Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has announced the appointments of Romila Thapar, an authority on Indian history, and Libby Larsen, a prolific American composer, to study at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.
Thapar, emeritus professor of ancient Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Dehli, is the first holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South. Larsen, the composer of more than 200 works, has been named to the Harissios Papamarkou Chair in Education and Technology in the Kluge Center.
The Library also announced the selection of Christopher Anderson of Indiana University and Julio Moreno of the University of San Francisco to receive the first Library of Congress Coca-Cola Fellowships for the Study of Advertising and World Cultures for 2003.
Romila Thapar
The holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South pursues research on the regions of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, or the islands of the Pacific including Australia and New Zealand, using the immense foreign language collections of the Library's specialized reading rooms. Thapar will spend 10 months at the Kluge Center pursuing "Historical Consciousness in Early India" as her area of research.
Thapar, who has served as visiting professor at Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania, is a recognized authority on Indian history. The author of many seminal works on the history of ancient India, her volume of the Penguin History of India has been continuously in print since 1966. Her latest publication is "Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300." Other recent works are "Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History" and "History and Beyond." In her published works, Thapar has pioneered both the study of early Indian texts as history and the integration of the critical use of archaeology with written sources.
During her career Thapar has held many visiting posts in Europe, the United States and Japan. She is an honorary fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She has honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago, the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, the University of Oxford and the University of Calcutta.
Libby Larsen
The Papamarkou Chair in Education and Technology was established through a generous gift from Alexander Papamarkou (deceased in 1998) in honor of his grandfather to address topics of education and technology that have an impact on the Library of Congress and the nation.
Beginning in June Larsen, as holder of this chair, will work to connect music education organizations with artists to plan new ways that arts educators and world-class artist practitioners can work together.
In addition, she will work to organize "The Global Green Room," a Web-based project to bring together leading practicing artists to consider "the soul" of America's culture. Larsen will also continue work on her book of essays about the cultural effects of music, electricity, sound and transportation.
Larsen has created more than 200 works spanning every genre, from intimate vocal and chamber music to massive orchestral and opera scores. Her opera, "Barnum's Bird," which was co-commissioned by the Library of Congress and the Odyssey Commissioning Program of the Plymouth Music Series in honor of the Library's 200th anniversary, had its world premiere in the Coolidge Auditorium in February 2002. Larsen's works are widely recorded on such labels as Angel/EMI, Nonesuch, Decca and Koch International Classics.
Her awards include the 1994 Grammy as producer of the CD, "The Art of Arleen Augér," a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bush Foundation, and numerous honorary doctorate degrees. Larsen's opera, "Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus," was selected as one of the eight best classical music events of 1990 by USA Today.
Christopher Anderson and Julio Moreno
Administered by the Library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division (MBRS) in collaboration with the Library's Office of Scholarly Programs and the John W. Kluge Center, the Coca-Cola Fellowship is awarded on a competitive basis to researchers studying the interrelationships among advertising, culture, commerce and the media.
The fellowship provides recipients with a stipend of $20,000 each and access to resources at the Library for an extended period of in-depth, multidisciplinary research into the Library's audiovisual and other research collections. The fellows will be provided with research facilities in the Kluge Center for the period of their research.
Anderson's proposal, "An Eye Made Quiet: History in the Ruins of Live Television," examines the cultural history of live television in the 1950s, especially the intermingling of entertainment and advertising.
Moreno's proposal is "American Business, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Cold War Culture in Latin America, 1945-1990," a comparative examination of the diverse interests and approaches of American corporations and Latin American governments toward consumers.
Billington selected the two recipients of the Coca-Cola Fellowship upon the recommendation of a three-person selection committee chosen from the broader academic community. Coca-Cola provided funding for five fellowships. Applications for the 2004 fellowship will be accepted beginning on Nov. 1. For more information, visit www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/cokefellowship/.
The Coca-Cola Company donated its archives of television broadcast advertising materials to the Library of Congress in November 2000 in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Coca-Cola's first TV commercial, which aired on Thanksgiving Day, 1950. The collection consists of more than 22,000 commercials that document the company's broadcast advertising, including those produced internationally.
The Library received the donation as part of the Bicentennial Gifts to the Nation program, marking the Library's 200th anniversary in 2000. The donation represents the largest gift of corporate advertising in the Library's history and joins a rich body of broadcast advertising materials dating to the early days of radio and television.