Faculty receive DSPs, named professorships

Five University faculty members, John Coetzee, Robert Fefferman, Janet Johnson, James Norris Jr. and Richard Shweder, have recently received distinguished service professorships.

Fourteen University professors have received named professorships, including two new faculty members, Arthur Haney, who also has been appointed Chairman of Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Bernard Wassertein.

Current faculty members who have received named professorships are: Philip Bohlman, Richard Fessler, Michael Geyer, Geoffrey Greene, Anil Kashyap, Susan Kidwell, Robert Morrissey, Canice Prendergast, Eric Santner, Harinder Singh, Lars Stole and Rebecca West.

John Coetzee

John Coetzee, Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, has been appointed a Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought. A scholar of literature who has written on the language, ethics and politics of figures ranging from Erasmus to Tolstoy and Kafka, Coetzee is best known as the first writer to be awarded twice with Britain’s highest honor for fiction, the Booker Prize.

He first won the award in 1983 for Life and Times of Michael K., and again in 1999 for Disgrace. Both his fiction and nonfiction have provided insights into the problems of violence, censorship and how people treat those who are different from them.

Among Coetzee’s academic writings are Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship and White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. His most recent work is Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II.

Educated at the University of Cape Town, where he earned B.A.s with honors in English (1960) and Mathematics (1961), Coetzee earned an M.A. in English there in 1963. He completed Ph.D. work in English and Linguistics at the University of Texas, Austin, in 1969.

Coetzee has taught at the State University of New York and the University of Cape Town, as well as Harvard University and the Johns Hopkins University.

He also is the recipient of the Jerusalem Prize and the Commonwealth Literary Award, and holds the rank of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Robert Fefferman

He had served as the Louis Block Professor since 1998, and as chairman of Mathematics from 1995 to 2001. Fefferman specializes in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations and probability theory. He joined the Chicago faculty in 1975 as an L.E. Dickson Instructor in Mathematics.

His honors include the University’s Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and a fellowship with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

He delivered the Seventh Rubio de Francia Memorial Lecture in Madrid, Spain, and the Riviere-Fabes Memorial Lectures at the University of Minnesota, among other invited talks.

In addition to his teaching and research, Fefferman also has been active in mathematics education outreach, having worked with public school teachers for the past 15 years at all levels, from elementary school through high school.

Fefferman received his B.S. in mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1972 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1975.

Janet Johnson

Janet Johnson, one of the world’s leading authorities on Demotic, a late stage of the ancient Egyptian language, has been named the Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor in the Oriental Institute, Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World and the College.

Demotic developed toward the middle of the first millennium B.C. and remained in use into the third century of the current era. It was written in a very cursive script derived ultimately from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Johnson is Director of the Demotic Dictionary Project at the Oriental Institute.

Her main interests include Egyptian language and Egypt in the “Late Period” (1st millennium B.C.). She also has recently published a third, online edition of a teaching grammar of Demotic, as well as articles on women and law in ancient Egyptian life. As Director of the Egyptian Readingbook Project, she is preparing an annotated, interactive, electronic readingbook for Middle Egyptian, the classic stage of the ancient Egyptian language, which is aimed at individuals in the first years of their study of ancient Egyptian.

Johnson, who has done fieldwork in Egypt and Jordan, was Director of the Oriental Institute from 1983 to 1989. She received a B.A. in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1972 in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Chicago. She joined the faculty in 1971 as an instructor.

James Norris has been appointed the Robert Millikan Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry and the College.

A physical chemist, Norris focuses his research on obtaining a more complete understanding of the beginning of the process of natural photosynthesis.

Norris served as president of the International Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Society from 1996 to 1999. He has received the Zavoisky Award from the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Humbolt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists, the Rumford Premium from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Memorial Award. He also is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Norris worked at Argonne National Laboratory in a variety of capacities, including senior scientist and section head of electron transfer and photosynthesis, from 1968 to 1995. He joined the Chicago faculty in 1984 and served as Chairman of Chemistry from 1997 to 2003.

Norris received his B.S. degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.

Richard Shweder

Richard Shweder is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on enthnopsychology, cultural psychology, the anthropology of thought and cross-cultural human development, and culture theory. He also is an associated faculty member in Anthropology.

He is the author or editor of 10 books, including Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Culture Psychology (1991), Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies (2002) and Why Do Men Barbecue?: Recipes for Cultural Psychology (2003).

