Scholars in diverse fields join faculty as Professors

Among the new faculty members on campus this fall are 10 distinguished scholars who have joined the University as full professors. Specializing in such diverse areas as film, philosophy, Japanese history, mathematics, psychology, sleep research, infectious diseases, genetics and postwar Germany are Tom Gunning, James Ketelaar, Jonathan Lear, David Ledbetter, Fanghua Lin, John Lucy, Rima McLeod, Wallace Mendelson, Eric Santner and Yuri Tsivian. Brief profiles follow.

Biological Sciences Division

David Ledbetter, a specialist on the genetics of human development and on prenatal detection of chromosomal abnormalities, joined the faculty in June as Professor in Obstetrics & Gynecology and Director of the Center for Medical Genetics. Ledbetter comes to Chicago from Bethesda, Md., where he was chief of the diagnostic branch of the National Center for Human Genome Research.

An authority on molecular cytogenetics, the use of DNA-based methods of detecting genetic abnormalities, Ledbetter has published extensively on the diagnosis and genetic underpinnings of birth defects and on new methods of detecting chromosomal abnormalities. He is particularly interested in genetic damage that can occur near the ends of chromosomes, often resulting in mental retardation, and he recently directed a transatlantic collaborative effort to develop the first complete set of molecular probes that can detect minute deletions or rearrangements of DNA at the chromosome ends.

Ledbetter has published more than 160 research papers and more than a dozen book chapters and review articles about birth defects, cytogenetics, prenatal testing and human genetics. He has been involved in the Human Genome Project for several years and directed a National Institutes of Health project to create a physical map of chromosome 17. He has also been instrumental in the effort to understand the genetics of several hereditary disorders that cause retardation, as well as in efforts to measure the safety and accuracy of various methods of prenatal testing. He has been honored for his work by the British Medical Genetics Society, which awarded him the Carter Medal in 1995.

He received his B.S. from Tulane University in 1975 and his Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin in 1981. He then joined the faculty at Baylor College, where he taught until 1993, when he joined the National Institutes of Health.

Rima McLeod, an internationally known authority on the infectious disease toxoplasmosis, formally rejoins the University as Professor in Ophthalmology & Visual Science. McLeod was a faculty member at Chicago from 1978 until 1990 and was an attending physician at Michael Reese Hospital.

Although she joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1990 as professor of medicine, immunology, microbiology and genetics, McLeod remained a member of the University of Chicago's Committee on Immunology and a Lecturer in Medicine and in the College.

The author of more than 60 articles in scientific journals and more than a dozen book chapters, McLeod is one of the world's experts on the molecular and cell biology, pathogenesis, immunology, genetics, treatment and prevention of toxoplasmosis, a disease caused by infection with Toxoplasma gondii, a microorganism that can have devastating effects on an unborn child of an infected mother or on people with an immune-system deficiency, often causing blindness. She was one of two physicians selected for their expertise on congenital toxoplasmosis in a recent survey of the best doctors in the United States.

McLeod has been active at the national and international level in infectious-disease research. She is a member of the World Health Organization committee on toxoplasmosis vaccines, a consultant to the Food and Drug Administration, and a member of the Toxoplasmosis Research Institute and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases tropical medicine parasitology study section.

McLeod received her A.B. from Berkeley in 1967 and her M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco, in 1971. She joined the faculty at Chicago in 1978 as Assistant Professor in Medicine and as an attending physician at Michael Reese, where she became the associate chief of infectious diseases in 1994.

Wallace Mendelson, a prominent sleep researcher and clinician, joins the faculty as Professor in Psychiatry. Mendelson comes to Chicago from the Cleveland Clinic, where he was director of the Sleep Disorders Center, and Ohio State University, where he was professor of psychiatry.

A prolific researcher, Mendelson has published more than 150 scientific articles, dozens of book chapters and three books on topics related to the physiology and pharmacology of sleep and sleep disorders. He is the author of The Use and Misuse of Sleeping Pills (1980) and Human Sleep: Research and Clinical Care (1987) and co-author of Human Sleep and Its Disorders (1977).

