#1701
Colum McCann
1965 - Present (59 years)
Colum McCann is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and now lives in New York. He is the co-founder and President of Narrative 4, an international empathy education nonprofit. He is also a Thomas Hunter Writer in Residence at Hunter College, New York. He is known as an international writer who believes in the "democracy of storytelling." Among his numerous honors are the U.S National Book Award, the Dublin Literary Prize, several major European awards, and an Oscar nomination.
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Jane Asher
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jane Asher is an English actress and author. She achieved early fame as a child actress and has worked extensively in film and TV throughout her career. Asher has appeared in TV shows and films such as Deep End , The Masque of the Red Death , Alfie , The Mistress, Crossroads, Death at a Funeral , and The Old Guys. She also appeared in two episodes of the 1950s TV series The Buccaneers alongside Robert Shaw. She was well known as the partner of Paul McCartney from 1963 to 1968.
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Francis Nolan
2000 - Present (24 years)
Francis J. Nolan is Professor of Phonetics at the University of Cambridge. Between 1993 and 1995 he was Secretary of the International Phonetic Association, and from 1999 to 2003 its Vice-President. He specialises in phonetics and phonology as well as in forensic linguistics. He is currently President of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians. He was one of the co-editors of the 1999 Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, the other being John Esling. He co-designed the language of Parseltongue featured in the Harry Potter films.
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Richard Rodriguez
1944 - Present (80 years)
Richard Rodriguez is an American writer who became famous as the author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez , a narrative about his intellectual development. Early life He was born on July 31, 1944, into a Mexican immigrant family in San Francisco, California. Rodriguez spoke Spanish until he went to a Catholic school at 6. As a youth in Sacramento, California, he delivered newspapers and worked as a gardener. He graduated from Sacramento's Christian Brothers High School.
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John Zorn
1953 - Present (71 years)
John Zorn is an American composer, conductor, saxophonist, arranger and producer who "deliberately resists category". His avant-garde and experimental approaches to composition and improvisation are inclusive of jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, contemporary, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and world music. In 2013, Down Beat described Zorn as "one of our most important composers" and in 2020 Rolling Stone noted that "[alt]hough Zorn has operated almost entirely outside the mainstream, he's gradually asserted himself as one of the most influential musicians of our time".
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Arvo Pärt
1935 - Present (89 years)
Arvo Pärt is an Estonian composer of contemporary classical music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs tintinnabuli, a compositional technique he invented. Pärt's music is in part inspired by Gregorian chant. His most performed works include Fratres , Spiegel im Spiegel , and Für Alina . From 2011 to 2018, and again in 2022, Pärt was the most performed living composer in the world, and the second most performed in 2019, after John Williams. The Arvo Pärt Centre, in Laulasmaa, was opened to the public in 2018.
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Martha Rosler
1943 - Present (81 years)
Martha Rosler is an American artist. She is a conceptual artist who works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to places of passage and systems of transport.
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Michael Swanwick
1950 - Present (74 years)
Michael Swanwick is an American fantasy and science fiction author who began publishing in the early 1980s. Writing career Swanwick's fiction writing began with short stories, starting in 1980 when he published "Ginungagap" in TriQuarterly and "The Feast of St. Janis" in New Dimensions 11. Both stories were nominees for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1981. His first novel was In the Drift , a look at the results of a more catastrophic Three Mile Island incident, which expands on his earlier short story "Mummer's Kiss". This was followed in 1987 by Vacuum Flowers, an adventurous ...
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Jane Setter
1966 - Present (58 years)
Jane Setter is a British phonetician. She teaches at the University of Reading, where she is Professor of Phonetics. She is best known for work on the pronunciation of British and Hong Kong English, and on speech prosody in atypical populations.
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Kevin Smith
1970 - Present (54 years)
Kevin Patrick Smith is an American director, producer, screenwriter, actor and comic book writer. He came to prominence with the low-budget comedy buddy film Clerks , which he wrote, directed, co-produced, and acted in as the character Silent Bob of stoner duo Jay and Silent Bob, characters who also appeared in Smith's later films Mallrats , Chasing Amy , Dogma , Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back , Clerks II , Jay and Silent Bob Reboot , and Clerks III which are set primarily in his home state of New Jersey. While not strictly sequential, the films have crossover plot elements, character refere...