He was named a 2002 Carnegie Scholar and is working on a new book, When Cultures Collide: The Moral Challenge in Cultural Migration. For this project, Shweder has been examining how Islamic immigrants adapt their religion to the secular society of the United States.

The book examines how much tolerance for cultural diversity is possible in a liberal democracy such as the United States by looking at such issues as separation of church and state, parental rights vs. children’s rights, the question of what is private and what is public, and the tension between individual and collective rights.

After completing his B.A. in 1966 in anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. in 1972 at Harvard University in social anthropology, Shweder joined the University faculty in 1973.

Philip Bohlman

Philip Bohlman, Professor in Music and the College, and Chair and Professor of the Committee on Jewish Studies, has been named the Mary Werkman Professor in the Humanities.

An expert on folk music and ethnomusicology, Bohlman has explored the political and religious power of music as it reflects and creates identities and experiences. He has worked to preserve and understand the music of Jews and others who performed in cabarets, concentrations camps and kibbutzes, through his scholarship in editing and published works, and through performances as artistic director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society.

He is the author of such books as History and Methods of Ethnomusicology (in Hebrew), “Jewish Folk Music:” A Central European Cultural History (in German), and World Music: A Very Short Introduction (in English).

Bohlman was a Mellon Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Cornell University and the University of Freiburg, as well as in Vienna and Bologna.

Currently a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Bohlman is a recipient of the Royal Music Association’s highest honor, the Dent Medal, and awards from the Fulbright foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt foundation.

Bohlman received his B.M. in piano in 1975, and his M.M. and Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Illinois in 1980 and 1984, respectively.

Richard Fessler

Richard Fessler, Professor in Surgery, has been appointed the John Harper Seeley Professor in Surgery. A pioneer in microendoscopic and minimally invasive spine surgery, Fessler joined the University faculty in 2002.

Fessler has developed several new surgical techniques including cervical micro-endoscopic discectomy and microendoscopic decompression of lumbar stenosis. He has a particular interest in transplantation of nerve tissue or cells and is considered one of the leading authorities on innovative methods to repair spinal cord injuries.

Fessler earned his M.D. and his Ph.D. in Pharmacology & Physiology from the University and completed his residency training in neurological surgery at the University Hospitals in 1989. He then joined the staff of the University of Florida Brain Institute, becoming the Dunspaugh-Dalton professor of brain and spinal surgery in 1994.

Fessler also became director of the institute’s surgical research and training laboratory and the University of Florida Spine Care Center. In 2000, Fessler moved to the Chicago Institute of Neurosurgery and NeuroResearch at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center.

He is the author of more than 60 peer-reviewed research papers, more than 50 book chapters and six books, including the Atlas of Neurosurgical Techniques, Lumbar Interbody Fusion and Percutaneous Spine Techniques. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the North American Spine Society and is an ex-officio member of the American Association of Neurological Surgery Board of Directors. Fessler also is a medical specialist and flight surgeon for NASA.

Michael Geyer

Michael Geyer, a leading figure in contemporary European history, has been named the Samuel Harper Professor in History and the College.

Geyer, a specialist on Germany as well as transnational issues, received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship earlier this year to do research for a book, titled Catastrophic Nationalism: The Culture of Defeat in Modern Germany.

He is pursuing this work at the American Academy in Berlin, where he is studying a wide variety of archival records as well as artistic and literary sources, including pamphlets and films related to World War I and World War II.

Among his other books are Processes of Globalization: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective, German Armaments: Policies and Politics 1860-1980, and with Konrad Jarausch, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories.

He also edited The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany, which was published by the University Press. Geyer completed his education in Germany and received a D. Phil. in 1976 from Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg. Before joining the Chicago faculty in 1986, he was a faculty member in Germany and at the University of Michigan.

Geoffrey Greene

Geoffrey Greene, Professor and Associate Director of the Ben May Institute for Cancer Research, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, the Cancer Research Center, the Committee on Cancer Biology and the College, has been named the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor.

Greene is an authority on the molecular mechanisms by which female hormones regulate cellular proliferation in hormone-responsive tissues and cancers. His studies of estrogen, the estrogen receptors, and drugs that mimic or oppose estrogen in different tissues, such as tamoxifen, have advanced understanding of this system and contributed to efforts to design new drugs. Newer drugs could maintain the beneficial effects of estrogen yet prevent breast and uterine cancers, which can be stimulated by estrogen.

The author of more than 160 research papers, Greene has received a number of prestigious awards for his research contributions and serves on several national committees as well as journal editorial boards.

