From the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, February 2, 1998
Trustees name two to tenured faculty ranks
Two faculty members have been appointed to tenured positions:
Peter Schäfer, who was named first incumbent of the Ronald O. Perelman Professorship of Judaic Studies in December, and Eduardo Cadava, who was promoted to associate professor of English in January.
Perelman Professor
Schäfer, a specialist in ancient Israel, Rabbinics and early Jewish mysticism, has been director of the Institute for Judaic Studies at the Free University of Berlin since 1984. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study for the past three years, two of them as Mellon Professor.
At Princeton, he will join the Ronald O. Perelman Institute for Judaic Studies, which, like the chair, was endowed by financier Ronald Perelman. Created in 1995, the institute is designed to bring together leading scholars to examine Jewish history, religion, literature, thought, society, politics and cultures.
Born and educated in Germany, Schäfer studied at the University of Bonn; Hebrew University in Jerusalem; the University of Freiburg, where he earned his PhD in 1968; and the University of Frankfurt, where he received his habilitation in 1973. He taught at Tübingen and Cologne before becoming director of the institute in Berlin, and he has been a visiting professor at Hebrew University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He was the 1994 recipient of Germany's Leibniz prize.
Among his recent books are Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World (1997); a multi-volume study of magic texts in the Cairo Geniza (with S. Shaked, starting in 1994); a study of principal themes in Jewish mysticism that appeared in English asThe Hidden and Manifest God (1992); and a multivolume series of synopses of the Jerusalem Talmud (with H.J. Becker, starting in 1991). He has also written nearly 70 scholarly articles (both in German and in English), a dozen encyclopedia entries and some 60 book reviews.
Editor of the Jewish Studies Quarterly, Schäfer also serves as coeditor of several ongoing projects: a translation of the Jerusalem Talmud, a history of ancient Judaism and early Christianity, texts and studies in ancient Judaism, and texts and studies in medieval and modern Judaism.
Cadava
Cadava has
been a member of the Princeton faculty since 1989, when he was
appointed assistant professor. In 1992 he was named John Maclean Jr.
Presidential Preceptor. He earned his 1979 BA from the University of
Arizona and his 1988 PhD from the University of California, Irvine.
Specializing in American literature and literary theory, Cadava has taught a wide range of courses at Princeton, including The Age of Emerson, The American Renaissance, History of Criticism, Literature and Photography, The Ethics of Friendship, and Poetics of Colonialism. He also participates regularly in the American Studies and European Cultural Studies programs.
Cadava has received several fellowships, including a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship for University Teachers and, most recently, a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. On leave from Princeton this academic year, he is visiting associate professor at the University of Iowa.
Cadava is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (1997), a study of Walter Benjamin's recourse to the language of photo-graphy in his discussions of history; and Emerson and the Climates of History (1997), a study of the politics of Emerson's meteorological reflections. He also coedited a collection of essays entitled Who Comes After the Subject? (1991).
He is currently working on a project on the politics of represen-tation ("Traces of Democracy") and a study of the relation between nationalism and mourning ("Mourning Nations")
Promoted to professor
In Physics,
Peter Meyers has been promoted to professor, as of July 1. He
works with the high-energy physics group. In 1997, he says,
"after a 10-year search, our experiment published evidence for one
process that could challenge or further confirm the very successful
`standard model' of elementary particles and their intereactions."
Meyers teaches freshman physics, and introductory courses in quantum mechanics for undergraduates and in high energy physics for graduate students. He also teaches Contemporary Physics, a course for nonscientists.
He came to Princeton in 1984 as research assistant and became
assistant professor in 1985 and associate professor in 1992. Winner
of teaching awards from the Undergraduate Engineering Council in 1989
and 1990, he won a Presidential Distinguished Teaching Award in
1991.
Faculty reappointments
The following assistant professors have been reappointed for three years beginning July 1:
In Architecture, Alessandra Ponte; in Art and Archaeology, Thomas Leisten; in Economics, Igal Hendel and Alessandro Lizzeri; in Mathematics, Arun Ram; in Music, Paul Koonce and Rob Wegman; in Politics, Oliver Avens, Sheri Berman and Mark Fey; and in Romance Languages and Literatures, Jean-Marc Kehres and Luiza Moreira.
The following have been reappointed for one year: In East Asian Studies, Soho Machida; in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Emery Snyder; and in Politics, Keisuke Iida.