List of Current Professors-at-Large (2000-2013)
There are currently 18 active Professors-at-Large, distributed across the following disciplines:
Physical Sciences (3): David Aldous, Charles Peskin, Shri Kulkarni
Life Sciences (4): Natalie Angier, Bert Hölldobler, Osvaldo Sala, J. Craig Venter
Social Sciences (4): Bassam Tibi, Lakhdar Brahimi, Ann Markusen, Sir Partha Dasgupta
Humanities (4): Okko Behrends, Judith Butler, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Laura Restrepo
Arts (3): Andy Goldsworthy, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lowery Stokes Sims
Below is a roster of the current Professors-at-Large, tenure of appointment, and a brief summary of accomplishments.
David Aldous (2004-2010) is a professor of statistics at the University of California , Berkeley. Prof. Aldous has made fundamental contributions to the study of discrete probability theory and its applications to the theory of algorithms, random combinatorial objects, random walks, and to probability models in physics and biology. Topics of current research are the interrelated topics of: the stochastic mean-field model of distance; recursive distributional equations, combinatorial optimization over random data and its scaling exponents, and local weak convergence of random networks; as well as the distinct topics of stochastic models of phylogenetic trees and nonuniform random mappings and Levy-type excursions. Prof. Aldous is the author of Probability Approximations via the Poisson Clumping Heuristic. He serves on editorial boards of numerous probability journals and has received several distinguished honors including the Rollo Davidson and Loeve prizes . For more information: http://128.32.135.2/users/aldous/
Natalie Angier (2006-2012) holds the sole title as President Council of Cornell Wormen A.D. White Professor-at Large. She was born in New York City in 1958 and grew up in the Bronx and New Buffalo, Michigan. After attending the University of Michigan for two years, she transferred to Barnard College in New York, from which she graduated with high honors. While in college, she studied English, physics and astronomy, and dreamed of starting a popular magazine about science for intelligent lay readers who wanted to know more about what's going on across the great divide of C.P. Snow's two cultures. Instead, at the age of 22, shewas hired as a founding staff reporter and writer for Discover, the science magazine that Time Inc. launched in 1980. Over the next decade, she also served as the senior science writer for Time magazine, an editor at the women's business magazine, Savvy, and a professor at the New York University's Graduate Program in Science and Environmental Reporting.
In 1990, Ms. Angier began writing for the New York Times, covering genetics, evolutionary biology, medicine and other subjects. In 1991, she won a Pulitzer prize, in the category of beat reporting, for a series of 10 feature articles on a wide array of scientific topics. Among them: the biology of scorpions, disputes over the Human Genome Project, the importance of parasites in evolution, and the ubiquitousness of philandering in the animal kingdom.
Her books include Natural Obsessions, an inside look at the high-throttle world of cancer research, which was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times and the American Association for the Advancement of Science; The Beauty Of The Beastly, a hymn to the multitudinous, mostly invertebrate creatures we'd rather forget, which also was cited as a New York Times notable book and has been translated into nine languages; and Woman: An Intimate Geography, a celebration of the female body and biology. A National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestseller, Woman has sold some 200,000 copies in this country and has been translated into twenty languages. It won a Maggie Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation; was nominated for the Samuel Johnson Award, Britain's largest nonfiction literary prize; was a finalist for the Booksense award by the Independent Bookseller's Association; was incorporated into Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues; and was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Talk magazine, People magazine, National Public Radio, the Bloomsbury Literary Review, the Village Voice, the New York Public Library, Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal and amazon.com.
In 2002, she edited The Best American Science and Nature Writing, described by Kirkus Reviews as a "splendid" anthology of "bright insights and buoyant prose" and by Oprah's O magazine as "impassioned...biting...supremely lucid...Science class was nothing like this." In 2007, Houghton Mifflin will publish my next book, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, Parade, Washington Monthly, Reader's Digest, Natural History, Geo, Preservation, Metropolis, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Self, Orion, Family Circle, Ms., American Health, Slate, North Dakota Quarterly, Free Inquiry, Underwire, Oxygen and other print and on-line magazines. My essays have been published in a number of anthologies, including The Bitch in the House; Sisterhood is Forever (an updated version of the classic Sisterhood is Powerful); Women's Voices, Feminist Visions; The Source of the Spring: Mothers Through the Eyes of Women Writers; When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories; The Nature of Nature; The New Science Journalists; The St. Martin's Guide to Writing; The Best American Science Writing (2000, 2001,2002, 2003, 2005); and The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2000, 2003, 2005).
