Leading scholars join faculty

Thirteen distinguished scholars have received faculty appointments at the University this year.

The 13 new professors are: Dan Black, Lee Fennell, Leela Gandhi, Lenore Grenoble, Ramón Gutiérrez, Richard McAdams, Willemien Otten, Jens Ludwig, Charles Payne, Christine Stansell, Gary Tubb, Ralph Ubl and Harald Uhlig.

(For new faculty members Lenore Grenoble, Ramón Gutiérrez, Charles Payne, Christine Stansell and Ralph Ubl, see story on distinguished service professorships and named chairs.)

Dan Black has been named a Professor in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies. He specializes in labor economics, public economics, applied econometrics and program evaluation. He serves as the principal investigator for the 1997 Cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Black has been a member of the economics faculty and a senior research associate at the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University since 1999. He was named the trustee professor of economics at Syracuse in 2004. Previously, he had served as an economics faculty member at the University of Kentucky.

He also has held visiting appointments at the Harris School, the Australian National University and Carnegie Mellon University. At Carnegie Mellon, he was a visiting professor at the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, and later a senior fellow at the Regional Census Research Data Center.

Black is the co-author of two books, On-the-Job Training (1997) and Consumer Behavior, Cost of Living Measures, and Income Tax (Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems) (1986).

He received a B.A. and an M.A. in history from the University of Kansas, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in economics from Purdue University.

Lee Fennell joins the University faculty as a Professor in Law. Her teaching and research interests include property, land use, housing, social welfare, state and local government law, and public finance. She is working on a book titled Property Unbound: Strategy and Choice in Metropolitan Neighborhoods.

Fennell came to the Law School as a Bigelow teaching fellow and Lecturer in the Law School in 1999. Previously she had practiced at Pettit & Martin, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco; the State and Local Legal Center in Washington, D.C.; and the Virginia School Boards Association in Charlottesville, Va. She joined the law faculty at the University of Texas in 2001, moving to the University of Illinois in 2004. She also has held visiting positions at Yale Law School, the New York University School of Law and the University of Virginia School of Law.

Fennell completed her B.B.A. in public administration, summa cum laude, at Baylor University in 1987. She was a member of the Order of the Coif honor society and was a John M. Olin fellow in law and economics at Georgetown University Law Center, where she earned her J.D., magna cum laude, in 1990. She also was a Henry Hoyns fellow in fiction at the University of Virginia, where she received an M.F.A. in fiction writing in 1998.

Leela Gandhi, newly appointed Professor in English Language & Literature and the College, studies late-Victorian radicalism, Indo-Anglican literature and Renaissance drama, and is one of the world’s leading scholars of postcolonial theory.

Her first book, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (1998), examined the philosophical and intellectual context of postcolonial theory, and drew connections between postcolonial theory and poststructuralism, postmodernism, Marxism and feminism. Gandhi’s second book, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship, traced the social networks of activists associated with marginalized lifestyles, subcultures and traditions, which united against imperialism in the late- 19th and early- 20th-century. Gandhi also co-wrote England in Twentieth Century Fiction: Through Colonial Eyes (2001) and has written a book of poetry, titled Measures of Home and Other Poems.

A native of Bombay and the great granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi is co-editor of Postcolonial Studies.

She comes to Chicago from La Trobe University in Australia, where she has served as a senior lecturer in English language and literature since 1999, and a lecturer since 1996. Gandhi also has taught at Delhi and Melbourne universities.

She earned her B.A. in English from Delhi University, and received both her M.Phil. and D.Phil. in English from Oxford University.

Jens Ludwig, an economist who studies violence and urban poverty, has been named Professor of Social Service Administration, Law and Public Policy in the School of Social Service Administration.

His research interests include education, social policy, crime, and law and economics.

He is co-author with Philip Cook of Gun Violence: The Real Costs (2000) and Guns in America: Results of a Comprehensive Survey on Private Firearms Ownership and Use (1997), and he collaborated again with Cook as co-editor of Evaluating Gun Policy (2003).

In 2006, Ludwig was awarded the David Kershaw Prize for Distinguished Contributions to Public Policy by Age 40 from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Before joining the Chicago faculty, he was a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, where he had taught since 1994. He also served as associate dean for Public Policy Admissions at Georgetown from 2006 to 2007.

