Princeton Weekly Bulletin November 16, 1998

Three are named full professor

At the trustees' October 24 meeting, three people were promoted to full professor.

	Robert Freidin, Gyan Prakash, and Leigh Schmidt (photos: Susan Geller)

Robert Freidin was named professor in the Council of the Humanities and Gyan Prakash was named professor of history, starting July 1. Leigh Schmidt was named professor of religion, as of September 1.

Freidin joined the faculty as director of the Linguistics Program in 1985 after a year as a visiting faculty member in Germanic Languages and Literatures and became associate professor of philosophy in 1988. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, he earned his 1971 PhD at Indiana University. Interested in theoretical linguistics, he has written articles on grammatical rules and on the theories of anaphora, case and predicate/argument structure. He is the author of Foundations of Generative Syntax (1992) and editor of Principles and Parameters in Comparative Grammar (1991) and Current Issues in Comparative Grammar (1995).

Prakash, who specializes in the history of colonial India, joined the faculty in 1988 as assistant professor and became associate professor in 1994. He earned his BA at Delhi University and MA at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, and his 1984 PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. Publications include edited volumes After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (1995) and Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial india (1990). He is currently working on a book entitled "Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of India."

Schmidt, whose field is American religious history, joined the tenured faculty at Princeton in 1996 after teaching at Drew University's Theological and Graduate Schools for seven years. He earned his BA at the University of California, Riverside, and his 1987 PhD at Princeton. He is the author of Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (1995) and Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (1989). He is currently working on a book entitled "Hearing Voices: Religion and the Acoustics of Modernity."