Ms. Angier has received numerous awards and honors, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) prize for excellence in science journalism; the Lewis Thomas award for distinguished writing in the life sciences; membership in the American Philosophical Society; the Barnard College Distinguished Alumna award; the Lowell Thomas Gold Medal for travel writing; the General Motors International award for writing about cancer; an honorary fellowship from the Society for Technical Communication; and the Freedom from Religion Foundation's "Emperor Has No Clothes" award.
Okko Behrends (2003-2009) holds the Chair of Roman Law, Civil Law and the History of Modern Private Law at the University of Göttingen . Prof. Behrends' work describes the way law influences society as well as the way society influences the law. He has published extensively on classical Roman law including private law, constitutional legal history, legal science and philosophy in the history of Roman jurisprudence, the constitutional economic and social significance of Roman private law and theory, the Twelve Tables' and the nature and limits of positivism in ancient and modern legal thought. His areas of interest also extend to other aspects of ancient life such as: surveying land and legal rights, the quartering system, defeated non-citizen barbarians, mercenaries, grave robbery and tomb desecration. For a list of publications: http://www.gwdg.de/~ujrg/behrends.htm
Judith Butler (2003-2009) is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California , Berkeley . She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, (Verso Press, 2000). In 2004, she published a collection of writings on war's impact on language and thought entitled Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning with Verso Press. That same year, The Judith Butler Reader appeared, edited by Sara Salih, with Blackwell Publishers. A collection of her essays on gender and sexuality, Undoing Gender, appeared with Routledge in 2004 as well. Her most recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself, is forthcoming with Fordham University Press (2005) and considers the partial opacity of the subject, and the relation between critique and ethical reflection. She is currently working on essays pertaining to Jewish Philosophy, focusing on pre-Zionist criticisms of state violence. She continues to write on cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics.An excellent (and searchable) bibliography of her work is at the following address: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/indiv/scctr/Wellek/butler/
Lakhdar Brahimi (2007-2013) is a distinguished career diplomat with over forty years of experience in domestic and international affairs. As a veteran United Nations envoy and advisor, he was appointed Special Adviser to the Secretary-General Kofi Annan in January 2001. Mr. Brahimi advised the Secretary-General on a wide range of issues, including situations in the areas of conflict prevention and resolution.
As former Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Afghanistan and Iraq and Head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (October 2001-December 31, 2004). Ambassador Brahimi was entrusted with overall authority for the political, human rights, relief, recovery, and reconstruction activities of the United Nations in Afghanistan. Mr. Brahimi previously served as the Secretary-General's Special Envoy for Afghanistan from July 1997 until October 1999.
In between his Afghanistan assignments, Mr. Brahimi served as Under-Secretary-General for Special Assignments in support of the Secretary-General's preventive and peacemaking efforts. In this capacity, he chaired an independent panel established by Secretary-General Annan to review United Nations peace operations. The report, released by the panel in 2000 and known as the "Brahimi Report," assessed the shortcomings of the existing system of peacekeeping and made specific recommendations for change, focusing on politics, strategy, and operational and organizational areas of need.
Prior to his first Afghanistan appointment, Mr. Brahimi served as Special Representative for Haiti (1994-1996), and Special Representative for South Africa (December 1993-June 1994). In the latter position, he led the United Nations Observer Mission until the 1994 democratic elections that resulted in Nelson Mandela taking the presidency of post-apartheid South Africa. He has also undertaken special missions on behalf of the Secretary-General to a number of countries, including Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Yemen, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sudan.
Mr. Brahimi was Minister for Foreign Affairs of Algeria from 1991 to 1993. He served as Rapporteur to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit). From 1984 to 1991, he was Under-Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, and from 1989 to 1991, served as Special Envoy of the Arab League Tripartite Committee to Lebanon, mediating the end of the civil war in that country. Mr. Brahimi was Diplomatic Adviser to the President of Algeria from 1982 to 1984, Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1971 to 1979, and Ambassador to Egypt and the Sudan, as well as Permanent Representative to the Arab League in Cairo (1963- 1970). From 1956 to 1961 during Algeria's independence struggle, he was the National Liberation Front (FLN) representative in Southeast Asia, resident in Jakarta.
