Dr. Pat Rogers, DeBartolo Professor in the English Department at the University
of South Florida, has been elected to the British Academy with installation on September
22. On a par with the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, the British
Academy focuses on the Social Sciences and Humanities. It was chartered in 1902
by King Edward VII. Each year it elects up to 38 Ordinary Fellows based in the United
Kingdom and up to 10 Corresponding Fellows based elsewhere. Besides Dr. Rogers,
the other scholars elected this year based in the United States are Daniel Kahneman
of Princeton University, Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago, Peter Phillips
of Yale University, and Bas van Fraasen of San Francisco State University. Past
Fellows of the Academy include John Maynard Keynes, Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin,
Louis and Mary Leakey, A. J. P. Taylor, Kenneth Clark, C. S. Lewis, and Henry Moore.
Election recognizes a scholar’s entire body of work. Dr. Rogers, a specialist in
Eighteenth-Century British Literature, has authored or edited forty-four books.
His most recent are The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope (Cambridge
University Press, 2007) and Edmund Curll, Bookseller (Oxford University Press,
2007). An edition of papers from the 20th DeBartolo Conference is forthcoming from
the University of Delaware Press. Rogers is currently working on a biography of
British poet Alexander Pope.