Harris Rewarded for 'Impeccable' Scholarship of Ancient Greece, Rome

William Harris, the William R. Shepherd Professor of History, received a prestigious award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Wednesday for outstanding scholarship on ancient Rome and Greece.

The foundation named Harris one of three recipients of the 2007 Distinguished Achievement Awards on Wednesday. The honor will bring the scholar and Columbia as much as $1.5 million in funding. According to the foundation's press release, this money will likely be used for sponsoring Harris's salary and research, as well as "providing support" to his students and co-workers.

The Distinguished Achievement Awards, the foundation wrote, aim to encourage the research and teaching of extraordinary, tenured professors in the humanities and to aid their universities in further developing the programs with which the recipients are associated.

The release lauded Harris's "impeccable" scholarship in his field, his teaching, and his broad span of historical interest. "He is known especially," the Foundation wrote, "for his creativity, transformative impact, and appetite for taking on big questions."

The only other Columbia faculty member to receive the award since its inception in 2001 was Robert Bagnall, Jay Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin Languages, in 2003. Bagnall and Harris co-authored the 1986 book Studies in Roman Law: In Memory of A. Arthur Schiller.

The year's other Distinguished Achievement Awards went to Peter Brooks, the Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale, and Thomas W. Laqueur, the Helen Fawcett Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley.

Mary Kohlmann can be reached at Mary.Kohlmann@columbiaspectator.com.