Five University of Chicago faculty members were named to the 2017 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on April 12.

Professors Lenore Grenoble, Young-Kee Kim, Jonathan Lear, W. J. T. Mitchell, and Tara Zahra will join this year’s 228-member class. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 and according to its website, “convenes leaders from the academic, business, and government sectors to respond to the challenges facing—and opportunities available to—the nation and the world.”

Grenoble is the chair of the Department of Linguistics and specializes in Slavic and Arctic Indigenous languages. She joined the faculty in 2007 and is an editor of a new digital series called Minority Languages in Europe.

Kim chairs the Department of Physics as well as many particle physics committees around the world, including the Rare Isotope Science Project’s International Advisory Committee in Korea and the Circular Electron Positron Collider’s International Advisory Committee in China.

Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy. He is a trained psychoanalyst and published his book Wisdom Won From Illness this year.

Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History, as well as editor of Critical Inquiry, an interdisciplinary journal that has been recognized for outstanding achievement by the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals three times.

Zahra teaches in the Department of History and co-chairs the executive committee of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. Last year, she published her most recent book titled The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World.

The five University of Chicago professors will join the academy’s 237th class in an induction ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 7.