More news about Yale people

Harold Shapiro

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Remembered

Law School professor Drew Days III ’66LLB (left), who served as US solicitor general in the Clinton administration, died on November 15. He was 79 years old. A native of Atlanta, Days was an attorney for the NAACP before becoming an assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Carter administration. Named the Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law in 1991, he was on the faculty from 1981 to 2017. He was founding director of the school’s Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights. Former dean Harold Hongju Koh called Days “one of the moral centers of the Yale Law School in the late twentieth century.”

Cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg, the Neil Gray Jr. Professor of English and professor emeritus of American studies, died on August 18 at the age of 88. Trachtenberg, who studied photography and its role in documenting history and culture, joined the Yale faculty in 1969. His was the first permanent faculty appointment in American studies, which he helped build into a leading program. He retired in 2001 but remained active at the university through the Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty.

Yale historian Ivo Banac died on June 30 in Zagreb, Croatia. He was 74. Banac, the Bradford Durfee Professor of History Emeritus, was a native of Dubrovnik, Croatia, and his teaching and scholarship were focused on Eastern Europe. He taught at Yale from 1977 to 2009 and was master of Pierson College from 1988 to 1995. After retirement, he taught in Croatia and became involved with politics, leading a major political party and serving as a cabinet minister.

Honored

Two Yale students and a recent graduate are among the 32 American Rhodes Scholars selected for 2021. Brian Reyes ’21 of Bronx, New York; Alondra Vázquez López ’21 of San Rafael, California; and Jackson Willis ’20 of St. Petersburg, Florida, will study at Oxford next year.