He was educated in Algeria and France (law and political science), and is fluent in Arabic, English, and French. Born in January 1934, he is married with three children. He retired from his duties in 2005 and is a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, the first global initiative to focus specifically on the link between exclusion, poverty, and law.
Sir Partha Dasgupta (2007-2013) is one of the world’s premier experts in the field of economics. He is currently the Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics and past chairman of the faculty of economics and politics at the University of Cambridge. From 1991 to 1997, Dasgupta was chairman of the scientific board of the Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and, from 1989 to 1992, professor of economics and philosophy, and director of the Program in Ethics in Society at Stanford University. His research interests have covered welfare and development economics; the economics of technological change; population, environmental, and resource economics; the theory of games; and the economics of under nutrition. Dasgupta is a fellow of St. John's College, a fellow of the Econometric Society, a fellow of the British Academy, foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, honorary fellow of the London School of Economics, honorary member of the American Economic Association, member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences. He is a past president of the Royal Economic Society (1998-2001) and the European Economic Association (1999). Dasgupta was named Knight Bachelor by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2002 in her Birthday Honours List for services to economics and was co-recipient (with Karl Goran Maler) of the 2002 Volvo Environment Prize. He is a fellow of the Royal Society (elected 2004) and a foreign member of the American Philosophical Society (elected 2005). The scope of his interests in economics and public policy include biodiversity, sustainability, poverty, and responsible environmental stewardship. He is widely recognized as a leader in the development of market-based environmental and natural resource management strategies.
Born in Dhaka (then in India) in 1942, he was educated in Varanasi, Delhi, and Cambridge.
Andy Goldsworthy (2000-2006; 2006-2008) is a British sculptor whose art is characterized by spare, simple shapes made from natural materials such as leaves, stones, water, or sticks. Although he builds stone walls and is engaged in a major project to reconstruct abandoned sheep folds in Cumbria in the north of England , most of his works are ephemeral; made for a day or even a moment, photographed, and left to decay or disappear. His works have been exhibited in museums throughout the world. Professor Goldsworthy is author of several books including: A Collaboration with Nature, Stone, Time and Passage. Recent permanent installations in the US include: Roof, the National Gallery of Art; Garden of Stones ,the Museum of Jewish Heritage ; and Faultline, the de Young Museum. Andy Goldsworthy received an honorary degree, Doctor of Letters, from the University of Glasgow in July 2005.. For a view of some of Professor Goldsworthy's work: http://www.hainesgallery.com/AG.work.html
Bert Hölldobler (2002-2008) is a zoologist whose behavioral physiology and sociobiology approach to the study of the 10,000 or so species of ants integrates chemical, physiological, ecological, and evolutionary studies. Trained initially at the University Würzburg, he then joined a research group studying insect behavior in Frankfurt , under the direction of Martin Lindauer. Although, in 1972 he was offered a position at Cornell in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, he accepted a professorship at Harvard to work with E.O. Wilson and with the world's greatest collection of ants at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology . His book, The Ants, written in collaboration with E.O. Wilson, was the first book written by scientists, primarily for scientists, to win the Pulizer Prize. A second book, Journey to the Ants, also co-authored with Wilson , won the Phi Betta Kappa Prize. In 1989, Dr. Hölldobler chose return to Europe to the University of Würzburg , where he built a department entirely committed to the study of social insects at all levels of molecular to ecological organization. Dr. Hölldobler has authored or co-authored more than 200 papers and three books, communicating his extensive knowledge of social insects and animal behavior in general. His leadership in behavioral research bridging the gap between the fields of social behavior, with its evolutionary approach, and neuroethology, with its mechanistic approach, was described by faculty supporting the nomination as an especially significant direction for future research in animal behavior. For a look at The Ants: http://www.amazon.com/
Shri Kulkarni (2007-2013) is currently the McArthur Professor of Astronomy and Professor of Planetary Sciences at California Institute of Technology. In addition, he directs the Caltech Optical Observatories and Micheslon Science Center. His research spans some of the most important and dynamic research areas in modern astrophysics. Kulkarni has three principal interests: (a) pulsar and neutron star astrophysics, (b) optical and IR interferometry and (c) the study of interstellar medium in our Galaxy and nearby galaxies. Kulkarni is a leading authority on exotic astrophysical phenomena such as gamma-ray bursts and brown dwarfs and has been associated with many major advances in understanding the universe. He has been a leader in the quest to improve the resolution of optical instruments and strongly believes that new instrumentation is a crucial part of modern astrophysical research and hence is involved in a variety of instrumentation development.
