Congratulations to Pascal Boyer

I am pleased to announce that Pascal Boyer, Professor of Anthropology and Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory in Arts & Sciences, will be formally installed in the Luce professorship in a ceremony on May 8, 2001.

Professor Boyer studied philosophy and anthropology at the universities of Paris-Nanterre and Cambridge. He has a doctorate in anthropology from Paris-Nanterre in 1983. He served as Senior Researcher, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Lyon, France, from October 1993, following positions as Junior and then Senior Research Fellow in Cultural Anthropology at King's College, Cambridge. He joined the Washington University faculty in September, 2001.

An internationally known researcher, Professor Boyer asks the fundamental question, How can we come to understand and scientifically investigate culture and relate it to minds and brains? In particular, his research focuses on religion and involves cultural anthropology as well as cognitive and developmental psychology. His work is inherently interdisciplinary, bridging these two key departments in Arts & Sciences and connecting as well to the programs in Social Thought & Analysis and Philosophy, Neuroscience, Psychology (PNP).

Professor Boyer's widely acclaimed book, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion, has been called a landmark both in the study of religion and in cognitive approaches to culture. His publications also include two additional books, an edited collection, over 40 journal articles and book chapters, and several articles forthcoming in 2001. He has received a number of research awards from foundations and institutions in France and England, as well as a fellowship grant from the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for study at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Professor Boyer brings together his research and teaching skill in his work in the classroom. In the current semester, he is teaching a graduate psychology course in Contemporary Topics in Cognitive Development. In Fall 2001, he will teach an undergraduate course in anthropology, Cognition and Culture, and a graduate psychology course in Autobiographical Memory.

As Luce Professor, he will also organize a series of seminars, lectures, and workshops to bring together the various people engaged in the experimental study of human memory (in neuroscience and psychology) and those who study or want to hear about the social and cultural effects of memory phenomena, in particular in the humanities. These events will be organized around such themes as the contribution of individual cognitive factors to the transmission of cultural knowledge and of cultural concepts, the role of memory (and forgetting) in building identity, the connections between memory and literacy, and the role of relevance in the construction of narrative.

The Luce Professorship Program was established in 1969 to encourage academic innovation and creativity through integrative and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and research in American private higher education. Douglass C. North, Spencer T. Olin Professor, served as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Law and Liberty in the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences from 1983 to 1990.

Edward S. Macias
January 2001