The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of seven faculty members, including four full professors and three assistant professors.
Professor
Yarimar Bonilla, in American studies, specializes in American studies, Latino/a/x studies, and Caribbean studies. Her appointment is effective July 1, 2023.
Bonilla will join Princeton from Hunter College-CUNY, where she has taught since 2018, most recently as a professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies. She also serves as the director of Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies. She previously taught at Rutgers University and at the University of Virginia.
Bonilla is the author of “Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and the co-editor of “Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm” (Haymarket Books, 2019) with Marisol LeBrón. She was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship in 2018.
Bonilla received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, an M.A. from the University of New Mexico and a B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras.
Arthur Spirling, in politics, specializes in data science. His appointment is effective July 1, 2023.
Spirling comes to Princeton from New York University, where he has taught since 2015, most recently as a professor of politics and data science. He previously taught at Harvard University.
He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed papers and received the Society for Political Methodology’s Emerging Scholar Award in 2018.
Spirling earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and an M.Sc. and a B.Sc. from the London School of Economics.
Eric Tate, in public and international affairs, specializes in geography. His appointment is effective July 1, 2023.
Tate joins Princeton’s faculty from the University of Iowa, where he has taught since 2011, most recently as an associate professor of geographical and sustainability sciences.
His research on flood vulnerability has received multiple grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Tate received a Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina, an M.S. from the University of Texas-Austin and a B.S. from Rice University.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, in African American studies, specializes in race, politics, and social justice. Taylor, who taught at Princeton from 2014 to 2022 and at Northwestern University beginning in 2022, will rejoin the faculty on July 1, 2023.
A contributing writer to The New Yorker, she is the author of “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership” (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), which was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020.
Taylor’s earlier book, “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” (Haymarket Books, 2016), won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is editor of “How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective” (Haymarket Books, 2018), which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT nonfiction.
In 2021, Taylor was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was named a Freedom Scholar in 2020. Taylor earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. from Northwestern University and a B.A. from Northeastern Illinois University.
Assistant professor
Christopher Griffin, in geosciences, is a specialist in the history of vertebrate life. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. from Virginia Tech and a B.S. from Cedarville University. Griffin will join the faculty in July 2024.
Yedidah Koren, in religion, joins the faculty this fall. A specialist in the cultural, intellectual, and social history of Jewish literature, she holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. from Tel Aviv University and a B.A. from Hebrew University.
Courtney Paquette, in operations research and financial engineering, joins the faculty this summer from McGill University, where she is currently an assistant professor. She is a specialist in mathematics and statistics, and holds a Ph.D. and a B.S. from the University of Washington.
