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Emeriti receive Mellon Fellowships

Published April 19, 2004; Category: ARTS & SCIENCES

Awards fund scholarly projects of retirees

Two Dartmouth emeritus professors have been awarded fellowships by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Hans H. Penner, Professor of Religion Emeritus, and Christian Wolff, Professor of Music and of Classics Emeritus, will both receive funds to support their continuing research activities.

The Mellon Emeritus Fellowship program, new this year, recognizes scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are retired but continue to pursue research opportunities. This year, the fellowships were awarded to 16 scholars nationally and include funds for research and other expenses.

Hans Penner

Hans Penner will write a two-part book on the Buddha. The first part will be a narrative of the life of the Buddha as represented in the canonical texts of Theravada Buddhism of Southeast Asia. The narrative will restore the mythical content of the life of the Buddha as a superhuman being.

The second part of the book will consist of a set of interpretations of the myth that focus on the overall framework of the myth, and its cosmological structure, that have contributed to the meaning and development of Buddhism throughout its long history. The main thesis of the book will be that the best approach to an adequate understanding of Buddhism entails, first of all, that we put to rest "the quest for the historical Buddha."

A member of the Dartmouth faculty since 1965, Penner is a specialist on religious myth and ritual, and on the methodological problems in the study of religion.

He has authored numerous scholarly works on the subject, including the book Impasse and Resolution: A Critique of the Study of Religion. He has also authored the entry on ritual for the Encyclopedia Britannica and has served as associate editor of the Harper's Dictionary of Religion. Penner received his doctorate from the University of Chicago.

Christian Wolff

Christian Wolff's fellowship will support music composition, performance and recording. He will compose a work for orchestra and soloists, and direct recordings of several of his older works. As part of its composition, the new piece will include instructions for placement of performers around the performance space to allow the audience to be partly inside where the sound is created. The score will allow for variation on the part of performers. Variation is also at the heart of the eight-day recording project, which will focus on pieces that because of freedom left to performers vary constantly in their outcome. Wolff plans a double CD of representative selections.

Wolff earned his doctorate from Harvard in classics and studied music under the pianist Grete Sultan and with composer John Cage. He jointed the Dartmouth faculty in 1971, with appointments in music, comparative literature and classics.

In 1975 he received the Award in Music from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1996 he was awarded the John Cage Award for Music. He is the author of more than 150 musical compositions - some of which are recorded on his 14 CDs - and of many articles and reviews in the fields of music and classics which were collected in his book, Cues, in 1998. He was elected to the Academy of the Arts in Berlin in 1998.

By JAMES DONNELLY

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