University scholars receive distinguished, named professorships

Twelve University faculty members, including three new faculty members, have been named distinguished service professors, while 17 scholars at the University have received named professorships.

The 12 faculty members who have received distinguished service professorships are: Philip Bohlman, Arnold Davidson, Norma Field, Franklin I. Gamwell, Clark Gilpin, Edward Kolb, Roger Myerson, William Schweiker and Rebecca West, and new faculty members Ramón Gutiérrez, Charles Payne and Christine Stansell.

Current faculty members who have received named professorships are: Stephen Archer, Kerwin Charles, Cathy Cohen, Constantin Fasolt, Robert Gooding-Williams, Donald Liu, Richard Neer, Philip Reny, Olaf Schneewind, Joshua Scodel, Arieh Shalhav, Walter Stadler, Josef Stern, William Wimsatt and Thomas Witten. New faculty members Lenore Grenoble and Ralph Ubl join the faculty as named professors.

Philip Bohlman, the Mary Werkman Professor in the Humanities and Music, has been named the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor.

Bohlman, who was Chair of Jewish Studies from 2003 to 2006, has broad research and teaching interests that include folk and popular music, Jewish music, music of the Middle East and South Asia, music and nationalism, and music and religion.

He has authored numerous books, most recently, The Music of European Nationalism (2004), Jüdische Volksmusik: Ein Mitteleuropäische Geistesgeschichte (2005) and the forthcoming Jewish Music and Modernity (2008). He is currently working on books about music drama during the Holocaust and Johann Gottfried Herder’s writings on music and nationalism, as well as “the silence of music,” the subject of his 2007 Royal Halloway-British Library lectures.

Bohlman also is a pianist and serves as the artistic director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, a Jewish cabaret that is an Ensemble-in-Residence at the University. He serves as president of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

He has won numerous honors, including the Edward Dent Medal of the Royal Music Association, the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin and most recently, the British Academy’s Derek Allen Prize for Musicology.

A member of the Chicago faculty since 1987, Bohlman also has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University and the Universities of Freiburg, Vienna and Newcastle as well as the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Bohlman received his M.M. and Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Illinois in 1980 and 1984, respectively.

Arnold Davidson, Professor in Philosophy, Comparative Literature, Philosophy of Religions in the Divinity School, Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science and the College, has been named the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor.

Davidson studies contemporary European philosophy, the history of philosophy, moral and political philosophy, the history and philosophy of religion, and the history of the human sciences. The author or editor of more than 10 books, Davidson is the author of The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (2001) and is co-author of La philosophie comme manière de vivre (2001, forthcoming in English translation). He is the author of numerous articles, written in French and Italian as well as in English and published in a wide variety of journals in the humanities. He is the Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry and a Director of the University’s France-Chicago Center.

Davidson has received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and he has been elected a visiting member of the Insitut Universitaire de France. He has taught at many universities in the United States and Europe, most recently as a visiting professor at the University of Pisa in 2007. He also is a director of the European Network in Contemporary French Philosophy.

A member of the Chicago faculty since 1986, Davidson received his M.A. in Philosophy from Georgetown University in 1975 and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1981.

Norma Field, the Robert S. Ingersoll Professor of Japanese Studies in East Asian Languages & Civilizations, has been named the Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor.

Field studies modern and contemporary Japanese literature and culture. Currently, she is researching the proletarian literature of the 1920s and 1930s in Japan, specifically the writings of Kobayashi Takiji (1904-1933). Her work has ranged from the analysis of Japanese novels to the moral and legal questions of crimes against women in World War II, and from the use of Japanese nationalist symbols to the integration of Koreans into Japanese society.

She has authored several books, including My Grandmother’s Land (2000), a selection of essays that was widely acclaimed in Japan. Other works include In the Realm of a Dying Emperor (1991) and From My Grandmother’s Bedside: Sketches of Postwar Tokyo (1997). She is currently working with Heather Bowen-Struyk on Literature for Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Fiction, a forthcoming book from the University Press.

