SAS Endowed Chairs...

The New Kahn Chair: Dr. Rozin

Dr. Paul Rozin, professor of psychology here for 27 years, is the inaugural recipient of the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professorship for Faculty Excellence. Dr. Rozin's research in cultural psychology and cultural evolution has produced well-known studies in the acquisition of likes and dislikes for foods; the nature and development of the magical belief in contagion; the cultural evolution of disgust; lay conceptions of risk of infection and toxic effects of foods; and the interaction of moral and health factors in concerns about risks. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977, and served as editor of Appetite for 10 years. Dr. Rozin has also served as Director of the General Honors and Benjamin Franklin Scholars programs. He is a 1956 Chicago alumnus who took his M.A. in 1959 and Ph.D. in 1961 from Harvard. The Kahn Professorship was established through a bequest by Mrs. Kahn, a Smith College alumna who worked for Newsweek and owned an interior design firm, and whose husband, a member of the Wharton Class of 1925, made his successful career in the oil and natural gas industry.

 

Annenberg Chair: Dr. Tomlinson

Dr. Gary A. Tomlinson, a member of the music faculty since 1979, is the new Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities. Dr. Tomlinson is a 1973 alumnus of Dartmouth who received his M.A. in 1975 and Ph.D. in 1979 from California at Berkeley. His areas of specialization are late Renaissance and early Baroque music, 19th-century Italian opera, and music historiography and anthropology. Dr. Tomlinson is the author of several articles and books, including Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (1993), Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (1987), and Italian Secular Song 1606-1636 (1986). His many prestigious awards and honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Alfred Einstein Prize of the American Musicological Society.

His chair is named for its donor, an alumnus and trustee emeritus who has endowed eight chairs at the University as well as founding the Annenberg School for Communication and Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

 

The New DiVito Chair: Dr. Marcus

Starting in 1998-99, Dr. Millicent Marcus of the University of Texas becomes the Mariano DiVito Professor in Italian Studies, the first to hold the chair created through a bequest from Mr. DiVito, an Italian immigrant who also supported the Center for Italian Studies at Penn. Dr. Marcus, a 1968 alumna of Cornell who took her Ph.D. from Yale in 1974, is a scholar of Italian medieval literature and Italian cinema who has won Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships, and whose books include Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (1993); Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (1986); and An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the 'Decameron,' Stanford French and Italian Studies (1979).

 

Farquhar Professor: Dr. Silver

Dr. Larry Silver, a specialist in Northern Renaissance and Baroque art and the history of graphics, has been recruited from Northwestern University as the James and Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor of the History of Art.

Dr. Silver, a 1969 Chicago alumnus, received his Ph.D. in 1974 from Harvard and taught at Northwestern for 18 years. The winner of a Kress Foundation Fellowship and a Fulbright among other awards, he is especially known for his 1993 textbook Art in History, and for The Paintings of Quinten Massys (1984). He was also the founding director of the Chicago Area Art History Colloquium and a consulting curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Farquhars and their son Douglas, a professor of art history at the University of Maryland who serves on Penn's History of Art Visiting Committee, have been prominent supporters of the University for many years. A pioneer in Florida land development in the 1940s, the late James Farquhar became the founding chairman of Nova University in Fort Lauderdale in 1961, and was chairman emeritus until 1976.

 

Regan Professor: Dr. Stewart

Dr. Susan Stewart, a Penn alumna whose joining the faculty became major news during the summer as she was named a MacArthur Fellow in July, had already been recruited to the Donald T. Regan Professorship in English before she won the no-strings "genius award." The Regan chair was established jointly by Merrill Lynch & Co., and friends of the Honorable Donald T. Regan, HON '72, the former Penn Trustees chairman who was an executive at Merrill Lynch before he became Chief of Staff to President Ronald Reagan.

Dr. Stewart graduated from Dickinson in 1973, took her M.A. from Johns Hopkins University in poetry, and came to Penn for her 1978 Ph.D. in folklore and folklife studies. She taught at Temple University for nearly 20 years. She is a widely read poet (Yellow Stars and Ice, 1981; The Hive, 1987;The Forest, 1995.) and a scholar of poetry and prose (Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation, 1991, and On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection , 1984), and has served as elected supervisor of the English Institute at Harvard. She continues on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern Literature and Public Culture. She is now at work on the history of the lyric in relation to the representation of the senses, focusing on poetic works from the classical period to the present.

 

The New Lauder Chair: Dr. Waldron

Dr. Arthur Waldron joins Penn as the Joseph H. Lauder Professor of International Relations, the chair established by Trustee Leonard Lauder, W '54, president and CEO of the Estee Lauder Companies and a co-founder with his brother of the Lauder Institute here.

Dr. Waldron, a 1971 Harvard alumnus who took his Ph.D. in history there in 1981 and stud-ied abroad in Japan, Taiwan, the USSR, France and England, has been a professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor of East Asian Studies at Brown University. His books include From War to Nationalism: China's Turning Point, 1924-1925 (1995) and The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (1989). His awards include a Ford Foundation Grant, a Hooper Fellowship and a Visiting Fellowship at the Institue of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.

...Endowed Term Chairs

Sheerr Professor: Dr. Stevens

Dr. Rosemary Stevens, professor of the history and sociology of science and former Dean of SAS, is the new Stanley I. Sheerr Endowed Term Professor.

