Arts and Sciences Appoints Two to Named Chairs

Dean Steven J. Fluharty has announced the appointments of two faculty members to named chairs in the School of Arts and Sciences.

Eve Troutt Powell, the School’s Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, has been appointed Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History and Africana Studies. She is a historian of the modern Middle East and its relationship with Africa. Her teaching and scholarship focus on slavery, colonialism, and the development of ethnic, racial, and national identities. Her research into Egypt as both a colonized territory of Great Britain and a colonizer of the Sudan—the “colonized colonizer,” as she terms it—is regarded as a groundbreaking, broadly influential study of the interplay between colonialism, slavery, and nationalism. Drawing from a variety of sources including film, cartoons, and photography, Dr. Troutt Powell is advancing understandings of slavery linked to Africa, Europe, and the Ottoman Empire while at the same time forging new methods of historiography.

Dr. Troutt Powell was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2003. She has been a fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt, the Social Science Resource Council, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Prior to becoming Associate Dean in July of 2013, Dr. Troutt Powell served as Graduate Chair in History, and she is a member of the Middle East Center and the Center for Africana Studies.

This chair is one of five created in 2000 by an exceptionally generous gift from Christopher H. Browne, C’69, who served Penn as a trustee and chairman of the Board of Overseers in the School of Arts and Sciences. The Browne chairs recognize faculty members who have achieved an extraordinary reputation for scholarly contributions, who have demonstrated great distinction in teaching, and who have demonstrated intellectual integrity and unquestioned commitment to free and open discussion of ideas.

Steven Weitzman, who comes to Penn from Stanford University, has been appointed Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literature in the Department of Religious Studies. He is also the new Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. Dr. Weitzman is a scholar of biblical and Jewish studies. He applies insights from the study of religion, literary theory, anthropology, and other fields to understand the origins of Jewish culture, the formation of the Bible and other ancient texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the history of how the Bible has been reimagined in later cultural traditions. Among his recent projects is a collaboration with a Stanford geneticist that aims to bridge Jewish studies and population genetics.

As Director of the Katz Center, Dr. Weitzman will lead this distinguished research institute into its third decade of post-doctoral research on Jewish civilization in all its historical and cultural manifestations.

The Abraham M. Ellis chair was created in 1954 by the Abraham M. and Rose Ellis Foundation. The Ella Darivoff Director was established in 2001 by Philip M. Darivoff, W’79, WG’85, and Betsy Marks Darivoff, C’79.