Board approves nine faculty appointments

The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of nine faculty members, including four full professors, one associate professor and four assistant professors.

Professor

Ada Ferrer, in history, specializes in Latin American history and Caribbean studies. She is joining the University as the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, effective July 1.

Ferrer comes to Princeton from New York University, where she has taught since 1995, most recently as the Julius, Roslyn, and Enid Silver Professor of History and Latin American Studies. She was the director of NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies from 2009 to 2011. In 2023, she was a visiting scholar at Oxford University’s Wolfson College.

Her book “Cuba: An American History” won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History and the PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers, among others. Her previous book, “Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution,” won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University; three different prizes — the Friedrich Katz Prize, the Wesley-Logan Prize, and the James Rawley Prize — from the American Historical Association; and many others, including an honorable mention for the PROSE Award. Her book “Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation and Revolution, 1868-1898” won the 2000 Berkshire Conference Book Prize for the best first book written by a woman historian in any field. Among her many other honors, she received a 2019 Guggenheim fellowship and was a 1992-93 Fulbright scholar in Spain.

Ferrer earned an A.B. from Vassar College, an M.A. from the University of Texas-Austin, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Christopher Harris, in visual arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts, specializes in film. His appointment is effective July 1.

Harris comes to Princeton from the University of Iowa, where he has taught since 2017, most recently as the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor in film and video production. He also served as the head of film and video production from 2017 to 2023, except when production stopped early in the pandemic. From 2001 to 2017, he taught in the film department at the University of Central Florida.

His 12 films include “Dreams Under Confinement,” “28.IV.81 (Descending Figures),” “Sunshine State (Extended Forecast)” and “Reckless Eyeballing,” all of which won major awards at international film festivals. He has another four films in progress. 

Among his many awards and honors are a 2023-24 Andrew Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship from the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for the Arts, a 2023 Herb Alpert Award in Film/Video, a Radcliffe Film Study Center fellowship from Harvard University, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. His work has been featured in dozens of news stories and has been the subject of at least nine other researchers’ articles and books.

Harris earned an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. from Webster University.

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, in the Effron Center for the Study of America and anthropology, specializes in Indigenous Studies. She is joining the University as the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Professor of Indigenous Studies, effective July 1.

Kauanui comes to Princeton from Wesleyan University, where she has taught since 2000, most recently as a full professor in American Studies and affiliate faculty in anthropology. She served as director of Wesleyan’s Center for the Americas from 2017 to 2019, and was the founding director of the school's Indigenous Studies Research Network. She was an inaugural council member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

Kauanui has published two monographs, “Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Indigeneity and Sovereignty” and “Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism,” and she is working on a third, “A Question of Decolonization: Hawaiian Indigeneity and the Dilemma of Feminism.” She has edited six books or collections, and she has published some 50 scholarly articles, essays, book chapters and encyclopedia entries, in addition to articles in The Guardian UK, Mississippi Review, The Honolulu Weekly, The Honolulu Advertiser, Honolulu Star Bulletin, and Hawaii Island Journal. She has given almost 200 invited lectures, including at Princeton.

She recently received the American Indian History Lifetime Achievement Award from the Western History Association. Among her many other honors, she is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, and the American Studies Association and Organization of American Historians have both appointed her to their distinguished speakers programs. She was a Fulbright scholar in New Zealand in 1994-95.

Kauanui has received research fellowships from the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of American History, the National Science Foundation and the Rockefeller Archives Center, among others.

She earned a Ph.D. from the University of California-Santa Cruz and a B.A. from the University of California-Berkeley.

Florencia Torche, in sociology and international affairs, specializes in social stratification and mobility. She is joining the University as the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, effective Sept. 1.

She comes to Princeton from Stanford University, where she has taught since 2016, most recently as the Dunlevie Family Professor of Sociology. Before that, she taught at New York University from 2006 through 2016 and at Queens College CUNY from 2004 to 2006.

Torche has written 47 peer-reviewed articles, and numerous book chapters, book reviews and other public-facing articles, in both English and Spanish. Her awards include four from the American Sociological Association: the James Coleman Award for Best Article in the field of Sociology of Education, the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award, the Outstanding Scholarly Contribution Award, and an honorable mention for Article of the Year Award. 

She has received major grants from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the United Nations and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, among others. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she is a member of the NAS working group addressing the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children and families.

She earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University and a B.A. from Universidad Católica de Chile.

Associate professor

Nicolás Pereda, in visual arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts, specializes in film and media studies. His appointment is effective July 1.

He comes to Princeton from the University of California-Berkeley, where he has taught since 2020, most recently as an associate professor. From 2015 through 2019, he taught at Rutgers University, and during the 2014-15 school year, he taught at Simon Fraser University.

He earned a B.A. and an M.F.A. from York University.

Assistant professor

Pauline Carry, in economics, joins the faculty in January 2025. She specializes in labor economics, macroeconomics, and public policy. She earned a Ph.D. from Institut Polytechnique de Paris, an M.S. from École Normale Supérieure and a B.A. from Université PSL-Lycée Henri IV. 

Nicholas Kuipers, in politics, joins the faculty in August. He specializes in comparative politics and comes to Princeton from the National University of Singapore, where he has taught since 2022. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and a B.A. from Oberlin College.

Temi Ogunye, in politics, joins the faculty in September. He specializes in political theory and holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, an M.A. from University College London and a B.A. from the University of Manchester.

Arthur Zeyang Yu, in politics, joins the faculty in September. A specialist in quantitative methods, he earned a a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, an M.Phil. from Hong Kong University of Science & Technology and a B.A. from Renmin University of China.