4 SSD faculty among those receiving named, distinguished service professorships
This page contains an excerpt of an article published by UChicago News. Read the full list of new named & distinguished service professorships here.
Nineteen University of Chicago faculty members have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships.
Profs. Nicholas Epley, Christopher Faraone, Bana Jabri and John Maunsell have received distinguished service professorships.
Profs. Curtis Bradley, Eric Budish, Hans Christensen, Daisy Delogu, Brent Doiron, James Evans, Ariel Kalil, Jonathan Levy, Valeri Nikolaev, Monica Peek, Andrei Pop, Devin Pope, Shyam Prabhakaran and Jane Risen and Asst. Prof. Emily Kern have received named professorships.
All appointments listed below are effective Jan. 1, 2022.
Social Sciences Division
James Evans has been named the Max Palevsky Professor in the Department of Sociology and the College.
Evans uses large-scale data, machine learning and generative models to understand how collectives think and what they know, inquiring into the emergence of ideas, shared patterns of reasoning, and the processes of attention, communication, agreement and certainty. As the founding director of UChicago’s Knowledge Lab, he designs observatories that connect data from text, images and other sensors with findings from interactive crowdsourcing and online experiments.
Evans is also the founding faculty director of the Masters in Computational Social Science Program. He teaches sought-after classes ranging from the Social Sciences Core curriculum, to upper-level courses on topics like “Imaginings of the End of the World,” and graduate courses on deep learning. In addition, and as a further demonstration of a remarkable commitment to student mentoring, he and his wife Jeanie have served as resident deans of the Campus North Residential Commons since 2016.
Emily Kern has been named the History of Science Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the College.
Kern earned her doctorate in history at Princeton in 2018 and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of New South Wales before joining UChicago’s Department of History as an assistant professor in July of this year. Her first book project, entitled The Cradle of Humanity: Science and the Making of African Origins, is focused on the multi-national and multi-armed scientific project of understanding human origins during the 19th and 20th centuries.
She has already garnered two major scholarly awards—a dissertation prize from the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, and the Ronald Rainger Early Career Award in the History of the Earth and Environmental Sciences from the History of Science Society.
Kern is the inaugural holder of this professorship, established last year by an anonymous donor to attract and support the top early-career scholars in the history of science, with a potential reach across the fields of history, anthropology, sociology and philosophy.
Jonathan Levy has been named the James Westfall Thompson Professor in the Department of History, the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College.
Levy is among the intellectual leaders of a new vanguard in the study of economic history with a particular focus on the history of capitalism. His first book, the multiple prize-winning Freaks of Fortune (2012) offered a fundamentally new approach to the rise of modern corporate capitalism in the United States by putting financialization, particularly insurance, at the center of the story. His well-received second book, Ages of American Capitalism (2021), is an entirely original synthetic account for general readers of American capitalism from the 17th century to the present.
He is at work on three book-length projects. The Fetish of Liquidity expands on a series of invited lectures Levy gave in 2017 at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales that examined the history of capital investment since 1945. At the same time, he is beginning a project on the climate history of the city of Houston—work he began in 2019 at Harvard’s Center for History and Economics—and is also completing a book of essays. He has held fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Library of Congress and is also an outstanding teacher and mentor who has recently taken on leading the undergraduate program in Law, Letters and Society.
Andrei Pop has been named the Allan and Jean Frumkin Professor in the the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, Department of Art History, and the College.
Pop is an innovative and ambitious scholar who has made substantial contributions at the intersection of art history and philosophy. He is also an active colleague across campus, enlivening scholarly discourse in the Department of Art History, where he has a secondary appointment, as well as in his primary appointment home, the Committee on Social Thought.
His first book, Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli (2015), offered an innovative re-examination of the ways in which 18th-century neo-classical and romantic artists—with Fuseli as the focal case—depicted and conceptualized classical antiquity. His most recent book is A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century (2019).
In addition, Pop has produced an outstanding body of published work, including a translation of Karl Rosenkranz’s 1853 Ästhetik des Hässlichen (Aesthetics of Ugliness); an edited anthology, Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory (2014); as well as an impressive set of articles and essays. Pop is developing a new project on caricature, which deepens his thinking about the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in artistic expression and takes it into more politically topical territory.