More news about Yale people

Appointed

William Boughton, who led the New Haven Symphony Orchestra from 2007 to 2019, has been appointed music director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra. He was interim conductor of the YSO for the 2018–19 season. Boughton will also be an adjunct associate professor in the School of Music.

Honored

In November, the Yale Alumni Association will present the Yale Medal to five alumni for service to the university: volunteer and Parents Annual Fund chair Nancy Marx Better ’84, School of Management founding dean William H. Donaldson ’53, Alumni Schools Committee veteran Caroline Hsiao Van ’79, Art Gallery board member John Walsh ’61, and volunteer Scott R. Williamson ’80.

Historian David Blight has been named a Sterling Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies. Blight, who has taught at Yale since 2003, is a leading scholar of the Civil War era. His biography of Frederick Douglass won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for history.

Michael Marsland

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Retired

Hazel Carby (left), the Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies, retired from full-time teaching this year after 30 years on the Yale faculty. As chair, she helped secure department status for Yale’s African American studies program and expand its curriculum to include the Caribbean and other parts of the African diaspora.

Remembered

Charles Reich ’52LLB, a professor at the Law School from 1960 to 1974, died on June 15. He was 91. Reich drew national fame—and a thinly disguised caricature in Doonesbury—for his 1970 book The Greening of America, which heralded 1960s counterculture as the dawn of a new era. He left Yale and moved to San Francisco in 1974, returning in the 1990s as a visiting professor.

Musicologist Vivian Perlis, who founded Yale’s ambitious Oral History of American Music project, died on July 4. She was 91. Perlis took a job in the music library in 1967 and began interviewing composers, their associates, and other music-world figures. The project now includes some 3,000 interviews.