The following was published in UChicago News on June 28, 2022.

Nineteen University of Chicago faculty members have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships.

Profs. Marshall Chin, Thomas Ginsburg, Robert Kendrick, Ernst Lengyel, Christian Leuz and Jason Merchant have received distinguished service professorships.

Profs. Matthew Boyle, Jacob Goldin, Colleen Grogan, Tara O. Henderson, Sherwin S.W. Ho, Karen Kim, Guido Lorenzoni, Noémie Ndiaye, Shigehiro Oishi, Adriana Robertson, Tobin Sosnick, Gil Stein and Alan Yu have received named professorships.

All appointments are effective July 1, unless otherwise noted.

Humanities Division

Matthew Boyle has been named the first Emerson and Grace Wineland Pugh Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the College.

Boyle works on topics in the philosophy of mind and on some issues in the history of philosophy. He has been especially concerned with the question of how we know our own minds and with debates about the scope and limits of such knowledge. He has written mainly on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, although he also has interests in the work of Aristotle, Aquinas, Fichte, Hegel and Sartre.

His book Transparency and Reflection, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2023, examines the distinction between rational and nonrational minds, the connection between rationality and the capacity for first-person awareness of one’s own cognitive activity, and the continuing relevance of these topics to contemporary debates in philosophy and psychology.

He has been the recipient of a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, an ACLS Fellowship, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Rhodes Scholarship.

Robert Kendrick has been named the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Music and Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College.

Kendrick works in early modern music and culture, with additional interests in Latin America, historical anthropology, traditional Mediterranean polyphony, laments and the visual arts. His most recent book is Fruits of the Cross: Passiontide Music Theater in Habsburg Vienna. He has advised or worked with multiple early music performance groups, including Chicago’s Newberry Consort, Bologna’s Cappella Artemisia and Boston’s La Donna Musicale.

In 2018, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2019, a Knight of the Italian Republic (Class VI). He serves as a member of Milan’s Accademia Ambrosiana. He also received the 2006 Graduate Teaching Excellence Award.

Jason Merchant has been named the Lorna Puttkammer Straus Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the College.

Merchant’s primary research is in formal syntax, where he has published and edited books and articles on grammatical theory, analyzing language structures in more than two dozen languages (with special emphasis on modern Greek and the West Germanic languages), and in formal semantics, morphology, and phonology. His work has helped establish the existence of silent syntactic structures in the grammatical representation of elliptical utterances, with important implications for computational and psycholinguistic models of language. He has also done experimental syntax, fieldwork in the Balkans, work on bilingual children’s language competency, and joint work on historical corpus semantics and legal interpretation showing that the phrase “bear arms” in the Second Amendment had an overwhelmingly plural and collective use only.

He has served as associate editor for Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America, and for Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and is on the editorial boards of several journals and book series. He is a recipient of the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and currently serves as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs of the University and as faculty director of UChicagoGRAD, overseeing policy for the University’s Ph.D. programs and postdoctoral researchers.

Noémie Ndiaye 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.

Ndiaye’s work explores the relation between theater—understood simultaneously as a medium, a practice, an industry, an institution, a social force, and a vibrant malleable set of literary forms—and the social, political, and cultural struggles of early modernity. These reveal crucial processes of racial, gender, and identity formation that have shaped our world. Her book, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race, forthcoming with University of Pennsylvania Press in August 2022, dissects the stagecraft used in early modern theater to represent and racialize Africans and Afro-descendants across borders in England, France and Spain.

Ndiaye is the co-editor of Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Pre-modern World (forthcoming with ACMRS Press in Spring 2023). She has published articles in journals such as Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Early Theatre, English Literary Renaissance, Literature Compass and Thaêtre, as well as essays in many edited collections. She is currently at work on a new monograph tentatively entitled Early Modernity in Black and Brown and on a special anniversary issue of Shakespeare Quarterly.

Ndiaye greatly enjoys collaborating with theater makers and visual artists. She is a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Research Board, and co-curator of the forthcoming “Race Before Race” exhibition at the Newberry Library.

Gil Stein has been named the Rowe Professor in Ancient Near Eastern Studies in the Oriental Institute, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the College.

Stein serves as director of the Chicago Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation. His research investigates the development of the earliest urbanized states in the Near East, ancient economies, the archaeology of colonialism, inter-regional interaction, zooarchaeology and the preservation of cultural heritage. He has led field projects of excavation, survey and museum work in Turkey, Syria and Afghanistan, and is currently digging at the 5th-4th millennium BC Chalcolithic site of Surezha in Northeast Iraq. He also conducts cultural heritage preservation projects in Afghanistan and Central Asia (Uzbekistan).

Stein has written over 50 journal articles, book chapters, and reviews; including the book Rethinking World Systems: Diasporas, Colonies, and Interaction in Uruk Mesopotamia; and the edited volumes The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives and Preserving the Cultural Heritage of Afghanistan.

Alan Yu has been named the William Colvin Professor of Linguistics and the College.

His research investigates questions related to language variation and change, particularly with regard to the so-called “actuation problem”—that is, what causes the inception of language change? He has also done extensive work on Cantonese and Washo, a Native American language spoken in California and Nevada.

He serves as director of the UChicago Phonology Laboratory and co-editor-in-chief of Laboratory Phonology. He is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.

His books include A Natural History of Infixation (2007), Origins of Sound Change: Approaches to Phonologization  (2013), and The Handbook of Phonological Theory with John Goldsmith and Jason Riggle (2011).