Encaenia and Honorary degrees 2014

The Honorands were:

The Most Reverend Dr Katharine Jefferts Schori, PhD

Degree of Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa

Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America and seventeen other nations

The Most Reverend Dr Katharine Jefferts Schori, PhD, holds a BS in biology from Stanford University and an MS and PhD in oceanography from Oregon State University. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State’s College of Oceanography and visiting scientist at the National Marine Fisheries Service before electing to read for an MDiv at Church Divinity School of the Pacific. She was ordained in 1994 and became assistant, and later associate, rector at the Church of the Good Samaritan in Corvallis, Oregon, where she was responsible for the Hispanic community and for adult education programmes. She also served as Chaplain with the Benton Hospice Service. In 2000 she was elected Bishop of Nevada and was ordained to the episcopate the following year. Five years later she was elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, becoming the first and only female primate in the Anglican Communion. She serves as chief pastor and primate to the Episcopal Church’s members in 17 countries and 110 dioceses and is responsible for initiating and developing policy for the Church. She has been vocal about the Episcopal Church’s mission priorities, including the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, issues of domestic poverty, climate change and environmental concerns, as well as the ongoing need to contextualise the gospel. She is a member of the Advisory Board for the Division of Earth and Life Sciences of the US National Academy of Sciences and serves on the boards of a number of ecclesiastical bodies, including the National Council of Churches of Christ in the US and the General Theological Seminary. From 2010 to 2013 she was a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Neighbourhood and Faith-Based Partnerships. She has held academic posts at the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Philosophy at Oregon State and has received honorary degrees from a number of institutions, including Berkeley Divinity School.

Sir Anish Kapoor, CBE

Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa

Artist and sculptor

Sir Anish Kapoor, CBE, born in Mumbai, was educated at the Hornsey College of Art and the Chelsea School of Art in London. Today he ranks among the most acclaimed contemporary sculptors in the world, and has exhibited extensively with solo shows and group exhibitions across the globe. He represented Britain at the Paris Biennale in 1982 and at the Venice Biennale in 1990, where he was awarded the Premio Duemila. He won the Turner Prize in 1991, and in 2002 he received the Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. He became in 2009 the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, and in 2010–11 a retrospective of his work was hosted in India for the first time at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi and Mumbai’s Mehboob Studios. A number of his large- scale installations have formed transient and permanent additions to buildings, landscapes and skylines around the world, including Cloud Gate at Chicago’s Millennium Park; Monumenta at the Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées; Dismemberment Site I for the Gibbs Farm sculpture park in New Zealand; and Temenos in Middlesbrough, one of a series of large scale works for the Tees Valley. In 2012 he completed the Arcelor Mittal Orbit, a 115m sculpture and observation tower and Britain’s largest piece of public art, at the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park. His many awards and honours include Japan’s Praemium Imperiale, India’s Padma Bhushan, and honorary fellowships from the London Institute, Leeds University, the University of Wolverhampton and the Royal Institute of British Architects. Elected Royal Academician in 1999, he was made CBE in 2003. In 2011 he was made Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and two years later he was knighted for services to visual arts.

Mr Robert Silvers

Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa

Editor and Co-founder of the New York Review of Books

Robert Silvers, BA, a native of New York, graduated from the University of Chicago in 1947. In 1950 he was appointed press secretary to Governor Chester Bowles of Connecticut. From 1953 to 1959 he lived in Paris, where he served with the US Army at SHAPE headquarters and attended the Sorbonne and the École des Sciences Politiques. He joined the editorial board of The Paris Review in 1954 and became its Paris editor two years later. From 1959 to 1963 he was an associate editor of Harper’s Magazine. In 1963 he co-founded The New York Review of Books, of which he was co-editor, with Barbara Epstein, for over forty years. He has been sole editor since her death in 2006. The journal is regarded as the leading English language forum for the serious discussion of contemporary literature, politics, history, philosophy, music, science, art, and other fields of intellectual endeavour. He is the editor or co-editor of several books, among them The Hidden Histories of Science, two volumes of The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships and The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage. He is a trustee of the New York Public Library, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and sits on the board of directors of both the American Ditchley Foundation and the Paris Review Foundation. He was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite in 1988 and Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur in 1998. His many other honours include the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts, The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize, a New York City Literary Honor, the National Humanities Medal, and honorary degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University.

Professor Jean-Marie Lehn, PhD

Degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa

Chemist

Professor Jean-Marie Lehn, PhD, was born in Rosheim, France. He read chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, receiving his doctorate in 1963. He moved to Harvard the following year to participate in the total synthesis of vitamin B12. On his return to Strasbourg in 1964 he began to work in areas at the interface between organic and physical chemistry, later taking an interest in biological processes. In 1968 his research led to the fabrication of cage-like molecules that contain a cavity into which another chemical species of appropriate size and shape may be included, to form a cryptate, as a key fits into a lock. Thus began his work on the chemical basis of molecular recognition, for which he was to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1987, with Cram and Pedersen. In 1970 he became Professor of Chemistry at the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg and from 1979 to 2010 he was Professor of the Chemistry of Molecular Interactions at the Collège de France in Paris. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Strasbourg, where he directs the Laboratory of Supramolecular Chemistry. He has been a Director at the Nanotechnology Institute of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology since 1998 and Honorary Director of the Lehn Institute of Functional Materials at China’s Sun Yat-Sen University since 2010. The author of more than 900 scientific publications, he has received numerous honours and awards, including the Davy Medal of the Royal Society and the Lavoisier Medal of the Société Chimique de France. He is Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur, and is, among many others, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He has held many visiting professorships, including, in 1999–2000, the Newton Abraham Visiting Professorship at Lincoln College, Oxford, and he is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees.

Sir Harrison Birtwistle CH, RAM (Hon FRAM)

Degree of Doctor of Music, honoris causa

Composer

Sir Harrison Birtwistle CH, RAM (Hon FRAM), studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music. From 1966 to 1968 he was Harkness Fellow at Princeton, where he completed the opera Punch and Judy, a work which, with Verses for Ensembles and The Triumph of Time, established him as a leading voice in British music. During the early 1970s to mid-1980s he worked with Sir Peter Hall as Musical Director of the National Theatre. The period was dominated by his monumental lyric tragedy, The Mask of Orpheus. Regarded as the leading British composer of his generation, his works are too numerous to list individually, but include the operas Gawain, The Second Mrs Kong, The Last Supper, The Io Passion, and The Minotaur; and the ensemble and orchestral works Secret Theatre, Pulse Shadows, Earth Dances, Exody, The Shadow of the Night and Night’s Black Bird. His most recent compositions include The Moth Requiem, Songs from the Same Earth, Construction with Guitar Player, and Responses. He has collaborated with many of the leading artists of our time, including Pierre Boulez, Daniel Barenboim, Christoph von Dohnányi, Peter Eötvös, Daniel Harding, Elgar Howarth, Vladimir Jurowski, Oliver Knussen, Sir Antonio Pappano, Sir Simon Rattle, and Franz Welser- Möst, and his work has been featured in major festivals and concert series including the BBC Proms, the Aldeburgh Festival, the Salzburg Festival, Glyndebourne, the Holland Festival, the Lucerne Festival, the Stockholm New Music Festival, the Wien Modern Festival, the Wittener Tage, the South Bank Centre, the Vienna Konzerthaus and Settembre Musica (Mi-to). His many honours include the Grawemeyer Award (1986) and the Siemens Prize (1995). Knighted in 1986, he was made a Companion of Honour in 2001. He is also a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Between 1994 and 2002 he was Henry Purcell Professor of Music at King’s College London and is currently Visiting Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music.