Field began teaching at the University in 1983. In 1998, she was the Toyota visiting professor for the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan. In 2004, she was a Scholar-in-Residence at Sapporo University in Japan and won a Japan Foundation fellowship the following year.

Field grew up in Tokyo and later attended Pitzer College in the United States, where she earned a B.A. in European studies. She then changed her focus to East Asia and earned an M.A. from Indiana University in 1974 and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in East Asian studies in 1983.

Franklin I. Gamwell, the Shailer Mathews Professor in the Divinity School, has been named the Shailer Mathews Distinguished Service Professor.

Gamwell studies the relationship of ethical and political theory in relation to Christian theology and the philosophy of religion. His teaching incorporates 20th-century thinkers, such as Alfred North Whitehead and Reinhold Niebuhr, and local figures, such as Charles Hartshorne and Schubert Ogden, both former professors at the University.

He is the author of numerous books, including The Divine Good: Modern Moral Theory and the Necessity of God (1990), Democracy on Purpose: Justice and the Reality of God (2000) and Politics as a Christian Vocation: Faith and Democracy Today (2005).

His articles have appeared in collections, anthologies, and both scholarly and popular journals, including the Journal of Religion.

Gamwell served as an Instructor in Ethics and Society at the Divinity School in 1971 and 1972. From 1973 until 1975, he was an assistant professor in religious studies at Manhattanville College. In 1975 he began work with the Rockefeller Family Philanthropic Office in New York, where he remained until 1979. He then returned to the faculty of the Divinity School and, in 1980, began his first of two terms as Dean of the Divinity School, a position he held for 10 years.

He received his B.A. in economics from Yale University in 1959. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Gamwell received his B.D. from Union Theological Seminary in 1963, and received both his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Divinity School at the University.

Clark Gilpin, the Margaret E. Burton Professor in the Divinity School and the College, has been named the Margaret E. Burton Distinguished Service Professor.

A prominent scholar of American religion and theological education, Gilpin studies the culture of theology in England and America since the 17th century, focusing on Puritanism and the relationship between religion and education in American culture.

Gilpin is the author of The Millenarian Piety of Roger Williams (1979), a biography of the American advocate of religious and political liberty during the 17th century. He also authored A Preface to Theology (1996), which examines the history of theology in America from the 18th century to present day and the theologian’s responsibilities to churches, the academic community and civil society.

He taught at Kenyon College and the Graduate Seminary of Phillips University before returning to Chicago in 1984. He also served as Dean of the Divinity School from 1990 to 2000.

Gilpin has a long history with the University. After receiving his M. Div. from the Lexington Theological Seminary in 1970, he received his A.M. in 1972 and his Ph.D. in 1974 from Chicago.

Ramón Gutiérrez has joined the University’s faculty as the Preston & Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor in History and the College.

Gutiérrez studies American History, with a particular interest in Chicano History; race and ethnicity in American life; Indian-White relations in the Americas; social and economic history of the Southwest; Colonial Latin America; and Mexican immigration.

In addition to two monographs and numerous articles, he has edited, co-edited or co-authored 10 books. His most recent project, a co-edited volume titled Mexicans in California: Emergent Challenges and Transformations, will be published by the University of Illinois Press. Gutiérrez serves on the editorial boards of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, American National Biography and Ethnic Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Culture, Race, Ethnoscapes and Ethnicity.

Gutiérrez comes to Chicago from the University of California, San Diego, where he was a professor in ethnic studies for more than 20 years. He has won awards for his research, teaching and publications, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Prize fellowship and the 2005 President’s Award from the American Culture Association for his contributions to the study of American culture.

Gutiérrez received his B.A. in Latin American history from the University of New Mexico, and both his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Edward Kolb, Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics, the Enrico Fermi Institute and the College, has been named the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor.

His major research interest is the application of particle physics to cosmology and astrophysics, with a special focus on studying elements of the very early Universe. He writes and lectures on cosmology as part of an effort to increase science education, particularly for the general public.

