Abrams will be awarded the Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. A member of the Academy of Arts and Letters, Abrams is the author of six books, including "The Mirror and the Lamp," which was named one of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century in a list compiled by the Modern Library at Random House. He also received the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Prize for his work in 1954. He is the founding and senior editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, the standard anthology now in its eighth edition used by college students in introductory literature courses. He is the grandfather of Sarah Brennan '03.
Maybury-Lewis will receive the Honorary Doctor of Science. He is an expert on kinship theory and structuralism. He is founder and president of Cultural Survival, an organization that has worked intensively on alternative strategies of development that protect the environment and the human rights of minority peoples. He has worked to change the policies of the multilateral development banks and co-authored the new guidelines adopted by the World Bank. In 1992 he hosted a PBS series, " Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World." He has been honored with the Grand Cross of the National Order of Scientific Merit from the Government of Brazil.