New faculty bring expertise to University

William Harms and Peter Schuler
News Office

As of Jan. 1, two new professors, Mary Anne Case and Iris Young, have taken up their respective faculty appointments in the Law School and the Department of Political Science. Dr. Vinay Kumar will begin his appointments in Pathology at the University March 1.

Case, an authority on sex, gender and sexuality, constitutional law and European legal systems, joined the University’s Law School faculty this Winter Quarter. She comes to Chicago from the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was first an associate professor and then professor of law.

At Virginia, she was named the Class of 1966 Research Professor of Law and received the Bankard Fund Award for Political Economy for research on comparative Germany-U.S. contract law. Previously, she was a litigator at the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York.

Case will teach classes on sexuality and European legal systems during her first year at Chicago.

She received her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School and a B.A. magna cum laude from Yale University. She also studied at Ludwig Maximilianus Universitaet in Munich, Germany.

Case’s publications include “Disaggregating Gender from Sex and Sexual Orientation: The Effeminate Man in the Law and Feminist Jurisprudence” and “Couples and Coupling in the Public Sphere: A Comment on the Legal History of Litigating for Lesbian and Gay Rights.”

Kumar has been appointed Professor and Chairman of Pathology, effective March 1. An authority on the cellular and molecular biology of natural killer cells, Kumar has been a leader in understanding the origin and differentiation of these cells and their role in the rejection of transplanted bone marrow.

Kumar comes to the University from the University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center, where he was the Vernie A. Stembridge professor of pathology, associate dean for medical education, and vice chairman for educational affairs in the department of pathology.

Born in India, Kumar graduated with honors at the age of 17 from Poona University. In 1967, at the age of 22, he earned his M.B.B.S.––the equivalent of the M.D. degree––from Punjab University Medical College in Amritsar. He completed both his Ph.D. in experimental pathology and his residency in anatomic pathology and hematology in 1972 at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where he was awarded the Khanolkar Prize for outstanding research in pathology.

He came to the United States in 1972 to join the pathology faculty at Boston City Hospital and Boston University, where he was honored for his teaching and research skills in both the basic and clinical sciences. He continued to be honored as a teacher and scientist after joining the faculty at the University of Texas, Southwestern, in 1982, becoming a professor of pathology in 1983.

An author of Basic Pathology and Robbins Pathologic Basis of Disease, the most widely used texts in the field, Kumar also is author or co-author of five other pathology textbooks and teaching aids. He has published more than 100 original articles in scientific journals, a dozen book chapters and nearly 20 review articles.

He has lectured throughout the United States and Europe, served on the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of Immunology, and recently completed his term as president of the American Society of Investigative Pathology.

Young, a leading political philosopher who specializes in theory of justice, democratic theory and feminist theory, has joined the University faculty as Professor in Political Science.

Young’s book, Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), argues for a conception of justice beyond distribution and for attending to rather than bracketing group differences.

Her two collections of essays in feminist theory, Throwing Like a Girl (1990) and Intersecting Voices (1997), include papers on female body experience, feminist social theory and normative analysis of policy issues, such as welfare policy, that affect women.

These interests are influenced by 10 years of teaching in a policy school at the University of Pittsburgh. Her recent published work is on themes of democratic communication and global democracy.

Before joining the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh, Young was a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Miami University in Ohio and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In 1995, she spent a term teaching philosophy at the G.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.

She received a B.A. in philosophy in 1970 from Queens College of the City University of New York and an M.A. in 1972 and Ph.D. in 1974, both in philosophy from Pennsylvania State University.