Over the course of his career, Kolb has won a number of awards and honors. In 2002, he was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Kolb, who was a founding head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group and the founding Director of the Particle Astrophysics Center at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, began his career at the lab and as a Professor at the University in 1983. Previously, he was a Deputy Group Leader in the Theoretical Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

He has held visiting positions at a number of institutions, including the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Michigan.

He received his B.S. in physics from the University of New Orleans in 1973, where he was the top graduate in his field. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1978.

Roger Myerson, formerly the William C. Norby Professor in Economics and the College, has been named the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College.

Myerson has made seminal contributions to the fields of economics and political science. In game theory he introduced a refinement of Nash’s equilibrium concept, called “proper equilibrium.” He has applied game theoretic tools to political science to study and compare electoral systems, and he also developed fundamental ideas of mechanism design, such as the revelation principle and “revenue-equivalence theorem.”

Myerson also has developed computer software for auditing formulas and for simulation and decision analysis for use with Microsoft spreadsheet software.

He is the author of Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict (1991) and Probability Models for Economic Decisions (2005). Myerson also has published numerous articles in Econometrica, Mathematics of Operations Research and the International Journal of Game Theory, for which he served as an editorial board member for 10 years.

During his 25-year tenure at Northwestern University, Myerson twice served as a Visiting Professor in Economics at Chicago. He later joined the Chicago faculty in 2001.

He received his A.B., summa cum laude, and S.M. in applied mathematics in 1973 from Harvard University and a Ph.D., also in applied mathematics, from Harvard University in 1976.

Charles Payne joins the Chicago faculty as the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Social Service Administration.

A noted scholar of urban education and school reform, Payne also researches social inequity with a focus on social change and the civil rights movement.

He has won numerous honors for his research, teaching and published work, including a 2004 Senior Scholar Award from the Spencer Foundation. He also was named a Class of 2004 Carnegie Scholar and received a 2007-2008 Alphonse Fletcher fellowship; the fellowship recognizes work that addresses and carries out the broad goals of Brown vs. Board of Education.

His first book, Getting What We Ask For (1984), won the Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book award in 1985, and his fourth book, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (2nd ed. 2007) has won five awards.

He is currently completing So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools and co-editing Teach Freedom: The African American Tradition of Education for Liberation, which are both due out within the next year.

Payne comes to Chicago from Duke University, where he has been a professor of African and African American studies, history and sociology.

He is a 1970 graduate of Syracuse University, where he earned his B.A. in Afro-American studies. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University in 1976.

William Schweiker, Professor of Theological Ethics in the Divinity School and the College, has been named the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor.

His scholarship and teaching interests involve theological and ethical questions on global dynamics, comparative religious ethics, the history of ethics and hermeneutical philosophy.

He is the author of multiple books, including the forthcoming Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism (2008), and has edited or contributed to six volumes, including Humanity Before God: Contemporary Faces of Jewish, Christian and Islamic Ethics (2006).

Schweiker recently was named Director of the Martin Marty Center, the Divinity School’s institute for advanced research in all fields of religion. He is a member of the American Academy of Religion and Societas Ethica, and has served on the board of the Society of Christian Ethics. Schweiker also has served as an editor for the Journal of Religion and as a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Religious Ethics.

Schweiker is an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church and has held visiting appointments at the University of Heidelberg.

Schweiker is an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church and has held visiting appointments at the University of Heidelberg.

A faculty member at Chicago since 1989, he received his B.A. in 1976 from Simpson College in Iowa, his M.Div. in 1980 from Duke University and his Ph.D. in 1985 from Chicago’s Divinity School.

Christine Stansell has joined the University’s faculty as the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor in History and the College.

Stansell is a historian of American women, with a focus on women’s and gender history; antebellum U.S. social and political history; American cultural history; and the history of human rights and post-catastrophic societies.

She is the author of City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860 (1986), which examines the multiple roles of working class women in antebellum New York City. Other works include American Moderns: New York Bohemia and the Creation of a New Century (2000), a book on the social origins of modernism in the early 20th century, and Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (1983), a co-edited volume with Ann Snitow and Sharon Thompson. She is currently working on a history of the feminist tradition from 1792-2002, taking into account global trends while focusing on the United States.

