Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 5, 2007|Volume 36, Number 5

Winners of Graduate School’s Wilbur Cross Medals to present talks

Four alumni of the Graduate School will receive the school’s highest honor, the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, on Tuesday, Oct. 9.

This year’s honorees are Carol T. Christ ’70 Ph.D., academic administrator and scholar of English literature; Paul Friedrich ’57 Ph.D., linguistic anthropologist; Anne Walters Robertson ’84 Ph.D., musicologist; and John Suppe ’69 Ph.D., geologist.

Each medalist will be honored at a lunch in his or her academic department, and each will give a talk at 4 p.m., prior to a formal awards ceremony and dinner hosted by Graduate School Dean Jon Butler. The talks are open to the entire Yale community, but are especially intended for graduate students and faculty.

Christ will speak on “Mapping a Career in the Academy” in Rm. 319 of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High St. Friedrich will present a talk titled “A Return to Yale” in Rm. 1, 51 Hillhouse Ave. Robertson will speak on “The Earliest Christ-Mass and the Beginnings of the Cyclic Mass in Western Europe,” in Rm. 207 of William L. Harkness Hall, 100 Wall St., and Suppe will discuss “The Weak Fault Problem and the Strength of the Crust” in Rm. 123, Kline Geology Laboratory, 210 Whitney Ave.

Brief profiles of this year’s Wilbur Cross Medalists follow:

Carol T. Christ

Christ has been president of Smith College since 2002. A scholar-administrator, she is the author of two books on 19th-century and modernist poetry, “The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry” and “Victorian and Modern Poetics.” She edited the “Norton Anthology of English Literature,” which sets the standard for the study of British literature.

She served for over 30 years on the faculty of the University of California-Berkeley, eventually becoming its executive vice chancellor, the school’s highest academic officer. She has, throughout her career, been a champion of women’s issues and diversity. During her five years at Smith, she has supervised a thorough curriculum review and has overseen major renovations to the campus.

Paul Friedrich

Friedrich is professor emeritus of anthropology, linguistics, and Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Chicago. His work in ethno-poetics is considered groundbreaking. His 11 books include four volumes of original poetry as well as “The ‘Gita’ Within ‘Walden,’” “Music in Russian Poetry,” “The Princes of Naranja: An Essay in Anthrohistorical Method,” “The Language of Parallax: Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminacy” and others that range from studies of formal linguistics and Homeric Greek to political anthropology and 20th-century philology. As a token of highest academic honor, 30 of his former students dedicated a festschrift to him, “Language, Culture and the Individual: A Tribute to Paul Friedrich.”

Anne Walters Robertson

Robertson is the Claire Dux Swift Distinguished Service Professor in Music at the University of Chicago. A classical pianist as well as a specialist in medieval and Renaissance music, she is author of two award-winning books about music and liturgy at the basilica where French royalty were buried and at the cathedral where they were crowned: “The Service Books of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis: Images of Ritual and Music in the Middle Ages” and “Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works.” At the University of Chicago, she has chaired the Music Department for six years and served as the associate provost and deputy provost for research and education.

John Suppe

Suppe is the Blair Professor of Geology at Princeton University. His pioneering research uncovered the fundamental forces that cause the upper portion of the Earth’s crust to be altered, causing earthquakes. He was the first to recognize the large-scale structure of the modern collision zone on the island of Taiwan — one of the most rapidly changing landscapes in the world. Because of his pioneering work, that region is now one of the most intensely studied mountain belts in the world. Suppe is author or editor of five books, including the widely used textbook, “Principles of Structural Geology.” A member of the faculty at Princeton since 1971, Suppe was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995.

Since the first Wilbur Cross Medal was presented in 1966 to Edgar Stephenson Furniss by the Graduate School Alumni Association (GSAA), the awards have almost always been given at Commencement. Last year, the Graduate School and the GSAA decided to shift the celebration to October, when the academic year would be in full swing. This allows the medalists to interact with students and faculty when they come to campus to be honored.

The medals are named for Wilbur Lucius Cross (1862-1948), who was dean of the Graduate School from 1916 to 1930. An alumnus of Yale College and the Graduate School (Ph.D. 1889), Cross was a noted scholar and author of “The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne,” “The History of Henry Fielding” and other books on the English novel. He was a distinguished literary critic, rejuvenating and editing the Yale Review. Following his retirement from academia, Cross was governor of Connecticut for four terms.

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