Dr. Kulkarni is interested in almost all aspects of the birth and evolution of neutron star systems. His fascination with pulsars began with his discovery (with D. Backer) of the first millisecond pulsar. Since then, he has been conducting new searches and building instrumentation to search for more of these fascinating objects. About three years ago he was part of a team that resulted in the discovery of the first pulsar in a globular cluster. Cluster pulsars are now a major focus of pulsar research and the three-dozen cluster pulsars discovered to date are offering us a fascinating glimpse into the massive star content of these ancient stellar systems. Heavily involved with the Keck Interferometer, Kulkarni is also the interdisciplinary scientist for NASAs Space Interfeometry Mission, set to launch in the next decade and with which astronomers hope to catalog planets around nearby stars. He has received numerous awards including the election to the National Academy of Science, Fellow of the Royal Society (London), Jansky Award by the Trustees of Associated Universities, Inc., Alan T. Waterman Award from NSF, Helen B. Warner Prize from the American Astronomical Society, and Packard Fellowship. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. In 2003, Professor Kulkarni was a Salpeter Lecturer at Cornell.
Lynn Hershman Leeson (2004-2010) is an artist who works with many media, including photography and installations. A consistent theme in her work is how people engage media-derived fantasies. Though she has produced over fifty major video works, Conceiving Ada is her first feature film. In 1989, her feature length video, "Longshot," won the Grand Prize at the Montbelliard Festival in France, and the Montreal Video Festival. Another work, Seeing Is Believing, won the First Prize in 1991 at Vigo , Spain . Her ongoing electronic diary, First Person Plural, has won numerous awards worldwide and screened most recently at the 1996 Berlin Film Festival. In 1995, she was the first woman to receive both a Tribute and a Retrospective at the San Francisco International Film Festival. In 1994, she was awarded (with director Peter Greenaway and theorist Jean Baudrillard) the prestigious Siemens Media Prize by the ZKM, which cited her as being the "most influential woman working in new media." Lynn Hershman Leeson is a Professor in the Program in Technocultural Studies at the University of California , Davis , and is the author of Clicking In, Hotlinks to a Digital Culture, published by Bay Press. She has had over 200 exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the world. In the late 1970s she pioneered the use of interactive artworks with her innovative art disk Lorna. Her artwork is included in such collections as The Museum of Modern Art, New York , The Seattle Art Museum, The D.G. Bank, Frankfurt, The Hess Collection, and the Walker Art Center . She has had retrospectives at The National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Contemporary Art , Warsaw . For more information: http://www.lynnhershman.com and http://www.agentruby.com
Ann Markusen (2007-2013) is a Professor of Planning and Public Policy and Graduate Faculty, Geography, and Applied Economics at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and Director of Project on Regional and Industrial Economics. Dr. Markusen is considered a long-standing force for original research in the fields of urban planning, regional science, and political economy, and a powerful educator and promoter of women in her several fields. Her areas of expertise include arts, culture, and economic development; regional economics and planning; industrial and occupational planning; and economic impact of high technology, and military spending. She is considered a world-renowned scholar in her field not just in the United States, but in Europe, Asia and Latin America as well. She was a Fulbright Lecturer in regional development economics in Brazil and has written on European, Korean, and Japanese regional economies as well as on North American cities and regions. Her research repeatedly delivers fresh, critical, and policy relevant insights about issues ranging from economic conversion of former military facilities, rural poverty, demographic change, social and cultural conditions necessary for economic development, the relationship between occupational and industrial structures, and typologies of industrial clusters, to the effects of globalizations on Latin American regions. Her influential work as a regional scientist bridges the qualitative/qualitative divide utilizing a mixed-methods approach considered as critical to the future of regional science. Dr. Markusen’s work on the economies of arts communities, artists and activity, and urban revitalization underscore this approach. She has authored more that a dozen books, and more than 60 refereed articles. From 1995-2002, she served as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and in 2002, was a Visiting Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. She chaired the Committee on Science Engineering and Public Policy from 1998-200 (having served as a member for six years). From 2001-2002 she was a member of the President’s Commission on Offsets in International Trade. Dr. Markusen is a recipient of the McCoy Award from the American Collegiate Schools of Planning (2005) and the prestigious Alonso Prize in Regional Science in 2006. She holds doctorate and master degrees in economics from Michigan State University and an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