Stansell, who was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow from 1993 to 1994, is a regular contributor to The New Republic, writing on feminism, biography and politics. Most recently, Stansell has written essays on the Supreme Court’s Carhart decision on abortion, and post-genocidal society in Cambodia and the genocide trials in Rwanda, as well as a review of a Princess Diana biography.

She began her career as a faculty member at Bard College in 1978, before returning to teach at her alma mater, Princeton University, where she has taught in the history department for the past 24 years.

She received her B.A. in English literature from Princeton University in 1971, and went on to receive both her M.Phil. and Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University.

Rebecca West, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in Romance Languages & Literatures, Cinema & Media Studies, and the College, has been named the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Service Professor.

West’s research interests include lyric poetry; narrative in modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture; Italian and Italian-American cinema; and gender studies, with a concentration on feminist theory and practice, and constructions of masculinity.

She is the author of Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling (2000), which won the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Publication Prize. Her previous book, Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge (1981), won the association’s Howard Marraro Prize. West also has published numerous articles in American and Italian journals and is on the editorial boards of several book series and scholarly journals.

Other honors include her fellowship at the American Academy in Rome and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

After joining the University’s faculty in 1973, West was a visiting professor at Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. She is currently a visiting professor at Yale University.

West received her B.A. in 1968 in French and Italian from the University of Pittsburgh, and her M.Phil. in 1971 and Ph.D. in 1974, both in Italian, from Yale University.

Stephen Archer, a noted clinical cardiologist and translational vascular biologist, has been named the Harold H. Hines Jr. Professor in Medicine.

Archer, who also is Cardiology Section Chief for the Department of Medicine, is leading an effort to build a University Heart and Vascular Institute, which will ultimately provide a home for transdepartmental programs that already exist or are being developed. This collaborative venture will create new programs for the delivery of care to heart and vascular patients. Thematic programs, to be run by multidisciplinary teams, will benefit patients and enhance research and education.

Archer studies mechanisms of oxygen sensing and develops experimental therapies for human diseases, including pulmonary hypertension, a fatal illness of young adults, and persistent ductus arteriosus, a common form of congenital heart disease.

Archer came to Chicago in April this year from the University of Alberta, where he founded the Vascular Biology Research Group and was the chair of heart and stroke cardiovascular research. He also was the principal investigator and scientific director of the Alberta Cardiovascular and Stroke Research Centre at the University of Alberta.

Prior to his appointments at Alberta, Archer completed training in medicine and cardiology at the University of Minnesota, where he became a professor of medicine. His trainees are on faculty at universities in Canada, Europe and the United States.

A member of the editorial board of Circulation Research and several other journals, Archer also is a recipient of research funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Institute for Health Research. He is an active volunteer for the American Heart Association and the incoming chair of its national Cardiopulmonary Critical Care Council.

Archer received his B.A. in 1977 from Queens University at Kingston and his M.D. in 1981 from Queen’s University.

Kerwin Charles, Associate Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, has been named the Steans Family Professor in Educational Policy.

Charles, whose research falls under the broad category of empirical labor economics, has studied, among other things, the reasons for and consequences of gender differences in educational attainment; the accurate measurement of racial wealth gaps; how wealth is transferred from generation to generation through families; how the racial makeup of a neighborhood can affect social connections; how health crises affect family stability and the labor supply; and several questions about the economics of marriage and the family.

In ongoing work, Charles is studying how various beliefs, prejudices and social considerations affect the labor market and other outcomes. One example is his work-in-progress, “Race and Conspicuous Consumption,” with Erik Hurst, Professor of Economics and the Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow in the Graduate School of Business.

Charles has published widely, including articles in the Journal of Labor Economics and the Journal of Political Economy.

Charles came to the University in 2005 from the University of Michigan, where he was an associate professor of economics and public policy. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

He received his B.S. from the University of Miami in 1989, his M.S. from Cornell University in 1993 and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1996.

Cathy Cohen, Professor in Political Science and the College, has been named the David and Mary Winton Green Professor.