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Ryan Burr
1972 - Present (52 years)
Ryan Burr is a sports television journalist. Burr worked for the NBC Sports Group from 2012 to 2021, with his duties mainly consisting of hosting all programs on Golf Channel and college basketball coverage. For college basketball, he mainly works as a play-by-play announcer on East Coast telecasts airing on the NBC Sports Network. Before joining the NBC Sports Group, Burr was previously a studio host and Sports Center anchor for ESPN. Burr is the founder of the Notah Begay Junior Golf National Championship which is broadcast on Golf Channel. In 2022 6 thousand junior golfers paid $300 to pl...
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Malcolm Arnold
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Sir Malcolm Henry Arnold was an English composer. His works feature music in many genres, including a cycle of nine symphonies, numerous concertos, concert works, chamber music, choral music and music for brass band and wind band. His style is tonal and rejoices in lively rhythms, brilliant orchestration, and an unabashed tunefulness. He wrote extensively for the theatre, with five ballets specially commissioned by the Royal Ballet, as well as two operas and a musical. He also produced scores for more than a hundred films, among these The Bridge on the River Kwai , for which he won an Oscar.
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William G. Moulton
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
William G. Moulton was an American linguist and professor emeritus of linguistics and Germanic languages and literatures of Princeton University. Career and education Moulton went to Princeton for his undergraduate education and pursued a joint degree in French and German. He was given a bachelor's degree as a Phi Beta Kappa in 1935. He was given a scholarship after graduating from Princeton and went to the University of Berlin to study languages for a year. In 1936, Moulton went to Yale University for graduate study.
Go to ProfileChris Barker is the American chair professor of linguistics at New York University, famous for his discovery of the universal iota combinator and his continuation-based approach to scope. Barker received a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale College in 1983, and both a bachelor’s degree in computer and information sciences in 1986, and a doctorate in linguistics in 1991 from the University of California, Santa Cruz
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Jane Campion
1954 - Present (70 years)
Dame Elizabeth Jane Campion is a New Zealand filmmaker. She is best known for writing and directing the critically acclaimed films The Piano and The Power of the Dog , for which she has received two Academy Awards , two BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. Campion was appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2016 New Year Honours, for services to film.
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Chrystelle Trump Bond
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Chrystelle Lee Trump Bond was an American dancer, choreographer, dance historian, and author. Bond was the founding chair of the dance department at Goucher College. She was the co-founder and director of Chorégraphie Antique, the dance history ensemble at Goucher. Bond was a dance critic for The Baltimore Sun.
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Max Lerner
1902 - 1992 (90 years)
Max Lerner was a Russian Empire-born American journalist and educator known for his controversial syndicated column. Background Maxwell Alan Lerner was born on December 20, 1902, in Minsk, in the Russian Empire, the son of Bessie and Benjamin Lerner. His Russian-Jewish family emigrated to the U.S. in 1907, where his father sold milk door to door. Lerner earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1923. He studied law there, but transferred to Washington University in St. Louis for an M.A. in 1925. He earned a PhD from Robert Brookings Graduate School of Economics and Government, Washington, D.C., ...
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Zubin Mehta
1936 - Present (88 years)
Zubin Mehta is an Indian conductor of Western classical music. He is music director emeritus of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor emeritus of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Mehta's father was the founder of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, and Mehta received his early musical education from him. When he was 18, he enrolled in the Vienna state music academy, from which he graduated after three years with a diploma as a conductor. He began winning international competitions and conducted the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic at age 21. Beginning in the 1960s, Mehta gained experience by ...
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Paul Wilson
1941 - Present (83 years)
Paul Robert Wilson is a Canadian translator and writer. In 1967 he moved to Czechoslovakia where he performed as a singer with The Plastic People of the Universe. Because he was a member of this group, he was expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1977. This band was banned in Czechoslovakia and their recordings could not be officially released. Wilson later founded a record label Boží Mlýn and released some of their recordings in Canada.
