[Chronicle]

Sept. 28, 1995

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    Seven distinguished scholars join faculty as Professors

    s Among the new faculty members on campus this fall are seven distinguished scholars who have joined the University as full professors. Specializing in such areas as philosophy and literature, politics and culture, business, history and physics are Menachem Brinker, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Pradeep Chintagunta, Susan Coppersmith, Claudio Lomnitz, Martha Nussbaum and Richard Thaler. Brief profiles follow.

    Divinity School & Law School Martha Nussbaum, a prominent scholar in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of literature, joins the faculty with a joint appointment in the Divinity School and the Law School. She has been named Professor of Law and Ethics in the Law School, and Professor in the Divinity School and in the New Collegiate Division. She is an associate member of Philosophy and Classical Languages & Literatures. Nussbaum comes to Chicago from Brown, where she was University Professor and professor of philosophy and classics.

    A prolific writer, Nussbaum has published more than 100 articles and reviews in American and European journals on a range of philosophical, literary and legal topics. She has edited six collections, including the just- published Women, Culture and Development (with J. Glover) and the forthcoming Laws and Nature: Shaping Sex, Preference and Family (with D. Estlund). The author of four books, she most recently wrote The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994). Her book Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life will be published in December. She is currently at work on two new books, including Citizens of the World: A Classical Defense of Radical Reform in Higher Education, a book on curricular controversies in American higher education.

    Among the numerous fellowships and prizes Nussbaum has received are the PEN Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the best collection of essays in 1991 for her book Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990) and the Literary Lion Award from the New York Public Library in 1993.

    She received her B.A. in 1969 from New York University and both her M.A., in 1971, and her Ph.D., in 1975, from Harvard. She then taught at Harvard until 1983, and in 1984 she joined the faculty at Brown. From 1987 to 1993, she was a research adviser to the World Institute for Development Economics Research. She also has held visiting professorships at Oxford, Stanford, Wellesley, the Ecole Normal Superieure de Jeunes Filles in Paris and the University of Oslo, Norway, as well as at Chicago. She was Visiting Professor in the Law School in 1994.

    Graduate School of Business Pradeep Chintagunta, who joins the GSB faculty as Professor of Marketing, specializes in several areas of marketing, including the analysis of household purchase behavior using scanner data, the investigation of competitive marketing strategies and studies involving the entertainment industry.

    Chintagunta comes to Chicago from Cornell, where he had been on the faculty since 1990. He received his bachelor of technology degree in 1984 from Banaras Hindu University, a postgraduate diploma in management in 1986 from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and his Ph.D. in 1990 from Northwestern.

    The author of numerous articles, he most recently co-authored the study "A Logit Model Analysis of Dynamic Pricing Policies," scheduled to appear in Management Science. He serves on the editorial boards of Marketing Science and the Journal of Marketing Research.

    Richard Thaler joins the GSB as Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics. He has also been appointed Director of the Center for Decision Research.

    Thaler was previously on the faculty at Cornell, where he was the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Economics and director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research. He is currently a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and co-director of the bureau's Behavioral Economics Project.

    An expert on behavioral economics, Thaler has written or co-written numerous papers and journal columns on this and related topics. He is the author of two books, Quasi-Rational Economics (1991) and The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life (1991), and the editor of Advances in Behavioral Finance (1993).

    He received his B.A. in 1967 from Case Western Reserve and his M.A. in 1970 and his Ph.D. in 1974 from the University of Rochester. He was on the faculty at Rochester from 1974 to 1978, when he joined the faculty at Cornell.

    Humanities Division Menachem Brinker, an expert in modern Hebrew literature, joins the faculty in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations as the first Henry Crown Professor of Modern Hebrew Studies. He comes to Chicago from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University where he was professor of philosophy and literature.

    Brinker's work focuses on the development of modern Hebrew literature and on key practitioners of this literature in the second half of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century. He is also a specialist in modern philosophy and literature and has written numerous journal articles on these subjects. He is the author of several books, including Meaning and Representation in the Fictional Work (1980) and J.P. Sartre: The Roads of Freedom (1992), and he is currently completing a book tentatively titled Last Jews or First Hebrews: Appeals for Reevaluation of All Jewish Values in Modern Hebrew Literature (1881-1921).

