Professorships of distinction go to 19 members of faculty

Five University faculty members, including two new members of the faculty (see story on New Faculty), have recently received distinguished service professorships, while 14 scholars at the University have received named professorships.

The five faculty members who have received distinguished service professorships are: Charles Larmore, Richard Thaler, Kenneth Warren, and new faculty members Michael Dawson and Stephen Raudenbush.

Current faculty members who have received named professorships are: Muzaffar Alam, Shadi Bartsch, Lauren Berlant, John Birge, James Conant, Christopher Faraone, Austan Goolsbee, Jeffrey Grogger, Jonathan Hall, Ziyad Hijazi, Robert Kottwitz, Marta Ptaszyanska, Jose Quintans, and Kazuo Yamaguchi.

Since 2002, Dawson has been a faculty member in the government and African-American studies departments at Harvard University. Dawson, who returned to Chicago in July, was previously the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in Political Science at the University. He also is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. He was co-principal investigator of the 1988 National Black Election Study and was principal investigator of the 1993-1994 National Black Politics Study, which he and Ronald Brown conducted.

Dawson also led the Black Civil Society Study, and with Lawrence Bobo, Dawson conducted six public opinion studies on the racial divide in the United States. The information the two scholars gathered between 2000 and 2004 is considered the richest data on this issue that exists. They currently are working on a book that will detail their analysis this data.

Dawson is the author of Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies, published in 2001. His book Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics , was published in 1994. Dawson also has written numerous articles on African-American political behavior and race and American politics. He and Bobo co-edit the Du Bois Review, a journal dedicated to social science research on race.

Dawson received a B.A. in 1982 from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in 1986 from Harvard University.

Larmore’s interests range over a number of areas in political and moral philosophy, particularly the nature of practical reason and the foundations of liberalism. He also has written extensively on various topics in the history of philosophy, including 17th-century philosophy and 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy.

Larmore has written numerous articles and six books, several of which have been published in English, French, German, Italian, Greek and Chinese. His publications include Les pratiques du moi (2004), The Morals of Modernity (1996), The Romantic Legacy (1996), and Patterns of Moral Complexity (1987).

Larmore also is a member of a dozen editorial boards, including those of Ethics, Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie and Cahiers de philosophie de l’Université de Caen.

His most recent articles are “Descartes and Skepticism” for The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations and “Eigeninteresse und Gespräch” for Erwägen/Wissen/Ethik.

Larmore came to Chicago in 1997 from Columbia University, where he taught for nearly 20 years.

He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University and his A.B. in Greek and philosophy from Harvard University. He also studied at the Ecole normale supŽrierure in Paris and the Universität Münster in Germany.

Raudenbush, who also is Chairman of the University’s newly established Committee on Education, is best known for his expertise in quantitative methodology using the advanced research technique of hierarchical linear models, which allows researchers to accurately evaluate data from school performance.

His research pursues the development, testing, refinement, and application of statistical methods for individual change. He also researches the effects of social settings, such as schools and neighborhoods.

Raudenbush has received several awards from the American Educational Research Association, including the Raymond B. Cattell Award for early career achievement in educational research in 1993, and the Palmer O. Johnson Award for the most outstanding paper in the AERA journal in 2003. He also was honored by the American Sociological Association with the Robert Park Award for outstanding work in community and urban sociology. He also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He received an Ed.D. in Policy Analysis and Evaluation Research in 1984 from Harvard University. Prior to joining the Chicago faculty, Raudenbush was, since 1998, a professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan.

Thaler’s research focuses on behavioral economics and finance, and the psychology of decision-making. He is currently a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he also is co-director of the Behavioral Economics Project, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation.

In addition to his numerous published journal articles, Thaler is the author of Quasi-Rational Economics (1991) and The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life (1991). He also edited Advances in Behavioral Finance (1993). He is the associate editor of the Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance, the Journal of Business, the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Thaler is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Thaler earned a B.A. in Economics from Case Western Reserve University in 1967, a M.A. in Economics from the University of Rochester in 1970, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Rochester in 1974.

Warren’s scholarship and teaching focus on American and African-American literature from the late-19th century through mid-20th century. He is especially interested in the way that debates about literary form and genre inform discussions of political and social change. The classes he teaches tend to reflect his interest in genre, the politics of race and the relation of culture to politics.

He also is the author of two books, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (1993), and So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (2003). Both books explore how various understandings of racial difference have affected, and continue to affect, the way that American authors write about and pass critical judgment on American literature.