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Lars Vikør
1946 - Present (78 years)
Lars Sigurdsson Vikør is a Norwegian linguist, translator and educator. Biography Lars Vikør is a graduate of the University of Oslo and the University of Leiden. He is a professor of Scandinavian languages and linguistics and specialist in Nynorsk lexicography at the University of Oslo. He is the main editor of the Norwegian Dictionary . He has also engaged in the National Association for Language Collection .
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Carmen de Lavallade
1931 - Present (93 years)
Carmen de Lavallade is an American actress, choreographer and dancer. Early life De Lavallade was born in Los Angeles, California, on March 6, 1931, to Creole parents from New Orleans, Louisiana. She was raised by her aunt, Adele, who owned one of the first African-American history bookshops on Central Avenue. De Lavallade's cousin, Janet Collins, was the first Creole/African descendant prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera. The family was Catholic.
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Nancy Milford
1938 - 2022 (84 years)
Nancy Lee Milford was an American biographer. She was noted for her biographies on Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Early life and education Nancy Lee Winston was born in Dearborn, Michigan, on March 26, 1938. Her father, Joseph Winston, worked as an engineer at General Motors and served in the United States Navy during World War II; her mother, Vivienne , was a housewife and volunteered at a Dearborn hospital. During her father's stint in the Navy, the family relocated to Washington, D.C., and San Francisco before going back to Michigan.
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Paul Greengrass
1955 - Present (69 years)
Paul Greengrass is an English film director, film producer, screenwriter and former journalist. He specialises in dramatisations of historic events and is known for his signature use of hand-held cameras.
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Lynn Neary
1901 - Present (123 years)
Lynn Neary is an American radio journalist. She is a correspondent on National Public Radio and on National Desk's Arts and Information Unit, covering books and publishing. Early years and education Neary was born and raised in Crestwood, Westchester County, NY. She earned a B.A. in English from Fordham University.
Go to ProfileJohn Lavine is a United States journalist and educator and currently the chief executive officer of StrategicMediaGroup.com. Previously, he was a media company publisher and editor, and then professor and Dean of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, as well as a professor of media management and strategy at the Kellogg School of Management.
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Tony Oursler
1957 - Present (67 years)
Tony Oursler is an American multimedia and installation artist. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the California Institute for the Arts, Valencia, California in 1979. His art covers a range of mediums, working with video, sculpture, installation, performance, and painting. The artist currently lives and works in New York City.
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Ágnes Gergely
1933 - Present (91 years)
Ágnes Gergely is a Hungarian writer, educator, journalist and translator. Biography She was born Ágnes Guttmann in family of Fenákel Rózsika and György Guttmann in Endrőd, a village on the Great Hungarian Plain. She took her pen name "Gergely" from the novel Eclipse of the Crescent Moon by the Hungarian writer Géza Gárdonyi because Agnes Gergely wished to be courageous like the hero from the story, Gergely Bornemissza.
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María Catrileo
1944 - Present (80 years)
María Catrileo Chiguailaf de Codo is a native Mapuche linguist and professor of Spanish, English and Mapudungun language. In 2009, Catrileo received the Provincial Prize for Conservation of National Monuments for her studies of the native Mapudungun language. Catrileo's work has focused on the phonology and morpho-syntax of the Mapudungun language and specially the verb forms. She is considered to be perhaps the only living Mapuche Indian to be a master of Spanish, English and Mapudungun. Currently, she is working at the Institute of Linguistics and Literature of the Austral University of Ch...
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Freddie Hubbard
1938 - 2008 (70 years)
Frederick Dewayne Hubbard was an American jazz trumpeter. He played bebop, hard bop, and post-bop styles from the early 1960s onwards. His unmistakable and influential tone contributed to new perspectives for modern jazz and bebop.
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Stefano Arduini
1956 - Present (68 years)
Stefano Arduini is a scholar of linguistics, rhetoric, semiotics and translation. He is Full Professor of Linguistics at the University of Rome Link Campus where he is the director the Publishing Professionals Master's degree. He teaches Theory of Translation at the University of Urbino, and is the president of San Pellegrino Unicampus Foundation in Misano Adriatico .
