April 12, 2007

Newman named Ver Steeg Fellow

Medieval religion scholar makes argument about the feminine divine

Barbara J. Newman has been named the second recipient of the Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship, the University’s first endowed award for excellence in research by a faculty member.

Newman, professor of English, religion and classics and John Evans Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, is a preeminent scholar in medieval religion and comparative literature.

Initiated last year when the Ver Steegs established and endowed the prize, the Ver Steeg award provides the recipient with a research grant of $30,000. Clarence Ver Steeg was a faculty member in the department of history from 1950 until 1992 and served as dean of The Graduate School from 1975 to 1986.

Provost Lawrence B. Dumas said, “We are deeply grateful to Dorothy and Clarence Ver Steeg for their vision in establishing this award, and we are delighted this year to recognize Professor Newman for path-breaking research and scholarship that have been recognized nationally and internationally.”

Newman is known for her work on medieval religious culture and women’s spirituality. She is the author of “God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages,” a monograph that makes a strong argument about the feminine divine and the ways that allegorical goddess figures deepened the Christian concept of God.

Newman’s most recent book is “Frauenlob’s Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and His Masterpiece,” published last year by Penn State University Press. This book introduces the poet-minstrel Frauenlob to English-speaking readers with a fresh translation of his masterpiece, a poem in praise of the Virgin Mary, and includes a performance on CD by the early music ensemble Sequentia.

She is also the author of “From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature” and three works on Hildegard of Bingen: an edited volume, “Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World”; an edition and translation of Hildegard’s collected songs, “Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum”; and “Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine.” The prize-winning ‘Sister of Wisdom’ was a landmark in medieval women’s studies and an important contribution to the broader study of religion.

In 2005, Newman was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the oldest learned society in academia. Election to the academy, which was founded in 1780, recognizes those who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large.

Newman, who served as chair of the department of  English from 1993-96, has been a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bellagio Center (Rockefeller Foundation) and the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern.

The Ver Steeg award is designed “to support the research of a tenured Northwestern faculty member whose research and scholarship are so outstanding as to enhance the reputation of Northwestern, nationally and internationally.” A broad academic field is identified by the Provost each year as the area from which nominations are solicited from school deans.

In recognition of Ver Steeg’s instrumental role in the development of the life sciences at Northwestern, that area was selected as the focus last year, when the first Ver Steeg award was made to J. Larry Jameson, Irving S. Cutter Professor of Medicine, chair of the Department of Medicine, and dean-designate of the Feinberg School of Medicine.