Institute For Advanced Study Appoints Three Trustees
The Institute for Advanced Study has appointed three new members to its Board of Trustees.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a sociologist and politician, has been president of Brazil since 1995, and will serve through 2002.
His early career was as an academic sociologist. An advocate of democratic reform, and opponent of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964-85, he lived and taught in exile for many years. President Cardoso has taught at the Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning in Santiago, Chile; the University of Sao Paolo, Brazil; Stanford University; the University of Paris; and Cambridge University, among other institutions.
President Cardoso was a visiting member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for three semesters in the 1970s.
He was elected to the Brazilian senate in 1983, a position he held until 1992. He served as Foreign Affairs Minister in 1992-93, and Finance Minister in1993-94. As Finance Minister, he helped lower the inflation rate, and was an architect of the Real Plan, a recovery strategy for the country’s ailing economy. He was one of the principal contributors to the Brazilian constitution of 1988.
His most recent book is Charting a New Course: The Politics of Globalization and Social Transformation (2001); he is also co-author of Dependency and Development in Latin America (1979) and co-editor of The New Global Economy in the Information Age: Reflections on Our Changing World (1993).
He received his doctorate from the University of Sao Paulo in 1961, and did postgraduate study at the University of Paris. He holds honorary degrees from the University of Chile and the University of Notre Dame, and is a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour.
Nancy Peretsman is Executive Vice President and Managing Director of Allen & Co., a leading investment banking firm. Prior to joining Allen & Co. in 1995, she headed the worldwide media investment banking practice at Salomon Brothers. For 25 years she has specialized in the media and communications industry, and has led transactions for such major corporations as CBS and MediaOne.
Peretsman serves on the Board of Directors of Charter Communications, the fourth largest cable company in the country, and Priceline, in which she was an original investor. In addition, she has received recognition from a number of sources, including citation in Fortune magazine’s “50 Most Powerful Women in American Business” and Money magazine’s “50 Smartest Women in the Money Business.” In 2001 she was named one of two Women of the Year by the Financial Women’s Association.
A former trustee of Princeton University, she serves on the board of the New School, where she has been a force behind the New School’s Distance Learning Program.
She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University, majoring in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and earned a master’s degree, with emphasis in finance, from the Yale School of Management in 1979.
W. Robert Connor is President and Director of the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, N.C., and professor of classics at Duke University, positions he has held since 1989. Previously, he was Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics and Chair of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, where he was a faculty member for 25 years. During his tenure at Princeton, he also chaired the Department of Classics and the Committee on Hellenic Studies.
A former president of the American Philological Association, Connor is also a former member of the Executive Committee of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and the Board of Visitors of the University of North Carolina, Asheville, and a former trustee of Princeton University. He has served on many committees and advisory panels concerned with strengthening teaching, including a Department of Education Commission on invigorating the senior year of high school. He is a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. In 1996 he served on an independent commission that looked at the future of the Fulbright program and issued the influential report, “Fulbright at Fifty.”
Among the books he has edited are Thucydides (1984) and The New Politicians of Fifth Century Athens (1971).
A graduate of Hamilton College, Connor received his Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University in 1961. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and has received honorary degrees from Hamilton College and Knox College.