From the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, April 14, 1997
Seven are promoted
to tenured ranksSeven current members of the faculty were promoted to the tenured rank of associate professor, as of July 1, by the trustees at their quarterly meeting on April 4: April Alliston of Comparative Literature, Miguel Centeno of Sociology, Beatriz Colomina of the School of Architecture, Georgios Deodatis of Civil Engineering and Operations Research, Sanjeev Kulkarni of Electrical Engineering, Thomas Levin of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Gerard Waters of Molecular Biology.
Alliston's interests include history and theory of the novel, literary theory and the relation of the novel to nonfictional prose forms.
She joined the Princeton faculty in 1989 after a year as a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow at Columbia University. She earned her 1980 BA and her 1988 PhD at Yale, having also studied at the University of Siena and the Free University of Berlin.
This semester Alliston is teaching Comparative History of Literary Criticism and co-teaching Introduction to the Study of Gender; she also teaches Enlightenment and Romanticism, The Eighteenth Century in Europe, and Gender and Narrative.
She is the author ofVirtue's Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century British and French Women's Fiction (1996), among other publications, and coauthor of the forthcoming "A Cultural Biography of James Fenimore Cooper." In progress, she says, is a book "investigating the role of gender conventions in shaping modern distinctions between historiographical and fictional narrative as they developed through the Enlightenment in France and England."
Alliston has received a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 1997-98.
Centeno, a native of Cuba, graduated from Yale University in 1980. After working as a consultant in New York City, he returned to Yale for a 1987 master's degree in management, earning his PhD in sociology in 1990. He joined the University faculty in 1990.
Centeno has been a National Science Foundation, Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson and Harry Frank Guggenheim fellow, and has also received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a visiting scholar at the Russian Humanities University in Moscow, the University of California, San Diego and various universities in Mexico.
Author of Mexico in the 1990s (1991), Democracy Within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico (2nd ed., 1997) and editor of Toward a New Cuba (1997) and The Politics of Expertise in Latin America (1997), he is also author of numerous articles and book chapters. He is currently working on a book "analyzing the role of war in Latin America and explaining the long peace on that continent," he says.
During his years in Princeton, Centeno has taught courses on Social Change, and Contemporary Cuba and Mexico, among others. This year he is teaching Introductory Sociology, Latinos in the United States and Political Sociology.
Currently Class of 1936 Bicentennial Preceptor, Centeno is the residential faculty fellow at Mathey College.
Colomina joined the faculty of the School of Architecture in 1988 after teaching at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture and Planning and at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona, Spain. She earned her master's degree in architecture in 1976 and her PhD in 1990 from the latter institution.
An architectural historian and theorist, she has written extensively on architecture and the modern institutions of representation, particularly print media, photography, advertising, film and television.
Colomina is editor of Architecture-production (1988) and Sexuality and Space (1992), which was awarded the 1993 International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects. Her most recent book, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994), won the 1995 International Book Award. She is currently at work on a book on the relationship between war and modern architecture.
She has received awards from the Chicago Institute for Architecture (SOM Foundation), Graham Foundation and Fondation Le Corbusier. In 1995, she was appointed Maclean Preceptor at Princeton and Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C.
Among the courses she teaches are Architecture and the Visual Arts, Analysis and Theory of Modern Architecture, and Topics in the History and Theory of Architecture.
Deodatis specializes in probabilistic methods in civil engineering and engineering mechanics, with emphasis on earthquake engineering applications. He was appointed to the faculty in 1991 after three years as a lecturer and research associate. In 1992 he won a National Young Investigator Award to support his research.
Deodatis teaches courses on random vibrations, design of concrete structures and introduction to finite element methods. In 1995 he was the winner of a Presidential Award for Distinguished Teaching, and he currently holds the NEC Preceptorship.
His publications include more than 30 papers in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics, Journal of Probabilistic Engineering Mechanics and other technical journals. Among his current projects is a book entitled "Simulation of Stochastic Processes in Fields," coauthored with M. Shinozuka, which is under contract to Cambridge University Press.
A native of Greece, Deodatis received his 1982 diploma in civil engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and earned an MS in 1984 and a PhD in 1987 at Columbia University.
Kulkarni' s interests lie, he says, in two main areas: primarily, statistical pattern recognition, machine learning and nonparametric estimation; and secondarily, image and video processing.
A member of the Princeton faculty since 1991, he has taught courses on pattern recognition, machine learning, computer vision, detection and estimation theory. New this semester is a course on learning theory and epistemology that he developed with Gilbert Harmon of Philosophy with support from the President's 250th Anniversary Fund for innovation in the classroom.
Kulkarni won a National Young Investigator Award in 1995, Army Research Office Young Investigator Award 1992, NSF Research Initiation Award in 1992. He is the author of some 30 papers in journals such as Annals of Statistics; Machine Learning; and IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, on Automatic Control, and on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence .
A graduate of Clarkson University with BS degrees in mathematics and electrical engineering, he also holds master's degrees in math (from Clarkson) and electrical engineering (from Stanford University). He earned his PhD in electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991, and he was a member of the technical staff in the laser radar measurements group at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.
Levin, who joined the faculty in 1991, was named Osgood University Preceptor in 1995. His research and teaching interests range from German philosophy to media history and theory. In Germanic Languages and Literatures, he teaches courses on the history of esthetics and critical theory, on German film history and theory, and on literary and cultural theory. He also regularly teaches interdisciplinary courses in film and new media in the European Cultural Studies Program, Writing Program and Freshman Seminars Program.
Educated at Yale, Levin earned his bachelor's degree there in 1979, master's degrees in art history and philosophy, and his PhD in philosophy in 1991, while also teaching in the departments of philosophy, literature, film and art history. He has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities (1990), Institute for Advanced Study/Collegium Budapest (1994) and Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna (1995).
A specialist in the works of Siegfried Kracauer, Levin has published a bibliography of Kracauer's works (1989), a volume of essays (Neue Interpretationen, 1990) and a volume of translations of early writings (The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays , 1995). Current projects include a new edition of Kracauer's 1947 From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film and a critical monograph entitled "Resistance to Cinema: Reading German Film Theory."
Waters studies the molecular mechanisms that govern protein traffic patterns within the cell. He came to Princeton in 1989 as research associate and was appointed assistant professor in 1991. He has been a Life Sciences Research Foundation Fellow and currently holds a Lucille P. Markey Biomedical Research Fellowship. The work of his lab is supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Science Foundation.
This semester Waters is co-teaching a graduate course in Cellular Bio-chemistry; in the fall he will co-teach undergraduate biochemistry.
A 1980 graduate of Hofstra University, he was a research technician at Pfizer Central Research for three years before earning his 1989 PhD from Rockefeller University. He is coauthor of numerous scientific papers in such publications as Nature , Science and the Journal of Cell Biology .