Warren has written on the Harlem Renaissance for The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, on 20th-century African American cultural movements for the Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, on Henry James for The Henry James Review and on realism for A Companion to American Thought.

Warren is the recipient of a 2005 Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Warren came to Chicago in 1991 from Northwestern University. He earned his Ph.D. in English and American literature from Stanford University, and his A.B. in history and literature from Harvard University.

His current research includes the history of religious and literary cultures in pre-colonial northern India, the history of Indo-Persian travel accounts and the comparative history of the Islamic world as seen from the Indian perspective.

Alam, who was a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin (2000-2001), edited with Franciose Delvoye and Marc Gaborieau The Making of Indo-Persian Culture: Indian and French Studies (2000). He is the author of The Languages of Political Islam in India, 1200-1800 (2004), and is collaborating with Sanjay Subrahmanyam on the forthcoming Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discovery: 1500-1800, to be published in 2006.

He has translated Persian materials from the later Mughal period and has worked closely with students on advanced Urdu and Persian literary and historical texts.

He joined the University faculty in 2001, after having taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where he was professor and chairperson of the Center for Historical Studies in the School of Social Sciences.

Alam has had a number of visiting professorships and fellowships around the world, including a term as a Commonwealth Academic Research Staff fellow at King’s College, London. In 1994, Alam was a Visiting Professor in History at the University.

He received his B.A. in 1967 from Jamia Millia University, New Delhi; a M.A. in 1968 and a M.Phil. in 1970 from Aligarh Muslin University, Aligarh; and an Indian doctorate in history in 1977 from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Bartsch studies and has published articles on Latin literature of the early empire, Julio-Claudian culture and society, and the history of classical rhetoric.

She is the author of the forthcoming The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (University Press), as well as Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan’s Civil War (1998); Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian (1994); and Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius (1989).

Bartsch is on the editorial board of Classical Philology, and edited with Thomas Bartscherer the forthcoming Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern (2005), and with David Wray the forthcoming Seneca and the Self.

Bartsch came to the University in 1998 from the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her B.A. from Princeton University and both her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in Latin and Classics, respectively.

She was a 2004-2005 fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and a 2000 recipient of a Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Berlant’s research focuses on the legal and normative production of identity in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly as it is lived in everyday life contexts of labor and intimacy. Along these same lines, Berlant also has done work in the aesthetics and theory of gender, sexuality and racial formation; political and critical theory, focusing on the centrality of affect and emotion to political life in the United States; and psychoanalysis.

She is completing a trilogy on national sentimentality, the first in the series being The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991) and the third The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997). The second, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture is forthcoming.

Berlant also has edited the volumes Intimacy (2000) and Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (2004); with Lisa Duggan, she edited Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State (2001) and collaborated with Laura Letinsky on Venus Inferred (2000). Her next project, Cruel Optimism, will explore the negative emotions that bind subjects to conventional forms of optimism in the contemporary United States.

Berlant joined the Chicago faculty in 1984. She earned her B.A. from Oberlin College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University in American literature, prose fiction and women’s studies.

Birge’s research activities focus on mathematical modeling of systems with uncertainty, stochastic programming, large-scale optimization, and operational and financial modeling.

Birge is the co-author, with F.V. Louveaux, of Introduction to Stochastic Programming (1997), and co-editor, with K.G. Murty, of Mathematical Programming: State of the Art 1994 (1994). He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, including “Option methods for incorporating risk into linear planning models,” published in Manufacturing and Services Operations Management (2000), and “Equilibrium value in a competitive power exchange market,” with C. Supatgiat and R.Q. Zhang in Computational Economics (2001).

Prior to joining the University faculty, Birge was Dean of Northwestern University’s Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. He also taught at the University of Michigan from 1980 to 1999, where he was chair of financial engineering and chair of industrial and operations engineering. Birge has served as a consultant to corporations such as Deutsche Bank, and is currently a consultant for Morgan Stanley.

He earned an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1977, an M.S. in operations research from Stanford University in 1979, and a Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University in 1980.

Conant has written articles on issues in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and aesthetics, as well as on such philosophers as Wittgenstein, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, William James, Frege, Carnap, Putnam, Cavell, Rorty and McDowell.

He most recently published “Cavell and the Concept of America” in Contending with Stanley Cavell (2005); “What ‘Ethics’ in the Tractatus is Not” in Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy: A Systematic Study (2005); and “How Wittgenstein’s Ladder Turned into a Fly-bottle in New History of German Literature (2005).