Cohen studies American politics, with a research emphasis on African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.

She is the author of The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (1999), which won the Best Book Award of 1999 on Race Relations and Public Policy from the American Political Science Association. The book also was listed as one of the Top 10 African-American Nonfiction Books and one of the Top 100 African-American Books of the century.

Cohen co-edited with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (1997). She currently is co-editing with Fred Harris Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities.

She has received many awards for her work, including the Robert Wood Johnson Investigator’s Award, the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy research fellowship and a research grant from the Ford Foundation for her current work on the Black Youth Project.

Cohen previously taught at Yale University as an assistant professor and then was promoted to professor of political science and African-American studies. She joined the Chicago faculty in 2002. From 2002 to 2005, she directed the University’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture.

Cohen earned her B.A. in political science in 1983 from Miami University and her Ph.D. in political science in 1993 from the University of Michigan.

Constantin Fasolt, Professor in History and the College, has been named the Karl J. Weintraub Professor.

Fasolt studies the origin and significance of modern historical and political thought. His teaching focuses on European intellectual history from the 13th to 17th century, particularly in Germany and France.

His most recent book, The Limits of History (2004), examines the practice of history and suggests that it is politically motivated. He has written numerous articles and serves as general editor of New Perspectives on the Past, a series of books that explore various fundamental aspects of history.

Fasolt has held fellowships with the Mellon Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center and the Woodrow Wilson Center. He also was awarded a research grant from the American Philosophical Society.

He has been a Chicago faculty member since 1983 and holds numerous positions, including Master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division, Deputy Dean of the Social Sciences and Associate Dean of the College.

Fasolt received three degrees from Columbia University: a M.A. in 1976, a M.Phil. in 1978 and a Ph.D. in 1981.

Robert Gooding-Williams, Professor in Political Science and the College, has been named the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor.

Gooding-Williams is a leading scholar on philosophical issues of race, with particular interest in the subjects of Nietzsche, Du Bois, critical race theory, African-American political thought, 19th-century continental philosophy, existentialism and aesthetics, with an emphasis on philosophy and literature.

He is the author of Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (2001) and Look! A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics (2005), and the editor of Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (1993). His current project, Contributions to the Critique of White Supremacy: Du Bois and Douglass as Political Philosophers, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

Gooding-Williams has been awarded numerous fellowships, including a 1996 Laurance A. Rockefeller fellowship at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

He joined the Chicago faculty in 2006, after teaching philosophy and African-American studies for seven years at Northwestern University, where he also directed the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities. Prior to his Northwestern post, he was a professor of black studies and the George Lyman Crosby 1896 professor of philosophy at Amherst College.

He received his B.A. in philosophy from Yale College in 1975 and his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1982 from Yale University.

Lenore Grenoble joins the Chicago faculty as the Carl Darling Buck Professor in Linguistics, Slavic Languages & Literatures and the College.

Grenoble studies and has published articles on Russian language and structure, specifically in the areas of discourse and conversation analysis, deixis and verbal categories. She also works extensively on the study of endangered languages and contact linguistics. Her fieldwork focuses primarily on indigenous languages in Siberia and the North, with an emphasis on the Tungus languages.

She is the author of Saving Languages: An Introduction to Language Revitalization (2006), as well as Language Policy in the Former Soviet Union (2003), Evenki: Languages of the World Materials (1999) and Deixis and Information Packaging in Russian Discourse (1998). Grenoble edited Endangered Languages: Current Issues and Future Prospects (1998), Essays in the Art and Theory of Translation (1997), and Language Documentation, Theory and Practice (forthcoming).

She has come to the University from Dartmouth College, where she has been on faculty since 1987. There she served both as chair of the program in linguistics and cognitive science as well as associate dean of the humanities.

Grenoble earned a B.A. from Cornell University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Slavic linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Donald Liu, Professor in Surgery, has been named the Mary Campau Ryerson Professor in Surgery.

