Faculty appointments bring distinguished scholars to University

Twelve distinguished scholars have recently received faculty appointments at the University. These 12 new faculty members have joined the Law School, the Committee on Social Thought and the departments of Chemistry, East Asian Languages & Civilizations, Economics, English Language & Literature, History, Philosophy, Psychology and Statistics.

Bennett Bertenthal

Bennett Bertenthal, Professor in Psychology, joined the Chicago faculty in September after serving as assistant director of the social, behavioral and economic sciences directorate at the National Science Foundation.

Bertenthal is the author of more than 70 publications on perceptual and cognitive development, developmental methodology, visual processing of motion information, and nonlinear modeling of posture and gait. His recent publications include a chapter on the origins of perception, action and representation in the Annual Review of Psychology and a chapter on perception and action in the Handbook of Child Psychology.

Last spring, he was a keynote speaker at the Workshop on the Social Sciences, organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

A fellow of the American Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association, Bertenthal has been the recipient of a Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health and the American Psychological Association’s Boyd R. McCandless Young Scientist Award for distinguished research. Currently, he is a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s steering committee on the development of infrastructure for the social and behavioral sciences.

In 1979, he joined the University of Virginia faculty as an assistant professor in psychology and then served as associate professor from 1985 to 1990, when he was named full professor. He also was associate editor of the journal Developmental Psychology from 1988 to 1990.

He was a member of the Human Development and Aging Review Panel at the National Institutes of Health from 1991 to 1996 and served as chair from 1994 to 1996. He also was chair of the program committee for the 1997 meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development and a member of the American Psychological Association.

Bertenthal received a B.A. in psychology from Brandeis University in 1971 and an M.A. in 1976 and Ph.D. in 1978 in developmental psychology from the University of Denver.

John Brewer

John Brewer, the John and Marion Sullivan University Professor in English Language & Literature and History, came to Chicago in July from the University of California-Los Angeles, where he was a professor in history.

A historian of 17th- and 18th-century Europe and North America, Brewer’s research has focused primarily on 18th-century Britain. During the 1970s and ’80s, Brewer’s research focused on a number of social history topics, including crime, forms of public ritual and the history of childhood. His work in the late ’70s at Yale University, where he taught history and became involved in the British Art Center, informed his interest in literary theory, the history of image-making and material culture.

Two of his major research projects are “Graphic Culture: Images, Ideology, Power and Identity” and “Unequal Exchange: American Money and European Art in the Late 19th and 20th Centuries.”

Brewer, who has been a Fulbright fellow, a Guggenheim fellow, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, has taught at Cambridge University; Washington University, St. Louis, Mo.; Yale University; Harvard University and the University of California-Los Angeles.

He has served as director of Clark Library and director of the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, both at UCLA.

An editor and co-editor of books in his field of expertise, Brewer has written Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge University Press, 1976); The Common People and Politics, 1750-1800: Popular Political Participation Depicted in Cartoon and Caricature (Chadwych-Healey, Cambridge, 1986); The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (Knopf and Unwin Hyman, New York and London, 1989); and The Pleasures of the Imagination: A History of British Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Harper Collins and Farrar Straus Giroux, London and New York, 1997).

In addition to writing and editing books, Brewer has authored nearly 30 research articles and essays that have been published in academic journals and texts.

He received a B.A. in history from Sussex College, Cambridge University, and his Ph.D. from Cambridge University.

John Cacioppo

John Cacioppo, a highly respected expert on attitudes and behaviors, has been named the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology. Also a new faculty member, Cacioppo joined the University after serving as a chaired professor in psychology at Ohio State University.

He has received numerous grants to support his research, including a five-year, $1.3 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in 1993 for the “Social Psychology Training Program,” a project for which he was co-principal investigator. He received a grant for nearly $260,000 in 1995 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to study social neuroscience. A 1994 grant from the National Institute of Aging provided Cacioppo with funding to study “Cardiac Reactivity and Cellular Immune Response to Stress.”

He is the co-author of a number of books, including Attitudes and Persuasion: Classic and Contemporary Approaches (1981), Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change (1986), Principles of Psychophysiology: Physical, Social and Inferential Elements (1990) and Emotional Contagion (1994).

Cacioppo has been editor of the journal Psychophysiology since 1995 and was the journal’s associate editor from 1984 to 1994. He also was associate editor of the Psychological Review from 1990 to 1994.

He was an assistant professor in psychology at Notre Dame from 1977 to 1979 before he took an appointment at the University of Iowa, where he served as an assistant professor and then professor in psychology until 1989, when he joined the Ohio State University faculty.

Cacioppo received a B.S. in economics in 1973 from the University of Missouri and an M.A. in psychology in 1975 and Ph.D. in psychology in 1977 from Ohio State University.

James Conant

James Conant, Professor in Philosophy, joined the Chicago faculty in July from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was a member of the philosophy faculty.

