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University trustees appoint professors

The board of trustees scored additional academic talent for the University last month, adding six new tenured professors to the faculty.

The new professors are Christopher Eisgruber '83 in public affairs, Brian Kernighan GS '69 in computer science, Chiara Nappi in physics, Angel Loureiro in Romance languages and literature, Carol Greenhouse in anthropology and Colin Palmer, the Dodge Professor of History.

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The University actively recruited the new professors using recommendations from academic departments as well as advertisements in academic journals.

Dean of the Faculty Joseph Taylor said some of the new faculty members were more difficult to recruit than others. But, he noted, "Princeton has a reputation that makes it relatively easy to attract people to our faculty."

Though the trustees are planning a faculty size increase to support the 500-student increase outlined in the Wythes report, Taylor said this latest increase was on pace with projected growth even before the report.

"For the most part, these acquisitions were already planned," he said.

In seeking new faculty, departments make recommendations to the faculty's Advisory Committee on Appointments and Advancements, of which Taylor is secretary.

The group then seeks information about the candidates' credentials and passes on its recommendations to the trustees' academic affairs committee.

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"[Our role] was really just to ask questions and to approve them and pass it on to the board of trustees for approval," chair of the trustees' academic affairs committee Lloyd Cotsen '50 said.

Who's who

For Eisgruber, the return to Princeton has an ironic twist.

When he was an undergraduate physics major at the University, Eisgruber's adviser discouraged him from taking a constitutional interpretation class because it would be too difficult for a sophomore science major to handle.

Not easily discouraged, however, Eisgruber disregarded the advice and took the class.

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Years later, Eisgruber himself is teaching a freshman seminar titled "The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy."

And now Eisgruber will be the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in the Wilson School and the Center for Human Values.

Kernighan, newly appointed to the computer science department, said he enjoyed being a visiting professor at Princeton last year. "When they made me an offer that I couldn't refuse, I didn't refuse it," he said.

"I'm having a great time — this really is actually a lot of fun," Kernighan said. "Universities are great places to hang out and you get to meet all kinds of interesting people — it really is a blast."

Kernighan said he tries to get to know his students when possible. "It's fun because then they become real people rather than just names on a list," he said.

Widely known for his contributions to the creation of the C programming language, Kernighan designs programs that help users interact with computers in an easy and natural way.

"Mostly what I'm interested in are user-interface kinds of things," he said.

Since 1969, Kernighan has worked at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., where he has been head of the computing structures research department for the past 20 years.

Nappi will be a full professor in the physics department. She taught the basic physics course for entering physics majors and engineers at the University in 1993.

Last summer while she was attending a physics conference on string theory, several MIT theoretical physics graduate students introduced themselves to her.

"I was surprised to hear that they had been in my physics class at [Princeton] in 1993," she said in an e-mail.

Nappi said she wants to make physics understandable to a wide variety of people. "I believe that physics is a very interesting subject and it should be made accessible to every student," she added.

For the past several years, Nappi has been teaching physics mainly for students majoring in the life sciences at the University of Southern California. "This is a very interesting course to teach because one needs to cover so many applications of physics to biology and medicine," she said.

Nappi currently is researching string theory. "Strings are believed to be the most elementary objects around," she explained. "String theory is needed to unify all elementary interactions, from gravity to electromagnetism, in one consistent theory."

Loureiro will serve as a professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, teaching contemporary Spanish literature and culture.

Loureiro taught at the University during the 1999-2000 spring semester. He taught an undergraduate course on culture and society in Spain since 1936, and a graduate course on the struggle for modernity in Spain.

He is currently writing a book about how Spanish intellectuals and politicians have viewed Spanish America during the past two centuries.

Loureiro said he is very committed to teaching and advising at the University.

"I also plan to organize a good number of cultural activities and to help the department establish or strengthen ties with other academic and cultural institutions in Latin America and in Spain," he said in an e-mail.

Loureiro has taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst since he finished his Ph.D. work at the University of Pennsylvania in 1985. He has also been a visiting professor at both Amherst College and Harvard University.

Greenhouse, who will be a professor in the anthropology department, said she is looking forward to teaching at Princeton. "It's obviously a very strong institution overall and that's part of the appeal," she said.

Greenhouse studies the anthropology of law and politics, specializing in the ethnography of contemporary United States. She said Princeton's department is particularly strong in these areas.

"It's a very interesting and innovative anthropology department," she said.

Greenhouse has been a professor at Indiana University since 1991. Prior to that, she taught at Cornell University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris.

Palmer is a newly appointed member of the history department. His areas of expertise include African-American history and the African diaspora, colonial Latin America and the Caribbean.

Palmer has been a distinguished professor of history at City University of New York Graduate School for the past six years. He was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina from 1980 to 1994.