School Welcomes 40 New Faculty Members
September 2006
Responding to a key component of its strategic plan, the School of Arts and Sciences has appointed 40 scholars to its standing faculty in 2006-2007. The new hires, recruited from institutions around the world, join the faculty at the junior and senior levels in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.
"Our success in recruiting these exceptional scholars reflects the strong reputation of Penn's School of Arts and Sciences," SAS Dean Rebecca W. Bushnell said. "We are pleased to welcome faculty of such high achievement and promise, and look forward to the many ways they will enrich our academic community."
As a group, the appointments represent a major step toward fulfilling a core goal of SAS's 2005 strategic plan that calls for a 10 percent faculty increase over five years. The School's standing faculty now numbers 495, the largest it has been in 16 years.
The additions include John L. Jackson, Jr., the first professor hired under the University's Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) initiative. The PIK program seeks to bring innovative scholars to the University to hold appointments in two schools simultaneously. Jackson, the Richard Perry University Associate Professor of Communication and Anthropology, will be based in SAS and the Annenberg School for Communication. He is a leading scholar of cultural anthropology and a documentary filmmaker.
Key appointments were made in the thematic areas of "integrated knowledge" identified in the strategic plan, especially in the areas of "Democracy and Constitutionalism" and "Cross-Cultural Contacts."
Among the new senior appointments are:
Roman de la Campa, who joins the faculty as the Edwin B. and Leonore R. Williams Professor of Romance Languages. He comes from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and will chair the Department of Romance Languages. His research looks at the ways in which theoretical discourses shape fields of study, particularly Latin Americanism in its various contemporary modes: Postmodern, Feminist, Postcolonial and Subaltern.
Richard Johnston, who comes from the University of British Columbia as professor of political science and research director of the National Annenberg Election Study. He is a top scholar of American and Canadian election processes. His focus is on public opinion, elections and representation, with a special concentration on campaign dynamics and the role of information. His books include The 2000 Presidential Election and the Foundations of Party Politics and The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South.
Jamal Elias, who joins the religious studies department as a full professor. He comes to Penn from Amherst College. Elias is a scholar of Islamic religion and culture with a focus on Sufi thought and history, Sufi literature and art and perception in the Islamic context. His books include Islam, Death Before Dying: The Sufi Poems of Sultan Bahu and The Throne Carrier of God: The Life and Thought of 'Ala' da-dawla as-Simnani.
Devesh Kapur, who joins the political science department as the Madan Lal Sobti Associate Professor for the Study of Contemporary India, and will serve as the new head of the Center for the Advanced Study of India. He comes from the University of Texas. His research examines local-global linkages in political and economic change in developing countries, particularly India, focusing especially on the role of international institutions and diasporas. He is author of Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design and coauthor of Give Us Your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World.
Adriana Petryna, who comes to Penn from the New School for Social Research, and will join the anthropology department as an associate professor. Her research explores bioethics, human-subjects research, commercial science and evolving regulatory regimes of protection in the United States and former Soviet Union. Her books include Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl and Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices.
Eve Troutt Powell, a MacArthur Fellow from the University of Georgia, who joins the history department as an associate professor. She is a historian of the modern Middle East whose interests include the cultural history of Egypt and the Sudan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when issues of nationalism, colonialism and slavery were deeply divisive. Her book A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan explores how these issues influenced the Egyptian nationalist movement.
Click here to view the entire list of new standing faculty members.