Four Arts and Sciences Faculty Named to Endowed Chairs
Dean Steven J. Fluharty is pleased to announce the appointment of four faculty members to named chairs in the School of Arts and Sciences.
Charles Kane, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, has been appointed the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences. He is an eminent theoretical physicist whose groundbreaking work on topological insulators—materials with a special kind of electrical conduction on their surface—has initiated a new field in condensed matter physics and garnered external recognition at the highest levels. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and he has received numerous awards, including the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Dirac Prize of the International Center for Theoretical Physics, the Oliver Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society, and the Physics Frontiers Prize of the Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation. In addition to his research, Kane has taught physics courses at all levels, ranging from topics in quantum condensed matter for advanced graduate students to introductory honors electromagnetism for freshmen, for which he received Penn's Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Jed Esty has been appointed the Vartan Gregorian Professor of English. Esty is an internationally recognized scholar of literary modernism and 20th-century British, Irish, and postcolonial literatures. He is the author of several publications, among them his book Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development, which opened original avenues of inquiry into relations among theories of modernism, the novel, and empire and national sovereignty. He has co-edited influential collections on realism in contemporary global literatures and on the state of postcolonial studies. Esty has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities and is the recipient of a Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching from Penn.
Scott Poethig, Professor of Biology, has been appointed the John H. and Margaret B. Fassitt Professor. He is widely recognized for his research on the genetics of plant maturation. Investigating variations in the rate of vegetative phase change—the morphological transition from juvenile to adult plants—in model systems, Poethig has shown that micro-RNAs control maturation in plants. He is now expanding his research to a non-model plant family in pursuit of still greater understandings of naturally occurring plant evolution. Poethig has received numerous honors for both his research, as evidenced by his election to the National Academy of Sciences, and his innovative and engaging work in the classroom, for which he received a Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching from Penn.
Ralph Rosen, Professor of Classical Studies, has been appointed the Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities. Rosen is a distinguished scholar of ancient comedy and satire as well as ancient medicine. His monographs, including Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire, which explores the dynamics of comic mockery in ancient Greek and Roman, broaden methodologies of research into literary, social, and cultural dynamics of classical antiquity as they advance the critical discourse in the field. In 2000 Rosen co-founded the Penn-Leiden Colloquia on Ancient Values, a biennial collaboration with Leiden University, the Netherlands, which has since produced eight published volumes of essays. Rosen teaches advanced seminars but also engages entry-level undergraduates in an interdisciplinary study of classics. He is the recipient of a Penn School of Arts and Sciences Ira Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching and is a former Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Chair of Classical Studies.
