July 29, 2004 Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov Appointed Holder of the Chair of Modern Culture at Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has appointed Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) as the first holder of the Chair of Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

Ivanov, a philologist and translator of international repute, will explore the symbols of the Old Slavic, Proto and Ancient Indian, Ancient Near Oriental and Pre-Columbian MesoAmerican cultures during his residency at the Kluge Center in his continuing study of the history of writing.

Ivanov is a professor in the department of Slavic languages and literatures and the program of Indo-European studies at UCLA. He has held many distinguished positions, including the director of the All-Union Library of Foreign Literature in Moscow, chairman of the Department of Structural Typology of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. and chairman of the Department of the Theory and History of World Culture and professor of the Philosophical Faculty at Moscow State University. He has also served as head of the Commission for the Complex Study of Creative Activity of the Scientific Council for the World Culture at the Academy of Sciences and president of the artistic translation section of the Moscow division of the U.S.S.R. writers' union.

A member of the Library of Congress Scholars' Council, Ivanov was curator for the 1994 Library of Congress exhibition "In the Beginning Was the Word: The Russian Church and Native Alaskan Cultures," which can be seen on the Library's Web site at www.loc.gov/exhibits/russian/russch1.html.

Ivanov has received numerous awards, including the Lenin Prize, and he is an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America as well as a fellow of the British Academy. He received doctorates from both Moscow State University and the University of Vilnius. He is the author of more than 15 books and 1,000 journal articles and has been editor in chief of Elementa, the Journal of Slavic Studies and Comparative Cultural Semiotics, since 1992.

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world's best thinkers to distill wisdom from the Library's rich resources and to stimulate and energize interaction with policymakers in Washington. The Kluge Center houses five senior Kluge Chairs (American Law and Governance, Countries and Cultures of the North, Countries and Cultures of the South, Technology and Society and Modern Culture); other senior-level chairs (Henry A. Kissinger Chair, Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in American History and Ethics and the Harissios Papamarkou Chair in Education and Technology); and nearly 25 postdoctoral fellows.

For more information on any of the fellowships, grants and programs offered by the Kluge Center, contact the Office of Scholarly Programs, Library of Congress, 101 Independence Avenue S.E., Washington, DC 20540-4860; telephone (202) 707-3302, fax (202) 707-3595, or visit the Web at www.loc.gov/kluge.