Liu is an internationally recognized expert in pediatric minimally invasive surgery. In 1999, he presented his seminal work on trans-anal mucosectomy in children with Hirschsprung’s Disease and his work has since become the standard of care for the surgical management of the disease.

Liu was among the first surgeons in the Chicago area to offer minimally invasive surgery as a treatment option, which minimizes pain, reduces tissue damage and scarring, and promotes faster recovery times in children. His basic research interests lie in necrotizing enterocolitis/gut immunology, tumor immunology and stem cell research.

His seminal work on minimally invasive surgery and surgical oncology has been described in “What’s New in Pediatric Surgery” in the most recent Journal of the American College of Surgeons and has been presented annually at the American Pediatric Surgical Association meetings.

Liu joined the University faculty in 1997, and now holds numerous positions within the University’s hospitals as Chief of Pediatric Surgery, Surgeon-in-Chief at the University Comer Children’s Hospital and Vice Chairman for Pediatric Programs in the Department of Surgery. Liu recently received accreditation for the rare and prestigious Pediatric Surgery Fellowship, for which he currently serves as the Program Director.

He received his M.D. from Thomas Jefferson University, completed his internship and residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and completed his fellowship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Richard Neer, Professor in Art History and the College, has been named the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor.

Neer’s research interests include the development of naturalism in Greek art, Athenian history and its representation, philosophical aesthetics and theories of style.

He has published widely on Greek art, historiography, French painting and cinema, and serves as co-editor of Critical Inquiry and associate editor of Classical Philology. His newest book, Theory of Sculpture: The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greece, is forthcoming from the University Press. He is currently writing a textbook titled Ancient Greek Art and Archaeology.

Neer is a recipient of a 2003 Andrew Heiskell Post-Doctoral Rome Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Rome.

After spending three years as a David E. Finley fellow in Washington, D.C. — working one year at the National Gallery and two years at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts — Neer joined the Chicago faculty in 1999.

He earned his A.B. in fine arts, magna cum laude with highest honors, from Harvard College in 1991, and both his M.A. and Ph.D. in history of art from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1994 and 1998, respectively.

Philip Reny, Professor in Economics and the College and Chair of Economics, has been named the William C. Norby Professor.

Reny’s most recent economic theory research includes multi-unit auction theory, equilibrium existence in discontinuous games and implementation theory.

He has published numerous journal articles in Econometrica, The Journal of Economic Theory, and Games and Economic Theory. He also is the co-author with Geoffrey Jehle of the textbook, Advanced Microeconomic Theory (1997).

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada recognized Reny’s work with two research grants between 1990 and 1995. In 1996, he was awarded a research grant from the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation. Since then, he has received four consecutive research grants from the National Science Foundation.

Reny is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a charter member of the Game Theory Society. He also has served as a National Science Foundation panel member and the program chair of the Second World Congress of the Game Theory Society.

He received his M.A. in Economics from the University of Western Ontario in 1982, where he also began his teaching career. In 1988, he received his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University and taught at the University of Pittsburgh before being appointed Professor in Economics at Chicago in 1999.

Olaf Schneewind, Professor in Microbiology and the College, has been named the Louis Block Professor in Microbiology and the College.

Schneewind researches the mechanisms and strategies that pathogenic bacteria use to cause human diseases. In 2003, he was elected Principal Investigator of the Great Lakes Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense, a program supporting a consortium of 20 area institutions, which is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Under his leadership, the center focuses on developing vaccines, treatments and diagnostics for such diseases as anthrax, botulism, tularemia, hemorrhagic fever viruses and plague.

He currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation as well as on several National Institutes of Health study sections. Schneewind also consults numerous pharmaceutical companies that rely on his scientific expertise and research experience in the development of new products.

A faculty member at Chicago since 2001, Schneewind previously taught at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine.

He studied at the University of Cologne, where he received both his M.D. and Ph.D. in microbiology in 1988. He completed his post-doctoral training under the mentorship of Vincent Fischetti in the Laboratory of Bacteriology and Immunology at Rockefeller University.

