Eighteen Princeton University faculty members were transferred to emeritus status in recent action by the Board of Trustees. Transfers are effective July 1, 2016, except where noted.
They are:
- Scott Burnham, the Scheide Professor of Music History and professor of music, effective Sept. 1, 2016;
- Edward Champlin, the Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and professor of classics;
- Douglas Clark, professor of computer science, effective Feb. 1, 2016;
- Ronald Comer, lecturer with continuing appointment of psychology, effective Feb. 1, 2016;
- John Cooper, the Henry Putnam Professor of Philosophy;
- Angus Deaton, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of International Affairs and professor of economics and international affairs;
- Paul DiMaggio, the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, effective Feb. 1, 2016;
- Robert Freidin, professor of linguistics in the Council of the Humanities;
- J. Richard Gott III, professor of astrophysical sciences;
- Abdellah Hammoudi, professor of anthropology;
- Nancy Weiss Malkiel, professor of history;
- Kirk McDonald, professor of physics;
- Ignacio Rodríguez-Iturbe, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Princeton Environmental Institute;
- Jerome Silbergeld, the P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor in Chinese Art and professor of art and archaeology;
- P. Adams Sitney, professor of visual arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts;
- Szymon Suckewer, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering;
- Ronald Surtz, professor of Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures;
- Robert Willig, professor of economics and public affairs.
Scott Burnham(Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications)
Scott Burnham is a scholar of the history of music theory, analysis and criticism renowned for his interpretation of music from the 18th and 19th centuries. He has published nearly 50 articles, most focusing on the music of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. His 1995 book, "Beethoven Hero," won the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory as the outstanding book in music theory, and his 2013 monograph, "Mozart's Grace," won the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society for exceptional merit.
On campus, Burnham has been a popular instructor, an active adviser and member of many University committees, and he has held numerous positions in the music department, including two terms as chair. He was honored with the 2013 Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton.
Burnham earned his bachelor's degree at Baldwin-Wallace College, his master's at Yale School of Music and his Ph.D. at Brandeis University. He taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook before joining the Princeton faculty in 1989. Upon his transfer to emeritus status, Burnham will join the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Edward Champlin(Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications)
Edward Champlin studies the social and cultural history of ancient Rome. His books include "Fronto and Antonine Rome," on the society revealed by the letters of the tutor of Marcus Aurelius; "Final Judgments: Duty and Emotion in Roman Wills," an exercise in the social history of the law; and "Nero," an exploration of the motives of a very bad man but an extraordinarily creative artist.
Champlin has been a Humboldt Fellow at Heidelberg University, a resident at the American Academy in Rome, a visiting fellow at Christ Church at the University of Oxford, and a National Endowment of the Humanities fellow. Next year, he will be a member at the Institute for Advanced Study to complete a book on the second emperor of Rome, Tiberius, as a master manipulator of myth.
Champlin holds a B.A. and M.A at the University of Toronto, and D.Phil. from Oxford. Chair of the classics department for six years and head of Butler College for eight years, he retires after 41 years at Princeton.
Douglas Clark(Photo courtesy of Douglas Clark)
Douglas Clark's research has focused on computer architecture and organization, particularly techniques for measuring and analyzing the performance of modern processors.
After earning an engineering degree from Yale University, Clark received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. He worked at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Digital Equipment Corporation and taught at Harvard University before joining the Princeton faculty in 1993.
In the private sector, Clark worked on hardware design, implementation and performance analysis. At Princeton, he worked on the Scalable High-Performance Really Inexpensive Multi-Processor (SHRIMP) project, specializing in performance monitoring issues, automatic projector alignment for a multiscreen display wall, and low-power techniques for modern microprocessors. He also was a popular professor and mentor to undergraduates and graduate students, known for explaining abstract concepts in concrete ways. He received the Undergraduate Engineering Council's Excellence in Teaching award three years in a row.
Ronald Comer(Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications)
Ronald Comer has studied, taught and advised on the topics of social and clinical psychology throughout his career. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. from Clark University. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1975.
Comer has written several textbooks: "Abnormal Psychology," now in its ninth edition; "Fundamentals in Abnormal Psychology"; and "Psychology Around Us," with Princeton's Elizabeth Gould.
