ITHACA, N.Y. -- Two Cornell University faculty members are among the 187 new fellows elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in honor of their distinguished contributions to their professions.

The two Cornell honorees, who will be inducted into the academy in October, are Peter Uwe Hohendahl, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German and Comparative Literature, and Paul L. Houston, professor of chemistry and chemical biology and senior associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which now has 3,700 fellows and 600 foreign honorary members, was founded in 1780 by John Adams, George Washington and James Bowdoin and is based in Cambridge, Mass. New fellows are chosen through an extensive selection process by members of the academy. There now are 73 fellows of the academy among Cornell faculty on the Ithaca campus and at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

Hohendahl's areas of expertise include 18th- to 20th-century German literature; intellectual history; literary and social theory; and comparative literature. He is director of the Institute for German Cultural Studies at Cornell.

Hohendahl joined the Cornell faculty in 1977 and is considered one of the leading authorities on German literature and critical theory in the United States. He received his doctorate from Hamburg University in 1964. He has authored 10 books in English and German, includingBuilding a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1830-1870 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), Reappraisals: Shifting Alignments in Postwar Critical Theory (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991) and Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). He is a co-editor of the journals New German Critique at Cornell and Zeitschrift fuer Germanistik at Humboldt University, Berlin. He was president of the North American Heine Society from 1986 to 1990. Hohendahl is a member of a number of professional associations, including the American Association of Teachers of German, the German Studies Association and the Modern Language Association. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 1996; a senior fellow at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington, D.C., in 2000; and he is a corresponding fellow of the Institute of Germanic Studies at the University of London School of Advanced Study.

Houston has an international reputation for research in the Þelds of materials and physical chemistry. He also has distinguished himself at Cornell by his excellence in teaching and advising at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He served as chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology from 1997 to 2001.

Houston heads an active research group in chemistry, pursuing materials science, combustion chemistry and photodissociation dynamics, especially as applied to atmospheric chemistry.

He earned his B.S. degree at Yale University in 1969 and his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California-Berkeley before coming to Cornell as an assistant professor in 1975. By 1985 he was a full professor, and in 1999 he was named the Peter J.W. Debye Professor of Chemistry. He has been a visiting scientist at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Germany; at the Institute for Molecular Science in Okazaki, Japan; and at the University of Rome-La Sapienza. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) as well as of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been an Alfred P. Sloan research fellow and a J. Simon Guggenheim fellow.

Houston served as senior editor ofThe Journal of Physical Chemistry from 1991 to 1997 and on the advisory boards of that journal (1988 to 1990) andThe Journal of Chemical Physics (1989 to 1991). He won the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award in 1980 and the Herbert P. Broida Prize of the APS in 2001.

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o American Academy of Arts and Sciences: http://www.amacad.org