Associate Faculty
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Ph.D., University of Cambridge, 1982
Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values
208 Marx Hall
(609) 258-4302
kappiah@princeton.edu
Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah joined the faculty from Harvard University in 2002. His interests include philosophy of mind and language, African and African American intellectual history, and political philosophy. His writings include numerous scholarly books, essays and articles along with reviews, short fiction, three novels and contributions to a volume of family poetry. He co-edited, with Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the five-volume Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience and of the two-volume Encyclopedia of Africa, both from Oxford University Press. Professor Appiah lectures widely in North America and in Europe, and reviews often for the New York Review of Books. His most recent projects are a book on the role of honor in moral change, an annotated collection of proverbs from his homeland, Asante, Ghana, on which he collaborated with his mother, and two books on the ethics of identity. He is currently working on a book on W. E. B.Du Bois. He keeps a website at www.appiah.net.
Selected Publications
- The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (Norton, 2010)
- Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Norton, 2006)
- The Ethics of Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005)
- Bu Must Be: Proverbs of the Akan, with Peggy Appiah (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2008)
- Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2003)
- Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton University Press, 1996) (Amy Gutmann, co-author)
- In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford University Press, 1992)
- For Truth in Semantics (Blackwell, 1986)
- Assertion and Conditionals (Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Recent Courses Taught
- PHI 337 - Relativism
- PHI 365-CHV 365 - The Life of Honor
- FRS 101 - Individuality as an Ideal
Eduardo Cadava
Ph.D. UC-Irvine, 1988
Professor, Department of English
21 McCosh Hall
(609) 258-4074
cadava@princeton.edu
Eduardo Cadava joined the faculty at Princeton in 1989. He specializes in American literature and culture, literary and political theory, comparative literature, media technologies, and theory of translation. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, 1997) and Emerson and the Climates of History (Stanford, 1997), and co-editor of Who Comes After the Subject? (Routledge, 1991), Cities Without Citizens (Rosenbach Museum/Slought Foundation, 2004), and a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled And Justice for All?: The Claims of Human Rights (Duke, 2004). He has published articles on, among others, Emerson, Benjamin, Kafka, and Celan, and on topics ranging from photography, architecture, democracy, and war, to memory, slavery, and the ethics of decision. He also has translated several essays by Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Blanchot, and others. He is currently finishing a collection of essays on the ethics and politics of mourning entitled Of Mourning and a small book on the relation between music and techniques of reproduction, memorization, and writing entitled Music on Bones. He teaches regularly in the Program in European Cultural Studies, and he also is an Associate Member of the Department of Comparative Literature, the Center for African American Studies, the Program in Latin American Studies, the School of Architecture, and the Institute for International and Regional Studies.
Paul DiMaggio
Ph.D., Harvard University, 1979
Professor, Department of Sociology
118 Wallace Hall
(609) 258-1971
dimaggio@princeton.edu
On Leave 2011-2012 Academic Year
Professor Paul DiMaggio joined the Princeton faculty in 1992. His research and teaching interests include organizational analysis, sociology of culture, social stratification, economic sociology, network analysis, sociology of art and literature and nonprofit organizations. Current and recent research projects address such topics as polarization in Americans' attitudes on social and cultural issues; public conflicts over the arts; explaining trends in public participation in the arts; the role of social networks in real estate, service and consumer markets; models of community and modes of organization in the late Progressive Era U.S.; the social location of homo economicus; changes in the structure and behavior of business corporations; trends in public attitudes towards federal arts funding; and the social influence of the Internet. He has written widely on organizational analysis, focusing especially on nonprofit and cultural organizations, on patterns of participation in the arts and on cultural conflict in the U.S.
Selected Publications:
- Race, Ethnicity and Participation in the Arts. (Seven Locks Press, 1992) (Report Monograph, with Francie Ostrower).
Recent Courses Taught:
- SOC 530- Selected Topics in Social Processes: Sociology of Culture
Mitchell Duneier
Professor, Department of Sociology
Wallace Hall
(805) 705-1010
mduneier@princeton.edu
On Leave Fall 2011
HOW DO SCIENCE AND POLITICS COME TOGETHER IN URBAN ETHNOGRAPHY?
I tend to choose my ethnographic projects with an eye to revealing both the common and distinctive elements of humanity. Most people have common bases of life, and many who are presumed to be quite different have some salient “moral” characteristics in common. Slim’s Table was an effort to document commonalities between an invisible inner city black working poor and mainstream society. Sidewalk tried to disentangle what is common and what is distinctive about unhoused black men on the streets, accounting for the distinctions and similarities in light of history, situation, and structure. These and other urban ethnographic projects have pivotal agendas that are both scientific and political: to systematically study the lives of the urban poor in a period of U.S. history characterized by a strong current of ideological and cultural dehumanization of marginalized social groups. In such an era, it is important to account for difference and to reaffirm elements of commonality in accordance with the highest standards of evidence. To do so rigorously is both a scientific enterprise and a political project.
Selected Publications:
- "Ethnography, the Ecological Fallacy, and the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave" 2006 American Sociological Review 71:683-92.
- Voices from the Sidewalk: Ethnography and Writing Race (in conversation with Les Back) Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2006, Vol. 29, 2006
- “Sur la négligence théorique et autres écueils de l’ethnographie ” Revue française de sociologie, Volume 1, January 2006
- “Talking City Trouble: Interactional Vandalism, Social Inequality, and the "Urban Interaction Problem" American Journal of Sociology (Volume 104, Number 5, March 1999) (co-authored with Harvey Molotch )
- Sidewalk, (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999) [With photographs by Ovie Carter and an afterword by Hakim Hasan]
- Slim’s Table (University of Chicago Press, 1992) [With photographs by Ovie Carter)
Simon Gikandi
Ph.D in English from Northwestern University
Robert Schirmer Professor of English
45 McCosh Hall
(609) 258-4072
sgikandi@princeton.edu
Professor Simon Gikandi graduated with a first-class degree in literature from the University of Nairobi, was a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, and got his Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University. His major fields of research and teaching are the Anglophone literatures and cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean and Postcolonial Britain, the “Black” Atlantic and the African Diaspora. He also has a special interest in the relation between literature and the production of knowledge and the history of English as a field of study. He is the general editor of The Encyclopedia of African Literature and co-editor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. He is currently completing a book on the relation between slavery and the culture of taste. Gikandi is the recipient of numerous awards from organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation and the Guggenheim Fellowship.
Selected Publications
- Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
- Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (Columbia University Press, 1996)
- Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Cornell University Press, 1992)
- Reading Chinua Achebe (Heinemann, 1991)
- Reading the African Novel (Heinemann, 1987)
Recent Courses Taught:
- ENG 382, 383 Topics in Literature and Nationality
William Gleason
Ph.D., University of California-Los Angeles, 1993
Professor
Department of English
19 McCosh Hall
(609) 258-1607
bgleason@princeton.edu
Professor William Gleason joined the Princeton faculty in 1993 after completing his PhD at UCLA. A specialist in American literature and culture, his research and teaching interests range from the 18th century to the present, with particular emphasis on the late 19th/early 20th century, and include American Studies, multi-ethnic U.S. literatures, material culture, popular culture, children¹s literature, architecture, environmental studies, work and leisure. He is the author of Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature (New York University Press, 2011) and The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840-1940 (Stanford University Press, 1999). He has also published essays on such writers as Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Crafts, Charles Chesnutt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edith Wharton, Thomas Pynchon, Louise Erdrich, and Charles Johnson. In 2006 Gleason received the President¹s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the McGraw Center Graduate Mentoring Award. Formerly Director of Graduate Studies, he is currently Acting Director of the Program in American Studies.
Recent Courses Taught:
- ENG 386/ENV 386 - Literature and Environment
- AMS 201 - American Places: Introduction to American Studies
- ENG 385 - Children¹s Literature
- ENG 357 - American Best Sellers
Hendrik Hartog
Professor
Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty
American legal and constitutional history; American social and family history
214 Dickinson
(609) 258-4166
hartog@princeton.edu
On Leave 2011-2012 Academic Year
Hendrik Hartog is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty. He holds a Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Brandeis University (1982), a J.D. from the New York University School of Law (1973), and an A.B. from Carleton College (1970). Before coming to Princeton, he taught at the University of Wisconsin Law School (1982-92) and at the Indiana University (Bloomington) School of Law (1977-82). Hartog has spent his scholarly life working in the social history of American law, obsessed with the difficulties and opportunities that come with studying how broad political and cultural themes have been expressed in ordinary legal conflicts. He has worked in a variety of areas of American legal history: on the history of city life, on the history of constitutional rights claims, on the history of marriage, and on the historiography of legal change. He is the author of Public Property and Private Power: the Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870 (1983) and Man and Wife in America: a History (2000). He is the editor of Law in the American Revolution and the Revolution in the Law (1981) and the coeditor of Law in Culture and Culture in Law (2000) and American Public Life and the Historical Imagination (2003). Representative articles include “Pigs and Positivism” (Wisconsin Law Review, 1985); “The Constitution of Aspiration and ‘The Rights that Belong to us All’” (Journal of American History, 1987); “Mrs. Packard on Dependency” (Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 1988); “Abigail Bailey’s Coverture: Law in a Married Woman’s Consciousness” (in Law in Everyday Life, 1993); “Lawyering, Husbands’ Rights, and ‘The Unwritten Law,’ in Nineteenth-Century America” (Journal of American History, 1997); and “Llewellyn, Divorce, and Description” (in American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, 2003). He has been awarded a variety of national fellowships and lectureships, and for a decade he coedited Studies in Legal History, the book series of the American Society for Legal History. He is affiliated with Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs and with the Program in American Studies.
Current Project
Professor Hartog is at present working on a study of inheritance conflicts in 19th- and 20th-century New Jersey, reading them in particular for what they show about parent-child relations, child labor, and how, in a time before pensions and Social Security, people used the promise of inheritance to secure care for themselves in old age.
Recent Publications
- Man and Wife in America: A History, Harvard University Press
- Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870 (Studies in Legal History), University of North Carolina Press
- American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, University of Notre Dame Press
Albert Raboteau
Ph.D, Yale University, 1974
Henry Putnam Professor of Religion, Department of Religion
134 1879 Hall
(609) 258-2761
raboteau@princeton.edu
Professor Albert Raboteau is one of the nation's foremost scholars of African American religious history. His research and teaching have focused specifically on American Catholic history and African American religious movements. During his tenure at Princeton, Professor Raboteau has served as dean of the Graduate School (1992-1993) and director of the Program in African American Studies. He is currently co-director of A Documentary History of African-American Religion and serves on the coordinating committee for the Center for the Study of American Religion.
Selected Publications:
- A Sorrowful Joy (Paulist Press, 2002)
- Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 2001);
- A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Beacon Press, 1995);
- Slave Religion: The 'Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 1980);
Recent Courses Taught:
- REL 320- African American Religious History
- REL 370- Re-Enchanting the World: Religion and the Literature of Fantasy
Judith Weisenfeld
Ph.D. Princeton University, 1992
Professor of Religion
Department of Religion
jweisenf@Princeton.EDU
Judith Weisenfeld joined the Princeton faculty in 2007. Her field is American religious history, with particular emphasis on 20th century African American religious history; religion, race, and gender; and religion in American film and popular culture. She is the author of Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 and African American Women and Christian Activism: New York's Black YWCA, 1905-1945. She is currently working on a project titled Apostles of Race: Religion and Black Racial Identity in Urban North, 1920-1950 for which she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.
Selected Publications
- Hollywood Be Thy Name: African-American Religion in American Film,1929-1949 (University of California Press, 2007)
- African-American Women and Christian Activism: New York's Black YWCA,1905-1945 (Harvard University Press, 1997)
- This Far By Faith: Readings in African-American Women's Religious Biography, edited with Richard Newman (Routledge, 1996)
Recent Courses Taught:
- REL 511: Black Gods and Utopian Visions:
- REL 505: Studies in Religions of the Americas: African American Women and Religion
- REL 377: Race and Religion in America