GREENVILLE, S.C.—Furman University president emeritus and professor of history David E. Shi has been named a Presidential Fellow with the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College in Florida.
As a Fellow, Shi will give public lectures, organize a symposium on the surging popularity of sustainability in higher education, speak to classes, and continue work on two book projects. He will begin his six-month resident fellowship Oct. 1.
Other Fellows joining the Institute this fall include writer and feminist activist Gloria Steinem, former Democratic Rep. Patricia Schroeder, and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough.
The Winter Park Institute was launched by Rollins College in 2008, an outgrowth of its 2007 colloquy, Liberal Education and Social Responsibility in a Global Community, which hosted scholars and writers Maya Angelou, Francis Fukuyama, and Salman Rushdie. The Institute has since hosted such notables as musicians Paul Simon and Béla Fleck, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Julian Bond.
A noted historian and cultural commentator, Shi served as the 10th president of Furman from 1994 to 2010. A 1973 Furman graduate, he joined the university administration in 1993 as vice president for academic affairs and dean. Before coming to Furman, he taught history at Davidson College for 17 years.
Shi is the author of several books, including Matthew Josephson, Bourgeois Bohemian, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, and Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850-1920. He is also co-author of the best-selling college textbook, America: a Narrative History, now in its eighth edition. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history at the University of Virginia.
For more information, contact Furman’s News and Media Relations office at 864-294-3107.