Mendelson has received numerous professional honors. He is the executive secretary-treasurer and president-elect of the Sleep Research Society, associate editor of the Journal of Clinical Electrophysiology and a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Sleep Research. He serves on advisory boards for the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Aging and the American Sleep Disorders Association.

Mendelson received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1965 and his M.D. from Washington University in 1969. He completed his residency in psychiatry at Washington University in 1974, while also serving in the U.S. Public Health Service.

In addition to his appointments at Cleveland Clinic and Ohio State University, both of which he had held since 1993, Mendelson has taught at Washington University, George Washington University School of Medicine and SUNY at Stony Brook, where he was director of the Center for the Study of Sleep and Waking. He also was a staff psychiatrist for the Laboratory of Clinical Psychopharmacology at the National Institute of Mental Health, where he was chief of the Section on Sleep Studies.

Humanities Division

Tom Gunning, an expert on early film, joins the faculty as Professor in Art. He comes to Chicago from Northwestern, where he was associate professor in the department of radio, television and film. He will work closely with the Film Studies Center here.

Gunning is well known for his writings on the "cinema of attractions" -- very early short films in which shock, stimulation and trickery take precedence over story or character.

He is the author of D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (1991), which won the 1992 Theater Library Association Award, and he is co-editor of An Invention of the Devil? Religion and Early Cinema (1992). He is currently at work on Siting the Cinema: An Anthology of Early Writings on the Film Phenomenon with co-editor Yuri Tsivian, who also joins the faculty this fall.

Gunning also has written the screenplay for the feature film Night Watches, which will be directed by Travis Preston and will star Elina Lowensohn.

A recipient in 1993 of the Award for Excellence in Teaching given by the New York State Chancellor, Gunning taught at SUNY at Purchase from 1986 until 1993, when he joined the faculty at Northwestern. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, the University of Stockholm and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He received his B.A. in 1970 from New York University's Washington Square College and his M.A. in 1974 and his Ph.D. in 1986 from NYU.

Eric Santner, a leading scholar of postwar and postmodern Germany from Princeton, joins the faculty as Professor in Germanic Studies.

Santner studies 18th-century poetry, issues of memory and mourning in postwar German society, Holocaust literature and film, and the uses of psychoanalysis in the study of literature, culture and society. He is the author of My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity (1996), a study of paranoia in late-19th-century German society, as well as Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (1990) and Friedrich Hoelderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination (1986). He also edited the volume Friedrich Hoelderlin: "Hyperion" and Selected Poems. He is presently at work on a book that explores psychoanalysis in the context of German-Jewish society at the turn of the century.

Since 1984, Santner has taught at Princeton in the department of German, where he was director of undergraduate studies from 1987 to 1992 and director of graduate studies from 1995 until coming to Chicago. In 1992, he was a senior fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell.

He received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1977 and his M.A. in 1982 and his Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of Texas at Austin.

Yuri Tsivian, a prominent scholar of film history, has been appointed Professor in Art, Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages & Literatures. He comes to Chicago from the University of Southern California, where he was on the faculty in the Critical Studies division of the School of Cinema-Television.

Tsivian's research focuses on early Russian film and 20th-century Russian culture. His books include Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 1909-1918 (1991, published simultaneously in English and Italian), Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (1994) and the forthcoming Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. He is involved in several ongoing film-restoration projects, including the transfer of restored films to video and CD-ROM.

Tsivian received his M.A. from the University of Latvia in 1972 and his Ph.D. in 1984 from the Institute of Theater, Music and Cinema in Leningrad. He has been a senior research fellow at the Institute of Folklore, Literature and Art at the Latvian Academy of Sciences since 1975.

