Princeton Weekly Bulletin June 8, 1998
Six join tenured faculty
The trustees have approved the appointments of four professors -- Kofi Agawu, Patrick Bolton, Sun-Yung Alice Chang and Peter Singer -- and the promotion of two -- Kevan Shokat and Bruce Western -- to the tenured position of associate professor. All appointments begin July 1 except Singer's, which begins July 1, 1999.
Agawu, professor of music, works in the areas of music analysis and theory, semiotics and music, music of the 19th century, and West African music. He has diplomas in musicianship, theory and the teaching of singing from the Royal Academy of Music, as well as a 1977 BA from Reading University, a 1978 MMus from Kings's College, London, and a 1982 PhD from Stanford University.
Currently visiting scholar at the University of Ghana, he has been a professor at Yale since 1995. He previously taught at Cornell for six years, at King's College, London for three, at Duke for one and at Haverford College for two years.
Among his many publications are African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective (1995) and Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (1991), which won the 1994 Society for Music Theory Young Scholar Award. A Guggenheim Fellow in 199091, Agawu received the 1992 Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association and the International Musicological Society.
Bolton, John H. Scully '66 Professor of Finance in the Economics Department, specializes in applied economic theory, corporate finance, industrial organization and contract theory. With bachelor's degrees from the Institut d'Etudes politiques de Paris (1979) and Cambridge (1982), he earned a 1983 MSc, a 1984 MPhil and a 1986 PhD at the London School of Economics.
After a year as assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley and three at Harvard, Bolton spent a year as chargé de recherche at the Laboratoire d'Econometrie of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and another as chargé de cours associé at the Free University of Brussels Institute for European Studies. In 1991 he went to the London School of Economics as Cassel Professor and taught there for three years before returning to the Free University of Brussels. In 1996 he became senior research fellow at the Center for Economic Research at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.
Born in Ireland, Bolton holds joint French and American nationality. Managing editor of the Review of Economic Studies since 1995, he has published articles and book chapters.
Chang, professor of mathematics, specializes in classical analysis and geometric PDE. She earned her 1970 BA at National Taiwan University and her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.
Chang was assistant professor at the State University of New York, Buffalo and University of California, Los Angeles before spending the year 1977-78 as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. After a year at the University of Maryland, she returned to the faculty of UCLA in 1980. Professor there since 1982, she was also a professor at Berkeley for two years and a visiting professor at Princeton and at the Institute in 1992-93.
A Sloan Fellow in 1979-81, Chang won UCLA's Outstanding Women of Science Award in 1989 and the American Mathematical Society's 1995 Satter Prize.
Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values, with special interests in animal rights and social philosophy.
A 1967 graduate of the University of Melbourne, he earned his BPhil at Oxford in 1971 and remained there as lecturer for two years. He was a visiting assistant professor at New York University in 1975-76 and spent a year as senior lecturer at La Trobe University in Australia before becoming professor at Monash University, where he was the first director of the Centre for Human Bioethics for eight years and is now deputy director.
DeCamp Lecturer at Princeton in 1992, Singer has been a visiting professor at the universities of British Columbia; Colorado; California, Irvine; Rome; and Canterbury. In 1992 he was elected Foundation President of the International Association of Bioethics.
Coeditor of Bioethics since 1985, Singer has published many articles and more than two dozen books, including Democracy and Disobedience (1973, 1994), Animal Liberation (1975, 1991, published in nine languages), Practical Ethics (1979), The Reproduction Revolution (with D. Wells), Should the Baby Live? (with H. Chase) and Rethinking Life and Death (1995), which won the National Book Council of Australia nonfiction award. He also wrote the major article on ethics in the current edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Promoted to tenure
In Chemistry and Molecular Biology, Shokat specializes in bio-organic chemistry and cellular signal transduction. His research is highly interdisciplinary, utilizing synthetic organic chemistry as well as molecular biology to address questions in chemistry and biology. One of his projects has been the identification of the substrates for the protein kinases, which are involved in human diseases such as cancer and immune system dysfunctions.
A 1986 graduate of Reed College, Shokat earned his 1991 PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a life sciences fellow of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Stanford University before coming to Princeton in 1994. He received a 1996 Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation and is a 1996 Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences. A 1997 Searle Scholar, he is also a Glaxo-Wellcome Scholar in organic chemistry.
Shokat has published numerous articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Current Biology, Chemistry and Biology and Nature, among other journals.
Sociologist Western works in the areas of political sociology, economic sociology and methodology. Appointed lecturer at Princeton in 1993, he became assistant professor in 1994. He earned his BA from the University of Queensland, Australia in 1987, and his 1990 MA and 1993 PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.
A 1995 Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and currently Richard Stockton Bicentennial Preceptor, Western has received research support from the National Science Foundation, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Russell Sage Foundation, and University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
In addition to numerous articles, chapters and reviews, he is author of Between Class and Market: Postwar Unionization in the Capitalist Democracies (1997).