ANDREW W. MELLON, born in 1855, was a financier, diplomat, and industrialist. Mr. Mellon helped found the Union Trust Company of Pittsburgh, the Gulf Oil Corporation, and the Pittsburgh Coal Company. In 1921, he left the presidency of the Mellon National Bank to become U.S. secretary of the treasury, serving for ten years under presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. He later served as ambassador to Great Britain during 1932-33. Upon his death in 1937, Mr. Mellon left his vast collection of art to create the National Gallery of Art and enough funds for the construction of the building on the Washington, D.C., mall. Four chairs at Hopkins are named for Andrew W. Mellon, two at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, one at the Peabody Conservatory, and one at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities
Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
Established in 1967 by Ailsa Mellon Bruce in memory of her father
Held by William Egginton
WILLIAM EGGINTON is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Decker Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. His research and teaching focus on Spanish and Latin American literature, literary theory, and the relation between literature and philosophy.
Professor Egginton is the author of numerous books, including How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher’s Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (Columbia UP, 2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2016), and, with David Castillo, Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (Bloomsbury, 2017). He is also the co-editor, with Mike Sandbothe, of The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy (2004) and, with David E. Johnson, of Thinking With Borges (2009), as well as the translator of Lisa Block de Behar’s Borges, the Passion of an Endless Quotation (2003).