Princeton Weekly Bulletin May 24, 1999
Most new emeriti intend to keep on reading, writing, teaching
Professors retire from departments of Art, Astrophysical Sciences, Classics, Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, Math, MAE, Molecular Biology, Philosophy, Romance Languages, and Sociolology
Fifteen professors are transferring to emeritus status this academic year:
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Victor Brombert |
James Marrow, professor of art and archaeology; Goro Shimura, Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Mathematics; and Charles Westoff, Maurice P. During '22 Professor of Demographic Studies and Sociology. All are effective July 1, except Marrow, who retired in January, and Levine and Westoff, who will retire September 1.
A specialist in French and comparative literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, Victor Brombert has been a member of the Princeton faculty since 1975. His interests also include the history of ideas and comparative studies of narrative.
In French, Brombert has taught the 19th and 20th century novel and poetry at undergraduate and graduate; in comparative literature, he has offered courses on the modern antihero and on the prison theme. For the past 12 years he has taught Modern European Writers (Literature 141) to more than 300 undergraduates each fall.
Brombert came to Princeton from Yale, where he earned his BA and his 1953 PhD and taught for 24 years. Raised and educated in Paris, he came to the United States in 1941 and served in the US Army before college. His publications include The Criticism of T.S. Eliot (1949), The Intellectual Hero: Studies in the French Novel, 1880-1955 (1961), The Romantic Prison (French 1976, English 1978), The Hidden Reader (1988), In Praise of Antiheroes (1999) and books on Stendahl, Flaubert and Hugo, as well many articles in edited volumes and scholarly journals.
From 1983 to 1994, he directed the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism, and he chaired the Council of the Humanities from 1989 to 1994. In 1979 he won the University's Behrman Award for distinguished achievement in the humanities.
Brombert has been a visiting professor at the Collège de France, Scuola Normale of Pisa and University of Puerto Rico, as well as US universities. President of the Modern Languages Association in 1989, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and an Officier des Palmes Académiques.
Next year, he says, he will continue to live "a triple life, residing partly in France, partly in Italy and partly in Princeton." He intends to continue writing, especially his memoirs, and looks forward to offering a freshman seminar in 2000-01.
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Clarence Brown |
After earning his BA from Duke University, Brown served for four years with the Army Security Agency, spending a year training in Russian language. He went on to earn his 1962 PhD in Russian Literature at Harvard University.
Brown's first book, The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (1965), which was nominated for a National Book Award, provided the first accurate translations of a Russian writer condemned to Siberia by Stalin, who remained a "nonperson" in the USSR. With the fall of the Communist regime, Brown observes, Mandelstam returned to prominence in Russia. Brown's other books include Mandelstam (1973) (winner of the Christian Gauss Award in Literary Criticism), The Viking Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader (1985), The Noise of Time (1986) and a translation of Evgeny Zamyatin's We (1993).
A lifelong cartoonist, Brown has had his work appear in the Saturday Review, where he was cartoon editor from 1977 to 1984, and in Esquire, Playboy and the Village Voice, among others. Since 1991 he has written a column called "Ink Soup" for the Times of Trenton. He has been a member of the Bobbitt Poetry Prize Committee of the Library of Congress since 1990.
Brown says he plans to do "a great deal of traveling," using Princeton and Seattle, Wash., as home bases, in addition to writing books and newspaper columns and review pieces.
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Elaine Fantham |
Born in England, Fantham took undergraduate degrees at Oxford and earned her PhD at the University of Liverpool in 1962. After two years at the University of Indiana, she moved to Canada, where she was a member of the faculty at the University of Toronto from 1968 to 1986.
A former trustee of the American Academy in Rome, Fantham has been vice president of the Classical Association of Canada and the American Philological Association. She chaired the Classics Department from 1989 to 1992 and currently directs the Program in the Ancient World.
Her publications include Roman Literary Culture (1995) and Women in the Classical World: Image and Text (1994, with H. Foley et al.) and Studies in Republican Latin Imagery (1972), and commentaries on Seneca's Troades, Lucan's Civil War and Ovid's Fasti. She is coeditor and translator of Erasmus: The Educational and Literary Works (1989).
Next year, in addition to teaching one course a semester at Princeton, Fantham will be a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, speaking on Roman literature and society at eight participating institutions. Then, "when I really retire," she says, "I plan to return to Toronto to be near my children and grandchildren."
