Two new professors join faculty

Two distinguished scholars join the University faculty as full professors this quarter. Shmuel Weinberger of the University of Pennsylvania rejoins the faculty as Professor in Mathematics and the College, and David Cohen of Berkeley has been named Professor of Social Thought and Law in the Committee on Social Thought, the Law School and the College.

Cohen is an expert on comparative legal and social history and the legal regulation of social practice, particularly in ancient Athens. He is the author of numerous articles and three books: Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens (1995), The Athenian Law of Theft (1983) and Law, Society, and Sexuality: The Enforcement of Morals at Classical Athens (1991). He also is co-editor of the two volume work David Daube: Collected Studies in Roman Law.

He is currently studying war crimes, in particular how individual legal responsibility can be assigned within large bureaucratic organizations. In the coming academic year, he intends to do archival research in Germany at the Historical Institute in Munich.

Before joining the Committee on Social Thought, Cohen was a professor of rhetoric and classics at Berkeley. He has been a Visiting Professor in the Law School three times, in 1991, 1993 and in 1996, when he was also a Visiting Professor in History and Classical Languages & Literatures.

He received his B.A. from Occidental College in 1969, his J.D. from UCLA in 1972, and his Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1981.

Weinberger, a specialist in geometrical topology, was a Chicago faculty member from 1984 to 1994, when he left the University to become the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania.

His research involves modifying techniques used to study simple shapes (a doughnut, for eximple) to study more complex geometries, where some parts of an object have different structure than others (as in a crumpled piece of paper).

Weinberger received his B.A. from New York University in 1981 at age 18 and his Ph.D. from the Courant Institute of the Mathematical Sciences in 1982. He was an instructor at Princeton for two years before joining the Chicago faculty as Assistant Professor. He was named Professor in 1987.

He is the author of The Topological Classification of Stratified Spaces (1994) and more than 70 scientific articles. The recipient of a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, he also received a Presidential Young Investigator Award.