Conant’s works, many of which focus on the work of Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, have been published in various academic journals and collections of essays. Some of his writings are “The James/Royce Dispute and the Development of James’ ‘Solution,’” which appeared in The Cambridge Companion to William James (Cambridge University Press, 1997); “On Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics,” which appeared in The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1996); “On Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors,” which appeared in The Grammar of Religious Belief (St. Martin’s Press, 1995); and “Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility,” which appeared in Morality and Religion (St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

Conant also has served as an editor for various projects, including Rationality and Theory Choice, a collection of philosophical essays by Thomas Kuhn. Conant co-edited the work with former University of Pittsburgh colleague John Haugeland, who is now his colleague here at Chicago.

Currently, Conant is co-authoring Wittgenstein and the Inheritance of Philosophy with Cora Diamond.

He has formerly served as a member of the editorial boards of the History of Philosophy Quarterly and the Cambridge History of Philosophy and currently is a member of the program committee of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division.

Conant has been the recipient of a University of Pittsburgh curriculum development grant, a Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation fellowship, a Harvard University Distinguished Teaching Fellow Award and a Harvard Graduate Academic Merit fellowship.

Born in Kyoto, Japan, he attended Harvard University, where he received a B.A. in philosophy and the history of science. He continued his studies at Harvard and received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1990.

Donald Harper, Professor in East Asian Languages & Civilizations, has joined the Chicago faculty after teaching on the faculty of East Asian studies at the University of Arizona.

He has been the recipient of various grants and fellowships, including a Humanities Research Initiative grant; travel awards from the University of Arizona and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for research in Tokyo and Beijing; an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship; and a Humboldt Foundation fellowship for research at the Institute for the History of Medicine, Munich University.

An expert on traditional Chinese medicine, Harper has written research articles for numerous texts and journals, including the Journal of Asian Studies, Cambridge History of Ancient China, Religions of China in Practice and the Journal of Gastronomy.

Some of his many works are “A Note on Nightmare Magic in Ancient and Medieval China,” “Magic in East Asia,” “The Conception of Illness in Early Chinese Medicine,” “Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts” and “Warring States Natural Philosophy and Occult Thought.”

Harper is currently editor of Early China and is a member of the editorial board of the Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series and The Journal of Chinese Religion.

He was a Visiting Professor in East Asian Languages & Civilizations at Chicago during the 1987-88 academic year and has been a visiting lecturer of Oriental languages at the University of California-Berkeley and a visiting professor of Oriental languages at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Harper is a graduate of the University of California-Berkeley, having received a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the institution.

John Haugeland

John Haugeland, Professor in Philosophy, came to the University in July from the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as an assistant professor, associate professor and then professor in philosophy.

He is the author of Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (Harvard University Press, 1998) and Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (Bradford/MIT Press, 1985), which has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French and Greek. Haugeland also has edited the books Mind Design (Bradford/MIT Press, 1981) and Mind Design II (Second Edition, MIT Press, 1997) and co-edited a collection of philosophical essays by Thomas Kuhn titled Rationality and Theory Choice (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming) with James Conant, also a new faculty member at Chicago.

Haugeland also has published more than 40 academic articles and reviews in a number of professional journals and research volumes in philosophy and cognitive science.

A nationally and internationally known scholar who has made professional presentations at universities in Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Finland, Sweden and Taiwan, Haugeland has been a research fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a member of the Council for Philosophical Studies and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.

Haugeland, who received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California-Berkeley and a B.S. in physics from Harvey Mudd College, also served in the Peace Corps in Tonga.

Michael Hopkins

Michael Hopkins, an inorganic chemist who specializes in the design of new materials with enhanced properties, has joined the University faculty as Professor in Chemistry.

The goal of Hopkins’s research is to design, synthesize and study inorganic and organometallic complexes and polymers that possess interesting electronic, optical, magnetic, photochemical and other properties. Using high-resolution and time-resolved spectroscopic methods, he develops a detailed understanding of the structures, dynamics and bonding of molecules in designing new materials.

He has received many honors and awards, including the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award at the University of Pittsburgh in 1996. He has been a fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 1993 to 1995; the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, 1990 to 1995; and a Los Alamos National Laboratory Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow, 1986 to 1987. Hopkins also was a visiting faculty scholar at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1998, a visiting professor at Ecole Centrale, Paris, in May 1997 and a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator from 1987 to 1992.

Hopkins had been a chemistry faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh since 1987. He also consults for several companies.

A 1980 graduate in chemistry from the University of California-San Diego, Hopkins received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1986.

Richard Jordan

Richard Jordan, a specialist in organometallic and inorganic chemistry, has joined the Chicago faculty as Professor in Chemistry.

Jordan is interested in the design, synthesis and study of reactive organotransition metal complexes and the application of these compounds in catalysis, olefin polymerization and organic synthesis. He and his collaborators have published approximately 100 papers in leading journals, hold three patents and have five additional patents pending. He has made fundamental contributions to the development of metallocene catalysts, which are revolutionizing the polyolefins industry.

His honors include the University of Iowa Faculty Scholar Award, the Union Carbide Research Innovation Award and the Chevron Research Award. He also was an Alfred P. Sloan research fellow from 1989 to 1991.

