Three receive Distinguished Service Professorships

Fulton, Hansen, Stafford honored

Three faculty members -- William Fulton, Miriam Hansen and Barbara Stafford -- have been awarded Distinguished Service Professorships.

"We are delighted to be able to honor Bill, Miriam and Barbara in this way," President Sonnenschein said. "They are scholars and teachers of the highest caliber, and their presence at Chicago greatly strengthens our university."

Fulton, Professor in Mathematics, has been named the Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor. Fulton, whose research interests focus on algebraic geometry and related fields, earlier this year was named the Erlander Professor in Sweden for the 1996-97 academic year.

The Erlander Professorship -- unique in Sweden, a country that does not have a tradition of named professorships -- enables Fulton to spend the year at the Swedish university of his choice. Fulton has chosen the Mittag-Leffler Institute, near Stockholm, which is devoting a year to the study of enumerative geometry and interactions with physics.

Fulton was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1980, and he has been a visiting professor at many institutions, including the University of Genoa, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo. He is the editor of the Journal of the American Mathematical Society and the author of 10 books, including the forthcoming graduate textbook Algebraic Topology: A First Course.

He received his B.A. in 1961 from Brown and his Ph.D. in 1966 from Princeton. He taught at Princeton, Brandeis and Brown before joining the Chicago faculty in 1987.

Miriam Hansen, Professor in English Language & Literature and Director of the Film Studies Center, has been named the Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities.

Hansen, who joined the University faculty in 1989, is an expert in the history and theory of cinema, with a special emphasis on the American silent film. She is the author of numerous articles on film in American and European journals and has published several books, including Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991). She is currently completing a book tentatively titled The Frankfurt School on Film and Mass Culture.

Hansen was awarded the Katherine Singer Kovacs Essay Prize in Film, TV and Video Studies for 1995. She won the prize for her essay "Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney," which was published in the winter 1993 issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly. This is the second time Hansen has won the award; in 1991, she received it for her essay "Adventures of Goldilocks: Spectatorship, Consumerism and Public Life."

She received her doctorate in 1975 from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitaet, Frankfurt, Germany, and her Staatsexamen in English and History from the Universitaet Frankfurt in 1976. Before joining the Chicago faculty, she taught at Frankfurt, Erlangen, Yale and Rutgers.

Barbara Stafford, Professor in Art, has been named the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor.

Stafford, a faculty member since 1981, is an expert in 18th- and 19th-century European art and art theory. Her current work focuses on how our digital society's ambivalent attitudes toward images originated in the Enlightenment. Her most recent book is Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (1994).

Stafford's Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (1991) won the 1992 Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies for the best book on an 18th-century topic published during the preceding year. The author of four books and numerous articles and critical editions, Stafford has lectured widely throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and a Humboldt prize in 1989, and she is president-elect of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. Stafford has been invited to be a Getty Scholar next year at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles.

She received her B.A. in 1964 and her M.A. in 1966 from Northwestern and her Ph.D. in art history in 1972 from Chicago. Before joining the faculty at Chicago, she taught at Loyola University and the University of Delaware.