Conant is currently working on three projects: a monograph on skepticism, a co-authored work with Cora Diamond on Wittgenstein, and a forthcoming collection of essays. He has edited two volumes of Hilary Putnam’s papers, and co-edited with John Haugeland (Professor and Chairman of Philosophy and Professor in the College) one volume of Thomas Kuhn’s papers. He also is editing an issue of Philosophical Topics on analytical Kantianism, as well as The Cambridge Companion to John Dewey, Putnam and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics and two volumes of The Norton Anthology of Philosophy.

Conant joined the University faculty in 1999, having taught previously at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his A.B., A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy from Harvard University.

Faraone studies and has published articles on archaic and Hellenistic Greek poetry, magic and religion, and Near Eastern influences on early Greek culture. He is the author of Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Early Greek Myth and Ritual (1992) and Ancient Greek Love Magic (1999). Faraone has recently published articles on Hesiod, Hipponax and the idea of “the wandering womb”—the belief that a woman’s womb needed to be exorcized as if it were an indwelling demon. The idea arose under the Roman Empire and was adapted from an earlier Greek theory that the womb could freely wander about the body and cause illness by colliding with other internal organs. Faraone is currently at work on two books, one on early hexametrical incantations and another on the poetic form of Greek elegy.

He also is the co-editor (with D. Obbink) of Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion (1991); (with T. Carpenter) Masks of Dionysus (1993); (with David Dodd), Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives: New Critical Perspectives (2003); and (with Laura McClure) Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World (2004).

He is a member of the American Philological Association, the Classical Association for the Midwest and the South, the Society for Biblical Literature, and the Women’s Classical Caucus.

Faraone came to the University in 1991 from Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Goolsbee’s research interests include public economics and policy, industrial organization, technology, media and the Internet, and capital investment.

He currently serves on the editorial advisory board of the National Tax Journal and is a commentator for “Marketplace” on National Public Radio. In addition, Goolsbee serves on the Steering Committee of the Public Economics Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research and as a member of the U.S. Census Advisory Board Committee. He has been a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 2001 and a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago since 1996.

Goolsbee was lead editor of the Journal of Law and Economics from 2001 to 2004. In 2005, the World Economic Forum named him one of the 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow.

His numerous journal publications include “The Consumer Gains from Direct Broadcast Satellites and the Competition with Cable Television,” published in Econometrica (2004), and “In a World Without Borders: The Impact of Taxes on Internet Commerce,” published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2000).

Goolsbee earned a B.A. in Economics from Yale University in 1991, a M.A. in Economics from Yale University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995. He has been a faculty member at the GSB since 1995.

Grogger is an expert on welfare policy, the economics of urban crime and applied microeconomics. His research includes analysis of the effect of gang injunctions in Los Angeles, the impact of welfare reform in the 1990s and work on the effects of racial profiling.

His forthcoming book Welfare Reform: Effects of a Decade of Change analyzes how the historic 1996 law that overhauled the nation’s welfare program has affected income, poverty and other measures.

He is co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources and an associate editor of the Journal of Population Economics. He also is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the National Longitudinal Surveys Technical Review Committee.

Prior to coming to the Harris School in 2004, Grogger taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and worked for the California Attorney General’s office.

He earned his Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, San Diego, and his B.A. from the University of Kansas.

Hall studies and writes on the social and cultural history of the early Iron Age and archaic Greece; ancient ethnicity and cultural identity; the Greek polis and Greek settlements overseas; historical method; and material culture.

Hall’s most recent book is Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture, for which he won the University Press’ 2004 Gordon J. Laing Prize.

His previous work, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (1997), also studied the question of what it meant to be ethnically Greek. For that work Hall earned the Charles J. Goodwin Award for Merit from the American Philological Association for best book in the field. He was the youngest scholar ever to receive the distinction.

He is currently at work on his next book, The Blackwell History of the Archaic Greek World.

Hall came to the University in 1996 from the University of Cambridge, where in 1993 he earned his Ph.D. He also studied at the University of Oxford where he received his B.A. in 1988 and M.A. in 1991.

An interventional cardiologist, specializing in the treatment of congenital heart disease in children and adults, Ziyad Hijazi, Section Chief of Pediatric Cardiology and Director of the Congenital Heart Center at the University, has been named the George M. Eisenberg Professor in Pediatrics.

