Chairs for Six in SAS:

Drs. Moudileno, Wilf, Cannon,

Richetti, de Grazia, and Rabaté

Dean Samuel H. Preston of the School of Arts and Sciences has announced the appointment of two faculty members to endowed chairs during the past semester, and of four to term chairs.

Two Endowed Professorships

Dr. Lydie Moudileno of Romance languages has been named to the M. Mark and Esther K. Watkins Assistant Professorship in the Humanities. Dr. Moudileno is an alumna of the Université de Nancy who received her M.A. in French from the University of Colorado at Boulder, in 1990, and her Ph.D. in French literature from UC/Berkeley in 1994. She taught at the University of Nebraska/Lincoln; at Colorado/Boulder where she won the Graduate Student Teaching Excellence Award; and at Berkeley; before joining Penn as assistant professor of French and Francophone literature in 1994. Last October, she chaired a conference in Paris at the Salon du Livre d'Outre-Mer on critical visions of the production artist. Her articles in The French Review and other academic journals explore themes of creolization and postcolonial identity in the works of Maryse Conde, Henri Lopes, and Soni Labou Tansi. The author of L'Ecrivain antillais au miroir de sa litterature (1997), she is working on a second book that will examine figures of black characters in literature and film from Africa and the diaspora.
 
The Watkins chair, established by a 1969 bequest to support the humanities at Penn, is for a scholar who is "an accomplished teacher and one who shows potential as a leader" in his or her field. It is named for M. Mark Watkins and his wife, Esther K. Watkins, established a bequest in 1969 to support the humanities at Penn. Mr. Watkins was a member of the Class of 1921 who was the president of Conoflow Corporation.
 
Dr. Herbert S. Wilf of mathematics has been appointed to the Thomas A. Scott Professorship in Mathematics. Dr. Wilf received his B.S. in 1952 from M.I.T. and his Ph.D. in 1958 from Columbia. After serving as manager of engineering computing at Fairchild Engine Division and head of the computing section at Nuclear Development Associates, Dr. Wilf taught for three years at the University of Illinois before joining Penn in 1962. He has has authored, co-authored and edited numerous books--including Algorithms and Complexity; Mathematics for the Physical Sciences--and published more than 100 research and expository papers. In 1994 Dr. Wilf co-founded the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, and he is currently an editor of the American Mathematical Monthly. His many honors include the Lindback Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Fellowship of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications; the Haimo Award of the Mathematics Association of America for Distinguished Teaching; and, most recently, the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Research given by the American Mathematical Society in January, 1998.
 
The Scott chair dates from 1881, when the one-time president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomas Alexander Scott, expressed a desire to endow a chair in mathematics in a letter to the trustees giving the disarmingly simple reason: "I understand help is needed for a chair of that character."

Four Term Professorships

Dr. Tyrone Cannon, associate professor of psychology and psychiatry, has been appointed to the Alfred L. Cass Term Chair. Dr. Cannon received his B.A. from Dartmouth in 1985 and his Ph.D. from USC in 1991. He came to Penn in 1991 following an internship at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA. Experimental psychopathology, behavioral genetics, and developmental and cognitive neuroscience, particularly as they apply to schizophrenia, are Dr. Cannon's primary research areas. Among his numerous awards are a Predoctoral Merit Fellowship while at USC, a Dissertation Fellowship from the Scottish Rite Foundation, the National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Young Scientist Award in 1990 from the Life History Research Society. Dr. Cannon holds membership in the Society for Psychophysiological Research; American Association for the Advancement of Science; and the American Psychological Society to name a few. Currently he is working on NIH-sponsored studies entitled Brain Function and Structure in Twins with Schizophrenia and Prenatal and Perinatal Factors in Adult Schizophrenia.
 
His chair was established when Stephen and Lucille Cass Oppenheim made a commitment in 1988 to establish a term chair in memory of Mrs. Oppenheim's father, Alfred. Mrs. Gertrude Cass, Alfred's widow and Mrs. Oppenheim's mother, also contributed to the gift. Stephen Oppenheim, W'60, is a specialist in tax law who is CEO of Faust, Rabbach and Stanger in New York. He and other members of the family have been long-term supporters of Penn and SAS.

Three in English:

Three professors from the Department of English have been named Clara M. Clendenen Term Chairs in English: Margreta de Grazia, John Richetti, and Jean-Michel Rabaté.

Dr. de Grazia received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr in 1968 and her M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1974) from Princeton. She taught at the University of New Mexico and at Georgetown before coming to Penn in 1983. She is the author of Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (1991), and co-edited Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (1996) with her SAS colleagues Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass. Among her prestigious fellowships are those of the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Studies, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently completing a book entitled Countermodern 'Hamlet' and editing, with Stanley Wells, the New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies.

Dr. Richetti received his B.A. from St. Francis College in Brooklyn in 1960, and his M.A. (1961) and Ph.D. (1968) in English at from Columbia, where he specialized in 18th-Century English literature. He has taught at St. John's University in New York, Columbia, Stanford, and Rutgers universities before coming to Penn as the Leonard Sugarman Term Professor of English in 1987. He served as chairman of the Department of English at Penn from 1990-95. His books include Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739; Defoe's Narratives: Situations and Structures; Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume; and Daniel Defoe. He has recently edited the Columbia History of the British Novel, and Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel. He has just completed a new book, The Novel and Social Change: Fiction and History in Britain 1680-1780. His awards and honors include Woodrow Wilson and Woodbridge Fellowships at Columbia; a Fulbright to University College, London; a Guggenheim; an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship; the Lindback Award at Rutgers; and a Senior Research Fellowship from the NEH. Dr. Richetti has served as co-editor of the Cambridge University Press Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought, and he is currently editing the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature volume of the Cambridge History of English Literature.

Dr. Rabaté received his B.A. from the Sorbonne Paris-III, completed his M.A. in English Literature in 1970, and his Ph.D. summa cum laude from Sorbonne Paris-VIII in 1980. Dr. Rabaté taught at the University of Dijon as professor of English a nd American Literature for 12 years and has also taught in Manchester, Paris and Montreal. He came to Penn in 1992 as the Marjorie G. Ernest Term Professor in English. Dr. Rabaté has published widely on such authors as Pound, Joyce, Beckett and Bernhard and on the topics of critical theory and the aesthetics of modernism. His books include: Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound's Cantos (1986); La Beauté Amere: Fragments d'esthetique (Barthes, Broch, Mishima, Rousseau) (1986); James Joyce: Portrait de l'auteur en autre lecteur (1984); Joyce Upon the Void: The Genesis of Doubt (1991); and Ghosts of Modernity (1996). Most recently, he edited Writing the Image after Roland Barthes (1997). Professor Rabaté is a founding member of the Groupe de recherches sur James Joyce, co-editor of James Joyce--Scribble, and has served as director for the College International de Philosophic (Paris) from 1992-1997. He is also co-director of Ulysses--fin-de-siecle, a publishing company in Dijon.

These three chairs stem from a bequest of Clara M. Clendenen, a 1925 graduate of Penn's School of Education who both taught and worked in banking, and who specified in her will that Penn's English department should receive a significant financial award from her estate.


Almanac, Vol. 44, No. 32, May 5, 1998

 FRONT PAGE | CONTENTS | JOB-OPS | CRIMESTATS | BETWEEN ISSUES | MAY at PENN