Maier Named Kenan Professor

NOTED HISTORIAN

Maier named Kenan Professor

Dr. Pauline R. Maier, an historian widely known for her work on the 
American Revolution, has been selected as the next holder of the William  
Kenan Jr. Professorship at MIT, the provost, Professor John M. Deutch, 
has announced.

The chair, established in 1973 by the William  R. Kenan Jr. Charitable 
Trust, is designated for distinguished scholarship and teaching in the 
humanities. Mr. Kenan, who died in 1965 and created the trust in his 
will, worked primarily in the fields of chemical and mechanical 
engineering and had a lifelong interest in education.

Professor Maier's major field of scholarship is eighteenth and 
nineteenth century American political history and Revolutionary 
politics, particularly the life and politics of Samuel Adams. Her 
current work focuses on the tradition of 1776 and how it shaped the 
organization of American society between the Revolution and the Civil 
War.

Professor Maier received her AB degree in American history and 
literature in 1960 from Radcliffe College, where she was elected to Phi 
Beta Kappa, and a PhD in American history from Harvard University in 
1968. In 1960-61 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of 
Economics.

She taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and at the 
University of Wisconsin, where she was the Robinson-Edwards Professor of 
History, before becoming professor of history at MIT in the Department 
of Humanities in 1978. She was acting associate head of the department 
in 1979-80 and was head of the department's History Section from 1979 to 
1988. In the spring of 1983 she was Visiting Cardozo Professor of 
History at Yale University.

Her awards and honors have included the Kidger Award of the New England 
History Teachers Association for "outstanding contributions" to the 
profession, an honorary Doctor of Laws from Regis College, a National 
Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and 
Independent Scholars and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 
Fellowship.

She is a member of the Society of American Historians, American 
Antiquarian Society, Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the 
Massachusetts Historical Society.

Professor Maier's 1972 book, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial 
Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain 1765-
1776,has become a standard reference in the literature on the American 
Revolution. She also is the author of The Old Revolutionaries: Political 
Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams. She has published widely in 
professional journals and other publications and has reviewed a number 
of books for the New York Times Book Review,  New Republic and scholarly 
journals.

She and her husband, Charles, have three children and make their home in 
Cambridge, Mass.