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Lorin Maazel
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Lorin Varencove Maazel was an American conductor, violinist and composer. He began conducting at the age of eight and by 1953 had decided to pursue a career in music. He had established a reputation in the concert halls of Europe by 1960 but, by comparison, his career in the U.S. progressed far more slowly. He served as music director of The Cleveland Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic, among other posts. Maazel was well-regarded in baton technique and possessed a photographic memory for scores.
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Mary Jane Phillips-Matz
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Mary Jane Phillips-Matz was an American biographer and writer on opera. She is mainly known for her biography of Giuseppe Verdi, a result of 30 years' research and published in 1992 by Oxford University Press. Born in Lebanon, Ohio and educated at Smith College and Columbia University, she lived for many years in Italy, and even after her return to the United States in the early 1970s spent her summers in Verdi's hometown of Busseto where she continued her exhaustive research into his life. She died in New York City at the age of 86, survived by three of her five children.
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George de la Peña
1955 - Present (69 years)
George de la Peña is an American ballet dancer, musical theatre performer, choreographer, actor, and teacher. He was born in 1955 in New York City, New York. Originally trained as a concert pianist, de la Peña switched to ballet while studying at the High School for the Performing Arts in New York City. He graduated from George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet. He joined American Ballet Theatre in the 1970s, rapidly rising to soloist. While at ABT, de la Peña danced in works choreographed by Mikhail Baryshnikov, Agnes de Mille, Kenneth MacMillan, and Jerome Robbins. By 1985, de la Peña and his then-wife, ballerina Rebecca Wright had both left ABT and moved to California.
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Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
Joseph Leo Mankiewicz was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. Mankiewicz had a long Hollywood career, and won both the Academy Award for Best Director and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in consecutive years for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve , the latter of which was nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won six.
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Pat Metheny
1954 - Present (70 years)
Patrick Bruce Metheny is an American jazz guitarist and composer. He was the leader of the Pat Metheny Group and continues to work in various small-combo, duet, and solo settings, as well as other side projects. His style incorporates elements of progressive and contemporary jazz, latin jazz, and jazz fusion. He has three gold albums and 20 Grammy Awards, and is the only person to have won Grammys in 10 categories.
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Jonathan Demme
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
Robert Jonathan Demme was an American film and television director, producer and screenwriter whose career spanned more than 30 years. Beginning his career under B-movie producer Roger Corman, Demme made his directorial debut with the 1974 women-in-prison film Caged Heat, before becoming known for his casually humanist films such as Melvin and Howard , Swing Shift , Something Wild , and Married to the Mob . His 1991 psychological horror film The Silence of the Lambs won five Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture.
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Lee Konitz
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Leon "Lee" Konitz was an American jazz alto saxophonist and composer. He performed successfully in a wide range of jazz styles, including bebop, cool jazz, and avant-garde jazz. Konitz's association with the cool jazz movement of the 1940s and 1950s includes participation in Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool sessions and his work with pianist Lennie Tristano. He was one of relatively few alto saxophonists of this era to retain a distinctive style, when Charlie Parker exerted a massive influence. Like other students of Tristano, Konitz improvised long, melodic lines with the rhythmic interest co...
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Manuel Alvar
1923 - 2001 (78 years)
Manuel Alvar was a Spanish linguist, historian, and university professor who specialized in the study of dialectology and philology of the Spanish language. Throughout his career, Alvar oversaw and influenced the creation of many Spanish linguistic atlases; maps which recorded speech variations in a given geographical area. He served as Director of the Real Academia Española for four years and was a member of language academies throughout Europe and Latin America.
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Bhikkhu Analayo
1962 - Present (62 years)
Bhikkhu Anālayo is a bhikkhu , scholar, and meditation teacher. He was born in Germany in 1962, and went forth in 1995 in the Theravāda monastic tradition Sri Lanka. He is best known for his comparative studies of Early Buddhist Texts as preserved by the various early Buddhist traditions.
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Michael Leff
1941 - 2010 (69 years)
Michael Leff was an internationally known U.S. scholar of rhetoric. He was a Professor and served as Chair of the Department of Communications Studies at the University of Memphis. Career Before teaching at the University of Memphis he held faculty positions at The University of California-Davis, Indiana University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Northwestern University. He also served as editor of Rhetorica, the journal of the International Society for History of Rhetoric, and as the founding president of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. Leff was an Argumentation Schol...