Charles Peskin (2004-2010) Charles S. Peskin's undergraduate studies were in Engineering and Applied Physics (A.B., Harvard, 1968) and his graduate studies were in Physiology (Ph.D., Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1972). He now combines those interests as a Professor of Mathematics, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and Member of the Center for Neural Science, at New York University . His teaching at NYU ranges from graduate courses like "Mathematical Aspects of Heart Physiology" to a freshman seminar on "Computer Simulation." Professor Peskin has worked on several problems in which mathematics and computing are applied to biology and medicine. Some examples are blood flow in the heart, computer-assisted design of prosthetic cardiac valves, fiber architecture of the heart and its valves, fluid dynamics of the inner ear, photon noise in vision and nuclear medicine, and Brownian ratchet dynamics of biomolecular motors. He is the inventor of the immersed boundary method, which is broadly useful for problems of biological fluid dynamics. Professor Peskin is a former MacArthur Fellow. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and also of the Institute of Medicine . For further information: http://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/peskin/
Laura Restrepo (2007-2013) is one of the most prominent of contemporary Latin American novelists and renowned Columbian journalist. She is a gifted storyteller in both Spanish and English who has achieved the rare distinction of having all of her novels translated into English and numerous other languages (at least fifteen). Ms. Restrepo has been both a witness/participant as well as a chronicler of the tumultuous decades since the Cuban Revolution and their impact on Latin America, especially Columbian, politics, culture, and society. As an eminent fiction writer, journalist, and political activist she is widely sought out to speak at universities and political forums because of her expertise in the Columbian Diaspora to Europe and the Americas and her profound knowledge of her country’s political scene, including conflicts with its different guerrilla factions that have pushed the country to the brink of civil war. She has been a significant political actor on behalf of de-militarization and domestic peace at both at home and abroad. In 1983, she was named as a member of a commission by then Columbian President Belisario Betancur, to negotiate peace with the militant rebel forces. Although peace was negotiated and followed by several months of truce, a breach of this action led subsequently to further political instability, which forced her into self-imposed exile (Spain and Mexico) for six years. During that time she continued the peace negotiations over long distance, which finally led to guerrilla disarmament (1989). Ms. Restrepo was a well-liked and respected professor of literature at the National University of Columbia in Bogota for several years. She is hailed as an inspirational, highly admired, approachable, and committed educator as evidenced through her
numerous engagements at other academic institutions. This includes a recent visit to Cornell in the spring of 2006. Likewise, her fiction is widely assigned in courses, which cross academic boundaries from the humanities to the social sciences.
Most recently, Laura Restrepo was awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for 2007. She is the recipient of numerous literary awards including Grinzane Cavour 2006 Prize in Italy for best foreign fiction; the VII Premio Alfaguara de Novella Prize (2004) for Delirio; the Premio Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz at the Guadelajara Book Fair (1997) for The Angel of Galilea (1995); Premio Arzobispo San Clemente Award (2002) for Leopard in the Sun (1993)
She graduated with a degree in philosophy and letters from the University of the Andes, and completed post-graduate work in political science.
Osvaldo Sala (2004-2010) is a Professor of Biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Director of the Environmental Chance Initiative, and Director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Brown University . Prof. Sala is an international leader in both ecological science and global environmental policy. His interests are in ecology span from the arid ecosystems of Patagonia to global change issues with a focus on ecosystem-level questions including primary production, ecosystem-water dynamics, and most recently, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Prof. Sala using a diverse set of tools in pursuing those interests ranging from field manipulations to ecosystem models. He is also interested in coordinating international research projects. For example, he led an international group who developed scenarios for biodiversity change in the next century. Prof. Sala has been a member of the scientific steering committee of International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, the Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems where he led Focus 4 Biodiversity and Global Change, and DIVERSITAS. He has also served as president of the Argentinean Society of Ecology. Currently, Prof. Sala is President of the Latin American Plant Sciences network (Red Latinoamericana de Botáánica) and the Secretary General of Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE). He has co-authored publication with colleagues from many countries including the US , UK , Germany , France , Australia , China , Japan , India , Canada , Mexico , Chile , and Venezuela . For more information: http//www.brown.edu/Research/ECI/people/sala/salamain.ht
Lowery Stokes Sims
