Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., Amos Lawrence Professor of Art, Emeritus
“My interest in art,” you have said, “began almost as I was born.” And, after a colorful pre-academic career that included experience as a meat salesman and as a wrestling opponent of Donald Rumsfeld, it is to art that you have dedicated your life. In addition to your vigorous teaching, you have contributed new understanding of the relationships between art and science and art and politics, particularly in Renaissance Italy. The American Historical Association cited your work on the importance of linear perspective to the history of ideas for its “innovative and interdisciplinary examination of the linkages among science, artistic representation, cognition, and culture.” This work has also won you a Guggenheim Fellowship and membership into the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. At an age when some scholars comfortably slip into dotage you instead pursued a new interest in pre-Columbian art of Meso-America—teaching yourself Maya and leading Raiders of the Lost Ark-type rafting trips to jungle-enshrouded ruins. You returned with the holy grail of new insights to advance this growing field of inquiry. Here at home we remember you also as a very able Director of the Graduate Program in Art History and as a generous colleague who devoted great energy to organizing for many years the Art Department Faculty Colloquia. We have benefited also from your being, in the often genteel world of Williams, someone who actually relishes a good argument, since wrestling with important ideas in art has, after all, been your calling since birth.
I hereby declare you Amos Lawrence Professor of Art, Emeritus, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.
June 3, 2007