American Academy Announces New Officers

August 1, 2001- The American Academy of Arts and Sciences announces the appointment of two new officers. The Council has named literary scholar and former Academy Vice-President Patricia Meyer Spacks as the organization’s 43rd President; she succeeds James O. Freedman who resigned due to ill health. Louis W. Cabot is the Academy's new Vice-President.

Spacks, the Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, has written on the poets and novelists of the eighteenth century in such books as The Poetry of Vision and Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels. In addition she has published essays on cultural as well as literary subjects, including adolescence, boredom, gossip, women writers,, and, most recently, privacy.

As chair of the board of directors of the American Council of Learned Societies and trustee of the National Humanities Center, Spacks is a strong advocate for the vital role the humanities play in American society. At the Academy, she serves on the Executive Committee of the Program on Humanities and Culture. In this role, she will oversee a study of the disciplines of the humanities and their institutional setting in the past century. In Spacks’s words, the study seeks to develop a new public concept of the humanities, partly by describing how deeply these disciplines have influenced, and in turn have been affected by, the social and cultural movements of the time.

Louis Wellington Cabot has been with the Cabot Corporation since 1948, serving as President (1950-1969), Chairman of the Board (1969-1986), and director emeritus (1986-present). In addition, Cabot was Chairman of the Brookings Institution (1986-1992) and a director of the boards of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (1975-1978), New England Telephone and Telegraph, Owens-Corning Fiberglass Corporation, R.R. Donnelley & Sons, Wang Laboratories, Inc., Penn Central R.R., and Arthur D. Little, Inc. He is currently Chairman of Cabot-Wellington LLC, a Director of Conservation International, and a trustee of Northeastern University, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Cabot Family Charitable Trust.

A veteran of World War II, Cabot was a member of the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management (1985). In addition, he chaired both the President’s Circle of the National Academy of Sciences (1992-1995) and the Sloan Commission on Government and Higher Education (1977-1980).

Both Patricia Spacks and Louis Cabot have been actively involved in Academy affairs. In addition to serving as an active member of the Humanities and Culture initiatives, Spacks was formerly chair of the Class IV Membership Committee; Cabot co-chairs the Development Committee and serves on both the Budget and Membership Committees.

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