University welcomes six scholars to faculty

Six distinguished scholars have recently joined the University’s faculty.

The new professors are Muzaffar Alam, Professor in South Asian Languages & Civilizations; Reid Hastie, Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the Graduate School of Business; David MacQueen, Professor in Computer Science; Roger Myerson, who began his Chicago faculty appointment as the William C. Norby Professor in Economics; Olaf Schneewind, Professor in Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology and Chairman of the Committee on Virology; and David Wellbery, Professor in Germanic Studies.

Muzaffar Alam joins the University faculty as Professor in South Asian Languages & Civilizations.

He previously was a professor of medieval Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Dehli. His work has explored the formation and decline of the Mughal Empire and also focused on the role of religion and literature in politics.Alam’s first major project was an edition of the late Mughal chronicle Tazkirat-us-Salatin Chaghta, which originated as his master’s thesis. In his doctoral work, he explored the reasons for the decline of the Mughal Empire. Attention to the role of different regions and actors led to a new view of the way imperial control was resisted at the local level, and this view was developed in essays published in the Proceedings of the Indian History Congress and the Indian Economic and Historical Review. It then culminated in The Crisis of Empire in Mughal Northern India.

The next phase of Alam’s work explored the formation of the Mughal Empire and led to two co-written volumes on representations of the Mughal Empire and South Asia in general: Traveller’s Tales in the East, now being completed, and an edition of the letters of the Swiss mercenary and Orientalist Colonel Antoine Polier titled A European Experience of the Mughal Orient, just published.

Additionally, Alam’s interests include the role of Sufism in India and the nature of Indo-Islamic political and religious interaction; the literature of political advice in the Mughal public sphere; the career of the Persian language in South Asia; and the issue of the identity formation of Indian Muslims in the decades leading up to colonial rule.

Alam has lectured at the University of Leiden; the School of Oriental and African Studies, London; the University of Wisconsin; the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; the University of Bologna; Munich University; and the University of California, Berkeley. He has held fellowships at King’s College, London; the College de France; the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme; the Kern Institute of Indology, Leiden; and the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin.

He earned his B.A. in history, political science and English literature at Jamie Millia University, New Dehli; his M.A. and M.Phil. in medieval Indian history at Aligarh Muslim University in Aligarh; and his Ph.D. at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He also holds a degree in Islamic studies from Dar-ul-uloom, Deoband.

Reid Hastie has joined the University faculty as Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the Graduate School of Business. He comes to Chicago from the University of Colorado where, since 1988, he was a professor of psychology and director of the Center for Research on Judgment and Policy.

Hastie’s research focuses on judgment and decision-making (managerial, legal, medical, engineering, and personal), memory and cognition and social psychology. Currently, he is studying the psychology of investment decisions, the role of explanations in category concept representations (including the effects of category classification, deductive, and inductive inferences) and civil jury decision-making (punitive damages and sexual harassment). He also is researching the primitive sources of confidence and probability judgments and neural substrates of risky decisions.

Hastie has published numerous articles in academic journals such as the Journal of Experimental Psychology, the Annual Review of Psychology and Cognitive Psychology. He is the co-author of Social Psychology in Court, Inside the Jury, Person Memory: The Cognitive Basis of Social Perception, and editor of Inside the Juror.

He has just published An Overview of the Field of Judgment and Decision, co-authored with Robyn Dawes, at Carnegie Mellon University, and   Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. Another book, Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide, co-authored with Cass Sunstein, the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor in the Law School, is in production at the University Press.

He has served on review panels for the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Research Council and on 14 professional journal editorial boards. Since 1975, he has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Hastie has taught at the University of Colorado, Northwestern University and Harvard University. In 1986 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

He received a B.S. from Stanford University in 1968, an M.A. from the University of California, San Diego, in 1970, and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1973, all in psychology.

David MacQueen has joined the Chicago faculty as a Professor in Computer Science. His research interests include theory of data types, design and implementation of functional programming languages, and formal methods and tools for software specification and program development.

