Lindsay Stewart ’69 JD’73 and Corinne Stewart ’71 have endowed the Lindsay and Corinne Stewart Professorship in Humanities through an outright gift and estate bequest totaling $2 Million. Their gifts will fund a full-time humanities professor in the College of Arts & Sciences, including an annual stipend for research.
The Stewart Professorship will allow us to honor an outstanding faculty member and provide them and, by extension, their students with additional opportunities for research and learning,” says Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences Ruth Feingold.
The first recipient of the Stewart Professorship will be Mary R. Bachvarova, Professor of Classics. Dr. Bachvarova is a humanist of expansive and far-reaching interests, ranging from cross-cultural interaction in early Anatolia, to gender and sexuality in the ancient world, to Greek & Near Eastern religion and magic. After earning her AB from Harvard University/Radcliffe College and her PhD from the University of Chicago, Dr. Bachvarova joined Willamette’s faculty of the College of Arts & Sciences in 2003.
Dr. Bachvarova is an ideal inaugural holder of the Stewart Professorship,” says Dean Feingold. “She is an internationally renowned scholar, with a prodigious record of publication. Among her many accolades, she was honored with the College of Arts & Sciences' Lawrence D. Cress Award for Excellence in Faculty Scholarship and held a prestigious American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship during her last sabbatical. Throughout her almost 20 years of service at Willamette she has become known as a rigorous and intellectually exciting instructor with a gift for teaching writing and for stimulating challenging classroom discussion. Among her colleagues, she also has a well-deserved reputation as a tireless contributor to the campus community.
Lindsay Stewart attended Willamette University, earning his B.A. in economics in 1969 and his J.D. in 1973. He continued his involvement with the university as a member of the Willamette University board of trustees serving from 1997-2003. Lindsay served as vice president (law) and chief-of-staff for Nike, Inc. in Beaverton, OR from 1981 until retiring in 2007. Corinne Stewart majored in American Studies at Willamette, earning her B.A. in 1971. She went on to earn her certificate in education, English and history from California State University (Fresno).
Through their generous gift, the Stewarts are not only directly supporting humanistic study at Willamette but are also calling public attention to the value of the Humanities in the academy and to society. The Humanities include a vast array of disciplines, disparate in their methodologies and approaches, but all centered on enduring — as well as emerging — questions about what it means to be a human being in the world.
