Three faculty elected to Academy of Arts and Sciences

Three members of the UW–Madison faculty — a chemist, a historian and a political scientist — are among 146 people elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

New members of the Academy, an organization founded in 1780 by John Adams and other leaders of the young republic, are chosen in recognition of their contributions to science, scholarship, public affairs and the arts.

Those elected from UW–Madison include:

F. Fleming Crim, professor of chemistry. Crim joined the UW- Madison faculty in 1977. He is noted for his studies of chemical reactions at the molecular level and for the development of techniques in spectroscopy that hold promise for controlling chemical reactions with light.

Gerda Lerner, professor emerita of history and women’s studies. Lerner joined the UW–Madison faculty in 1980. She is considered a pioneer in the field of women’s history, establishing UW–Madison’s Graduate Program in Women’s History in 1981. Before her retirement in 1991, she headed a team that compiled a groundbreaking oral history on the Midwestern origins of the modern women’s movement.

M. Crawford Young, a professor of political science. He joined the faculty here in 1963 and is an internationally recognized scholar of African politics. He is a leader in the study of the political dimensions of cultural pluralism and is considered the preeminent scholar of politics in Zaire.