Greene earned his B.A. in chemistry from the College of Wooster, in Wooster, Ohio, and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Northwestern University. He came to the University in 1974 as a postdoctoral trainee in the Ben May Laboratory and joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1980. He became a Professor in 1991.

Anil Kashyap

Anil Kashyap, Professor of Economics in the Graduate School of Business, has been appointed the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics and Finance in the GSB.

His scholarship includes research into banking, business cycles, corporate finance and monetary policy.

Before joining the GSB faculty in 1991, Kashyap served as an economist with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington, D.C. He is co-author (with Takeo Hoshi) of Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan: The Road to the Future, which received the 45th Nikkei Prize for Excellent Books in Economic Science.

His other recent works include the article, “Banks as Liquidity Providers: An Explanation for the Co-Existence of Lending and Deposit-Taking,” (with Raghuram Rajan, the Joseph L. Gidwitz Professor of Finance in the GSB, and J.C. Stein), which was published in the Journal of Finance in 2002. The work received the journal’s 2002 Brattle Prize for the most distinguished paper.

Kashyap currently serves as a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and co-edits the Journal of Political Economy.

Kashyap, who was a Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England during 2001, received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Susan Kidwell

Susan Kidwell has been named the William Rainey Harper Professor in Geophysical Sciences and the College.

Her research focuses on the quality of sedimentary and fossil records as archives of earth history. Her stratigraphic field studies have primarily concerned the recognition and interpretation of hiatuses and the biasing effects on fossil occurrences, whereas experiments and meta-analysis in modern-day environments address rates of skeletal recycling and the capture of quantitative ecological information.

Kidwell is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a Presidential Young Investigator of the National Science Foundation.

She is a recipient of the Charles Schuchert Award from the Paleontological Society and of the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the University.

She has served on the National Research Council Board on Earth Sciences and Resources, and on science advisory boards for the National Center for Ecological Analysis and synthesis and for the Geosciences Directorate of the National Science Foundation. She also chaired the Provost’s Task Force on the Quality of Student Experience from 1994 to 1996.

Kidwell taught at the University of Arizona from 1981 to 1985 before she joined the Chicago faculty in 1985. She received her B.S. degree from the College of William and Mary and her Ph.D. from Yale University.

Robert Morrissey

Robert Morrissey has been appointed the Benjamin Franklin Professor in Romance Languages & Literatures and the College.

Morrissey specializes in 18th- and 19th-century French history, literature and critical theory. His work concentrates on themes and cultural currents over the longue durée.

He recently published Charlemagne and France: A Thousand Years of Mythology. This book, which received the Grand Prix d’Histoire Chateaubriand when it originally appeared in French, sheds light on “one of the most guarded secrets of the French political imagination,” according to the eminent cultural historian Marc Fumaroli, Professor in Romance Languages & Literatures.

Morrissey is the Director of ARTFL (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language), a multifaceted project creating electronic resources for the study of French, and he is the Executive Director of the France-Chicago Center.

Morrissey also has published La Rêverie jusqu’à Rousseau; Recherches sur un topos littéraire, produced an electronic edition of Diderot and d’Alembert’s famous Encyclopédie, and edited with Philippe Roger a collection of essays titled L’Encylopédie: du réseau au livre et ddu livre au réseau.

He has just completed a new edition of Rousseau’s Rêverie d’un promeneur solitaire. Among his honors are grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In 1997, he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérit. Morrissey earned his B.A. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and his M.A. in 1971 at the Sorbonne.

Morrissey, who began teaching at the University in 1978, earned his Ph.D. with honors in French literature from Chicago in 1981. He currently is in residence in Paris, where he is serving as the first Director of the University Paris Center.

Canice Prendergast

Canice Prendergast, Professor of Economics in the Graduate School of Business, has been named the W. Allen Wallis Professor of Economics in the GSB.

A GSB faculty member since 1990, Prendergast teaches M.B.A. courses in international comparative organizations and managing the workplace. He is editor of the Journal of Political Economy, and he previously served as foreign editor of the Review of Economic Studies, editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and associate editor of the RAND Journal of Economics.

Included among his recent publications are “The Limits of Bureaucratic Efficiency” and “The Tenuous Trade-Off Between Risk and Incentives,” both published in the Journal of Political Economy; and “Incentives and Uncertainty,” published in the Journal of Labor Economics.