Ludwig, who is a faculty research fellow for the National Bureau of Economic Research, taught at the University’s Law School for two quarters as a Visiting Professor in 2004 and 2006. He also was a visiting scholar at the Northwestern and University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research from 1997 to 1998, and an Andrew W. Mellon fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution from 2001 to 2002.

He received a B.A. in economics from Rutgers University in 1990 and a Ph.D. in economics from Duke University in 1994.

Richard McAdams, who has been appointed Professor in the Law School, focuses his scholarship on criminal law and procedure, social norms, law and economics, and inequality.

McAdams comes to Chicago from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was the Guy Raymond Jones professor of law. He began teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1990 and was elected “Teacher of the Year” by the student body in 1993. McAdams served on the faculty of Boston University before moving to Illinois. He also has been a visiting professor at the University of Virginia and Yale University, and a visiting fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences of Australian National University.

He is a member of the board of directors of the American Law and Economics Association and a member of the editorial board of the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. Before he began teaching, McAdams spent three years as an associate with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in Philadelphia. After graduation, he clerked for Chief Judge Harrison Winter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

McAdams completed a B.A. in economics with honors and a membership in Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1982. He was an editor of the Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif honor society at the University of Virginia, where he earned his J.D. in 1985.

Willemien Otten, a scholar of the history of Christianity and Christian thought, has been named a Professor in the Divinity School.

Otten’s research on the history of Christian thought has a strong focus on the Western medieval and the early Christian theological tradition.

Underlying her work is a structural attempt to see the contribution of medieval theologians as more than the sum total of ancient and patristic influences. Instead, she aims to analyze the cultural outlook that allowed these influences to become woven into the fabric of a humanist tradition, in which the treatment of theological questions is embedded in the broader study of the liberal arts.

After publishing her monograph, The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (1991), she wrote From Paradise to Paradigm: A Study of Twelfth-Century Humanism (2004), which featured, among others, Peter Abelard and such ‘Chartrian’ writers as Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille.

Since 2003, Otten has been chair of Theology at the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands, and since 1997, she has served as a professor for that institution. She also has taught at Boston College, Loyola University in Chicago and the University of Amsterdam.

She earned her B.A. in Theology from the University of Amsterdam in 1980, and her M.A in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 1989, both in Theology, from the University of Amsterdam.

Gary Tubb, a scholar and teacher of Sanskrit, has joined the faculty as Professor in South Asian Languages & Civilizations and the College.

Tubb’s major interests are Sanskrit literary theory and Sanskrit poetry and poetics. In addition to his scholarship of Sanskrit language and literature, Tubb studies the literary, religious and philosophical traditions of India.

He is the author of the 2007 textbook, Scholastic Sanskrit: A Handbook For Students. He also is completing an English translation of Sanskrit: Language of the Gods, with scholars Yigal Bronner, Assistant Professor in South Asian Languages & Civilizations, and David Shulman.

Prior to coming to Chicago, Tubb was the Dharam Hinduja senior lecturer in Sanskrit teaching and Indic research at Columbia University, a position he had held since 1999. Prior to that appointment, he was a senior lecturer in Sanskrit at Columbia University from 1995 to 1999. He also has taught at Harvard and Brown universities, and at Vassar College.

He was named a research fellow of the International Association of Sanskrit Studies in 2006, and he received a Winston fellowship from the Norman and Rosita Winston Foundation in 2003.

He earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard University.

Harald Uhlig, a specialist in applied quantitative theory and applied quantitative methods in economics, has been named Professor in Economics and the College.

Uhlig’s research interests include business cycles, financial markets, economic policy, Bayesian time series analysis and the psychological foundations of dynamic decision theory. In particular, he is interested in studying the interrelation of macroeconomics and financial markets, and the role of monetary and fiscal policy.

Uhlig was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society in 2003. That same year, he received the 2003 Gossen Preis of the Verein fŸr Socialpolitik, awarded annually to an economist in the German-language area whose work has gained international reputation. He also was elected to be one of seven participants in the “May meetings” (1990) of the Review of Economic Studies.

Uhlig has been a professor of economics at Humboldt University, Berlin, since 2000, and he has been a guest researcher at the Bundesbank. He previously served on the faculties of Princeton University and Tilburg University in The Netherlands.

He received a vordiplom in mathematics in 1982, a vordiplom in economics in 1983 and a diplom (M.A.) in mathematics in 1985, all from the Technical University of Berlin. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1990.