Princeton University

Fourteen new faculty members appointed

Princeton NJ — The Board of Trustees has approved the appointments of 14 new faculty members — three to full professor, one to associate professor and 10 to assistant professor.

The new full professors are Mark Beissinger in politics; Carles Boix in politics and public affairs; and Christopher Skinner in mathematics. All are effective Sept. 1, 2006.

Beissinger is coming to Princeton from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has been a faculty member since 1988. A specialist in comparative politics, Beissinger was promoted to full professor at Wisconsin in 1995 and served as chair of its Department of Politics from 2001 to 2004. He also served as the founding director of Wisconsin’s Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia for six years.

Beissinger is the author or editor of four books, including “Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State” (Cambridge University Press, 2002). That volume won both the 2003 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, presented by the American Political Science Association for the best book published in the United States on government, politics or international affairs, and the 2003 Mattei Dogan Award, presented by the Society for Comparative Research for the best book published in the field of comparative research.

A graduate of Duke University, Beissinger earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, where he was an assistant professor from 1982 to 1987.

Boix has been a faculty member at the University of Chicago since 1999. He also taught at Ohio State University for four years. He is a specialist in comparative politics and the political economy of advanced industrialized countries.

Boix has twice won the American Political Science Association’s William Riker Award for Best Book on Political Economy: for “Political Parties, Growth and Equality (Cambridge University Press, 1998); and for “Democracy and Redistribution” (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics.

Boix has received a German Marshall Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, the latter to work on a forthcoming book titled “The Birth of Party Democracy.” A graduate of the University of Barcelona in Spain, Boix earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Skinner earned his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1997. Since 2000, he has been a faculty member at the University of Michigan, where he earned his bachelor’s degree.

A member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1997 to 2000, he also held a visiting position there and at Princeton in 2003-04. He is a specialist in number theory.

Skinner currently holds two grants from the National Science Foundation and a five-year fellowship from the Packard Foundation.

Marc Melitz was appointed an associate professor of economics and international affairs with continuing tenure, effective July 1, 2006. A specialist in international trade, he has served on the faculty at Harvard University since 2000. He also has been affiliated with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Economic Policy Research.

Melitz was a 2005 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Haverford College, a master’s degree from the University of Maryland School of Business and Management and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

The appointments to assistant professor are:

Janet Chen, appointed assistant professor of history and East Asian studies for a three-year term, effective Sept. 1, 2006. Her research and teaching focus on modern China. A graduate of Williams College, she holds a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Devin Fore, appointed assistant professor of German for a three-year term, effective Sept. 1, 2006. He specializes in German literature, visual art and cultural theory. A graduate of Vassar College, he holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has been a postdoctoral fellow for the past year at Cornell University.

Emilie Hafner-Burton, appointed assistant professor of politics and international affairs for a three-year term, effective July 1, 2006. An authority on international relations, she has served as a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University since 2003. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Seattle University and her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Elizabeth Harman, appointed assistant professor of philosophy and the University Center for Human Values, for a three-year term, effective July 1, 2006. She will come to Princeton from New York University, where she has been an assistant professor since 2003. Her research and teaching concentrate on ethics and metaphysics. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

AnneMarie Luijendijk, appointed assistant professor of religion for a three-year term, effective July 1, 2006. She earned her doctor of theology from Harvard University, where she has been a lecturer for the past year. A specialist in early Christianity, she also holds a master’s degree from Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands.

Ekaterina Pravilova, appointed assistant professor of history for a three-year term, effective Sept. 1, 2006. An authority on imperial Russia, she previously has taught at the North-Western Academy of Public Administration and at European University, both in St. Petersburg. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from St. Petersburg State University and a Ph.D. from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Pierre Raphael, appointed assistant professor of mathematics for a three-year term, effective Sept. 1, 2006. His teaching and research focus on analysis and partial differential equations. For the past two years, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at Université Paris-Sud. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Ecole Polytechnique, his master’s degree from Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and his doctoral degree from Université de Cergy-Pontoise.

Tracy Smith, appointed assistant professor of creative writing in the University Center for Creative and Performing Arts for a three-year term, effective July 1, 2006. She has been a visiting assistant professor at Princeton for the past year, and also has taught at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York, the City University of New York and the University of Pittsburgh. An award-winning poet, Smith earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and her M.F.A. from Columbia University.

Lian-Tao Wang, appointed assistant professor of physics for a three-year term, effective Sept. 1, 2006. A specialist in high-energy theory, he has spent two years each as a research associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard University. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Fudan University in China and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Simone Warzel, appointed assistant professor of mathematics for a three-year term, effective July 1, 2006. A specialist in mathematical physics, she has been a visiting research fellow at Princeton since 2004. She earned her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, where she also was a research assistant.