Since 1981, MacQueen had worked at the Computing Sciences Research Center of Bell Laboratories, the research arm of Lucent Technologies. From 1991 to 1998 he also headed the Software Principles Research Department of Bell Laboratories.

MacQueen served as a member of the technical staff of the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute from 1979 to 1980. He was a postdoctoral research fellow in the departments of artificial intelligence and computer science at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland from 1975 to 1979. He also was a faculty member at the Air Force Institute of Technology from 1972 to 1975.

He was elected a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1999 and named a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs in 1989.

MacQueen received his B.S. degree with great distinction and departmental honors in mathematics from Stanford University in 1968, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972.

Roger Myerson, a leading expert on economic game theory, joins the University faculty as the William C. Norby Professor in Economics. Prior to his University appointment, Myerson was the Harold L. Stuart professor of decision sciences, professor of economics and professor of political science at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.

In addition to game theory, his research interests include the economics of information and analysis of voting systems.

He has been both a Guggenheim fellow and a Sloan Foundation research fellow.

Myerson is the author of Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict (1991), and he currently is writing a textbook titled Probability and Decision Analysis in Spreadsheets. He also is developing the mathematical theory of games with population uncertainty and applying these models for analysis of large voting games.

Myerson has published computer software programs related to his work and more than 70 papers on game theory and other topics concerning his research.

Those papers include “Large Poisson Games” and “Comparison of Scoring Rules in Poisson Voting Games,” both published in the Journal of Economic Theory; “Theoretical Comparisons of Electoral Systems” and “Informational Origins of Political Bias Towards Critical Groups of Voters,” both published in the European Economic Review; “Nash Equilibrium and the History of Economic Theory,” published in the Journal of Economic Literature; and “Economic Analysis of Constitutions,” published in the Chicago Law Review.

He received an A.B., summa cum laude, and an S.M. in 1993 from Harvard University, both in applied mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1976 from Harvard University.

Olaf Schneewind has joined the faculty of the University as Professor in Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology and Chairman of the Committee on Virology.

Schneewind’s studies have focused on bacterial pathogens, and he is particularly interested in how bacteria establish disease while infecting humans. He has developed a number of systems to facilitate the study of protein targeting in bacterial pathogens.

Schneewind comes to the University from the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine, where he was a professor of microbiology and immunology.

The author or co-author of more than 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters, Schneewind has served as a consultant to a number of pharmaceutical companies. He is a member of the American Society for Microbiology and, since 1993, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Schneewind graduated from the University of Cologne’s Medical School in 1988 with an M.D. and a Ph.D. in microbiology.

His doctoral thesis won the University of Cologne’s VUB Prize for best doctoral thesis. He did his postdoctoral training with Vincent Fischetti at Rockefeller University.

Schneewind was recognized with the 1995 Stein-Oppenheimer Research Award and received an Eli Lilly grant in 1996.

David Wellbery, the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh University Professor in Germanic Studies, comes to Chicago from Johns Hopkins University.

Wellbery’s work has focused on classical German literature and its significance for contemporary theoretical questions.

He has published Lessing’s “Laocoon”: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason and The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism, as well as works in German and Portuguese on Goethe, Schopenhauer and deconstruction. He is co-editor of the journal Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fuer Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte and serves on the editorial boards of several other journals including the Goethe Yearbook and Comparative Literature. He has edited collections on diverse topics such as Reconstructing Individualism and The Ends of Rhetoric. The author of more than 45 articles and essays that have been published in such journals as the Goethe Yearbook, the Stanford Italian Review, the Stanford Literature Review and Weimarer Beitrage, Wellbery also has translated a study of the poet Ranier Maria Rilke.

Wellbery served as chairman of the comparative literature department and director of graduate studies at Stanford University, and he was a member of the editorial board of the Johns Hopkins University Press.

He has organized a wide range of conferences, including Interpretation-Discourse-Society, The Novel and the Writer’s Life and Concepts of the Modern.

He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, the Danforth Foundation and the Fulbright Foundation as well as the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at Stanford University.

Wellbery earned his B.A. from the State University of New York in 1969 and continued his studies at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Mainz. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1977.