Today at Brown

Sixteen faculty members – 12 professors and four assistant professors – were named by the Corporation at its May meeting to endowed chairs. They are:

Full professors

Shadi Bartsch
Professor of Classics
W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics

Since 1998, Bartsch has been a professor of classics at the University of Chicago, where she also has held a named chair since 2005. Bartsch is a leading Latinist and has a global vision for classics. She earned her B.A. from Princeton University and both her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in Latin and classics, respectively. She is the author of Decoding the Anxient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius (1989), Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian (1994), and Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan's Civil War (1998). Her most recent project, The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire, was published last month by the University of Chicago Press.

Wayne Bowen
Professor of Biology
Upjohn Professor of Pharmacology

Bowen received his B.S. in chemistry from Morgan State College in 1974 and completed his Ph.D. in biochemistry and neurobiology at Cornell University in 1981. He then spent three years as a postdoctoral staff fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., where he studied opiate receptor biochemistry. He initially came to Brown in 1983, when he taught endocrinology, introductory biology, and biochemistry and founded the macromolecular biochemistry facility — a one-man lab that supplied synthetic peptides to scientiststhroughout the campus and affiliated hospitals.

John Cherry
Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and of Classics
Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology

After a brief stint at the University of Sheffield, Cherry was appointed to a university lectureship in Aegean prehistory in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge, which he held from 1980 until 1993. Throughout that period, he was a fellow and tutor at Fitzwilliam College, where he directed studies in classics and in archaeology and anthropology. In 1993 he moved to the University of Michigan as professor of classical archaeology and Greek, serving there for 11 years as director of the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology. At Michigan he was also a curator in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, where he was in charge of the prehistoric collections, as well as initiating a renewed program of publications. He came to Brown in 2006.

Joseph Crisco
Professor of Orthopaedics
Henry Frederick Lippitt Professor of Orthopaedic Research

Trey Crisco’s research interests are in musculoskeletal bioengineering, where he has developed advanced imaging modalities for the study of in vivo joint mechanics and studied spinebiomechanics and injury prevention in sports. His current primary workis focused on the normal and pathological mechanics underlying thefunction of the human wrist. This work is now expanding to related areas in comparative biomechanics. His work has been primarily funded by the NIH and has resulted in more than 80 peer-reviewed publications. He serves on several NIH study sections, editorial boards, and on the scientific advisory committees of International Federation of Women’s Lacrosse, U.S. Lacrosse, and USA Baseball. Crisco is a former president of the American Society of Biomechanics. He is currently teaching a new course in product design and development that is a joint effort betweenthe Industrial Design Department at RISD and Engineering at Brown.

Carolyn Dean
Associate Dean of the Faculty and Professor of History
John Hay Professor of International Studies

Dean, who is professor of history and modern media and culture, received her Ph.D in history from UC-Berkeley. She is the author of four books, including The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject and, most recently, The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust. Dean is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and various other awards, including the Carnegie Foundation’s Rhode Island Professor of the Year Award in 1996. She was appointed associate dean of the faculty in 2005.

Oded Galor
Professor of Economics
Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics

Galor completed his B.A. and M.A. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He served as Chilewich Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University, and at Brown he is a core faculty in the Population Studies and Training Center and a faculty associate of the Watson Institute for International Studies. Galor has been the editor of the principal journal in his field – the Journal of Economic Growth – since 1995, and he is editor of the newly established quarterly, Foundations and Trends in Economic Growth. In addition he has been a member of the editorial board of Economics and Human Biology since 2003 and the Journal of Economic Inequality since 2003); an associate editor of the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking since 2004, the Journal of Population Economics since 2007, and Macroeconomic Dynamics since 2000; and a member of the advisory board of the Journal of Economic Research since 1997.

Edward Hawrot
Professor of Medical Science
Alva O. Way University Professor of Medical Science

Hawrot, associate dean of the Program in Biology, came to Brown in 1990 as chair of the molecular pharmacology section in the Division of Biology and Medicine. Subsequently, upon the merger of three sections to form the present Department of Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology, and Biotechnology, he was appointed chair of the new academic department. Hawrot is a past reviewing editor for the Journal of Biological Chemistry. He recently began a four-year term with the biophysics of neural systems study section of the Center for Scientific Review (NIH). Hawrot was involved in the preparation of the part of the NSF RI-EPSCoR proposal focusing on a proposed EPSCoR Center for Proteomics to facilitate collaborative research. He was co-principal investigator on a Research Alliance proposal collaboratively submitted with a team of Rhode Island scientists. This proposal was funded through one of the recent R.I. Science and Technology Advisory Council awards, with the funds used to purchase a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer for collaborative research in the state.

Peter Monti
Professor of Medical Science
Donald G. Millar Distinguished Professor of Alcohol and Addiction Studies

Monti, director of the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies, is also a senior career research scientist for the Department of Veterans Affairs. A recognized leader in understanding the biobehavioral mechanisms that underlie addictive behavior as well as its prevention and treatment, Monti has published approximately 200 papers, monographs, and chapters. These are primarily focused in the areas of assessment, mechanisms, early intervention, and treatment.During this past year he has lectured both nationally and internationally. He recently completed two books: Treating Alcohol Dependence: A Coping Skills Training Guide and The Tobacco Dependence Treatment Handbook: A Guide to Best Practices.

