Two Penn State faculty elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Two Penn State faculty who have made distinguished contributions to the fields of literature and language studies and geography have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. They are part of the 2024 cohort of 250 new members representing 31 areas of expertise. They join the more than 14,600 members elected since the academy was established by John Adams, John Hancock and 60 other founders of the United States in 1780.

Penn State faculty elected to the 2024 class are P. Gabrielle Foreman, the Paterno Family Professor of American Literature and professor of African American studies and of history, and Karl S. Zimmerer, professor of geography and member of the ecology and rural sociology programs.

“Congratulations to Drs. Foreman and Zimmerer on this well-deserved recognition from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,” said Andrew Read, senior vice president for research at Penn State. “Conducting high-impact scholarship and research is part of Penn State’s DNA. Gabrielle’s work leading the Colored Conventions Project has preserved important and understudied events critical to understanding the American experience. Karl’s work in the field of agrobiodiversity has identified sustainable approaches to protecting crop biodiversity and addressing global hunger. Their accomplishments demonstrate our faculty’s commitment not only to providing our students with a world-class education but creating and disseminating knowledge for the benefit of our global society.”

With more than $1 billion in annual research expenditures, Penn State ranks among the top 30 U.S. research universities and is one of only three institutions in the nation accorded land-grant, sea-grant, sun-grant and space-grant status. This year’s members represent the College of the Liberal Arts and the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.

P. Gabrielle Foreman

Foreman is a literary historian and digital humanist who recovers and studies the early traditions of African American activism to understand the power of collaborative production of knowledge. She is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow and a founding co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research (#DigBlk) at Penn State. She is also the founding faculty director and current co-director of the Colored Conventions Project, which locates, transcribes and archives the 19th- century documentary record of Black activism in the U.S.

Prior to joining Penn State, Foreman was the Ned B. Allen Professor of English, professor of history and Africana studies and senior library fellow at the University of Delaware. She has authored and edited five books, including “Praise Songs for Dave the Potter: Art and Poetry for David Drake," as well as scores of widely cited journal articles. She received her doctorate in ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Karl S. Zimmerer

Zimmerer is an environment-society geographer specializing in global food geographies. He uses ecological and social scientific approaches to research the human-environment dynamics of biodiversity in food systems and land use worldwide. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He leads sustainability research in the Geographic Synthesis for Social and Ecological Sustainability (GeoSyntheSES) Lab at Penn State and recently became founding editor of the journal “Urban Agriculture-Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems."

Prior to joining Penn State, Zimmerer was a professor of geography, of environmental studies and of Latin American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has authored and edited seven books, including “Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihoods in the Peruvian Andes," and more than 100 lead-author articles in top peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Publications of the Modern Language Association. He earned his doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley.