Penn Arts and Sciences Appoints Three Term Professors
Dean Steven Fluharty is pleased to announce the appointment of three endowed term professors in the School of Arts and Sciences.
History Professor Warren Breckman has been appointed the Rose Family Endowed Term Professor. Breckman is internationally recognized as a leading scholar of European intellectual and cultural history whose research focuses on political theory. He has made significant contributions to scholarship on Marx and the Young Hegelians’ relationship to political, theological, and ideological developments in mid-19th-century Germany; European Romanticism; and echoes of German Romanticism in Western European radical thought after the collapse of Marxism. Breckman is the executive co-editor of Journal of the History of Ideas and has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and an Alexander von Humbodt-Stiftung Research Fellow.
The Rose Family Endowed Term Chair was established by Mr. and Mrs. Gary D. Rose in 1991. Both Gary D. Rose, C’67, and Karen Bress Rose, CW’67, GED’68, have a long history of volunteer service and philanthropy to Penn. Mr. Rose is currently a member of the School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers and was formerly a limited partner at Goldman Sachs and Company in New York.
Junhyong Kim has been named the Patricia M. Williams Term Professor in Biology. In his work at the interface of genomics, computational and mathematical biology, and evolution, Kim develops and uses quantitative and experimental methods to examine the evolution of dynamic processes in organisms at the cellular and sub-cellular level. Collaborating with James Eberwine’s lab at the Perelman School of Medicine, Kim’s lab is forging new understandings of gene expression and RNA biology, and has helped decipher the mechanisms of RNA localization in neurons and advanced efforts to understand how RNA variability in single cells relates to cell degeneration and dysfunction. His awards and honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, the Sloan Foundation Young Investigator Award, and the New England Bioscience Society Research Award. He is past co-director of the Penn Genomics Frontiers Institute with Eberwine, and current co-director of the Penn Program in Single-Cell Biology.
The Patricia M. Williams Term Chair was established by Paul C. Williams, W’76, PAR’03, in honor of his mother. Mr. Williams is currently managing director at Nuveen Investments, LLC, where he leads new product development for Nuveen’s complex of closed-end, exchange-listed funds. He is a Trustee Emeritus of the University, a member of the School’s Board of Overseers, and a former President of Penn Alumni. In 2011 he earned the University’s Alumni Award of Merit.
Catriona MacLeod has been appointed Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of German. Her research on 18th- and 19th-century German literature and cultural representation encompasses gender studies—in particular literary and aesthetic figurations of androgyny—as well as the intersections between high art and popular culture in Weimar Classicism, and the relationship between verbal and visual arts. Incorporating literary theory with philosophical aesthetics, material culture, and art history, she has undertaken interdisciplinary investigations into the decline—in aesthetic theory and practice—of the status of sculpture from the 18th to the 20th centuries. MacLeod has won the Ira Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching in Penn Arts and Sciences, and she currently serves as the secretary of the International Association of Word and Image Studies and as senior editor of the journal Word & Image.
The Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Chair was established through the bequest of Edmund and Louise Kahn. Mr. Kahn was a 1925 Wharton graduate who had a highly successful career in the oil and natural gas industry. Mrs. Kahn, a graduate of Smith College, worked for Newsweek and owned an interior design firm. The couple created several professorships in the School of Arts and Sciences and generously supported Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, the Modern Languages College House, and other projects at the University.
