Professors receive new named and distinguished appointments

Seventeen members of the faculty from a range of disciplines across the University have received new faculty appointments. Several of the appointments became effective Nov. 1, 2002, while the others were effective Jan. 1.

Five University faculty members, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jeffrey Harvey, Thomas Holt, Peter McCullagh, Janel Mueller and David Oxtoby, have received distinguished service professorships. Twelve professors recently honored with named chairs are: Albert Alschuler, Lisa Bernstein, Mary Anne Case, Charles Cohen, Donald Lamb, John Lucy, Jean-Luc Marion, Thomas Pavel, Eric Posner, Michael Stein and Kenneth Warren.

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Professor in South Asian Languages & Civilizations and the College, has been named the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor.

Chakrabarty’s research interests are modern South Asian history and historiography, postcolonial theory and its impact on history-writing, and comparative studies of politics of modernity. He is currently working on a book on multiculturalism and democracy, and another on literature and history. His latest book is Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies.

He is a founding member of the series Subaltern Studies, a co-editor of Critical Inquiry and a founding editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies. He also has served on the editorial committee of Public Culture and the American Historical Review.

Other publications include Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference and Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940. He also co-edited Cosmopolitanism with his colleague Sheldon Pollock, the George V. Brobinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages & Civilizations and the College, Carol Breckinridge and former Chicago professor Homi Bhabha.

A volume of his Bengali-language essays, titled Itihash: torke-bitorke (Arguing About History), is being published by Ananda Publishers, Calcutta, India.

After studying physics as an undergraduate at Calcutta University and graduating from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta, Chakrabarty went on to earn a Ph.D. in history from Australian National University in 1984. He taught at the University of Melbourne before joining the Chicago faculty in 1995.

Jeffrey Harvey

Jeffrey Harvey, who studies the theoretical behavior of the most fundamental particles of matter, has been named the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Service Professor. He was formerly the Louis Block Professor in Physics and the College.

Harvey specializes in string theory, particle physics and cosmology. Much of his current work focuses on string theory. Strings are theoretical particles that help explain how the four fundamental forces of nature–gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces–fit together.

Harvey became a Professor in Physics at Chicago in 1990. Previously he had been a faculty member at Princeton University.

He has been the recipient of an Alfred Sloan Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator award. He also is an elected fellow of the American Physical Society.

He is the co-editor of four books, String Theory and Quantum Gravity ’91, String Theory and Quantum Gravity ’92, Recent Directions in Particle Theory, from Superstrings and Black Holes to the Standard Model, and Strings, Branes and Gravity.

Harvey received his B.Sc. in physics and mathematics from the University of Minnesota with Phi Beta Kappa honors and his Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology.

Thomas Holt

Thomas Holt, one of the nation’s foremost scholars of African-American history, has been appointed a Distinguished Service Professor. The distinction has been added to his current title, making Holt the James Westfall Thompson Distinguished Service Professor in History.

Holt is a specialist in American slavery emancipation, race relations and freedom movements. He is the author of The Problem of Race in the 21st Century, published in 2002; The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938, published in 1992; and Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (1977).

He is a co-author with Frederick Cooper and Rebecca Scott of Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Post-emancipation Societies, published in 2000; and with Elsa Barkley Brown, Major Problems in African-American History, published in two volumes in 2000 and 2002.

Holt, who was president of the American Historical Association from 1994 to 1995, has received numerous awards for his work. He received the Elsa Goveia Prize in 1995 from the Association of Caribbean Historians for The Problem of Freedom and the Southern Historical Association’s Charles S. Sydnor Award in 1978 for Black over White.

Holt, who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1990, received a B.A. in 1965 and an M.A. in 1967 from Howard University, and an M.Phil in 1970 and a Ph.D. in 1973 in American studies from Yale University.

He joined the history faculty at Howard University in 1972, and beginning in 1976, he served as an associate professor of history and African-American studies at Harvard University until he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1979. He joined the Chicago faculty in 1987.

Peter McCullagh

Peter McCullagh, who seeks to develop a mathematical foundation for statistical models, has been named the John MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor.

His early work was concerned with the theory and applications of a class of statistical models called generalized linear models.

McCullagh formerly was the Ralph & Mary Otis Isham Professor in Statistics and the College. He served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Statistics at Chicago from 1977 to 1979, and returned in 1985 as a Professor. He also held positions at Imperial College, London, the University of British Columbia, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, and AT&T Bell Labs.