Comer, who received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1993, has taught a number of popular courses in abnormal psychology, developmental psychopathology and controversies in clinical psychology. He also developed a clinical psychology program for undergraduates, including giving students opportunities to engage in independent research with mental health facilities and advising students interested in health professions. He has served on many departmental and University committees, including serving as chair of the Institutional Review Board, which oversees human research participant studies.
John Cooper(Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications)
John Cooper is a renowned scholar of ancient philosophy, with a focus on ancient ethics and politics and a broader interest in ancient epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of mind. His first book, "Reason and Human Good in Aristotle," won the American Philosophical Association's 1977 Matchette Foundation Book Prize. Cooper has since published works on Plato, Seneca, ancient moral psychology and ethical theory, and ways of life depicted in ancient philosophy. He has brought these topics into the classroom in formats ranging from freshman seminars to the graduate-level classical philosophy program.
Cooper has been recognized at Princeton with the Graduate Mentoring Award and the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Cooper earned his bachelor's degree at Harvard, attended Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship, and returned to Harvard for his Ph.D. He taught at Harvard and the University of Pittsburgh before being appointed to the Princeton faculty in 1981.
Angus Deaton(Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications)
Angus Deaton received the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his body of research in consumption, poverty and welfare. Among the best known of his works are three books: "Economics and Consumer Behavior" with John Muellbauer, "Understanding Consumption," and "The Analysis of Household Surveys." Deaton is also widely known for research with Princeton's Anne Case on mortality of middle-aged white Americans, and for research with Princeton's Daniel Kahneman on the link between income and happiness. Some of Deaton's other key research topics are demand analysis, econometrics, saving behavior, measuring poverty in India, commodity pricing, and the relationship between health status and economic status.
Deaton is a fellow of the Econometric Society, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and an honorary fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society and of the National Academy of Sciences. He also was named a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II of England.
Deaton earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He taught at the University of Bristol before joining the Princeton faculty in 1983.
Paul DiMaggio(Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications)
Paul DiMaggio's research contributions span several areas in sociology. He has studied the production and consumption of art, including research on the classification of art and how cultural capital determines life success. DiMaggio's work on organizational analysis with Walter Powell on mechanisms leading organizations to herd-like behavior has been influential and widely cited. DiMaggio has also studied polarization in American public opinion, the role of network externalities in social stratification, and the relationship between culture and cognition.
In addition to being an intellectual leader in the field, DiMaggio has mentored numerous graduate students who now teach at leading departments across the country, and he has served on many University and national committees. He is a member of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
DiMaggio earned his bachelor's degree at Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. at Harvard. He taught at Yale before coming to Princeton in 1992. DiMaggio is now a professor of sociology at New York University.
Robert Freidin(Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications)
Robert Freidin is a scholar of generative linguistics and grammar, a framework for understanding human language pioneered by his former colleague, Noam Chomsky, and others in the 1950s. Working with the premise that human beings have an innate faculty for understanding and constructing language, Freidin has focused on how humans construct sentences. He has written a number of key papers and essays in the field.
He has also studied the history of generative linguistics and edited a landmark six-volume collection, "Syntax: Critical Concepts," with Howard Lasnik. Freidin's courses in linguistics at Princeton have led him to publish two textbooks, "Foundations of Generative Syntax" and "Syntax: Basic Concepts and Applications."
Freidin received his B.A. from the University of California-Berkeley and then earned his Ph.D. at Indiana University Bloomington. After stints at Purdue University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University and McGill University, Freidin joined the Princeton faculty in 1985.
J. Richard Gott III(Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications)
J. Richard Gott III is noted for his contributions to cosmology and general relativity. One seminal 1972 paper, with Princeton's James Gunn, studied the Coma Cluster of galaxies. In 1986, he proposed that the clustering pattern of the galaxies in the universe should be sponge-like, and that widely cited paper has now been confirmed by surveys of the sky. In 2004, he and doctoral student Mario Jurić produced a diagram known as the "Map of the Universe," looking from Earth back to the Big Bang. Gott has also written about the possibility of time travel, based on his discovery of exact solutions to Einstein's field equations for the gravitational field around cosmic strings.
