Professors Kofi Agawu and Denis Feeney have received Princeton's Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.
Agawu, a professor of music, was a faculty member at Princeton from 1998 to 2006 and returned to the University in 2007. He is a wide-ranging scholar who studies both classical and Western music. His scholarly work encompasses the fields of music theory, musicology and ethnomusicology.
Agawu has written on Brahms, Mahler, Schubert and Stravinsky, among other composers, and has published critical essays on general topics of music theory, analysis and interpretation. His book "Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music" received the Society for Music Theory's Outstanding Publication Award in 1994. His other recent books include "Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions" and "Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music."
Feeney, the Giger Professor of Latin and a professor of classics, specializes in Latin literature and Roman culture. He has taught at Princeton since 2000 and served as chair of the classics department from 2003 to 2009.
In his book "The Gods in Epic," Feeney investigates poets and critics in the classical tradition, as well as the boundaries between Roman religion and epic forms of representation. In "Literature and Religion at Rome," he examines the interaction between the literary and religious systems of Rome. "Caesar's Calendar," published in 2007, explores Roman constructions of time. Feeney also has written articles on the Latin poets Catullus, Horace, Ovid and Virgil.
Bestowed annually, the Behrman Award was established in 1975 by a gift from the late Howard Behrman, a physician and book collector.
