ANN ARBOR—Five University of Michigan faculty have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a prestigious society that recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions in scholarly and professional fields.

The five fellows?Elizabeth Anderson, L. Ross Chambers, Susan Gelman, John Jackson and Margaret Jane Radin?are among the 212 newly chosen scholars, scientists, artists, civic, corporate and philanthropic leaders.

“The Academy honors excellence by electing to membership remarkable men and women who have made preeminent contributions to their fields, and to the world,” said Academy President Emilio Bizzi. “We are pleased to welcome into the Academy these new members to help advance our founders’ goal of ‘cherishing knowledge and shaping the future.'”

Anderson is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies. She teaches ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of the social sciences, and feminist theory. Her research has focused on democratic theory, equality in political philosophy and American law, racial integration, theories of value and rational choice.

Chambers is the Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature. Chambers has been an internationally recognized authority in French literature, comparative literature, literary criticism and literary theory. He authored about a dozen books and several articles on 19th and 20th century French writers and on a variety of approaches to literature.

Gelman, the Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of Psychology, has research interests involving cognitive development, language acquisition, inductive reasoning, causal reasoning, and relationships between language and thought.

Jackson is the M. Kent Jennings Collegiate Professor in Political Science. His interest is the creation, evolution and growth of market economies, with a concentration on the dynamics of firm creation, growth and death. He is modeling these processes to understand how economic, political and sociological factors affect these dynamics.

Radin is a law professor whose research involves intellectual property, information technology, electronic commerce, and the jurisprudence of cyberspace. Most recently, she has investigated the role of contract in the online world.

Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots, the academy has elected as members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership includes some 200 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

This year’s new fellows include U.S. Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice John Paul Stevens; two-time cabinet secretary and former White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III; and blues guitarist B.B. King.

AAAS will induct the new class at a ceremony on Oct. 11 in Cambridge, Mass.