Faculty Members Receive Distinguished Service and Named Professorships

June 14, 2018 (last updated on November 21, 2019)

Four faculty members from the Division of the Social Sciences have been appointed to named professorships.

Steven Pincus

Steven Pincus has been named the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor for the Department of History and the College.

Pincus’s research explores Atlantic history, the history of Britain and its British Empire, global history, early American history, and the history of the Netherlands, with a particular emphasis on the history of political economy and state formation.

He is the author of Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1668 and England’s Glorious Revolution 1688-89, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, and most recently The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for Activist Government. He has published numerous essays on the economic, cultural, political and intellectual history of early modern Britain, early modern Empires, the British Empire, and the early modern Atlantic. Currently, Pincus is completing a book on the global British Empire (c. 1650-1784) that offers a new interpretation of the American Revolution and the origins of British India, and a book comparing the Irish Revolution (1778-1782) with the American Revolution.

Pincus, who was at UChicago from 1993 until 2005, is returning this summer from Yale University.

Susan Stokes

Susan Stokes has been named the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and the College. Stokes’s research focuses on democratic theory, distributive politics, comparative political behavior and how democracy works in developing societies. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2008. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Fulbright, the American Philosophical Society, and the Russell Sage Foundation. She is the author or co-author of five books, including the forthcoming, Why Bother? Rethinking Participation in Elections and Protests co-authored with S. Erdem Aytaç; Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism, co-authored with Thad Dunning, Marcelo Nazareno and Valeria Brusco and recipient of best-book prizes from the Comparative Politics and Comparative Democratization sections of American Political Science Association;.and Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America, which received prizes from the APSA Comparative Democratization section, the Society for Comparative Research, and the Hallett Prize for a lasting-contribution award. Stokes’s articles have appeared in The American Political Science Review, World Politics, and The Latin American Research Review.

Stokes, who was at UChicago from 1991 until 2005, is returning from Yale University.

Harald Uhlig

Harald Uhlig has been named the inaugural Bruce Allen and Barbara Ritzenhaler Professor in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics.

A macroeconomist, Uhlig’s research focuses on applied quantitative theory and applied dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium theory, the intersection of macroeconomics and financial economics, and Bayesian time series analysis and macroeconomic applications. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and serves as an elected regional representative of North America for the organization. He also serves as head editor of the Journal of Political Economy.

His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Becker-Friedman Institute.

Uhlig co-edited the second volume of the Handbook of Macroeconomics, published in 2016.  He contributed to Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Eleventh World Congress. His recent articles have been published in the Journal of Monetary Economics, Econometrica, and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. 

He served as chair of the department from 2009-2012.

Tara Zahra 

Tara Zahra has been named the Homer J. Livingston Professor in the Department of History.

Zahra’s research focuses on the history of Modern Europe from a transnational and comparative perspective; including the Habsburg Empire and successor states; migration; gender and the family; nationalism and internationalism.

Her first book, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948, as well as her second, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II, have each earned multiple book awards. Her third, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World, was recently published, along with Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement, which she co-edited with Leora Auslander. She is currently working on a history of deglobalization in interwar Europe. Zahra is co-chair of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2014 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.