Gott has received the Robert J. Trumpler Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Astronomical League Award and Princeton's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Gott earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard and his Ph.D. at Princeton. After fellowships at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge, he joined the Princeton faculty in 1976.
Abdellah Hammoudi(Photo courtesy of Abdellah Hammoudi)
Abdellah Hammoudi is an anthropologist who has conducted fieldwork in his native Morocco as well as in Libya, Saudi Arabia and India, as a way of examining issues including development, political economy, civil society, authority, legitimacy, democracy and religious experience. He has written books on Moroccan ritual tradition and Moroccan authoritarianism, and he authored an acclaimed personal and ethnographic account of his own journey of the hajj, "A Season in Mecca."
For more than a decade, Hammoudi served as director of Princeton's Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. He has also taught, lectured and edited a collection of essays on fieldwork with Princeton's John Borneman.
Hammoudi earned licenses in sociology and philosophy from the Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, and a doctorate from the Sorbonne. He taught at Mohammed V University, New York University, the University of California-Los Angeles and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and he consulted on development issues across North Africa. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1991.
Nancy Weiss Malkiel(Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications)
Nancy Weiss Malkiel is a scholar of 20th-century American history. Her principal publications are "The National Urban League, 1910-1940," "Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR" and "Whitney M. Young Jr. and the Struggle for Civil Rights." Her latest book, "'Keep the Damned Women Out': The Struggle for Coeducation," will be published in September.
For 24 years, from 1987 to 2011, Malkiel served as Princeton's dean of the college, overseeing all aspects of undergraduate education. Some of her signature accomplishments during this period were implementing the University's groundbreaking no-loan financial aid policy, increasing opportunities for study and work abroad, enhancing academic programs for freshmen, expanding the residential college system and the founding of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning.
After receiving her B.A. at Smith College, Malkiel earned her Ph.D. at Harvard. She joined the Princeton faculty in 1969.
Kirk McDonald(Photo courtesy of A.J. Stewart Smith)
Kirk McDonald has been at the forefront of experimental high-energy particle physics research throughout his career. In the 1970s, he studied the quark structure of hadrons at Fermilab, the world's highest-energy accelerator laboratory at the time. In the next decade, McDonald conducted research and designed a detector at the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. Next, he was a founding member of the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, serving on the executive board and playing a lead role in the design and construction of one of the chambers. Results from BaBar in 2001 confirmed a theory of matter known as the Standard Model, whose theorists were awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize.
Most recently, McDonald has been involved in the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment near Hong Kong, and the team's research was awarded a Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2016. He has published extensively, and his teaching has been highly rated by students.
McDonald earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Arizona and his Ph.D. at Caltech. He then took a fellowship at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, and a fellowship at the University of Chicago before joining the Princeton faculty in 1976.
Ignacio Rodríguez-Iturbe(Photo by Pryde Brown for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering)
Ignacio Rodríguez-Iturbe is a pioneer in the field of hydrology. He is known for developing rigorous mathematical theories for hydrologic processes and for geophysical and biological processes for which the water cycle plays a central role. His work has provided methods for examining fundamental problems in hydrology, for solving engineering problems linked to drought and flood, and for studying rainfall, vegetation's interplay with the water cycle, and river networks.
Rodríguez-Iturbe is the author of several influential textbooks on hydrology, river basins and ecohydrology. He is a member or fellow of many academic societies, and he has won numerous awards, most notably the Bowie Medal of the American Geophysical Union and the Stockholm Water Prize of the Stockholm International Water Institute.
Rodríguez-Iturbe attended the University of Zulia in Venezuela for his undergraduate education. He received a master's degree from Caltech and a Ph.D. from Colorado State University. He then taught at the University of Zulia, MIT, Simón Bolívar University, the International Institute of Advanced Studies in Caracas, the University of Iowa and Texas A&M University. Rodríguez-Iturbe joined the Princeton faculty in 1999.
Jerome Silbergeld is an esteemed scholar of Chinese art history. He served as the founding director of Princeton's Tang Center for East Asian Art, and he nurtured it into a leading center for Asian art in the United States through its symposia, lectures and scholarly books.