Hijazi is an authority on the nonsurgical treatment of heart defects. He has led national clinical trials of innovative devices designed to repair congenital heart defects—which would have required a major operation just a few years ago—without surgery.

A prolific clinical researcher, author and speaker, Hijazi has published many scientific articles, abstracts and book chapters, and he has co-edited with colleagues from pediatric cardiology the textbook Essential Pediatric Cardiology. He currently is co-editing two textbooks, one on the new area of transcatheter valve repair and replacement, and the other on techniques for intervention in patients with congenital heart defects.

Hijazi serves on the editorial board of a number of medical journals, and he directs the annual Pediatric Interventional Cardiac Symposium and Emerging New Technologies in Congenital Heart Surgery, two of the foremost international education and training conferences for physicians who specialize in these fields.

He came to the University in 1999 from Tufts University School of Medicine, where he was an associate professor of medicine while serving as director of pediatric cardiology at the New England Medical Center.

Born in Jordan, he earned his medical degree in 1982 from the Jordan University School of Medicine and a master’s in public health from Yale University in 1986. He completed a residency in pediatrics at Yale New Haven Hospital in 1988 and a fellowship in pediatric cardiology in 1991.

Kottwitz specializes in number theory, representation theory and algebraic geometry. He began his academic career as acting assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Washington in 1977. He attained the rank of professor at Washington before joining the Chicago faculty in 1989.

Kottwitz also has held many visiting positions, including three at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.

Kottwitz was co-organizer of the Clay Mathematics Institute Summer School held in Toronto in 2003, and co-organized a conference to honor University of Toronto mathematician James Arthur in 2004.

Among his many invited talks was a presentation in Berlin at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians, and at conferences to honor mathematicians Jean-Pierre Labesse in Paris in 2003 and Robert MacPherson at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2004.

Kottwitz was awarded a 2001 Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching at the University. He received his B.S. from the University of Washington in 1972 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977.

Ptaszynska is an acclaimed composer and percussionist with a special interest in the performance and analysis of new music and contemporary opera. She teaches music composition and courses on music after 1945, contemporary opera, as well as 18th-century counterpoint.

She has written numerous works on commission, including two operas, symphonic works (including commissions from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Cincinnati Symphony), concerti and a Holocaust memorial cantata.

Among Ptaszynska’s honors are first prize for her work Winter’s Tale at the International Rostrum of Composers in 1986 and the Cross of Merit from the Polish government in 1995.

Ptaszynska joined the Chicago faculty in 1998 after teaching at Indiana University. Prior to her work there, Ptaszynska was the composer-in-residence at Northwestern University for five years.

Ptaszynska earned her three M.A. degrees from the Warsaw Academy of Music (formerly the Higher School of Music) in composition, music theory and percussion. She also studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen as well as Witold Lutowslawski in her native Poland. At the Cleveland Institute of Music she received her artist diploma degree.

Quintans’ research focuses on immunological problems dealing with lymphocyte apoptosis and immune regulation.

Quintans served on the scientific staff of the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland from 1972 to 1976. He served as Chairman of the Committee on Immunology from 1985 to 1990 and Chairman of Pathology from 1989 to 1994. Quintans also has served as Director of the Medical Scientist Training Program and Chairman of the Pathology Graduate Review Program since 1991. He is currently Master of the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division and Director of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate Education Program.

A 1986 recipient of the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Quintans has taught graduate courses in the Committee on Immunology and in the Pritzker School of Medicine. He currently teaches undergraduate courses in Immunobiology and co-teaches Pscychoneuroimmunology with Martha McClintock, (the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology and the College).

He earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. in 1975 from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and then came to Chicago in 1976 as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the La Rabida-University of Chicago Institute. He then joined the Chicago faculty the following year as Assistant Professor of Pathology. He became Associate Professor in 1983 and Professor in 1987.

Yamaguchi’s current work focuses on latent-class methods/models for panel data, fertility decline in Japan and Europe, and gender differences in work commitment in the United States.

Yamaguchi was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 2002 for his research in the statistical and behavioral models of family processes. In 2003, the Institute of Scientific Information named him one of the most highly cited scholars in the social sciences.

He is the author of nearly 70 scholarly articles published in professional journals, with many of those articles appearing in such publications as Sociological Methodology, the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review and the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Yamaguchi has been a member of the Chicago faculty since 1991. Prior to coming to the University, he taught at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

He received a B.A. in mathematics in 1971 from the University of Tokyo and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Chicago in 1981.