Capital Formation in Japan, and Quantitative Japanese Economic History.

Born in the Free City of Danzig, Poland, Rosovsky came to the U.S. as a refugee when he was 13. He is a graduate of William and Mary and holds a master's degree and a Ph.D. from Harvard.