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Wen Fong |
He offered many courses in Chinese art. From 1961 to 1998 he directed the PhD program in Chinese and Japanese art and archaeology, the first such program in the United States. In 1959 he established Princeton's Far Eastern Seminar Archives, which include more than 50,000 photographs of Chinese and Japanese paintings.
Faculty curator of Asian art at the Art Museum, Fong chaired the museum's executive committee from 1971 to 1974. As special consultant for Asian affairs and head of the Asian Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for the past three decades, and he has helped to create major collections and organized exhibitions and symposiums for both museums. In 1977 he was a member of the Chinese Painting Delegation to the People's Republic of China, the first international art historical delegation to tour China.
Fong's many publications include The Problem of Forgeries in Chinese Painting (1963), Sung and Yuan Painting (1973), Summer Mountains: The Timeless Landscape (1975) and Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th-14th Century (1992). He has also served as editor of volumes associated with major exhibitions. His most recent book is The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliot Collection (1999).
Since 1955 Fong has been a member of the College Art Association of America, which awarded him its Distinguished Teaching Award in 1998. A trustee of the China Institute of America since 1984, he was elected to the Academia Sinica and the American Philosophical Society in 1992.
Fong is currently organizing a large exhibition, tentatively titled "Early Imperial China: The First Millennium," to take place in 2003 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Harold Furth |
A native of Vienna, he earned his AB and his 1960 PhD at Harvard. He worked on controlled fusion research at the Lawrence Radiation Lab from 1956 to 1967, then joined the staff of the Plasma Physics Lab and the University faculty as a professor of astrophysical sciences. He coled the experimental division at the Plasma Physics Lab from 1967 to 1978, when he was appointed associate director and head of the research department. He became program director in 1980 and director of the laboratory in 1981.
In the 1960s Furth and others offered a correct theoretical description of instabilities arising due to resistance in a plasma. Later, he and two others described a method for using energized ion beams to heat a plasma in such a way as to speed fusion reactions --the breakthrough that allowed the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor to approach the milestone called breakeven, in which the power derived from fusion reactions equals the power put into the plasma. Furth also was instrumental in research on the physics of ignited plasmas.
A fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Furth served on the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Research Council's Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics and Resources. He received the E.O. Lawrence Memorial Award from the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1974, the James Clerk Maxwell Prize in Plasma Physics from the American Physical Society in 1983 and the Delmer S. Fahrney Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1992. He holds more than 20 patents, primarily in the areas of controlled magnetic fusion technology and metal-forming with pulsed magnetic fields. He has published more than 200 technical papers.
In recent years, Furth says, he has become active as an advocate of a step-by-step approach to the goal of fusion energy, which would use the expertise gained in high-temperature plasma physics for the benefit of scientific disciplines such as high-energy-accelerator physics, while also pursuing economically viable strategies aimed at near-term industrial applications.
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Ivin Glassman |
Glassman has received numerous teaching honors, including the Ralph Coats Roe Award from the American Society for Engineering Education and the SEAS Distinguished Teaching Award. In 1980 students voted his course on Fossil Fuel Energy Conversion as the number one course at Princeton (along with a class in art and archeology).
In 1972 Glassman founded the University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, which conducts fundamental research as well as public policy analysis. He has been a member and chair of NATO/AGARD's Propulsion and Energetics Panel and a member of the National Academy of Science's Committee on Motor Vehicle Emissions. He is the editor and founder of the journal Combustion Science and Technology. In 1996 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Glassman received his BE and his 1950 DrEng degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1950, when he joined the faculty at Princeton. He was appointed Goddard Professor in 1988.
As emeritus professor, Glassman intends to devote more time to his journal, he says, creating an online letter version and a production system done entirely by e-mail. He also expects to do consulting, to give seminars and to read more of his favorite mystery authors.
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Lionel Gossman |
Born in Scotland, Gossman earned his MA at the University of Glasgow in 1951 and a diplome d'études supérieures at the University of Paris in 1952 and his DPhil at Oxford in 1957.
After teaching at the University of Lille and at Glasgow, he came to the United States in 1958 and joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins, where he taught until 1976, when he came to Princeton as professor of Romance languages and literatures. He was appointed to the Pyne professorship in 1983 and received the Behrman Award in 1990. Named an Officier des Palmes Académiques in 1991, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1996.