Joshua Scodel, Professor in English Language & Literature, Comparative Literature and the College, and Chair of Comparative Literature, has been named the Helen A. Regenstein Professor.

Scodel’s research focuses on 16th- and 17th-century English literature in relation to intellectual, cultural and political history. Scodel is particularly interested in early modern English literature’s engagement with classical and Renaissance continental literature and thought, and in issues of translation, literary imitation and influence.

Scodel is the author of The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (1991) and Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (2002). He has co-edited with Janel Mueller, the William Rainey Harper Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the College and Professor Emerita in English Language & Literature, a forthcoming critical edition of the translations of Queen Elizabeth I’s translations of religious, philosophical and poetic texts from Latin, French and Italian. He is currently writing a book on early modern English literary representations of liberty.

He also has published articles on such topics as Cavalier love poetry, 17th-century literary criticism and the Restoration Pindaric ode. He served as an editor of Modern Philology from 1995 to 2004.

Scodel received his B.A. in comparative literature from Princeton University in 1979, and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University in 1985, the year that he joined the Chicago faculty.

Arieh Shalhav, Professor in Surgery and Section Chief of Urology in Medicine, has been named the Fritz and Mary Lee Duda Professor in Surgery.

A nationally recognized authority on minimally invasive urologic surgery, Shalhav directs the University’s Minimally Invasive Urology Program and Fellowship, which combines clinical instruction with didactic and laboratory teaching.

Shalhav serves on the Laparoscopy Education Committee of the American Urological Association, and he has recently been selected president and host of the 2010 World Congress of Endourology.

He joined the Chicago faculty as Associate Professor in Surgery in 2002 and was promoted to Professor in 2006. During the last four years as Director of the MIU Program and Fellowship, he has developed one of the most prominent laparoscopic and robotic surgery programs in the Midwest, with faculty members who are training three clinical fellows each year in the program.

After serving in the Israeli Army, Shalhav graduated from the Hadassah School of Medicine of Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1987. He then completed general surgery and urology residency training at the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University from 1988 to 1995. He remained there for one year as an instructor.

Shalhav then undertook fellowship training in laparoscopy and endourology from 1996 to 1998 at Washington University in St. Louis, where he became an assistant professor. After one year at Washington, he moved to the University of Indiana, where he taught until his 2002 appointment at Chicago.

Walter Stadler, Professor in Medicine, has been named the Fred C. Buffett Professor. He also has been appointed Associate Dean of Clinical Research.

Stadler is an active physician who specializes in the treatment of patients with kidney, bladder, prostate and testicular cancer. His research focuses on new treatments for urological cancers, including the development of molecular and imaging markers for predicting response to anti-angiogenic therapies and other molecular targeted therapies.

Stadler has written or co-authored more than 100 articles for medical journals such as Cancer Research and the Journal of Clinical Oncology and has authored numerous book chapters, reviews and editorials.

He has received several research awards, including the ASCO Young Investigator Award in 1994, the Young Investigator Award from the Cancer Research Foundation in 1996 and the Stulberg Clinical Investigator Award from the Kidney Cancer Association in 1999.

Stadler is an active member of the medical advisory board of the Kidney Cancer Association, and the editorial board of UpToDate in Oncology, an information source for cancer specialists. He is chair of the Cancer Center scientific review committee and a cadre leader for the Cancer and Leukemia Group B Genitourinary Cancer Committee.

Stadler received his M.D. from Yale University in 1988. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Michael Reese Hospital in 1991 and a fellowship at Chicago in 1994. He joined the Chicago faculty in 1997 as an Assistant Professor.

Josef Stern, Professor in Philosophy, Jewish Studies and the College, has been named the William H. Colvin Professor.

Stern, whose current research is on contemporary philosophy of language and medieval Jewish philosophy, also continues to teach topics in epistemology and metaphysics, Islamic and Latin medieval philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of art.

Stern’s current research project, for which he has been awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, is to complete a monograph entitled The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. He is the author of two previous books, Problems and Parables of Law: Maimonides and Nahmanides on Reasons for the Commandments (1998) and Metaphor in Context (2000), and co-editor of Adaptations and Innovations: Studies on the Interaction Between Jewish and Islamic Thought and Literature from the Early Middle Ages to the Late Twentieth Century (2007).

