13 New faculty members named, 4 promoted

Princeton NJ -- The appointments of 13 new faculty members, seven as full professors, one as an associate professor and five as assistant professors, have been approved by the Board of Trustees.

The full professors are: Christopher Chyba, professor of astrophysics and international affairs, effective July 1, 2005; Helen (Sarah) Kay, professor of French and Italian, effective Feb. 1, 2006; Philip Morgan, professor of history and the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolutionary Era, effective July 1, 2005; Stephen Morris, professor of economics, effective Sept. 1, 2005; Jonas Pontusson, professor of politics, effective July 1, 2005; Kim Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values, effective July 1, 2005; and Hyun Song Shin, professor of economics, effective Jan. 1, 2006.

The associate professor is Delia Graff, associate professor of philosophy. Her appointment, with continuing tenure, is effective Sept. 1, 2005.

The assistant professors are: Jeremy Braddock, assistant professor of English, effective July 1, 2005; Rachel DeLue, assistant professor of art and archaeology, effective Sept. 1, 2005; Natasha Lee, assistant professor of French and Italian, effective Sept. 1, 2005; Michael Reynolds, assistant professor of Near Eastern studies, effective Sept. 1, 2005; and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, assistant professor of economics and international affairs, effective Aug. 1, 2005. All have three-year appointments.

Professors

Chyba will come to Princeton from Stanford University, where he has been a faculty member in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences since 1999. He also is co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. Previously he taught at the University of Arizona for two years.

Chyba’s field of specialization is science and security policy, and he held several positions in the federal government before entering academia. He has worked for the White House Office of Science and Technology, where he researched surveillance for biological terrorism and threats of emerging infectious diseases. He also was director for international environmental affairs for the National Security Council staff and an associate at the NASA Ames Research Center and Goddard Space Flight Center.

A graduate of Swarthmore College, Chyba earned a second bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge. He was awarded a Ph.D. in astronomy from Cornell University.

Chyba was the recipient of a Marshall scholarship in 1982, a White House fellowship in 1993 and a MacArthur fellowship in 2001. In 1994 he was selected as one of Time magazine’s “50 most promising leaders age 40 and under.” He is co-editor of “Comets and the Origins and Evolution of Life” (Springer-Verlag, 1997), and he has written numerous articles for the journals Science, Nature and Icarus.

Kay, who specializes in French medieval literature, will join Princeton from the University of Cambridge, where she has been a faculty member since 1984. She also has taught at Liverpool University and has been a visiting professor at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania.

A fellow of the British Academy, Kay has been awarded a four-year grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Board in England for a research project, “Poetic Knowledge in Late Medieval France.” The project involves a series of seminars and meetings to analyze the role of poetry in transmitting and shaping knowledge in the later Middle Ages.

She also is working on a monograph series for the University of Pennsylvania Press on French literature. She is the author of five other books and the editor of two more.

Kay earned her B.A. and Ph.D. from Oxford University and her M.A. from the University of Reading.

Morgan has been a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University since 2000; in 2003 he was appointed the Harry Black Professor of History. He also has taught at the College of William and Mary, Florida State University and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

A scholar of early America, Morgan also studies African-American history and the Atlantic world. He has written more than 40 articles for journals and other publications, mainly on slavery. He is co-editor of “Black Experience and the Empire” (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Morgan’s 1998 book, “Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the 18th-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry,” won 10 awards, including the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University and the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society. It also won two awards from the American Historical Association: the Albert Beveridge Award and the Wesley-Logan Prize.

In 2001, Morgan was elected to the Royal Historical Society and the Society of American Historians. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2002. Morgan received his bachelor’s degree from Cambridge University and his Ph.D. from University College London.

Morris will come to Princeton from Yale University, where he has been a faculty member since 1998 — most recently serving as the Ford Foundation Professor of Economics. A specialist in microeconomics and game theory, he also taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1991 to 1998. He has been a visiting lecturer, scholar or professor at Brown University, the International Monetary Fund, the London School of Economics, Northwestern University, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the University of Melbourne in Australia, the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium and Makerere University in Uganda.

