Professor Ed Muir, of the Department of History, was elected as the new president of the American Historical Association. He is the first professor at Northwestern to receive this honor, and it is indicative of his high esteem as both a scholar and a person.
According to their website, the American Historical Association is the largest professional organization that serves historians in all fields and all professions. The organization advocates for history education, the role that critical historical thinking plays in public life, and the professional work of historians.
Muir is the Clarence L. Ver Steeg Professor in the Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, and he holds a Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence. He studies Italian social and cultural history, with a particular emphasis on the late Middle Ages and Renaissance periods. Muir also has a special interest in the history of ritual and violence in continental Europe.
Additionally, Muir has served as the president of two other major academic societies in the field: The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference and The Renaissance Society of America. He has also received a number of prestigious fellowships throughout his career, including awards from Guggenheim, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the National Humanities Center, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Newberry Library.
Read the full announcement here.