Executive Committee

João Biehl (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley; Ph.D. Graduate Theological Union) is Associate Professor of Anthropology. He is the author of the award-winning book Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (2005) and of Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival (2007). He is also the co-editor of Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (2007). He is currently writing the history of a millennial cult and civil war that took place among German immigrants in 19th century Brazil. He teaches courses in medical anthropology; science, technology, and society; globalization and development; culture and mental health; and contemporary social theory. He received Princeton’s Presidential Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005.

Thomas Espenshade (Ph.D., Princeton University) is Professor of Sociology. He has interests in social demography and its intersections with sociology and other social sciences. He is directing the National Study of College Experience, a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to examine the experiences of minority and non-minority high school graduates in applying to and attending academically selective U.S. colleges and universities. He is also a faculty co-PI on the Campus Life in America Student Survey (the CLASS Project) funded by the Ford Foundation. This project is investigating what colleges and universities can do programmatically to maximize the educational benefits of diversity. He is author or editor of Keys to Successful Immigration: Implications of the New Jersey Experience (1997), The International Migration of the Highly Skilled (2001) and articles in the American Sociological Review, Population and Development Review, Sociology of Education, Social Science Quarterly, Demography, Population Studies, and Annual Review of Sociology.

Simon Gikandi (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is Professor of English at Princeton University. Professor of English at Princeton 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 is the author of many books including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, which was a Choice Outstanding Academic Publication for 2004. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature and the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature.

R. Marie Griffith (Ph.D., Harvard University) is Director of the Program in the Study of Women and Gender and Professor of Religion specializing in American religious history. She is the author of God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission and Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. She has co-edited a volume on Women and Religion in the African Diaspora and recently published American Religions: A Documentary History.  She is working on a new book about Christians and sexuality in the U.S.

Peter Jeffery (Ph.D., Princeton University) is the Scheide Professor of Music History. He teaches courses in medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music, world music, liturgy, music and spirituality. Among his publications are Re-Envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant and the three-volume Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant: An Anthology. His most recent book, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery was released by Yale University Press in 2006.

Kevin M. Kruse (Ph.D., Cornell University) is Associate Professor of History.  His research has focused on political, southern, and urban/suburban history in modern America. Recent publications include White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism and The New Suburban History. His current project focuses on the rise of religious conservativism in postwar America, a study tentatively titled One Nation Under God: Cold War Christianity and the Origins of the Religious Right.

Katherine T. Rohrer (Ph.D., Princeton University), who sits with the Committee as a non-voting member, is Vice Provost for Academic Programs. She is secretary of the Academic Planning Group and of the Priorities Committee. She has served as Associate Dean of the Faculty and has taught as a full-time faculty member in the Departments of Music at both Princeton and Columbia. Her scholarly interests concern seventeenth-century music, particularly opera and the works of Henry Purcell. She is a practicing Anglican choral musician.

Carolyn Rouse (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam (2004) and Uncertain Suffering: Racial Healthcare Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease (UC Press Berkeley).  She is finishing a co-written book entitled Televised Redemption: The Media Production of Black Jews, Christians and Muslims. Her current book project, The New Missionaries, examines discourses of charity and development and is tied to her own project building a school in a fishing village in Ghana. In addition to being an anthropologist, Rouse is also a filmmaker. She has produced, directed, and/or edited a number of documentaries including Chicks in White Satin (1994), a film about a lesbian wedding; and Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali (1998).
Valerie A. Smith (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is Director of the Center for African American Studies and Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature in the Department of English. She has published widely in the areas of race, gender, and twentieth-century U.S. culture, particularly African-American literature and film. Her books include Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings and Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. At present she is completing a book on the cultural memory of the Civil Rights Movement.

Stephen F. Teiser (Ph.D., Princeton University), D. T. Suzuki Professor in Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion, specializes in Chinese Buddhism. His latest book is Reinventing the Wheel: Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples, which examines Buddhist cosmological paintings in India, central Asia, China, Tibet, and Japan. He is the Director of the Tibet Site Seminar, a four-year project funded by the Luce Foundation for teaching Ph.D. students in the fields of Art History and Buddhist Studies. Professor Teiser also co-directs the Buddhist Studies Workshop.

Christian Wildberg (Ph.D., Cambridge) is Professor of Classics and Master of Forbes College.  His interests include Classical Philosophy, in particular Neoplatonism, Plato and Aristotle; the intellectual history of the fifth century BCE (Tragedy, Presocratics); Ancient Science and Cosmology; and Ancient Greek Religion.  His publications include Hyperesie und Epiphanie: Ein Versuch über die Bedeutung der Götter in den Dramen des Euripides (2002) and several publications on the sixth century philosopher John Philoponus.

Robert Wuthnow, Center Director (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is the Gerhard R. Andlinger `52 Professor of Sociology. He has published widely in the sociology of religion, culture, and civil society. His recent books include After the Baby Boomers:  How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion; America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity; and Saving America? Faith-Based Services and the Future of Civil Society.  He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Boundless Faith:  The Global Outreach of American Churches.

Froma Zeitlin (Ph.D., Columbia University) is the Charles Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature, Professor of Comparative Literature. She served as the Director of the Program in Judaic Studies from its inception in Fall 1996 until Fall 2005. She has published extensively in the field of Greek literature and in gender studies, including Under the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes and Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Her current project is entitled Vision, Figuration, and Image from Theater to Romance in Ancient Greece. She contributed an essay to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Ancient Novel on the topic of Religion.  She is also completing an essay on intersections of Jewish and Christian martyrdom tropes in Shoah fiction.

Jenny Wiley Legath (Ph.D., Princeton University) is Associate Director of the Center.  Her current project, "The Phoebe Phenomenon," examines the Protestant deaconess movement in the United States from 1880 to 1930.  She sits with the Committee as a non-voting member.