The following was published in UChicago News on July 1, 2020.

Thirteen University of Chicago faculty members have received named professorships or have been appointed distinguished service professors.

Profs. Clifford Ando, John Birge, Frances Ferguson, Vinay Kumar, Ka Yee C. Lee and Linda Waite received distinguished service professorships, while Profs. Neil Brenner, Junhong Chen, Scott Eggener, Timothy Harrison, Eric Pamer, Mercedes Pascual and Brook Ziporyn received named professorships.

Division of the Humanities

Prof. Cliff Ando
Clifford Ando has been named the David B. and Clara E. Stern Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Classics and History and the College.

A prolific author, Ando writes on a wide range of topics within the histories of religion, law and government in the ancient world. Recently he has turned his attention to issues in legal history, the nature of domination in republican empires and the conduct of legal and political theory in contexts of weak state power.

He is currently working on a collaborative project to produce a new edition of the surviving texts of Roman statutes, and a rhetorical and sociolinguistic study of legal Latin from archaic Rome to the medieval period.

Ando served as the Lucy Shoe Merritt Scholar in Residence from 2014 to 2015 at the American Academy in Rome, and received the 2012 Frederich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar or research fellow at 12 other institutions outside the United States, including in France, Germany, England, New Zealand and South Africa.

Frances Ferguson has been named the Mabel Greene Myers Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College.

Prof. Frances Ferguson
While she focuses her scholarship on writing from the 18th century and the Romantic period, Ferguson has wide-ranging scholarly interests, including such topics as pornography, Edmund Burke’s and Immanuel Kant’s accounts of aesthetics and philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s thinking on law and constitutions. She has held several visiting professorships, most recently at the University of Cambridge. There, Ferguson gave a public lecture about the relationship between Bitcoin and Blockchain, the place of whales in the Bitcoin community, and the tension between using Bitcoin for currency and using it for investment.

Her forthcoming book aims to describe 18th- and early 19th-century efforts to democratize education. Ferguson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2011, she received the Distinguished Scholar Award for lifetime achievement from the Keats-Shelley Association of America.

Timothy Harrison has been named the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Assistant Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern English Literature in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College.

Prof. Timothy Harrison
He focuses his scholarship on how early modern literature intersects with multidisciplinary fields of study, including philosophy, theology and the sciences. Currently, Harrison is the director of the undergraduate program in Renaissance Studies, a program he developed with UChicago historian Ada Palmer.

His first book, Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in fall 2020. This book examines the role played by poetry in the emergence of the concept of consciousness through the lens of the poetry and prose of John Milton and Thomas Traherne alongside such philosophers as René Descartes and John Locke.

His current work includes researching and writing The Being of Effort in Early Modernity, which extends his work on consciousness into the realm of biology by exploring how Milton's poetry develops an account of life as it is lived that draws on the resources of both the Reformation theology of the will and the philosophical ideas expressed by such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway.