Dr. Robert Conquest elected to Academy of Arts and Sciences (05/30/04)

Dr. Robert Conquest elected to Academy of Arts and Sciences

STANFORD, Calif. - Robert Conquest, the world-renowned authority on Joseph Stalin and Russian history, and a Hoover Institution research fellow, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is one of 178 new fellows and 24 new foreign honorary members elected to the academy. The 202 men and women are leaders in scholarship, business, the arts, and public affairs.

The finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation - including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th century - are chosen to join the academy.

Dr. Conquest is the 31st Hoover Institution fellow to be elected to the academy. The announcement was made on April 30.

The academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people." The unique structure of the American Academy allows it to conduct interdisciplinary studies on international security, social policy, education and the humanities that draw on the range of academic and intellectual disciplines of its members. The current membership of more than 4,500 includes 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners.

The academy will welcome this year's new fellows and foreign honorary members at its annual induction ceremony in October at its headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Robert Conquest's awards and honors include the Jefferson Lectureship in the Humanities, the federal government's highest distinction in the field, in 1993; the Richard Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters in 1999; and the Alexis de Tocqueville Award in 1992. His major scholarly concern has been with the nature of and relations between despotic and consensual cultures.

He is the author of 18 books on Soviet history, politics, and international affairs, including the classic "The Great Terror" (Macmillan, 1968). Translations have appeared in more than 20 languages, including Russian. Other works include the acclaimed "Harvest of Sorrow" (Oxford University Press, 1986), documenting the 1932-1933 Great Famine in Ukraine which has appeared in many translations.

Later books are "Stalin and the Kirov Murder" (Oxford University Press, 1988); "Tyrants and Typewriters" (Lexington Books, 1989); "The Great Terror: A Reassessment" (Oxford University Press, 1990); "Stalin: Breaker of Nations" (Viking, 1991), and "Reflections on a Ravaged Century" (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999). His most recent book, "The Dragons of Expectation" (W.W. Norton), will be published later this year.

Dr. Conquest has been literary editor of the London Spectator, brought out six volumes of poetry and one of literary criticism, edited the seminal New Lines anthologies (Macmillan, 1955-1963), and published a verse translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic "Prussian Nights" (Harvill Press, 1977). He has also published a science fiction novel and is joint author, with Kingsley Amis, of another novel, "The Egyptologists." He received the American Academy of Arts and Letters 1997 Award for light verse.

He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a fellow of the British Academy, a fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and a member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. He has been a research fellow at the London School of Economics, a fellow of the Columbia University Russian Institute, a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a distinguished visiting scholar at the Heritage Foundation and a research associate of Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute.

Educated at Winchester College, the University of Grenoble and Magdalen College, Oxford, he was an exhibitioner in modern history and took his B.A. and M.A. degrees in politics, philosophy and economics and his D. Litt. degree in Soviet history.

Dr. Conquest served through World War II in the British infantry and thereafter in His Majesty's Diplomatic Service, being awarded the Order of the British Empire. In 1996 he was named a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.

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