The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointments of 17 faculty members, including four full professors and 13 assistant professors.
Professor
Judith Hamera, in dance in the Lewis Center for the Arts, will join the faculty July 1 from Texas A&M University, where she has been a professor since 2005. She previously taught at California State University-Los Angeles. She earned her B.A. at Wayne State University and her Ph.D. at Northwestern University.
Hamera's research focus is performance studies, and she is the author of three books and co-editor of a volume in the field. Her 2007 book, "Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City," was named Book of the Year by the National Communication Association Ethnography Division.
Ilyana Kuziemko, in economics, will join the faculty on July 1 from Columbia University. Kuziemko was an assistant professor at Princeton from 2007 to 2012 and took public service leave to serve as deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 2009-10. She holds bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University and earned a second bachelor's degree from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
A research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Kuziemko studies public, labor and health economics. Recent research topics include redistribution of wealth, risk and health care costs, and demand for health insurance.
Jhumpa Lahiri, in creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts, will join the faculty on July 1, 2015. Lahiri is an esteemed writer of essays, short stories and novels. Her 1999 collection of short stories, "Interpreter of Maladies," won the Pulitzer Prize, and her 2013 novel "The Lowland" was a National Book Award finalist.
Lahiri is a writer in residence at John Cabot University in Rome, and she has held the same position at Vassar College and Baruch College. Lahiri holds a bachelor's degree from Barnard College at Columbia; master's degrees in English literature, creative writing and comparative studies in literature and the arts from Boston University (BU); and a Ph.D. in Renaissance studies from BU.
Assaf Naor, in mathematics, will join the faculty on July 1 from New York University, where he has taught since 2006. Previously, he worked at Microsoft Research. Naor received his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Naor's research interests span a number of mathematical fields, including analysis, probability, quantitative geometry, linear and non-linear geometric Banach space theory, and structure theory of metric spaces, as well as their applications to theoretical computer science, combinatorics and mathematical physics.
Assistant professor
Faisal Ahmed, in politics, will join the faculty on July 1 from Oxford, where he has been a postdoctoral fellow since 2011. He was a postdoc at Princeton in 2010-11. A scholar of political science and international relations, Ahmed holds a B.A. from Northwestern and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
José Avalos, in chemical and biological engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, will join the faculty on Nov. 1. Avalos specializes in bioengineering and biofuels production. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2009; he previously was a biotech analyst at Decision Resources Group and a postdoc at Rockefeller University. He holds a B.S. from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, a master's degree from the University of London, and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.
Ruha Benjamin, in African American studies, will join the faculty on Aug. 1. Benjamin, a sociologist, has been an assistant professor at Boston University since 2010 and previously was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-Los Angeles. She earned a B.A. at Spelman College and a Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley.
Jonathan Gribetz, in Near Eastern studies and Judaic studies, will join the faculty on July 1. Gribetz, whose research focuses on modern Israeli society, is an assistant professor at Rutgers University. He has an A.B. from Harvard, a master's from Oxford, and two master's and a Ph.D. from Columbia.
Johannes Haushofer, in psychology and public affairs, will join the faculty on July 1. Haushofer's research interests include psychology, neurobiology and the economics of poverty. From 2011 to 2014, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and MIT. He earned a B.A. at Oxford, and doctoral degrees at Harvard and the University of Zurich.
Katherine Hill Reischl, in Slavic languages and literatures, will join the faculty on Aug. 1. A scholar of Russian literature and culture, Hill Reischl holds bachelor's and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago.
Casey Lew-Williams, in psychology, will join the faculty on Sept. 1. Lew-Williams specializes in language acquisition and has been an assistant professor at Northwestern since 2012. He previously was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his B.A. at University of California-Berkeley and his Ph.D. at Stanford University.
Elizabeth Lew-Williams, in history, will join the faculty on Sept. 1. A scholar of Asian American history, Lew-Williams is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern. She holds a B.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from Stanford.
Fabio Pusateri, in mathematics, will join the faculty on Sept. 1. Pusateri, who has been an associate research scholar at Princeton since 2011, focuses on partial differential equations. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at Roma Tre University in Rome and his Ph.D. from NYU.
Ju Ri Seo, in music, will join the faculty on July 1. A composer, Seo earned her B.A. at Yonsei University in Seoul and her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Mykhaylo Shkolnikov, in mathematics, will join the faculty on July 1. Shkolnikov, whose research is in the field of probability theory, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich and his Ph.D. at Stanford.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, in African American studies, will join the faculty on Sept. 1. Taylor, who focuses on social science, has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her B.A. at Northeastern Illinois University and her Ph.D. from Northwestern.
Carolyn Yerkes, in art and archaeology, will join the faculty on Sept. 1. A scholar of early modern European art history, Yerkes is a lecturer at Columbia. She holds a B.A., two master's degrees and a Ph.D. from Columbia, as well as a master's degree in architecture from Princeton.