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Date: June 3, 1997
Princeton University Honors
Four Faculty for Teaching
PRINCETON, N.J., June 3 -- Princeton University honored four of its faculty for their accomplishments as teachers at this morning's 250th Commencement exercises. The 1997 President's Awards for Distinguished Teaching were presented to Miguel Centeno, assistant professor of sociology; Emmet Gowin, professor in the Council of the Humanities and Visual Arts; Gideon Rosen, assistant professor of philosophy; and Lawrence Rosen, professor of anthropology.
Centeno, who becomes associate professor July 1, has just been named master of Wilson College. Author of Mexico in the 1990s (1991) and editor of The Politics of Expertise in Latin America (1997), he has taught courses on Social Change, Contemporary Cuba and Mexico, and Latinos in the United States, among others, including introductory sociology.
According to a colleague, Centeno offers "enthusiasm, brilliance, charisma and genuine concern for students." An undergraduate said Centeno "stimulates and challenges" students "while setting them free to discover the wonder and beauty of the material for themselves."
A 1980 graduate of Yale University, Centeno earned a master's degree in management from Yale in 1987 and his PhD in sociology in 1990, the same year he joined the Princeton faculty.
Gowin has taught photography at Princeton since 1973, offering introductory and advanced photography courses. He was tenured in 1991 and promoted to professor in 1994.
A 1965 graduate of Richmond Professional Institute, he earned an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1967. Exhibitions of Gowin's work have been held in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the Museum of the City of Paris; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which published a retrospective of his work, Emmet Gowin/Photographs (1990).
Described by a student as a "passionate and gifted" photographer and teacher, he was deemed "an invaluable source of information and inspiration" by another. Gowin is "able to facilitate [in students] a realization of their own ideas and projects," said a member of the Class of 1993.
Gideon Rosen, who is Jonathan Dickinson Bicentennial Preceptor, teaches Introduction to Metaphysics and Epistemology, as well as Problems of Philosophy and Philosophy of Mind. He has also taught a freshman seminar in Freedom and Responsibility.
Described by students as "magnetic," "engaging" and "crystal clear," he offers "provocative ideas that challenge every undergraduate."
A 1984 graduate of Columbia University, he received his PhD in 1989 from Princeton. After teaching at the University of Michigan, he joined the Princeton faculty in 1993.
Also interested in the philosophy of mathematics, Rosen is author of A Subject With No Object: Strategies for Nominalist Reconstrual in Mathematics (with J. Burgess, 1997).
Lawrence Rosen graduated from Brandeis University in 1963, earning his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1968 and his JD from Chicago in 1974. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1977 after teaching both anthropology and law at Duke University.
Author of The Anthropology of Justice: Law as Culture in Islamic Society (1989; 1996), he edited Other Intentions: Cultural Contexts and the Attribution of Inner States (1995).
Among the courses Rosen has taught at Princeton are Anthropology of Law, Anthropology of the Middle East, Islamic Law, Indigenous Peoples and the Right of Cultural Integrity, and introductory anthropology.
Credited by one student with being "a wonderful Devil's advocate," he "makes students see both sides of every issue," according to another student. A faculty colleague observed that Rosen is "particularly successful in getting students to reexamine their assumptions in dealing with cross-cultural issues."