He is a fellow of several professional, statistical and scientific organizations. He has received the University of Birmingham’s Alison Powell Memorial Prize, the Royal Statistical Society’s Guy Medal in Bronze, the Presidents’ Award from the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies and the Statistician of the Year Award from the Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002.

McCullagh’s publications include three books, Generalized Linear Models (1983), Tensor Methods in Statistics (1987), and Generalized Linear Models (1989).

He received his B.Sc. degree in mathematics and statistics at the University of Birmingham and his Ph.D. in statistics at Imperial College, London.

Janel Mueller

Janel Mueller, Dean of the Division of the Humanities and a William Rainey Harper Professor in the College, has been given the distinction of Distinguished Service Professor, which has been added to her current title.

Mueller’s expertise is in English literature from the 15th through the 17th centuries. Her scholarly pursuits include religious and historical writing in early modern England; John Milton; early English women authors; linguistics and literature; and society and literature.

Among her recent major works are an edition of the collected writings of Elizabeth I, co-edited with Leah Marcus and Mary Beth Rose (University of Chicago Press, 2000); a scholarly companion volume, Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals (University of Chicago Press, 2002) co-edited with Leah Marcus; and The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (2002) with David Loewenstein.

Mueller also has collaborated with Suzanne Gossett on completing the late Josephine Roberts’ edition of part two of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania in the University of Arizona’s Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies series.

Mueller has served on the University’s Task Force on Undergraduate Education, and for multiple terms in the Council of the University Senate and the College Council. She has chaired the Department of English Language & Literature and was sole editor of Modern Philology from 1988 to 1998.

She has been named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and has been honored with the University’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and with the University’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

A native of Chicago, Mueller began her teaching career at the University in 1967.

She earned her M.A. from Radcliffe College in 1961, and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1965.

David Oxtoby

The University has added Distinguished Service Professor to the title of David Oxtoby, the William Rainey Harper Professor in Chemistry and the College and the Dean of the Physical Sciences Division.

Oxtoby is the author or co-author of more than 165 scientific articles on such subjects as liquids, light scattering, chemical reaction dynamics and phase transitions and has written two chemistry textbooks.

His honors include the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Marlow Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry, and fellowships of the American Physical Society, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He also has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and a Teacher-Scholar of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

Oxtoby joined the University faculty in 1977. He served as Master of the Physical Sciences Collegiate Division and Associate Dean of the College from 1984 to 1987, and as Director of the James Franck Institute from 1992 to 1995. He is now in his second five-year term as Dean of the Physical Sciences Division, initially having been appointed to the position in 1995.

He received his A.B. in 1972 from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in 1975 from the University of California, Berkeley.

Albert Alschuler

Albert Alschuler, who was until Jan. 1 the Wilson-Dickinson Professor in the Law School, has been named the Julius Kreeger Professor in the Law School.

A fellow in the Law School’s Center for Studies in Criminal Justice from 1967 to 1968, Alschuler joined the Chicago faculty in 1985.

Alschuler was awarded the Sutherland Prize of the American Society of Legal Historians in 1997, for his study of the jurist Sir William Blackstone and has written on a variety of legal topics. Those topics include plea bargaining, sentencing reform, privacy, search and seizure, civil procedure, jury selection, legal history, legal ethics, confessions, courtroom conduct, and American legal theory.

He is the author of Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and co-author of The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination: Its Origins and Development (University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Alschuler, who has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Colorado and the University of Texas at Austin, also served as a special assistant in the Office of the Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, and as a law clerk for the Hon. Walter Schaefer, a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, prior to teaching.

He earned an A.B. from Harvard University in 1962, and he received his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1965.

Lisa Bernstein

Lisa Bernstein, a Professor in the Law School since 1998, has been named the Wilson-Dickinson Professor in the Law School.

Bernstein, whose scholarship interests focus on private commercial law, studies industries that have opted out of the public legal system, replacing it with privately drafted commercial codes and arbitration tribunals to resolve disputes.

Bernstein’s most recent articles include “Private Commercial Law in the Cotton Industry: Creating Cooperation Through Rules, Norms, and Institutions,” “The Questionable Empirical Basis of Article 2’s Incorporation Strategy: A Preliminary Study,” and “On Compensation and Information: The Secrecy Interest in Contract Law” with Omri Benshahar.

She began teaching as an associate professor at Boston University School of Law in 1991 and was named a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center in 1995 after serving as a visiting professor there.

Bernstein also was a Visiting Professor at the University in 1997, a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law and Columbia University Law School.

Prior to her teaching career, Bernstein was a visiting research fellow in law and economics at Harvard University.