Among his publications are Men and Masks: A Study of Molière (1963), Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment (1968), The Empire Unpossess'd (1981), Between History and Literature (1990) and Geneva-Zurich-Basel: History, Culture and National Identity (with N. Bouvier et al., 1994). Forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press is "Basel in the Age of Burckhardt."
Gossman plans to continue with his research, working particularly on some translation projects, in which, he says, "I'll do less talking myself--just present five or six pages of introduction and let the other guy speak."
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Richard Jeffrey |
With an MA in philosophy from the University of Chicago, he worked as a computer research engineer at MIT before earning his 1957 PhD in philosophy at Princeton. His first teaching post was as assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT. In 1959 he moved to Stanford University as assistant professor of philosophy. A visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study and visiting associate professor of philosophy at Princeton in 1963, he then taught at City College of New York and the University of Pennsylvania before joining the faculty at Princeton in 1974.
Author of five books, Jeffrey presented a new theory of decision-making under uncertainty and of probable knowledge in The Logic of Decision (1965). These themes were developed further in Probability and the Art of Judgment (1992). Jeffrey's textbook Computability and Logic (with G. Boolos, 1974) bridged the gap, he says, between general books on logic and treatises written for mathematicians.
Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, Jeffrey is currently president of the Philosophy of Science Association. He means to "keep doing the things I enjoy doing: reading and writing," in addition to traveling and teaching a course on philosophy of science at the University of California, Irvine.
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Russell Kulsrud |
A graduate of the University of Maryland, Kulsrud earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1954, when he joined the research staff of Project Matterhorn, Princeton's effort to develop controlled nuclear fusion. In 1962 he joined the staff of the Plasma Physics Lab as senior research physicist, and in 1964 he became a lecturer in the Astrophysical Sciences Department. From 1964 to 1966 he was head of the Plasma Physics Lab's Theoretical Division.
After a year as professor in applied sciences at Yale, Kulsrud returned to Princeton in 1967 as senior research physicist and lecturer with rank of professor in astrophysical sciences. In 1989 he was named professor of astrophysical sciences.
A Fellow of the American Physical Society since 1968, he was awarded the James Clerk Maxwell Prize in Plasma Physics by the Plasma Physics Division of the American Physical Society in 1993. Author of more than 100 papers, he is a member of the American Physical Society, American Astronomical Society and International Astronomical Union Commission 33.
In addition to continuing research at the Plasma Physics Lab and working with PhD students, Kulsrud plans to "travel a little more to non-meeting destinations" and "to pursue the study of scientific areas such as field theory and general relativity, just for fun." He also wants to spend more time playing the piano.
Yu-Kung Kao's field is Chinese literature, particularly classical poetry and vernacular fiction.
Among Kao's writings are studies of the aesthetic underpinnings of form in T'ang verse and of the evolution of lyric vision in Chinese narrative. He has taught numerous undergraduate and graduate courses on Chinese poetry, fiction and drama.
A native of Mukden, China, Kao earned his BA at National Taiwan University and his 1962 PhD in history at Harvard. He became an assistant professor at Princeton the following year and was promoted to associate professor in 1967 and professor in 1975.
A former officer of the Chinese Teachers Association, he is a member of the Modern Language Association. He also served on the board of directors of the Princeton Regional Ballet.
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Sau-Hai Lam |
After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he came to Princeton for his graduate work in what was then called the Department of Aeronautical Engineering and received his PhD in 1958. In 1959 he joined the faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor. The next year he returned to Princeton to join the faculty. Tenured in 1963, he was appointed to the Wilsey Professorship 10 years later.
As a teacher Lam has earned a reputation for expressing complicated ideas in a simple way. He is coauthor of the textbook Principles of Fluid Mechanics (with W. H. Li, 1964). Chair of the Engineering Physics Program from 1972 to 1980, in the 1980s he was chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, cochair of the Program in Applied Mathematics and associate dean of the Engineering School. He was a principal force in the establishment of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics.
Lam is an associate editor of the American Physical Society journal Physics of Fluids and was recently elected to be a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has done consulting work with aerospace research labs.
Next year Lam expects to continue his research and to maintain contact with the department. In addition, he hopes to travel regularly to the West Coast to see his grandchildren.
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Arnold Levine |
A graduate of the State University of New York, Levine earned his 1966 PhD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He joined the faculty at Princeton as an assistant professor of biochemistry in 1968, earning promotion to associate professor in 1973. In 1979 he became chairman of the department of microbiology at the SUNY, Stony Brook School of Medicine. He returned to Princeton to found the Department of Molecular Biology in 1984 and to become Wiess Professor.
