People

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 a volume of poetry. Professor Appiah also is co-editor, with Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., of the 3,000-article Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience and the Encarta Africana CD-Rom. His most recent projects are a second set of Tanner Lectures in Human Values (a lecture series presented by several universities around the world), 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.

Selected Publications

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Norton, 2006)
The Ethics of Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005)
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 319/ CHV 319- Normative Ethics
FRS 101- Individuality as an Ideal

Paul DiMaggio
Ph.D., Harvard University, 1979
Professor, Department of Sociology
118 Wallace Hall
609-258-1971
dimaggio@princeton.edu

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

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
Associate Professor
Department of English
19 McCosh Hall
609-258-1607
bgleason@princeton.edu

Professor William Gleason specializes in 19th- and 20th-century American literature, American cultural studies and popular culture. He has written essays on Thoreau, Chesnutt, Pynchon, Erdrich and Charles Johnson. He is currently working on a study of race, architecture and American literature.

Selected Publications:

The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840-1940 (Stanford University Press, 1999).

Recent Courses Taught:

ENG 366- American Best Sellers
AMS 201- American Places: Introduction to American Studies

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

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’sProgram 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

Professor Judith Weisenfeld specializes in 20th-century African American religious history, with an emphasis on black women's history and on film and popular culture. She is currently working on a project on African American religious performance in the early 20th century.

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 505 - Studies in Religions of the Americas: African American Women and Religion