Professors To Be Awarded National Humanitites Medals At White House Ceremony

Diana L. Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at the Divinity School, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, are among the nine Americans who have been selected by the president of the United States as winners of the 1998 National Humanities Medals.

The award will be presented by President William J. Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday, Nov. 5, at 9:30 a.m. at a special ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House.

"The 1998 National Humanities Medalists represent virtuosity in the humanities in a variety of ways -- through writing and teaching, scholarship and literary creation, and public outreach and philanthropy," said William R. Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Diana L. Eck is the creator and director of the Harvard-based Pluralism Project, which documents and analyzes America's religious diversity and produced an acclaimed CD-ROM that is now in wide use as a resource for studying the role of religion in American culture.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard and the author of the best-selling Colored People: A Memoir and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. He is also co-editor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature.

Another award recipient, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., is a former Harvard faculty member, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and author of A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965).