Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd from the Faculty of Arts has been awarded the Humanities Aronui Medal from the Royal Society of New Zealand for outstanding and wide‐ranging contribution to the humanities.
Professor Boyd, from English, Drama, and Writing Studies in the School of Humanities, is well known for his work on Russian‐American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. He has written and edited 19 books and over 250 articles and an extensive website on Nabokov and his work has been translated into fifteen languages and received many awards.
Professor Boyd said being awarded the Humanities Aronui Medal is great recognition for him and the study of humanities.
“As a few Kiwis with good antennae have commented, I am better known in London and New York than in New Zealand. It’s wonderful to have the recognition in my own country.”
During his extensive time in academia Professor Boyd has long been a campaigner for the Arts and Humanities.
“One of the claims I would make is that everything we do at university, even in the sciences, is humanities. As far as we know, there is no science or other academic inquiry without humans. Whether in engineering or economics, researchers and teachers in those fields have to engage with the traditions of research and the heritage of problems in their fields — which sounds very much like the humanities to me. Researchers responding to the results of others in whatever field have to understand the explanatory aims behind claims being made. That’s what we specialise in in the humanities.”
The medal selection panel noted his outstanding and wide-ranging contribution to linking the study of literature and art more generally with the sciences.
Professor Boyd has written on literature from Homer to the present, from epics to comics, and on American, Brazilian, English, Greek, Irish, New Zealand and Russian writers, including Shakespeare and Dr Seuss.
In recent years he has become interested in new evolutionary and cognitive approaches to literature and the arts, exploring why we engage in art and storytelling and whether our minds and behaviour have been shaped and can be reshaped by art and literature. His work in this area has earned the interest of scholars working in fields from anthropology to zoology, via philosophy and neuroscience.
The Humanities Aronui Medal is his latest accolade. He was awarded a Marsden Fund grant in 2012 to write a biography of philosopher of science and politics Karl Popper.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and has been awarded a James Cook Fellowship (1997‐1999) and a Claude McCarthy Fellowship (1981‐82).