In 1979 Levine discovered the p53 tumor suppressor protein, a molecule that inhibits tumor development. Disruption of this protein's normal function is associated with an estimated 60 percent of human cancers. More recently Levine has researched the mechanisms by which cells control their division, studying the role of viruses in disrupting cell division.
Levine was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991 and to its Institute of Medicine in 1995. Among his awards are the Katharine Berkan Judd Award from Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Brinker International Award from the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cancer Research, First Annual Strang Award from the Strang Cancer Prevention Center and Clowes Award from the American Association for Cancer Research.
James Marrow, who came to Princeton in 1991, is a specialist in art of the late Middle Ages in Northern Europe. At Princeton he taught courses on painting, printmaking, illuminated books and iconography, as well as seminars on Dürer, Fouquet, Bosch and van Eyck.
A graduate of the University of Minnesota, he spent several years as a research fellow and lecturer at the University of Reading, England, before going to the State University of New York, Binghamton as associate professor in 1970. He received his PhD from Columbia in 1975. In 1980 he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught before coming to Princeton, first as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1990-91 and then as a professor at the University.
Marrow is the author of Heures des Turin-Milan (2 vols., 1994-96), Biblia Pauperum (2 vols., 1993-94), The Hours of Simon de Varie (1994), Hans Baldung Grien: Prints and Drawings (1981) and Passion Iconography in Northern European Art (1979), among other books and articles. Founder and president of the Medieval Manuscript Society, he is also president of the US National Committee for the History of Art.
Currently a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Marrow is preparing a book on pictorial innovation in the late Middle Ages and collaborating on major exhibitions of illuminated manuscripts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the New York Public Library.
Mathematician Goro Shimura has focused on finding relations among diverse areas of number theory, geometry and algebra. His work has been instrumental in establishing the modern theory of automorphic forms and especially the theory's relation to arithmetical geometry and number theory.
His guiding philosophy, Shimura says, is that for many geometric objects, there is a natural way of presenting them other than the conventional mathematical expressions. This thinking led him to solve many longstanding problems and raise new areas of inquiry. In 1964 he formulated an important conjecture that suggests a surprising relation between elliptic and modular curves. Fellow Princetonian Andrew Wiles used this conjecture to solve Fermat's Last Theorem.
Shimura studied at the University of Tokyo, obtaining his DSc in 1958. He taught at the University of Tokyo and Osaka University before coming to Princeton in 1962 as a visiting professor. He was appointed to the regular faculty in 1964. He has been a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced study five times.
Among many honors and awards, Shimura received the Cole Prize for number theory in 1976 and the Steele Prize for lifetime achievement in 1996, both from the American Mathematical Society.
The aesthetic aspects of math have been a strong motivation in his career, Shimura says. As a youth, he thought he might be a fashion designer. As emeritus professor, he says he might pursue the study of "low-dimensional topology" by designing dresses for his wife.
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Charles Westoff |
After serving in the US Navy, Westoff earned his AB from Syracuse University and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1953. He worked as a research associate at the Milbank Memorial Fund until 1955, when he joined the Office of Population Research. He continued there part-time while associate professor and chair of the sociology and anthropology department at New York University's Washington Square College from 1958 to 1962.
He joined the Princeton faculty as professor of sociology in 1962 and at the same time was named associate director of the Office of Population Research, which he later served as director from 1975 to 1992. He was appointed to the During chair in 1972.
Westoff's studies of fertility yielded several books, including Family Growth in Metropolitan America (1961) and The Later Years of Childbearing (1970). His work on US population growth led to From Now to Zero: Fertility, Contraception and Abortion in America (1971) and The Contraceptive Revolution (1977). His comparative studies include Unmet Need and the Demand for Family Planning (1991) and Mass Media and Reproductive Behavior in Sub-Saharan Africa (1997).
A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a
member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of
Sciences, Westoff received the Irene Taueber Award of the
Population Association of America in 1995. He was executive
director of the Commission on Population Growth and the American
Future in Washington, DC, from 1970 to 1972 and was on the
Committee on Population of the National Academy of Sciences from
1983 to 1988. He has been consultant to the World Fertility
Survey, UNESCO, the UN Population Division Demographic and Health
Surveys, and the African Development Bank.
Photos by Denise Applewhite, Robert P. Matthews, Lawrence French