From 1987 through 1990, Tsivian was the head of the restoration team assigned to Early Russian Films at the Central Film Museum in Moscow. He was also consultant curator at Riga Film Museum from 1987 to 1993, when he became the scientific supervisor at the National Cinematheque of Latvia, an appointment he continues to hold. He is director of the UNESCO Summer School on Film History in Riga, and he has held visiting appointments at the University of Amsterdam, the British Film Institute, the University of Southern California and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Physical Sciences Division

Fanghua Lin, who in 1988 joined the University faculty as Professor in Mathematics at age 29, returns to Chicago as Professor in Mathematics after seven years on the faculty at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. A specialist in partial differential equations, Lin has expertise spanning the range from purely theoretical to applied mathematics.

Among Lin's research interests are the study of minimum surfaces, especially in higher dimensions, and harmonic maps, or maps of minimum energy, which have applications in the study of liquid crystals. His research also involves theory of partial differential equations and their applications.

In 1989, Lin was named a Presidential Young Investigator and was also awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He has served since 1988 as associate director of the Institute for Advanced Research at Zhejiang University in China.

Lin has been professor of mathematics at NYU's Courant Institute since 1989. He received his B.S. from Zhejiang University in 1981 and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1985. He has held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the University of Paris at Orsey. He was awarded a professorship in the Institute of Mathematics, Academia Sinica, in 1988 and a professorship in Academia Sinica's Institute of Applied Mathematics in 1989.

Social Sciences Division

James Ketelaar, a leading scholar of Buddhism and Japanese history and a Chicago alumnus, joins the faculty as Professor in History. He comes to the University from Stanford, where he had been on the faculty since 1989.

He has received numerous awards for his research, including the Hans Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award in 1991 for Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (1990), which was based on his dissertation. He also received the Dean's Innovation Fund for Undergraduate Education Research fellowship from Stanford while on the faculty there.

Ketelaar is the author of the forthcoming Ezo: A History of Japan's Eastern Frontier. In addition, he has written numerous articles on Buddhism and topics related to Japanese history and has presented papers and organized a multitude of panels and discussions on these subjects at conferences around the United States and in Japan.

Prior to teaching at Stanford, Ketelaar served on the faculty at the University of North Florida. During the past academic year, he was a on the faculty at Japan's Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies, a program for undergraduates from U.S. colleges. He received his B.A. in 1978 from Kalamazoo College and his Ph.D. in 1987 from Chicago.

Jonathan Lear, a leading American philosopher whose work examines both Freud and the ancient Greek thinkers, has joined the University faculty as Professor in the Committee on Social Thought. He comes to Chicago from Yale, where he was professor of philosophy.

During his distinguished career, Lear has been the recipient of many honors, including the Heinz Hartmann Award in 1993 from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute for his book Love and Its Place in Nature (1991). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the 1987-88 academic year and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 1984-85.

He is the author of numerous articles on Aristotle and Plato, as well as the books Aristotle and Logical Theory (1980) and Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (1988). He is currently completing the volume Inside and Outside the Mind.

Lear, who is also a practicing psychoanalyst, was on the faculty at Yale from 1978 to 1979, when he joined the faculty at Cambridge. He taught at Cambridge until 1984, returning to Yale the following year. He received a B.A. in 1970 from Yale, a B.A. in 1973 and an M.A. in 1976 from Cambridge, and his Ph.D. in 1978 from Rockefeller University.

John Lucy, a distinguished scholar whose work has found new connections between linguistics and anthropology, joins the Chicago faculty as Professor in Psychology. Lucy received his Ph.D. from Chicago in 1987.

His research interests include psychological anthropology, including comparative child development and the intersection between culture and cognition, and linguistic anthropology, particularly the role of language in culture and cognitive constraints on linguistic variation. He has also studied Mesoamerican culture and language forms, including Mayan languages and life-cycle transition rituals, as well as social-science methodology.

He is the author of Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (1992) and Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, to be published this year. He is currently at work on the book Language Diversity and Intellectual Development.

Lucy comes to Chicago from the University of Pennsylvania, where he had been on the faculty since 1989. He previously served as a William Rainey Harper Instructor at Chicago, and he was a visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. He received his B.A. from Pomona College in 1972.