She received an A.B. in Economics from Chicago in 1986 and a J.D. from Harvard University in 1990.

Mary Anne Case

Mary Anne Case, Professor in the Law School, has been named the Arnold I. Shure Professor in the Law School.

Case, who joined the Chicago faculty in 1999, and who also served as a Visiting Professor in 1998, teaches courses in feminist jurisprudence, the regulation of sexuality, European legal systems and constitutional law. Her research interests include the regulation of sex, gender, and sexuality, as well as the First Amendment and comparative contract law.

Prior to joining the Law School faculty, she was the class of 1966 research professor of law at the University of Virginia. She also studied at the University of Munich and has done litigation for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison in New York.

Her most recent articles include “Are Plain Hamburgers Now Unconstitutional? The Equal Protection Component of Bush v. Gore as a Chapter in the History of Ideas;” “Reflections on Constitutionalizing Women’s Equality;” “How High the Apple Pie? A Few Troubling Questions about Where, Why, and How the Burden of Care for Children Should Be Shifted;” and “Changing Room? A Quick Tour of Men’s and Women’s Rooms in U.S. Law over the Last Decade, from the U.S. Constitution to Local Ordinances.”

Case received her B.A. magna cum laude from Yale University in 1979 and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard University in 1985.

Charles Cohen

Charles Cohen, Professor in Art History and the College, and Chair of the Committee on the Visual Arts, has been named the Mary L. Block Professor.

Cohen’s scholarship has included research on the Italian Renaissance and Mannerist art. Currently he is examining the works of Venetian and other northern Italian artists as well as the themes of provincialism, religious art before the Council of Trent, and the changing role of drawing in the creative process in Italian art.

His latest book is The Art of Giovanni Antiorio da Pordenone: Between Dialect and Language.

His other books are I disegni di Pomponio Amalteo and The Drawings of Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone. Currently, Cohen is working on a monograph on Lorenzo Lotto and a book on Venetian art of the 1530s.

Cohen has been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. During his tenure at the University he has served as Chair of the Department of Art History and the Committee on Art and Design and, along with his wife Sondra, as a Resident Master of Pierce Hall for 22 years.

Before joining the Chicago faculty in 1970, Cohen taught at Harvard University.

He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1963, an M.F.A. from Princeton University in 1965, and a Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1971.

Donald Lamb

Donald Lamb Jr., who has focused his research on fundamental, unsolved problems in high-energy astrophysics, has been named the Louis Block Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Last year, Lamb became Director of the University’s Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes. He also is the mission scientist for NASA’s High Energy Transient Explorer II satellite, which studies gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe.

Lamb became a Professor at the University in 1985. Previously he had been a physicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and a member of the faculty at Harvard University and the University of Illinois.

He also has held visiting appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, the Institute for Space and Aeronautical Science in Tokyo, Japan, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

He is the author of more than 300 publications and the co-editor of two books, Fundamental Problems in the Theory of Stellar Evolution (1981), and Cataclysmic Variables and Low-Mass X-ray Binaries (1984).

A former Guggenheim Fellow and Marshall Scholar, Lamb earned his B.A. cum laude from Rice University, his M.Sc. from the University of Liverpool and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.

John Lucy

John Lucy, who has become a leading figure in studying how language affects thought, has been named the William Benton Professor in the Committee on Human Development and the College.

Lucy has done extensive fieldwork in Mexico, where he has studied language, cognitive development and other areas of interest, including religious ritual.

Lucy, who is on leave this year in the Netherlands, is completing a book with Suzanne Gaskins on grammatical categories and cognitive development based on a comparison of Yucatec Maya and American English.

He also has written two books, Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (1992) and Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (1992).

Lucy joined the faculty in 1996 and served as Master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division; Deputy Dean of the Social Sciences Division; and Associate Dean in the College from 1999 to 2002. Last year from January to June, he was Interim Dean of the Social Sciences Division.

He received a B.A. in mathematics from Pomona College in 1972 and a Ph.D. from Chicago’s Committee on Human Development in 1987. He served on the faculty in the University of Pennsylvania’s anthropology department before joining the Chicago faculty.

Jean-Luc Marion

Jean-Luc Marion has been named the John Nuveen Professor in the Divinity School and the College. Marion, who has served as Visiting Professor at Chicago for almost a decade, will be involved in the Divinity School’s Philosophy of Religion program. He also is a professor of philosophy at the Université de Paris IV – Sorbonne, where he is chair of the Centre d’Etudes Cartésiennes.