Prendergast has received several awards from the National Science Foundation and was elected a faculty research fellow by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

He received his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1989 after earning a M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics. Earlier he served as a lecturer at Jesus College, Oxford University, and an Open Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University.

Eric Santner

Eric Santner, Professor and Chair of Germanic Studies, Professor in the Committee on Jewish Studies and the College, and formerly the Harriet & Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Modern European Jewish History, has been named the Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies.

Santner has worked to understand how German writers and poets like Freud, Kafka and Hšlderlin might help us respond to the religious and political predicament of the modern world. He has been active in making Chicago a center for the study of the theology and philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig.

His recent book On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig was honored by the Modern Language Association and described by theorist Slavoj Zizek as “one of the key texts of the last 100 yearsÉon a par with Heidegger and Wittgenstein.”

His current work, Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, which Santner co-edited with Moishe Postone, Associate Professor in History and the Social Sciences Collegiate Division, is being published by the University Press this fall.

Santner’s other books include My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity and Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany.

Santner earned a B.A. in philosophy from Oberlin College in 1977, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in German literature in 1982 and 1984, respectively.

Before coming to Chicago he was a member of the Princeton University faculty, and also has taught at Cornell University and the University of Texas.

Among his honors are fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the International Institute of Education’s Fulbright Program and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Harinder Singh

Harinder Singh, Professor in Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology, the Committees on Cancer Biology, Developmental Biology, Genetics, Immunology, the Cancer Research Center and the College, has been appointed a Louis Block Professor.

Singh is an expert on regulatory molecules that enable a self-renewing pluripotent hematopoietic stem cell to generate various cells of the immune system. His laboratory concentrates on molecular and genetic analyses of transcription factors that regulate the development and gene expression patterns of white blood cells. His group has identified a regulatory protein that controls the generation of both innate and adaptive cells of the immune system.

The author of nearly 50 research papers, review articles and book chapters, Singh has been serving as an editor of Molecular and Cellular Biology since 1997. He has presented at research meetings throughout the United States, Europe and Asia and has won several awards, including appointment to the board of scientific counselors for the National Cancer Institute.

After postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the Chicago faculty in 1989. He became a Professor in 2000 and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2002.

Singh earned his B.S. and M.S. in biochemistry from Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana, Punjab, India, and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Northwestern University.

Lars Stole

Lars Stole, Professor of Economics in the Graduate School of Business, has been named the Eli B. and Harriet B. Williams Professor of Economics in the GSB.

An expert in the economics of contracts and organizations, industrial organization and informational economics, Stole focuses his current research on price discrimination, intra-organizational resource allocation and non-monetary exchange.

His recent works include “Organizational Design and Technology Choice Under Intrafirm Bargaining: Reply,” with Jeffrey Zwiebel, American Economic Review, March 2003; and “The Revelation and Taxation Principles in Common Agency Games,” with David Martimort, Econometrica, July 2002.

Stole joined the faculty of the GSB in 1991 after receiving his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received an M.S. from the London School of Economics and has served as an Olin Fellow at Harvard University Law School and a visiting professor at Tel Aviv University, M.I.T. and other institutions.

During the 2001-02 academic year, Stole was the David W. Johnson Professor in Economics, a one-year rotating professorship for GSB faculty teaching in the Executive M.B.A. Program.

Stole was editor of the RAND Journal of Economics from 1997 to 2000, and has served as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and a National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellow.

Rebecca West

Rebecca West, Professor in Romance Languages & Literatures, the Committee on Cinema & Media Studies and the College, and who also is the Director of the Center for Gender Studies, has been appointed the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in Romance Languages & Literatures and the College.

West’s interests span Italian culture from Danté to contemporary Italian narrative. She has written extensively on 19th- and 20th-century Italian literature, feminist theory, and Italian and Italian-American cinema.

Her books include Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge, which won the Modern Language Association’s Marraro Prize; and Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling, the recipient of the MLA’s Scaglione Publication Prize.

She has edited or co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, Italian Feminist Theory and Practice: Equality and Difference, and Pagina, Pellicola, Pratica: Studi Sul Cinema Italiano. She currently is working on the literary and mass media “afterlife” of Collodi’s Pinocchio, as well as on a book about the contemporary Italian writer Luigi Malerba.

West earned her B.A. with high honors in French and Italian from the University of Pittsburgh in 1968, an M.Phil. in Italian, also with honors, from Yale University in 1971, and a Ph.D. in Italian from Yale University in 1974.

She has taught at Yale University, Northwestern University, Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, and has been honored with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy in Rome.