Morris has written or co-written numerous articles and papers for leading academic and economics journals on topics such as the economic basis of political correctness, information economics, speculative investor behavior, inflation dynamics, fiscal stabilization and exchange rate instability, private value auctions, risk management and currency crises. He currently is the foreign editor of the Review of Economic Studies, associate editor of Econometrica and a member of the editorial board of the American Economic Review. He was the founding editor of BEPress Journals of Theoretical Economics, where he serves on the editorial board.

Morris has been the recipient of four National Science Foundation grants for economic research. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 1996-98 and won the Carl Arvid Andersen Prize Fellowship from the Cowles Foundation in 1990. His other honors include election as a fellow of the Econometric Society in 2002.

Morris earned his B.A. from Cambridge University and was an economist for Uganda’s Ministry of Planning and Economic Development before earning his Ph.D. from Yale.

Scheppele currently is the John J. O’Brien Professor of Comparative Law and professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught since 1996. She has won several teaching awards, both at the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of Michigan, where she taught for 12 years. This past year, she was a fellow in Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs.

Scheppele’s primary field is comparative constitutional law, and she has spent nearly half of the last decade working under three different grants from the National Science Foundation in post-socialist countries undergoing constitutional transformations. While in the Program in Law and Public Affairs, she was working to finish her book based on this research called “How Constitutions Work: Rethinking Constitutional Theory Through Constitutional Ethnography.”

Scheppele also conducts research on constitutions under stress, most recently writing about post-9/11 responses in comparative perspective. Her book “Legal Secrets” won special recognition from the American Sociological Association and, in an earlier form, a dissertation prize from the American Political Science Association.

She received an A.B. from Barnard College and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Pontusson will arrive from Cornell University, where he has taught in the government department since 1984.

A native of Stockholm, he has written numerous journal articles about Sweden and other European nations. His field of specialization is comparative politics.

Pontusson is the author of “The Limits of Social Democracy: Investment Politics in Sweden” (Cornell University Press, 1992). He is co-editor of “Unions, Employers and Central Banks: Macroeconomic Coordination and Institutional Change in Social Market Economies” (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and “Bargaining for Change: Union Politics in Europe and North America” (Cornell University Press, 1992).

A graduate of Amherst College, Pontusson received his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley.

Shin will join the Princeton faculty from the London School of Economics, where he has taught since 2000. The holder of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford University, he also has taught there and at the University of Southampton.

A specialist in applied microeconomic theory, his research interests center on financial economics, with particular reference to asset pricing, risk, disclosures and financial regulation. He is the author or co-author of numerous papers for professional journals on topics including liquidity “black holes,” the social value of public information and the consumption value of gambling.

Elected a fellow of the Econometric Society in 2005, Shin has served as a research fellow of the Center for Economic Policy Research, a council member of the European Economic Association and co-director of the regulation and financial stability program of the Financial Markets Group, one of the leading centers in Europe for academic research into financial markets.

Shin has served in editorial leadership roles with several economics journals, including the Review of Economic Studies, the International Journal of Central Banking, the Journal of Economic Theory and Econometrica.

Associate professor

Graf, whose field is the philosophy of language, logic and metaphysics, was an assistant professor at Princeton from 1997 to 2001, when she left to join the faculty at Cornell University. She has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Assistant professors

Braddock is a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century American literature. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a visiting assistant professor of English at Haverford College.

DeLue, whose field is American art, has been an assistant professor at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.

Lee, who studies 18th-century French literature, has been an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Montreal and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Reynolds, a specialist in Middle East cultures, earned his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2003. He has been a research fellow at Harvard University’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. A graduate of Harvard, he earned an M.A. from Columbia University.

Rossi-Hansberg studies macro-, international and urban economics. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has been an assistant professor at Stanford University.

Board approves four promotions

The Board of Trustees has approved the promotions of four faculty members. The faculty members and their departments, by the academic rank to which they are being promoted, are:

Professor — Thomas Leisten, art and archaeology; Igor Rodnianski, mathematics. Both are effective July 1, 2005.

Associate professor — David Stern, ecology and evolutionary biology; Martin Wikelski, ecology and evolutionary biology. Both, with continuing tenure, are effective July 1, 2005.