People

Director

David Bellos has a joint appointment in Princeton’s Department of French and Italian and the Department of Comparative Literature. Professor Bellos’ current interests are in literary translation and the development of translation studies. He also has worked in nineteenth century studies, modern and contemporary French writing, the history of the book and film studies, and as the translator and biographer of the French Jewish novelist, Georges Perec. Ph.D. University of Oxford.

Sandra L. Bermann++ is the Cotsen Professor of the Humanities and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Her current projects focus on lyric poetry, translation, the intersections between twentieth-century historiography and literary theory, and new directions in the field of comparative literature. Ph.D. Columbia University.

William Bialek+ is the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics and a member of the multidisciplinary Lewis–Sigler Institute. Professor Bialek participates in the interdepartmental educational programs in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Biophysics, Neuroscience, and Quantitative and Computational Biology, and is an associated faculty member in the Department of Molecular Biology.  Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley.

Caryl Emerson+ is the Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, chair of the Slavic department, and a professor of comparative literatures. Her research interests include Mikhail Bakhtin, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, the context and relevance of literary and cultural criticism, and most recently, the adaptation of Russian literary classics to the Soviet-era stage. Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin.

Christiane Fellbaum+++ is a senior research scientist in the Department of Computer Science. Her interests include lexical semantics, computational linguistics, figurative language, and lexical databases. She teaches courses on computational linguistics and bilingualism. Ph.D. Princeton University.

Rubén Gallo+ is an associate professor of Latin American literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures. His research interests include the avant-garde, psychoanalysis, and transatlantic exchanges between Mexico and France. Ph.D. Columbia University. 

Adele Goldberg+ is a professor of linguistics and an associate in the Department of Psychology whose research focuses on why languages are the way they are. Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley.

Michael Gordin is a professor in the Department of History and director of the Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies. His interests include history of modern physical sciences, especially in Russia and the Soviet Union, and Russian . Ph.D. Harvard University.

Daniel Heller-Roazen+ is a professor of comparative literature and the director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism. His research encompasses various aspects of classical, medieval, and modern literature and philosophy. Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University.

Joshua T. Katz+ is a professor of classics and director of the Program in Linguistics. He is a linguist by training, a classicist by profession, and a comparative philologist at heart. Ph.D. Harvard University.

Martin Kern+ is a professor of East Asian studies who specializes in classical Chinese literature. His research interests include ancient poetry and poetics, formation of the early Chinese textual tradition, and relations between writing and performance. Ph.D. University of Cologne.

Paul Muldoon+ a Pulitzer-prizewinning poet, is the Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor in Creative Writing and founding chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. 

Daniel Osherson+ is a professor in the Department of Psychology and member of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. His interests include the neural basis of language and reasoning, the nature of concepts, and the theory of rational belief and action. Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania.

Alan W. Patten+ is an associate professor of politics and chair of the Fund for Canadian Studies. His interests lie in the fields of political theory and language politics. Ph.D. University of Oxford.

Robert Schapire+ is a professor in the Department of Computer Science.  His main research interest is in theoretical and applied machine learning.  Ph.D. MIT.

Kim Lane Scheppele+ is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values. She is also a faculty member of the Department of Sociology and serves as the director of the Woodrow Wilson School’s Program in Law and Public Affairs. Ph.D. University of Chicago.

Nigel Smith+ is a professor of English and currently serves as chair of the Renaissance Studies Committee. His interests include poetry; poetic theory; the social role of literature; literature, politics, and religion; literature and visual art; heresy and heterodoxy; radical literature; early prose fiction; women’s writing; journalism; censorship; the early modern public sphere; travel; and the history of linguistic ideas. Ph.D. University of Oxford.

Jeffrey Stout+ is a professor in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Ethics after Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (1988) and with Robert McSwain, is coeditor of Grammar and Grace:  Reformulations of Aquinas and Wittgenstein (2004). Ph.D. Princeton University.

C. K. Williams+ a Pulitzer-prizewinning poet, is a lecturer with the rank of professor in Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts. In addition to collections of his poetry, he has published translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others.