AUTHOR: Stephen Houston

Stephen Houston serves as the Dupee Family Professor of Social Sciences at Brown University, where he also holds an appointment in Anthropology, and, for 2018-2019, the Jay Kislak Chair at the Library of Congress. A specialist in Classic Maya archaeology, civilization, writing systems, and indigenous representation, Houston is the author of many books and articles, including, most recently, “Temple of the Night Sun” (Precolumbia Mesoweb Press), “The Maya” (with Michael Coe, now its 9th edition), and “The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence” (Yale University Press), winner of a PROSE Award in 2014, and “The Gifted Passage: Young Men in Classic Maya Art and Text” (Yale University Press). He was co-curator of a major show, “Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea,” exhibited at the Peabody-Essex Museum, the Kimbell, and the St. Louis Museum of Fine Arts. Houston has been honored with a MacArthur Fellowship, along with stipends and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks, the Clark Art Institute, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2014–2015, he was Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. In recognition of Houston's scholarship, the President of Guatemala awarded him, in 2011, the Grand Cross of the Order of the Quetzal, that country's highest honor. For that same body of work, Houston also received the Tatiana Proskouriakoff Award in 2013 from the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. He is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania; his Ph.D., awarded in 1987, is from Yale.

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