This article originally appeared in UChicago News on June 13, 2018.

Five faculty members in the Division of the Humanities received named professorships or were appointed distinguished service professors. James Chandler, Michèle Lowrie, and Richard Neer received distinguished service professorships; and Robert L. Kendrick, and Deborah L. Nelson received named professorships.

James Chandler has been named the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor in English, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College.

A distinguished expert of the Romantic period in English literature, Chandler also has specialized in studies of the history of the novel; the relationship between politics and literature, and history and criticism; and cinema studies. For the past 18 years, he headed up the Franke Institute for Humanities at the University of Chicago, which has contributed to redefining the humanities and its role within academics and the world. Previously, Chandler was the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor.

Recently, Chandler published An Archaelogy of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema, which links the work of Frank Capra and the golden age of Hollywood to a larger cultural and intellectual history of literature. For many years, he has received funding from foundations as Andrew W. Mellon to enable collaborative projects with other like-minded institutions such as Cambridge University, University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University.

Robert L. Kendrick has been named the William Colvin Professor in Music, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College.

Specializing in early-modern music and culture, Kendrick also has embraced Latin American music, historical anthropology, traditional Mediterranean polyphony and the visual arts. His most recent book, Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week, explores the impact of performing liturgical music on European cultures from the mid-16th century to the 17th century.

In 2018, Kendrick was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he serves as a member of Milan’s Accademia Ambrosiana. To honor his distinguished teaching abilities, he received the 2006 Humanities Graduate Teaching Excellence Award.

Michèle Lowrie has been named the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in Classics and the College.

Author of monographs on Horace and the literary culture of Augustan Rome (both from Oxford University Press), several edited volumes, and more than 40 articles ranging over Latin poetry and prose to Victor Hugo, Hermann Broch and Jacques Derrida, Lowrie is one of two scholars in the Division of Humanities and one of only 66 worldwide to receive a fellowship for her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the 2018-2019 academic year. She will step down from serving as deputy dean for the Division of Humanities in July and hopes to use the fellowship to complete a book called Security: A Roman Metaphor.

Earlier this year, Lowrie delivered the J. H. Gray Lectures in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge on security in Roman literature and political thought. She will also hold residential fellowships at the Center for Advanced Studies at Ludwig-Maximillan’s University in Munich and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Durham in England during her sabbatical year.

Richard Neer has been named the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College.

An expert in Greek art and architecture, Neer works at the intersection of art history, archaelogy and aesthetics. He has published widely on Greek vase painting, sculpture, architecture and poetry, as well as on French painting of the 17th century, theories on style and the history of cinema.

Starting in 2019, Neer will become director of the Franke Institute of the Humanities. Currently, he serves as the executive editor of Critical Inquiry. His recently published books are The Emergence of Classical Style in Greek Sculpture and Art and Archaeology of the Greek World: A New History, 2500-100 BCE.

Deborah L. Nelson has been named the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor in English Language and Literature.

Studying the late 20th century culture and politics, Nelson focuses on American literature and plays; gender and sexuality studies; photography; and Cold War history. Her 2017 book Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, explores the six famous women’s similar style and philosophical viewpoint, which derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. Their stance was a critical counter-tradition to the more familiar post-World War II polar attitudes of emotional expressivity and cool irony.

Nelson is a founding member of the Post45 collective, which publishes an online journal Post45 and book series at Stanford University Press. She serves as the chair of the English Language and Literatures Department and on the board of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.