Dietrich Neumann
Professor of History of Art and Architecture
Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence

Neumann studied architecture at the Technical University in Munich and at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. He received his Ph.D. in the history of architecture at the Technical University in Munich. He joined Brown in 1989 as a visiting professor and became assistant professor in 1991, associate professor in 1996, and professor in 1999. His research concentrates mostly on late 19th and early 20th century architecture. He has published essays on the history of building materials and books on German skyscrapers of the 1920s, the history of film set design, and architectural illumination. He has curated and edited the catalogs of a number of exhibitions, such as “Film Architecture” (Providence, Los Angeles, Frankfurt), “Richard Neutra’s Windshield House” (Harvard University, RISD, Washington, Pittsburgh), “Unbuilt Providence” (Brown), “Friedrich St. Florian: Retrospective” (Brown), and “Luminous Buildings: Architecture of the Night” (Stuttgart and Rotterdam).

Robert Pelcovits
Professor of Physics
Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence

Pelcovits joined the Brown physics department in 1979. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1978. He has done postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois and Brookhaven National Laboratory. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a recipient of the Bergmann Memorial Award from the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation. He has been a visiting professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Tel Aviv University, and Brandeis University.

Chi-Wang Shu
Professor of Applied Mathematics
Theodore B. Stowell University Professor of Applied Mathematics

Shu received his B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Science and Technology of China–Hefei in 1982. In 1986 he received his Ph.D. in mathematics from UCLA, with Stanley Osher as his advisor. He then spent a year at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota as a postdoctoral fellow. Since 1987 he has been with Brown’s Division of Applied Mathematics, serving as its chair from 1999 to 2005. In 1992 he received the NASA Public Service Group Achievement Award for pioneering work in computational fluid dynamics as part of the ICASE algorithm team. In 1995 he received the first Feng Kang Prize of Scientific Computing from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Since 2004 he has been listed as an ISI highly cited author in mathematics by the ISI Web ofKnowledge, Thomson Scientific Company. In 2007 he received the SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering “for the development of numerical methods that have had a great impact on scientific computing.”

Keith Waldrop
Professor of English
Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities

Waldrop is an award-winning poet whose interests also include a number of translation projects and teaching. He has a volume of poems and a volume of prose in progress, as well as several translation projects, including a complete English version of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. He received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from University of Michigan in 1964 and joined the Brown faculty in 1968. His numerous honors include, most recently, the Pell Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Assistant Professors

Sherine Hamdy

Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of the Social Sciences and International Affairs

Hamdy received her B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University and her Ph.D. from New York University. Her focus is on the anthropology of medicine, health, science, and technology, and the production of knowledge. Her field experience has been primarily in Egypt, where she has pursued Muslim ethical responses to biotechnological dilemmas. Her current research is focused on the organ transplant debate in Egyptian life. Hamdy’s dissertation, Our Bodies Belong to God: Islam, Medical Sciences and Ethical Reasoning in Egyptian Life, addressed questions of science, medicine, bioethics, and Islam. An Egyptian-American who grew up in various parts of the world, Hamdy is fluent in modern standard, Qur’anic, and classical Arabic, as well as in English, French, and Spanish.

James Russell
Assistant Professor of Geological Sciences
Joukowsky Family Assistant Professor of Geological Sciences

Russell received his Ph.D. in ecology from the University of Minnesota in 2004 and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Limnological Research Center, University of Minnesota. He is an expert in the area of paleolimnology, especially large African lakes. He has studied the paleoclimatology of Lake Edward, Uganda-Congo; piston cores from Lake Bosumatwi, Ghana; and piston cores and seismic data from Lake Tanganyika, Africa. He has developed methods for paleolimnology analysis.

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro
Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy
Mary Tefft and John Hazen White Sr. Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy

Weitz-Shapiro has just completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University, specializing in comparative politics with a regional focus on Latin America. Her dissertation, Choosing Clientelism: Political Competition, Poverty and Social Welfare Policy in Argentina, asks Robert Putnam’s questions for Latin America: Why do some local governments deliver goods and services in ways that facilitate equal access, while others distribute according to clientelistic criteria? Her research has implications for the quality of democracy and development.

Vazira Zamindar
Assistant Professor of History
Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of the Humanities

Zamindar received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. She is a scholar of modern South Asian history, and her book, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, has just been published by Columbia University Press. At Brown she teaches courses on the history of colonialism and nationalism in South Asia, including the Partition of 1947 and Gandhi. She has broad theoretical interests in interdisciplinary history, and the politics of violence and its effects on history writing. Before Brown, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in Leiden, the Netherlands. She is working on an edited collection on the colonial history of archaeology, entitled Heritage in Other Histories: The Politics of Placing the Past in the Muslim World, forthcoming from Routledge, UK.