Described as both a preeminent scholar of Descartes and a Catholic philosopher of major stature, Marion studies both the history of modern philosophy and contemporary phenomenology. In the former field, he has published several books on Descartes’ ontology, rational theology and metaphysics, focusing on medieval sources and drawing on modern patterns of interpretation (On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism and Cartesian Questions).

In the field of phenomenology, Marion is pursuing a long-term inquiry into the question of God, as in his books God Without Being (second edition, University of Chicago Press, 1995), and The Idol and Distance.

Before joining the faculty at the Sorbonne in 1995, he taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Ulm, in Paris, the University of Poitiers and the University of Nanterre.

Marion studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Ulm, in Paris, and went on to earn his Doctorat de 3e cycle in 1974 as well as his Doctorat d’Etat at the Sorbonne in 1980. He received the prestigious Grand Prix de Philosophie from the Académie Française in 1992 for his work as a whole.

Thomas Pavel

Thomas Pavel, Chairman and Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and the College, has been named the first Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor.

Pavel’s research interests include 17th- and 20th-century French literature, intellectual history, poetics and the history of fiction, as well as the interactions between literary criticism, linguistics and philosophy.

His most recent English book is The Spell of Language: Poststructuralism and Speculation (University of Chicago Press, 2000), which originally appeared as Le Mirage linguistique. The book was translated into Portuguese and Romanian and won the René Wellek Prize in 1992.

Pavel also recently organized a conference on iconoclasm, focusing on Alan Besançon’s The Forbidden Image (English translation, University of Chicago Press, 2000).

Among his books are La Pensée du roman: Histoire d’un genre littéraire and Fictional Worlds, which was translated into French, Italian, Romanian and Spanish.

Pavel taught at the University of Ottawa, the University of Quebec, the University of California-Santa Cruz, and Princeton University before coming to Chicago in 1997.

After earning an M.A. in linguistics from the University of Bucharest in 1962, Pavel earned his Doctorat 3e cycle from the University of Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle, in 1971.

Eric Posner

Eric Posner, a Professor in the Law School since 1999, has been named the Kirkland & Ellis Professor in the Law School.

Posner, who was a Visiting Professor in the Law School in 1997, focuses his scholarship on several areas of law, including contract law, bankruptcy, commercial law, social norms, international law, cost/benefit analysis and international arbitration.

Prior to joining the Chicago faculty, Posner taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School from 1993 to 1998. He previously served as an attorney advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice, and he was a clerk for Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit.

Posner is author of Law and Social Norms (2000), co-editor with Matthew Adler of Cost-Benefit Analysis: Legal, Philosophical, and Economic Perspectives (University of Chicago Press, 2001), and editor of Chicago Lectures in Law and Economics (2000).

In 1995, Posner was awarded a John M. Olin fellowship at the University of Southern California, and in 1996, he was awarded a University Research Foundation grant at the University of Pennsylvania.

Posner received his B.A. and M.A. from Yale University in philosophy summa cum laude in 1988, and his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1991.

Michael Stein

Michael Stein, who specializes in spatial statistics and the applications of statistics to geophysics and environmental monitoring, has been named the Ralph & Mary Otis Isham Professor.

Stein’s current research focuses on statistical descriptions of environmental processes varying in space and time and on methods for combining monitoring data and physical models to assess the state of the environment.

Stein is Director of the University’s Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science, established last year with a $6.25 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency. The center is devoted to the development of statistical methods for more precise environmental risk assessments.

Stein joined the statistics faculty at Chicago as an Assistant Professor in 1985.

Stein, who served as Chairman of the Statistics Department from 1998 to 2001, is the author of Statistical Interpolation of Spatial Data: Some Theory for Kriging (1999).

He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

Stein received his B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also has an M.S. and a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University. He served as a postdoctoral research fellow in mathematical sciences at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

Kenneth Warren

Kenneth Warren, Professor in English Language & Literature and the College, has been named the William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor.

Warren specializes in African-American literature, and 19th- and 20th-century American literature and critical theory. His work has ranged from studying such major 20th-century writers as Leon Forrest and Ralph Ellison to such 19th-century critics as William Dean Howells.

Warren is the author of Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (University of Chicago Press, 1993). His second book, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in September.

Warren’s articles include “The End(s) of African American Studies,” “Ralph Ellison and the Reconfiguration of African American Cultural Politics,” and “The Problem of Anthologies, or Making the Dead Wince.”

Warren is a member of the editorial boards of the Cambridge Series of American Literature and American Literary History.

Before joining the Chicago faculty in 1991, he taught at Northwestern University.

He earned an A.B. in history and literature in 1980 from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1988.