One of the world's leading experts in the history and evolution of health care administration, Dr. Stevens is a 1957 Oxford alumna who received her Ph.D. in epidemiology from Yale in 1979. She taught at Yale and Tulane before coming to Penn. Twice chair of History and Sociology of Science, she is a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the Center for the Advancement of Health, and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Her books include In Sickness and In Wealth: American Hospitals in the Twentieth Century (1989), The Alien Doctors (1978), and Welfare Medicine in America (1974). In 1990, she was cited for her distinction in research and contributions to health services research with The Baxter Foundation Prize, the American Board of Medical Specialties Special Award, and the Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine.

Stanley I. Sheerr, W'33, is perhaps best known at Penn for his family's 1967 gift naming the Sheerr Pool in Gimbel Gym. Although Stanley and Francis Sheerr have passed away, Richard Sheerr, C'69, and Constance Sheerr Kittner, CW'61, their son and daughter, remain active supporters of Penn.

 

Class of 1965 Professor: Dr. Wolf

Dr. Eugene Wolf, professor of music, has been named to the chair established in 1990 by the Class of 1965 in honor of their 25th reunion.

Dr. Wolf is an alumnus of Rochester's Eastman School of Music, 1961, with an M.S. and Ph.D. from New York University. He has been on the faculty here since 1973, and has served as director of graduate studies and chair of the music department. A specialist in 18th-century music, Dr. Wolf has been honored with the Alfred Einstein prize of the American Musicological Society, the Richard S. Hill Award of the Music Library Association (with his wife, Jean K. Wolf), a Guggenheim fellowship, a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. Dr. Wolf has written numerous articles and essays, as well as his 1981 book The Symphonies of Johann Stamitz: A Study in the Formation of the Classical Style and The Symphony at Mannheim: Johann Stamitz, Christian Cannabich, written in 1984 with his wife. Dr. Wolf presently serves as series editor for Recent Researches in the Music of the Classical Era, A-R Editions, Inc.

Alumni Suzanne Denbo Jaffe, James S. Riepe, and George A. Weiss are the Class of '65 representatives for this professorship.

 

...and Term Chairs

Carey Term Chair to Dr. Kirillov

Dr. Alexandre Kirillov, who first came to Penn as a visiting professor of mathematics in 1992 and became a full professor here in 1994, has been appointed the Francis J. Carey Term Professor in Mathematics. The chair is one created by alumnus William Polk Carey to honor his brother, also an alumnus.

A member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and alumnus of Moscow State University, Dr. Kirillov focuses his research on the theory of group representations, differential geometry and mathematical physics-to such effect that he has received three invitations to lecture before the International Congress of Mathematicians, held every five years-and only two mathematicians in history have been invited more. Currently he serves on the Scientific Council of the Erwin Schroedinger Institute in Vienna. His publications, printed in multiple languages, include What is Number?; Theorems and Problems of Functional Analysis, which he co-authored with D. Gvishiani; and Elements of the Theory of Representations.

Francis J. Carey, C'45, L'49, is president of the New York investment banking firm of W.P. Carey & Co., Inc. William Carey, W'53, chairs the firm and is on Economics Visiting Committee of SAS. He also serves on the board of the Institute for Economic Research.

 

Katz Term Professor: Dr. Wenger

Dr. Beth S. Wenger has been appointed the Katz Family Term Professor in American Jewish History, taking a chair established by Herbert D. and Eleanor Meyerhoff Katz.

Dr. Wenger is a 1985 alumna of Wesleyan who received her Ph.D. in history in 1992 at Yale, with a thesis named the Best Doctoral Dissertation in American Jewish History. Since then she has won fellowships and grants from Mellon, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture; held postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton and at Penn's Center for Judaic Studies. One of her primary research interests is the growing sense of national identity that emerged among Jewish immigrants to America, and her latest book is New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (1996).

The Katzes have been dedicated supporters of Jewish Studies at SAS for many years. As the current chair of the Board of Overseers for the Center for Judaic Studies, Mr. Katz, W'51, is also a board member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, vice president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and the vice chairman of the United Jewish Appeal. Mrs. Katz is a 1954 Wellesley graduate, a trustee of Curry College, and president of the Eleanor M. and Herbert Katz Family Foundation.

 

The William Smith Chair: Dr. Yodh

Dr. Arjun Yodh has been appointed the William Smith Term Professor, taking a chair created by Alumnus Martin Lipton, Esq., in honor of the first provost of the University.

Dr. Yodh, a professor of physics who came to Penn in 1988, earned his B.S. at Cornell in 1981 and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Harvard. Honored for his research by the Office of Naval Research and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, he has also been a Lilly Foundation Faculty Teaching Fellow, developing new courses in modern optics for undergraduates and graduates at Penn. He has published extensively, notably in the British journal Nature. Currently, Dr. Yodh has focused his research interests on aspects of chemical, condensed-matter, and optical physics. Most of his experiments are oriented toward lasers and the unique spectroscopies these tools offer.

Mr. Lipton, W'52, is senior partner and director of New York's Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a former Penn trustee and a member of the SAS Board of Overseers. He also heads the NYU Law Center Foundation and the Charles Zarkin Memorial Foundation, Inc.


Return to:Almanac, University of Pennsylvania, September 23, 1997, Volume 44, Number 5