Three Centers Have New Directors

When the 2005-06 academic year kicks off in September, three academic centers within the College of Humanities will be calling on the energies and imagination of new leaders.

Daniel Frank will step to the helm of the Melton Center for Jewish Studies, while Richard Firth Green does likewise for the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Dorothy Noyes will head up the Center for Folklore Studies.

As center directors, the three were appointed by Dean of Humanities John W. Roberts to terms of four years.

Heres a quick snapshot of the new directors.

Professor Daniel Frank, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, specializes in the history, literature, and culture of Jews in Islamic lands during the Middle Ages. An authority on the Karaites, a sect that does not accept the authority of the Talmud, he has recently published Search Scripture Well: Karaite Exegetes and the Origins of the Jewish Bible Commentary in the Islamic East (2004). He has served as a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a Lecturer in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford

Humanities Distinguished Professor Richard Firth Green, Department of English, has been recognized as one of the leading scholars and literary historians of his generation for the last two decades. He is an internationally ranked medieval scholar who specializes in literature and law, court culture of the late middle ages, and medieval culture and folklore. Among Green´s landmark books are A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (1998) and Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (1980).

Dorothy Noyes, Department of English, is an internationally respected folklorist who studies the collective representations of plural societies. She is especially interested in how inter-group relations are articulated in traditional performance. Noyes is the author of two books, Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco (2003) and Uses of Tradition: Arts of Italian Americans in Philadelphia (1989), as well as numerous articles on folklore theory. She held a prestigious Camargo Foundation Fellowship in the fall of 2003 and sits on the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society.

Best wishes to Professors Frank, Green, and Noyes in their new leadership roles.