Arthur Hobson Quinn Professor of Anthropology:
Greg Urban

SAS Dean Samuel H. Preston is pleased to announce that Dr. Greg Urban, professor of anthropology, has been appointed the Arthur Hobson Quinn Professor of Anthropology after serving a five-year term as the Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor.

After he completed his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, Dr. Urban remained there for two years as the William Rainey Harper Teaching Fellow. He came to Penn in 1994 following 14 years of faculty service at the University of Texas.

As the chair of the Department of Anthropology, Dr. Urban has recently embarked on an initiative to invigorate the undergraduate program. By overseeing the launch of innovative courses ranging from Witchcraft in the Modern World to The Information Age: Culture, Technology, and Economics, he is leading the department's efforts to incorporate contemporary themes of business, medicine, and society into anthropological scholarship. In addition to his appointment, Dr. Urban is a member of the Graduate Group in Linguistics and serves as a Latin American and Latino Studies Program executive committee member.

Dr. Urban is a noted scholar in areas of cultural and linguistic anthropology; culture theory; discourse; corporations and culture; South American Indians; and metaculture. Distinguished research in these fields has earned him fellowship and grant support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and Social Science Research Council. Dr. Urban was also recognized for his outstanding teaching with a Texas Excellence Teaching Award.

The author or editor of seven books, Dr. Urban received the American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize for his Metaphysical Community: The Interplay of the Senses and the Intellect. His articles have been included in publications such as the International Journal of American Linguistics, Semiotica, and the Latin American Research Review. His latest article, "Metasignaling and Language Origins" was published in a recent volume of American Anthropologist.

This chair was created by an anonymous donor to honor Arthur Hobson Quinn, an 1894 graduate of the University who went on to become an English professor and a preeminent scholar of American literature and drama. In 1912, Professor Quinn was named the first dean of the College faculty under the initial system that differentiated the College from other Schools at Penn. In 1946, he received Penn's Alumni Award of Merit.