(2005-2011) earned her PhD in Art History from City University of New York and has spent 32 years working in museums: 27 years on the education and curatorial staff at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and then as the Executive Director of The Studio Museum in Harlem . Her knowledge and assessment of painting and sculpture and of installation and performance led to responsibilities in creating programs and exhibitions, tracking trends in the visual arts, to recommending acquisitions for permanent collections. . Throughout her career, Dr. Sims has been engaged in issues around funding for the arts and dialogues around censorship and freedom of expression both through advocacy and through public policy. Dr. Sims has served on selection panels for municipal, state, and national funding institutions, foundations, and corporations. She has taught art history at Queens College , School of Visual Arts , Rutgers University and New York University . To read some recent articles written by Dr. Sims: http://www.arturolindsay.com/articles/Tradition.pdf http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/WomenofSubstance.html
Sanjay Subrahmanyam (2002-2008) was born in New Delhi and earned his BA and MA in Economic from the University of Delhi , where he also received his PhD in Economic History in 1987 for his thesis on 'Trade and the Regional Economy of South India, c. 1550-1650'. From 1983 to 1995, he taught economic history and comparative economic development at the Delhi School of Economics. In these years, his interests broadened from economic and commercial history to the study of the interplay of political and economic history and of political culture and cultural history. This is first reflected in his first set of books: The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500-1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1700 (Oxford University Press, 1990); a joint work with V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka-period Tamilnadu (Oxford University Press, 1992), and The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A political and economic history (Longman, 1993), a work of synthesis reflecting his interest in the history of the Iberian empires. In the course of the 1990s, Subrahmanyam's work reflected his growing interest in the history of the Mughal empire and the comparative history of early modern empires. This accompanied his move to Paris as Directeur d'études in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales from 1995-2002. A second set of books includes these interests: The Mughal State, 1526-1750 edited jointly with Muzaffar Alam (Oxford University Press, 1998); The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India (University of Michigan Press, 2001); and another joint work with V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800 (The Other Press, 2003). In 2002, Subrahmanyam was appointed as the first holder of the newly created Chair in Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford . His most recent 2-volume work is entitled Explorations in Connected History. Vol. I: Mughals and Franks. Vol. II: From the Tagus to the Ganges ( Oxford University Press, 2004). He is also the Joint Managing Editor of The Indian Economic and Social History Review, published from New Delhi . . His current research includes a joint book, nearing completion, with Muzaffar Alam, on travel-writing in the Indo-Persian world from 1400 to 1800. He also continues to collaborate with V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman on other projects of cultural history relating to South India . Dr. Subrahmanyam is currently Professor and Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Indian History at the University of California in Los Angeles . His web page address is http://www.history.ucla.edu/subrahma/
Bassam Tibi (2004-2010) is an international relations expert who directs the Center for International Affairs at the University of Göttingen , Germany . Prof. Tibi publishes widely in English, Arabic, German, and French on modern Islam, Arab nationalism, democracy and religion, and the multifaceted challenges that Islam and Europe jointly face in the age of globalization. He is known for his views on a modern form of Islam, which he calls "Euro-Islam," that he considers compatible with secular democracy in Europe . His perspective challenges both those who consider Islam a foreign body in Europe and religious fundamentalists who want to shape civic society in their image. Prof. Tibi's most recent book on the subject Der neue Totalitarismus, characterizes politicized Islamic fundamentalism as a new form of totalitarianism. Earlier books and articles have addressed the need for European countries to embrace Muslim citizens in Europe who hold close the civic principles of secular democracy. Titles include: Islam between Culture and Politics (2001), The Challenge of Fundamentalism, Political Islam, and the New World Disorder (1998, 2002), and From Global Jihad to Democratic Peace (forthcoming). For information about Prof. Tibi's books: http://www.amazon.com/
Craig Venter (2003-2009) is the founder of a commercial company, Celera Genomics, whose team of researchers was one of the two which first completed sequencing of the human genome. Beginning with his invention and development of EST sequencing to identify sequences of large numbers of expressed genes, Dr. Venter went on to determine the structural sequence of the hereditary materials of other mammalian, insect, bacterial, and viral genomes. This research has increased understanding of genetic diversity and enabled new strategies that would improve the human condition. His current research is on the creation of a synthetic genome and production of microbes capable of producing fuel or consuming environmental waste products such as carbon dioxide fumes from power plants that contribute to global warming. Dr. Venter is founder and president of three new research groups: The J. Craig Venter Science Foundation, The Center for Advancement of Genomics, and the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives. For more information: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/venter.html
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