Malti-Douglas
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Indiana University’s Fedwa Malti-Douglas has become the fourth IU faculty member in history to be elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society (APS).
She is the Martha C. Kraft Professor of humanities at IU Bloomington and teaches gender studies, comparative literature and law.
Previous IU honorees are the late geneticist Marcus Rhoades (1962), the late Herman B Wells (1964) and the School of Medicine’s Lawrence Einhorn (2001). The APS was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 and recognizes achievements in five classes of academic disciplines: mathematical and physical sciences; biological sciences; social sciences; humanities; and the arts, professions, and public and private affairs. Malti-Douglas is one of 10 new members in the humanities class.
“The great debates of our age—about artificial intelligence, about the manipulation of the genome, about new definitions of gender, of marriage and religion, even of liberty and security, and the clash of cultures—all these debates involve central questions in the humanities,” Malti-Douglas said.
This year’s inductees include Stephen Breyer, justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Washington Post chairman Donald Graham, historian David McCullough and cultural and global affairs commentator Noam Chomsky, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Malti-Douglas’ intellectual focus has been on visual and verbal narratives, in both high and popular culture, especially where the narratives intersect with issues of marginality, disability, gender and the body. She began her career as a medievalist and then turned to the contemporary Middle East and North Africa, as well as to the immigrant populations in France and Belgium. In recent years, she has broadened her research area to include Europe, Latin America and the U.S.
She is the author of The Starr Report Disrobed (Columbia University Press, 2000), which earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination, and Men, Women and God(s), which was chosen as a Centennial Book by the University of California Press in 1995. Her co-authored book, Arab Comic Strips (IU Press, 1994) was named a Reader’s Catalog Selection (one of the Best Books in Print) by The New York Review of Books. In 1997, she received a $100,000 award from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences.
http://www.iuinfo.indiana.edu/HomePages/012299/text/kuwait.htm
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