Four faculty members receive named chairs

Professorship in College among new endowed chairs Four endowed professorships, two of them established during the Campaign for the Next Century, have been awarded to University faculty members. The recipients, the first to be named to the chairs, are political scientist Ralph Lerner; Eric Santner, a scholar of postwar and postmodern Germany; medical ethicist Mark Siegler; and economist Nancy Stokey.

Ralph Lerner

Lerner, Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College, has been named the first Benjamin Franklin Professor.

The Benjamin Franklin Professorship was established according to the will of the Raymond Kjellberg, an alumnus of the College and the Pritzker School of Medicine who attended the University during the Hutchins era and went on to become a distinguished neurosurgeon in Boston.

A longtime teacher in the College, Lerner received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1964.

He is an expert on medieval political philosophy, American political thought and American constitutional law and has published numerous articles and book chapters on these topics. He is the author of The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic (1987) and Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment (1994), and the co-editor, with Philip Kurland, of The Founders' Constitution (1987). The five-volume Constitution received numerous prizes, including the Press' Gordon J. Laing Award.

Lerner received his A.B. in 1947, his A.M. in 1949 and his Ph.D. in 1953, all from the University. He was a post-graduate scholar in medieval Hebrew at Cambridge before joining the Chicago faculty in 1957.

Eric Santner

Eric Santner, Professor in Germanic Studies and a leading scholar of German literature, cinema and history, has been named the first Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Modern European Jewish History.

The Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professorship was established by Mr. and Mrs. Meyer to support a professor in the field of modern European Jewish history. The chair is intended for scholars in the field of Holocaust 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 is presently at work on a book that explores psychoanalytical, theological and political conceptions of trauma.

From 1984 until joining the Chicago faculty in autumn quarter 1996, Santner taught at Princeton. 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.

Mark Siegler

Siegler, Director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and Professor in Medicine, has received the first Lindy Bergman Professorship. The Lindy Bergman Professorship was established by art collector and philanthropist Lindy Bergman, a longtime friend of the University. She is a Trustee of the Hospitals and a benefactor of the Bergman Family Eye Center in the new Duchossois Center for Advanced Medicine.

Siegler received his M.D. from the University in 1967 and has been a faculty member since 1971. He is known worldwide for his teaching and research in the field of medical ethics.

In 1970s, Siegler helped develop the field of clinical medical ethics to address practical ethical issues that arise in patient care. In 1984, he founded the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University. It quickly became the principal center in the United States for the study of the practical medical and ethical problems that confront physicians, researchers and patients. Now known as the MacLean Center, it remains the world's largest ethics fellowship training program for doctors, and more than 40 of its graduates direct ethics programs in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

He has served on the editorial boards of medical journals, including the Journal of Clinical Ethics. He has also been a member of the ethics committees of several national organizations, including the American College of Surgeons. He has won numerous awards, most recently the Chirone Prize from the Italian National Academy of Medicine and the University of Bologna. A general internist, Siegler was also named one of the best doctors in the city in the January issue of Chicago magazine.

Nancy Stokey

Stokey, Professor in Economics and the College, has received the first Frederick Henry Prince Professorship in Economics.

The Frederick Henry Prince Professorship was established through gifts from the Frederick Henry Prince Testamentary Trust and the Ford Foundation. The professorship is named in honor of the late Frederick Prince, a Chicago business leader who owned Union Stockyards.

An expert on economic theory and economic development, Stokey examines the impact education and job training have on the development of national economies. She has shown that economies continue to expand when workforces adapt more complex skills, moving, for instance, from manufacturing into high technology. She is the author of numerous papers on economic growth and related issues and is co-author of the book Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics (1989).

Stokey received her B.A. from Pennsylvania in 1972 and her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1978. Before joining the Chicago faculty in 1990, she taught at Northwestern, where she was the Harold Stuart Professor of Managerial Economics.