Stern joined the faculty in 1979 as a William Rainey Harper Fellow in the College and became an Assistant Professor in Philosophy in 1981. He was a scholar in the Chicago Humanities Institute from 1991 to 1992, and he has been awarded research fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Lady Davis Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Israel Science Foundation. He is currently a fellow in the Library of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

He has been a visiting professor at The Hebrew University, Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He also has taught philosophy at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

Stern earned his B.A. cum laude, and his M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. with special honors, all from Columbia University.

Ralph Ubl has been named the Allan and Jean Frumkin Professor in Social Thought and the College.

Ubl studies 20th-century and contemporary art, Italian Baroque painting, art history, and psychoanalysis and art theory. He is best known for his studies of the German surrealist artist, Max Ernst, and Aurora, a painting by Italian baroque artist Guido Reni. Ubl’s current work has focused mostly on the 19th-century French painter Eugène Delacroix.

Ubl is the author of Prähistoriche Zukunft Max Ernst und die Ungleichzeitigket des Bildes (2004), and has co-edited a book on the detail in art and literature. He also has published numerous book chapters and journal articles on the work of such artists as Delacroix, Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico and Willem de Kooning.

Ubl joins the Chicago faculty after serving as an assistant professor of art history at the University of Basel and a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe.

He studied art history and philosophy at the University of Vienna, where he received his M.A. in 1995, and his Ph.D. in 1999.

William Wimsatt, Professor in Philosophy and the College, has been named the Peter B. Ritzma Professor.

Wimsatt studies philosophy of biology, psychology and the social sciences, the history of genetics and methodological problems in the analysis of complex evolved systems. One of the first “new” philosophers of biology to practice closer engagement with the sciences, he pioneered work on functional organization, reductionistic problem solving strategies, units of selection, robustness, the strengths and problems of model building and simulation, and scientific visualization.

Wimsatt recently authored Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: piecewise approximations to reality (2004). His research now focuses on the impact of development dependencies in the evolution of adaptive systems in biological, cognitive, social and cultural evolution.

Wimsatt has won numerous research fellowships: he was awarded a fellowship from the National Humanities Center in 2000, and was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006 and a senior fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for the Study of Evolution and Cognition in 2003. Wimsatt, a founding member of BioQUEST, also won a graduate teaching award in 1993.

Wimsatt, who founded and directs the Big Problems program in the College, has held visiting distinguished professorships at Ohio State and Washington universities.

Wimsatt studied engineering physics before earning his A.B. in philosophy in 1965 from Cornell University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, in 1968 and 1971, respectively.

He did post-doctoral research in population biology as a Hinds research fellow at Chicago in 1969, before joining the faculty in 1971.

Thomas Witten, Professor in Physics, the James Franck Institute and the College, has been named the Homer J. Livingston Professor.

Witten’s field of theoretical condensed matter physics involves studying the random organizations of matter and the consequences of deformation in tenuous structuresÑsuch as polymers, complex fluids and aggregation phenomenaÑwhen subjected to structureless external forces. His interest in mathematical tools called fractals led him to his theoretical studies of polymer physics.

Witten has won numerous honors for his research, including the 2002 Polymer Physics Prize from the American Physical Society “for outstanding theoretical contributions to the understanding of polymers and complex fluids.”

He is the author of Structured Fluids: Polymers, Colloids, Surfactants (2004). He also has published many academic articles such as “Stress Focusing in Elastic Sheets,” published in Reviews of Modern Physics (2007).

Witten came to the University in 1989, after holding positions on the University of Michigan faculty and the research staff of Exxon Corp. He also held visiting positions at Boston University, the C˜llege de France and the Institute Henri Poincare in Paris.

He received his B.A. in physics from Reed College and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, San Diego.

Photo credits: Some photos were taken by Dan Dry, Beth Rooney and Jason Smith, while others were courtesy of the faculty members.