    Brinker had taught since 1962 at Tel Aviv University. He began teaching at the Hebrew University in 1972 and was named full professor there in 1989. He also was a visiting professor at Columbia from 1988 to 1990 and at Chicago, as the Helen Regenstein Professor of Jewish Studies in the Divinity School, in 1994. He served as chairman of the Israeli Philosophical Association from 1978 to 1980.

    He received his B.A. in 1959 and his M.A. in 1964 from the Hebrew University and his Ph.D. in 1974 from Tel Aviv University.

    The Henry Crown Professorship was endowed with a gift from Chicago's Crown family. Brinker is the first holder of the chair, which has been established during the Campaign for the Next Century.

    Dipesh Chakrabarty, who has been appointed Professor in South Asian Languages & Civilizations and the College, is a social historian whose work also focuses on theoretical issues in historiography and nationalism, particularly post-colonialism. He previously was on the faculty at the University of Melbourne, where he was the Ashworth Reader in Social Theory and director of the Ashworth Centre for Social Theory.

    Chakrabarty has published numerous essays and reviews and has addressed conferences throughout the United States, Europe, Australia and South Asia. He is the author of the book Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940 (1989), the editor of a forthcoming collection of essays, Techniques of the Nationalist Self: Essays in Indian History, and co-editor of Subaltern Studies Vol. 9. He is also currently working on a book tentatively titled History's Unworking: Modernity and Indian Pasts.

    A member of many editorial boards on Asian and other cultural studies, he has recently been named to serve on the advisory board of a new journal on Australasian studies. He has also been extensively involved as a public speaker in Australia for the recent Amnesty International campaign on human-rights abuses in India.

    Chakrabarty began teaching at the University of Melbourne in 1982. He also has been a visiting professor at Berkeley, at the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta and at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He was Visiting Professor in History at Chicago in 1994.

    He received his B.Sc. in 1969 from Calcutta University and his Ph.D. in 1983 from the Australian National University.

    Physical Sciences Division Susan Coppersmith, a specialist in condensed matter theory, has been appointed Professor in Physics, the James Franck Institute and the College. She will be among the faculty members working in the JFI's Materials Research Science & Engineering Center.

    Coppersmith's research interests are in nonlinear dynamics and disordered systems. She has already collaborated extensively with Chicago researchers, including publishing a paper this summer in the journal Science about the distribution of forces in granular materials -- how a sand pile holds itself up, or how stresses are distributed throughout grain in a silo, for example.

    Before coming to Chicago, Coppersmith worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she had been a member of the technical staff since 1987. In 1986, she was awarded a National Science Foundation Visiting Professorship for Women and spent the year as a visiting lecturer at Princeton. This year she was the chair of the Gordon Conference on Condensed Matter Physics, and she has served since 1993 as a trustee for the Aspen Center for Physics.

    Before joining AT&T, she was a research associate at Brookhaven National Laboratories. She received her B.S. in 1978 from MIT and her M.S. in 1981 and her Ph.D. in 1983 from Cornell.

    Social Sciences Division Claudio Lomnitz, a leading scholar of Latin American politics and culture, has been named Professor in History.

    The author of Exits From the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space (1992) and Evolucion de una sociedad rural (1982), Lomnitz has focused much of his research on the historical connections between corruption in Mexico and the development of Mexico's government. He is particularly interested in the role of corruption in the presentation of rituals, which in many cases are financed by government leaders with public funds. He is organizing a conference on corruption in Mexico, to be held on campus from Thursday, Nov. 30, through Saturday, Dec. 2.

    Lomnitz had been on the faculty at New York University since 1988. He also taught at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa and the Colegio de Mexico.

    A native of Chile, he received his undergraduate degree in 1978 from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa in Mexico City and his M.A. in 1979 and his Ph.D. in 1987 from Stanford.