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Alejandro González Iñárritu
1963 - Present (61 years)
Alejandro González Iñárritu is a Mexican filmmaker. He is primarily known for making modern psychological drama films about the human condition. His projects have garnered critical acclaim and numerous accolades including four Academy Awards with a Special Achievement Award, three Golden Globe Awards, three BAFTA Awards, two Directors Guild of America Awards. His most notable films include Amores perros , 21 Grams , Babel , Biutiful , Birdman , The Revenant , and Bardo .
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David Simon
1960 - Present (64 years)
David Judah Simon is an American author, journalist, screenwriter, and producer best known for his work on The Wire . He worked for The Baltimore Sun City Desk for twelve years , wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets , and co-wrote The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood with Ed Burns. The former book was the basis for the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street , on which Simon served as a writer and producer. Simon adapted the latter book into the HBO mini-series The Corner .
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Kehinde Wiley
1977 - Present (47 years)
Kehinde Wiley is an American portrait painter based in New York City, who is known for his highly naturalistic paintings of Black people, frequently referencing the work of Old Master paintings. He was commissioned in 2017 to paint a portrait of former President Barack Obama for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, which has portraits of all previous American presidents. The Columbus Museum of Art, which hosted an exhibition of his work in 2007, describes his work as follows: "Wiley has gained recent acclaim for his heroic portraits which address the image and status of young African-Am...
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Seiji Ozawa
1935 - Present (89 years)
is a Japanese conductor known for his advocacy of modern composers and for his work with the San Francisco Symphony, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna State Opera, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he served as music director for 29 years. He is the recipient of numerous international awards.
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Joan Jett
1958 - Present (66 years)
Joan Jett is an American rock singer, guitarist, songwriter, record producer and actress. She is best known for her work as the frontwoman of her band Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and for founding and performing with the Runaways, who recorded and released the hit song "Cherry Bomb". With the Blackhearts, Jett is known for her rendition of the song "I Love Rock 'n Roll" which was number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks in 1982. Jett's other notable songs include "Bad Reputation", "Light of Day", "I Hate Myself for Loving You" and her covers of "Crimson and Clover", "Do You Wanna...
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Dale Carrico
1965 - Present (59 years)
Dale Carrico is an American critical theorist and rhetorician. He is a critic of futurology and geoengineering. Carrico received his Ph.D. from the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley in 2005 and is an adjunct at the San Francisco Art Institute. Carrico was the Human Rights Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies from 2004 to 2008. He organized the 12th Annual Boundaries in Question Conference in March 2003, the 13th Annual Boundaries in Question Conference in March 2004, on the topic "New Feminist Perspectives on Biotechnology and Bioethics...
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Ignatius Mattingly
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
Ignatius G. Mattingly was a prominent American linguist and speech scientist. Prior to his academic career, he was an analyst for the National Security Agency from 1955 to 1966. He was a Lecturer and then Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut from 1966 to 1996 and a researcher at Haskins Laboratories from 1966 until his death in 2004. He is best known for his pioneering work on speech synthesis and reading and for his theoretical work on the motor theory of speech perception in conjunction with Alvin Liberman . He received his B.A. in English from Yale University in 1947, his M.A.
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Julia Hirschberg
1950 - Present (74 years)
Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. Hirschberg was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017 for contributions to the use of prosody in text-to-speech and spoken dialogue systems, and to audio browsing and retrieval.
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Kon Ichikawa
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Kon Ichikawa was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His work displays a vast range in genre and style, from the anti-war films The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain , to the documentary Tokyo Olympiad , which won two BAFTA Film Awards, and the 19th-century revenge drama An Actor's Revenge . His film Odd Obsession won the Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.
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Kate Wilhelm
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Kate Wilhelm was an American author. She wrote novels and stories in the science fiction, mystery, and suspense genres, including the Hugo Award–winning Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Wilhelm established the Clarion Workshop along with her husband Damon Knight and writer Robin Scott Wilson.
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