Mellon Foundation fellowships awarded to Daniel Heller-Roazen and Gideon Rosen

Two Princeton University faculty members have been awarded New Directions Fellowships by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grants, two of only eight awarded by the foundation in the program's inaugural year, will allow the faculty members to formally train in academic fields outside their discipline.

Daniel Heller-Roazen, an assistant professor of comparative literature, received $172,000 to study medieval Arabic thought and Arabic and Persian languages. Gideon Rosen, professor of philosophy, received $270,000 to study the philosophy of law.

Announcing the new program, the Mellon Foundation said that cross-disciplinary scholarship "holds great potential, but in practice it can demand formal substantive and methodological training that faculty members are rarely in a position to acquire. This fellowship program aims to permit scholars to gain such training in connection with work on problems that interest them most." The grant money may be used over the next three years.

Heller-Roazen, who has taught at Princeton since 2000, focuses his scholarship on medieval European poetry and philosophy. The fellowship will enable him to continue his studies of Arabic languages during two summers at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and spend a year completing the M. Phil. program in medieval Arabic thought at Oxford University.

"I hope to obtain the scholarly and professional skills necessary to bridge the disciplinary gap between medieval European culture and the classical Arabic tradition and to unite, in my teaching and my publications, two domains of research that are at once profoundly connected and yet rarely considered together," Heller-Roazen wrote in his proposal. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.

Rosen, who joined the Princeton faculty in 1993, focuses his research on metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of mathematics. He is interested in expanding his examination of the degree to which people are legally responsible for their crimes. Rosen plans to spend a year at a law school studying the foundations of jurisprudence and the doctrine of responsibility in criminal law.

Rosen hopes this course of study will instruct him in "how independent moral considerations feed into legal deliberations at various levels." A graduate of Columbia University, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton.

Contact: Marilyn Marks (609) 258-3601