Silbergeld has continued to publish, lecture and curate museum exhibitions during his tenure. Some of the topics on which he has written are the aesthetics of old age in Chinese painting, body image in Chinese films, landscape painting and the family model in Chinese art and culture. His courses have spanned traditional and contemporary Chinese painting, architecture and gardens, and Chinese cinema and photographs.
Silbergeld taught at the University of Washington for 25 years before coming to Princeton in 2001. He earned his bachelor's and doctoral degrees at Stanford University, and he earned a master's degree at the University of Oregon.
P. Adams Sitney(Photo courtesy of P. Adams Sitney)
P. Adams Sitney is a leading historian of avant-garde cinema. He is the author of "Visionary Film: The American Avant Garde," which was published in 1974. In 1970, Sitney co-founded the Anthology Film Archives, an international center for the preservation, study and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental and avant-garde cinema.
Sitney is the author of four other books about film, editor of many journals and anthologies, and recipient of numerous honors, including the American Academy in Berlin's Anna-Maria Kellen Berlin Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sitney joined the Princeton faculty in 1980, and he has taught courses on film history, major filmmakers, the language of cinema and avant-garde cinema. He also has taught courses outside of film studies, participating in humanities sequence courses on great books in Western European and American civilization. His efforts earned him Princeton's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2010. Sitney earned his bachelor's degree and his Ph.D. from Yale.
Szymon Suckewer(Photo courtesy of the School of Engineering and Applied Science)
Szymon Suckewer is a premier scientist in the field of X-ray lasers and plasma spectroscopy. Among his many honors, Suckewer won the American Physical Society's Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research in 1990 and its Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science in 2007. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and American Optical Society. He has published more than 200 papers and has more than two dozen patents and patent applications.
After earning his M.S. at Moscow University and his Ph.D. and D.Sc. at Warsaw University, Suckewer was a researcher and professor at Warsaw's Institute of Nuclear Research. He joined the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in 1975 and became the principal research physicist in charge of the X-Ray Laser Project in 1980. Suckewer's group developed several types of soft X-ray lasers and inexpensive diagnostic methods for fusion devices.
Suckewer was appointed to the Princeton faculty in 1987, after which he headed a new X-ray lab on campus and became director of the Program in Plasma Science and Technology. In recent years, he has added research interests in bioengineering and medical application of lasers, and plasma spark plugs for internal combustion engines that decrease their negative effects on the environment.
Ronald Surtz
Ronald Surtz's scholarship has focused on religious texts, particularly religious writings by women in the pre-modern period. His books have covered the influence of medieval liturgy and courtly festivities on early modern Spanish drama; themes of gender, power and authority in the sermons of the Franciscan nun Mother Juana de la Cruz; and 15th- and 16th-century texts of religious women in Spain who inspired St. Teresa of Avila. Surtz has also edited two collections of essays, an anthology of edited plays, and a translation of de la Cruz's sermons.
At Princeton, where he has taught since 1973, his courses have been spanned the departments of Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures, history, religion, music, art, architecture and comparative literature.
Surtz earned his B.A. at Yale and received a Ph.D. from Harvard.
Robert Willig(Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications)
Robert Willig studies industrial organization, regulation and antitrust. His paper "Consumer's Surplus Without Apology" rejuvenated quantitative applications of welfare economics to policy analysis. One of his lasting contributions to research on industry structure is his co-authored 1982 book "Contestable Markets and the Theory of Industry Structure," which analyzes the determinants of prices and structure in economic markets without entry barriers. Willig's body of published research has contributed to understanding of theory and policy of predatory practices, nonlinear pricing, network access pricing, impacts of mergers, privatization, intellectual property disputes, and various forms of legal and administrative regulation in a wide variety of industry settings.
Willig's interest in antitrust and regulation extended beyond academia. He was the deputy assistant attorney general for economic analysis in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 1989 to 1991, and he has advised state, federal and international agencies on welfare-enhancing economic regulation. Willig was a co-founder of the international economic consultancy Compass Lexecon.
After earning his bachelor's degree at Harvard, Willig received his Ph.D. from Stanford. He worked in the economics group at Bell Labs before joining Princeton in 1978. Willig served for many years as the faculty chair of the Master in Public Affairs program and of the economics field in the Woodrow Wilson School.
