Philosophy Professor Roger S. Gottlieb has been named WPI's new Paris Fletcher Distinguished Professor of Humanities. The two-year professorship, which carries a stipend, was established in 1985 by the George I. Alden Trust. It is awarded in recognition of fine teaching and to enhance opportunities for scholarship and research. Paris Fletcher, who died in 1990, was a longtime community leader, lawyer and friend of education.
Gottlieb received a B.A. and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University. A member of the WPI faculty since 1981, he is the coordinator of the Institute's Humanities/Environmental Studies curriculum which enables students who are interested in humanistically oriented environmental studies to major in the humanities with concentrations in literature, philosophy and religion, or history. The program prepares graduates for careers in law, business, government service, environmental activism and journalism, and for graduate study in the humanities.
Gottlieb has also chaired the WPI Campus Committee on Environmental Affairs, which has worked on a range of campus environmental issues, including the need to find ways to reduce paper use. He is on the steering committee of the Religion and Ecology section of the American Academy of Religion and is the editor of Capital, Nature, Socialism, an international environmental journal.
Gottlieb has written widely on social theory, the Holocaust, contemporary spirituality and environmental theory. Among his recent books are Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust and Marxism 1844-1990: Origins, Betrayal, Rebirth. He is the editor of This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment, a survey of traditional religious myths, creation stories and conceptions of nature from Jewish, Christian, Native American, Indian, African, Chinese and indigenous texts and commentators. Contributors focus on religion in an age of environmental crisis.
During the second half of the 1995-96 academic year, he will be on sabbatical to complete Holocaust and Ecocide, an examination of three critical similarities between the Holocaust and humanity's current treatment of the environment. "The book," Gottlieb says, "will describe the despair that takes the form of a rejection of spiritual forces or meanings; the public despair that arises when the full scope of Jewish resistance is absent from public commemorations of the event; and the political despair prompted by the way humanity as a whole has created an environmental crisis that in some ways mimics the Holocaust on a global scale.
Give feedback: newspeak@wpi.wpi.edu