Jordan comes to Chicago from the University of Iowa, where he had served on the chemistry faculty since 1988 and in the university’s research foundation since 1995. He was a member of the chemistry faculty at Washington State University from 1983 to 1987 and a research chemist at ARCO Chemical Company in 1975 and 1976. He also held appointments as a visiting professor at the University of Rennes in 1992 and at Oxford University, England, in 1991.

He received his B.S. in chemistry with high honors in 1975 from Rutgers University. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton University in 1981 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1981 to 1983.

Steven Lalley

Steven Lalley, whose specialties encompass probability theory, ergodic theory and fractal geometry, has been appointed Professor in Statistics.

Lalley’s research has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation since 1980.

The author or co-author of more than 40 scholarly papers, Lalley’s most recent work will appear in publications such as Probability Theory and Related Fields and Annals of Applied Probability.

Lalley also has delivered more than 20 invited lectures in cities such as Cambridge, Paris and Helsinki on such topics including “Stochastic Growth Models,” and “Filtering Chaotic Time Series.”

He is a member of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society. Lalley taught at Purdue University from 1986 to 1999 and at Columbia University from 1980 to 1986. He was a visiting scholar at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, from 1982 to 1983.

A 1976 graduate of Michigan State University, Lalley earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980.

Mark Lilla

Mark Lilla has joined the Chicago faculty as a Professor on the Committee on Social Thought.

Author of the book G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (Harvard University Press, 1993), Lilla is currently completing The Philosopher and the Tyrant. He also has edited New French Thought: Political Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1994) and co-edited The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (Partisan Review Press, forthcoming) and The Public Face of Architecture: Civic Culture and Public Spaces (Free Press, 1987).

Lilla’s articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and The Wilson Quarterly.

He is a former Fulbright fellow, Humboldt fellow and a Newcombe fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation. He also received the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome.

Since 1996, Lilla has served as associate director of the Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; and the Suntory Foundation in Japan. A fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, Lilla was the institute’s program director from 1994 to 1995. He also is a member of the Honorary Committee of the Center for Political Thought at Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.

A former associate professor of politics at New York University, Lilla began teaching as an assistant professor at NYU in 1990.

In 1991, he received the Leo Strauss Award of the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in political philosophy in the United States. Lilla also has been honored by the French Ministry of Education as a Knight of the Order of Academic Palms.

He earned his Ph.D. in government and a master’s degree in public policy at Harvard University and his A.B. in political science and economics at the University of Michigan.

Philip Reny

Philip Reny, an economic theorist, has been named Professor in Economics.

He is co-author of Advanced Microeconomic Theory (1997) and the author or co-author of many journal articles on topics such as game theory. Among his papers are “Independence on Relative Probability Spaces and Consistent Assessments in Games Trees” and “The Partnered Core of a Game Without Side Payments,” both published in the Journal of Economic Theory.

He has a number of projects underway with colleagues, including “Efficient Auctions for Agents with Interdependent Values,” “On the Existence of Pure Strategy Monotone Equilibrium in Multi-unit Auctions” and “On the Existence of Nash Equilibrium in Discontinuous Supermodular Games with Strategic Complementarities.”

Reny has received research grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S.-Israel Bi-national Science Foundation as well as from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

He served as assistant professor in economics at the University of Western Ontario from 1986 to 1991 and as associate professor in economics there from 1991 to 1994, when he was appointed professor in economics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Reny received his initial university education in Canada, earning a B.A. in economics and mathematics in 1981 from Carleton University and an M.A. in economics in 1982 from the University of Western Ontario. He continued his education at Princeton, where he received a Ph.D. in economics in 1988.

George Triantis

George Triantis, a Visiting Professor in Chicago’s Law School during the 1998 Fall Quarter, joined the University in July as Professor in the Law School.

Before joining the Chicago faculty, Triantis was the Nicholas E. Chimicles research professor in business law and regulation at the University of Virginia School of Law.

Triantis, whose specialty is contract and commercial law, has held visiting professorships at Columbia University Law School, Harvard Law School, T.C. Williams School of Law at the University of Richmond, University of Toronto, and New York University School of Law. He also was a visiting professor at Virginia in 1993, becoming a professor of law there in 1994 and director of the John M. Olin program in law and economics in 1995.

Honored by both his peers and students, Triantis was awarded the Roger and Madeleine Traynor Faculty Achievement Award for Excellence in Legal Scholarship at Virginia in 1998 and was voted Professor of the Year in 1992 by the students at the University of Toronto. He previously taught as an assistant professor on the faculty of law and the faculty of management at the University of Toronto.

Triantis, who also studies secured transactions and bankruptcy, is at the forefront of applying options theory to the study of contracts and commercial law. He has had academic papers published in numerous law journals, including “Debt Financing and Motivation,” published in the Richmond Law Review; “The Role of Debt in Interactive Corporate Governance,” published in the California Law Review; and “Timing Problems in Contract Breach Decisions,” published in the Journal of Law and Economics.

Triantis received his J.S.D. in 1989 from Stanford University. He also received a L.L.M. from the University of Virginia and a L.L.B. from the University of Toronto. Specializing in economics, Triantis earned a B.A. in 1980 from Trinity College, University of Toronto.

Stories by Laurie Davis, William Harms and Steve Koppes.