Vartan Gregorian (In Memoriam 1934-2021)

Vartan Gregorian is the twelfth president of Carnegie Corporation of New York.  Prior to his current position, which he assumed in June 1997, Gregorian served for nine years as the sixteenth president of Brown University and from 1981-1989 he was president of the New York Public Library.  He was born in Tabriz, Iran, of Armenian parents, receiving his elementary education in Iran and his secondary education in Lebanon.  In 1956 he entered Stanford University, where he majored in history and the humanities, graduating with honors in 1958.  He was awarded a Ph.D. in history and humanities from Stanford in 1964. He taught at San Francisco State College, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Austin. In 1972 Gregorian joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty then became the founding dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and four years later became its twenty-third provost until 1981.

Gregorian is the author of The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 1880-1946, The Road To Home: My Life And Times, and Islam: A Mosaic, Not A Monolith.  A Phi Beta Kappa and a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Training Fellow, he is a recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and the American Philosophical Society.  He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.  In 1969, he received the Danforth Foundation’s E.H. Harbison Distinguished Teaching Award.  In 2004, Gregorian was presented the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil award, by President George W. Bush. President Clinton awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 1998. 

To view Vartan's In Memoriam, please click here.