News from PRINCETON
UNIVERSITY
Office of Communications
Stanhope Hall
Princeton, New Jersey 08544-5264
Telephone 609-258-3601; Fax 609-258-1301
January 26, 2002
Contact: Marilyn Marks (609) 258-3601, mmarks@princeton.edu
Princeton appoints Anthony Appiah, James Haxby as senior faculty
members
Grants tenure to Thomas Duffy; promotes Giovanni Maggi
to full professor
Princeton, N.J. - Princeton University's Board of Trustees today appointed
two scholars to the faculty as full professors, effective Sept. 1, 2002.
They are: Kwame Anthony Appiah, named as the Laurance S. Rockefeller
University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human
Values; and James Van Loan Haxby, appointed as professor of psychology.
The board also promoted Thomas S. Duffy from assistant professor of
geosciences to associate professor with continuing tenure and Giovanni
Maggi from associate to full professor of economics, and made other
promotions and appointments.
Appiah, currently the Charles H. Carswell Professor of Afro-American
Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University, specializes in moral
and political philosophy, African and African-American studies, literary
theory and criticism, and issues of personal and political identity,
multiculturalism and nationalism. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1991,
after holding faculty positions at Duke, Cornell and Yale universities.
His writings include numerous scholarly books, essays and articles
along with reviews, short fiction, three novels and a volume of poetry.
Along with Princeton Provost Amy Gutmann, Appiah wrote "Color Conscious:
The Political Morality of Race" (Princeton University Press, 1996),
which won the Annual Book Award of the North American Society for Social
Philosophy, the Ralph J. Bunche Award of the American Political Science
Association and the Gustavus Myers Award for the Study of Human Rights.
His book, "In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture"
(Oxford University Press, 1992), was honored by the African Studies
Association, the Cleveland Foundation and the Modern Language Association.
Appiah also is co-editor, with Harvard University Professor Henry Louis
Gates Jr., of the 3,000-article "Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African
and African-American Experience" and the Encarta Africana CD-Rom. His
most recent projects are a second set of Tanner Lectures in Human Values
(a lecture series presented by several universities around the world),
and an annotated collection of proverbs from his homeland, Asante, Ghana,
on which he collaborated with his mother.
Appiah received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at Clare
College, Cambridge University.
"I believe that, of all the universities in the world, Princeton is
the one where I have the best chance of doing the work, as a scholar
and teacher, that I want to do," he said. "I have the deepest respect
for the faculty and the traditions of the philosophy department and
of the Center for Human Values, each of which strikes me as providing
quite extraordinary colleagues with whom to pursue the questions that
engage me."
Haxby has been a researcher at the National Institutes of Health in
Bethesda, Md., since 1982. Currently, he is a research psychologist
and chief of the Section on Functional Brain Imaging in the Laboratory
of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health, which
investigates the human brain systems that control visual perception,
attention and memory. He also has been a senior staff fellow, a research
psychologist and chief of the Neuropsychology Unit in the Laboratory
of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging.
Haxby has published more than 125 articles in medical and scientific
journals on topics such as visual cognition, perception and memory.
He and his colleagues recently published a study in which they were
able to tell what kind of object a person was viewing a face, house
or scissors, for example by the pattern of brain activity evoked.
A graduate of Carleton College, Haxby was a Fulbright-DAAD Scholar
at the Universität Bonn. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of
Minnesota. Among other honors, Haxby has received the National Institutes
of Health Director's Award and is an external scientific member of the
Max Planck Society.
At Princeton, Haxby will be active in the Center for the Study of Brain,
Mind and Behavior, an interdisciplinary research center that investigates
how the physical mechanisms of the brain give rise to functions of the
mind, such as perception, moral behavior and logical thought.
"I look forward to working with the superb graduate and undergraduate
students that Princeton is known for and to being challenged by their
fresh perspectives," said Haxby, noting that the NIH, while larger than
Princeton, has no students. At Princeton, he plans to continue his research
in visual cognitive neuroscience, particularly his work in the social
aspects of face perception, such as the ability to perceive and interpret
small changes in expression during social interaction. (more) Princeton
University President Shirley M. Tilghman said she was "delighted to
welcome both of these scholars to Princeton."
"Anthony Appiah brings even greater distinction to our philosophy department,
to our Center for Human Values, and to our distinguished and growing
work in African-American studies," she said. "Jim Haxby will strengthen
our work in brain imaging and cognition, an area that has become a focus
of our psychology department and that promises to tell us a great deal
about the complex questions surrounding why people think and act as
they do."
Duffy was promoted to the University's tenured ranks after serving
for five years as an assistant professor. He holds a Ph.D. from the
California Institute of Technology, where he was a postdoctoral fellow.
His research studies the structure, composition and evolution of the
Earth and other planets through laboratory experiments on the properties
of minerals and other geological materials at extreme conditions of
pressure and temperature. Maggi, who was promoted to full professor,
received his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. He joined
the Princeton faculty as an assistant professor in 1994 and was promoted
to associate professor, with tenure, last year. His research interests
include international trade, contracts, industrial organization and
political economy. The promotions of Duffy and Maggi are effective July
1, 2002.
In addition, Robert L. Kimmel, an instructor in economics, was promoted
to assistant professor, and Li-Shiuan Peh was appointed assistant professor
of electrical engineering. Both of these actions are effective Feb.
1, 2002. Twenty-two assistant professors were reappointed for varying
terms.
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