START researcher and Distinguished University Professor of psychology Michele J. Gelfand will be inducted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and professor of government and politics Frances E. Lee will also be inducted with Gelfand in October 2019.
The new class will be inducted at a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and join the Academy members who came before them, including Benjamin Franklin (elected 1781) and Alexander Hamilton (1791) in the eighteenth century; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1864), Maria Mitchell (1848), and Charles Darwin (1874) in the nineteenth; Albert Einstein (1924), Robert Frost (1931), Margaret Mead (1948), Milton Friedman (1959), and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966) in the twentieth, and more recently Antonin Scalia (2003), Michael Bloomberg (2007), John Lithgow(2010), Judy Woodruff (2012), and Bryan Stevenson (2014).
The Academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good. The Academy’s dual mission remains essentially the same 239 years later, with honorees from increasingly diverse fields and with the work now focused on the arts, democracy, education, global affairs, and science.
“It is wonderful news that Professor Frances Lee and Professor Michele Gelfand, two distinguished members of the BSOS faculty, have both been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,” said Dean Gregory F. Ball. “Professor Lee is a leading scholar of the U.S. Congress. Professor Gelfand is a world thought leader in Cross-cultural Psychology who has pioneered our thinking about the effects of ‘loose’ and ‘tight’ cultures on human behavior. We are honored at BSOS to have them both as members of our faculty.”
Michele Gelfand is Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences. Her work has been published in outlets such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Psychological Science, Nature Scientific Reports, Nature Human Behavior, PLOS 1, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Research in Organizational Behavior, Annual Review of Psychology, American Psychologist, and the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, among others. Gelfand is the founding co-editor of the Advances in Culture and Psychology annual series and the Frontiers of Culture and Psychology series (with CY Chiu and Ying-Yi Hong, Oxford University Press). Her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World was published by Scribner in 2018.
She is the Past President of the International Association for Conflict Management, Past Division Chair of the Conflict Division of the Academy of Management, Past Treasurer of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, and co-founder of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution. She received the 2016 Diener award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the 2017 Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the APA, the 2019 Outstanding Cultural Psychology Award from SPSP, the 2109 Science-Practitioner award from SIOP, and the Annaliese Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation which was given to seven scientists worldwide for outstanding contributions in their fields. Her work published in Science was honored with the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Her funding (~$13 million) is from NSF, FBI, and DOD. Learn more on her Wiki page and on her website.
Frances E. Lee is a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, where she teaches courses in American government, the public policy process, legislative politics, and political institutions. She is the author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (2016) and Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate (2009). Lee is also the coauthor of Sizing Up The Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (1999) and of a comprehensive textbook on the U.S. Congress, Congress and Its Members (Sage/CQ Press). She co-edited the Oxford Handbook of the American Congress (2011) and a volume forthcoming in 2019, Can America Govern Itself?
Her books have received national recognition, including the American Political Science Association’s Richard F. Fenno Award for the best book on legislative politics and the D. B. Hardeman Award—presented by the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation for the best book on a congressional topic—in both 1999 and 2009. She is founding editor of the Cambridge Elements Series in American Politics. She was co-editor of Legislative Studies Quarterly, handling all the manuscripts submitted on the U.S. Congress (2014-2018). Her research has also appeared in numerous journal outlets, including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, and Journal of Politics, among others.
Story and Images courtesy of UMD College of Behavioral and Social Sciences.