Faculty

David Archer is a Professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences. His research interests span a range of topics pertaining to the global carbon cycle and its relation to global climate, with special focus on ocean sedimentary processes and their impact on the evolution of atmospheric CO2. He regularly teaches classes on global warming, environmental chemistry, and global geochemical cycles.

Alida Bouris is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration (SSA). Her primary research focuses on the relationship between social context and adolescent health, with a particular emphasis on understanding how parents and families can help prevent HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and unplanned pregnancies among marginalized youth aged 10-24 years old. The overall goal of Dr. Bouris's research agenda is to develop effective interventions that capitalize on the strengths of families and other supportive persons in the lives of young people. In addition, she studies the social-contextual factors associated with poor mental health among LGBT youth of color, and how structural inequalities and co-occurring psychosocial problems are linked to health.

At SSA, Professor Bouris teaches courses on social work practice and cognitive-behavioral therapy. In 2013, she was the recipient of the William Pollak Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2015, she received the Award for Excellence in Doctoral Student Mentoring.

Read about Alida Bouris's MLA Class on Our Shifting Definitions of Mental Health and Mental Illness

Jason Bridges is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. His primary research and teaching areas are the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. He also has interests in metaphysics and epistemology, the philosophy of action, the later work of Wittgenstein, and political philosophy. His main current projects are about reasons and rationality, and epistemic and semantic contextualism.

Marco Garrido is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago. His primary research interest focuses on the relationship between the urban poor and middle class in Manila. More broadly, his research examines the relationship between urban structures and political dissensus, as well as the role that class plays in shaping urban spaces, social life, and politics.

Andreas Glaeseris is a professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Sociology. He is a sociologist of culture with a particular interest in the construction of identities and knowledges. His work interlaces substantive interests with efforts to build social theory. He is currently finishing a book aiming at the development of a political epistemology which asks how people come to understand the world of politics from within their particular biographical trajectories and social milieus. He also has begun work on a new project which studies the emergence of dominant understandings about Muslim immigrants in the interaction between contingent historical events, the cycles of electoral politics, everyday experiences and mass-mediated discourses in Germany, France and Britain.

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Faith Hillis is an historian of modern Russia, with a special interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics, culture, and ideas. Her work explores how Russia's peculiar political institutions—and its status as a multiethnic empire—shaped public opinion and political cultures. It also interrogates Russia's relationship with the outside world, asking where the Russian experience belongs in the broader context of European and global history. In addition, she is interested in the theory and practice of the digital humanities.

Her most recent book, Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Exiles and the Quest for Freedom, 1830–1930, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. The book provides the first synthetic account of Europe's "Russian colonies"—boisterous and politically fractious communities formed by exiles from the Russian empire that emerged across the continent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book treats the "Russian colonies" as utopian communities in which radical activists worked to transform social relations and individual behavior, and it explores how these unique spaces influenced Russian political imaginaries as well as the culture of their host societies. Ultimately, the project offers a bold reassessment of Russia's relationship with Europe, the origins of the Russian revolution, and the creation of the Bolshevik regime.

Her first book, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation, was published by Cornell University Press in 2013 and released in paperback in 2017. Children of Rus' argues that it was on the extreme periphery of the tsarist empire—a region that today is located at the very center of the independent nation of Ukraine—that Russian nationalism first took shape and assumed its most potent form. The book reconstructs how nineteenth-century provincial intellectuals came to see local folk customs as the purest manifestation of an ancient nation that unified all the Orthodox East Slavs, and how they successfully propagated their ideas across the empire through lobbying and mass political mobilization. In addition, it reconceptualizes state-society relations under tsarism, showing how residents of a diverse and contested peripheral region managed to shape political ideas and identities across Russia—and even beyond its borders. Children of Rus' was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013.

Her current research is enriched by technology, and she is interested in thinking through how historians can use digital tools to open new avenues for exploration and to communicate their findings to other scholars and the general public. She is particularly interested in using geo-spatial analysis to analyze flows of people, ideas, and commodities over time and across space. For examples of her (ongoing) work in digital cartography, see her Utopia's Discontents website in development and her study of émigré publications.

She has held research fellowships at Columbia, Harvard, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her research has been funded by ACLS, IREX, Fulbright-Hays, and the NEH.

Edward W. Kolb is a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He was the founding head of the NASA/Fermilab Astrophysics Group at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. In addition to more than 200 scientific papers, he is a coauthor of The Early Universe, the standard textbook on particle physics and cosmology. His book for the general public, Blind Watchers of the Sky (winner of the 1996 Emme Award from the AAS), is the story of the people and ideas that shaped our view of the universe. Kolb was awarded the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

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Rochona Majumdar is a historian of modern India with a focus on Bengal. Her writings span histories of gender and sexuality, Indian cinema, especially art cinema and film music, and modern Indian intellectual history. Majumdar also writes on postcolonial history and theory. 

Majumdar started out as a historian of gender and arranged marriage in colonial and postcolonial Bengal that resulted in her book Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal. Her interest in postcoloniality as an intellectual standpoint led to her second work, Writing Postcolonial History, where she analyzed the impact of postcolonial theory on a variety of historical fields. Her interests in the culture and aesthetics of mass democracy led Majumdar to study cinema, in particular Indian cinema. Currently, she is finishing a monograph entitled Art Cinema in India: Aesthetic and Political Histories and The Indian New Cinemas Reader: Texts, Debates, Histories (co-edited) with Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Moinak Biswas.

For several years, Majumdar has been interested in the question of whether certain key concepts can be translated across cultures. She has published a few essays on concepts such as “samaj” (society) and “sabhyata” (civility/civilization). This is a long-term project that will map the emergence of these and other concepts over the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in order to write a global history of Indian social thought.

Majumdar’s work has been supported by the American Institute for Indian Studies and the Harry Frank Guggenheim foundation. She has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Emotions, Berlin and IWM, Vienna.

Majumdar also writes for The Indian Express, Outlook and Anandabazar Patrika (in Bengali).

Robert Martinis an emeritus curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, where he served as Provost for five years. He is also an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the University of Chicago, where he has taught in the College and is a member of the Committee of Evolutionary Biology. His research interests span the fields of anthropology, evolutionary biology and human reproductive biology. He has authored 300 publications, including peer-reviewed papers, books, book chapters, and book translations, and regularly maintains a blog on human evolution for Psychology Today.

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Peggy Mason is a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. After twenty-five years of researching the cellular mechanisms of pain modulation, her research interests have shifted to the biological basis of empathy and helping. A self-described “neuroevangelist,” she is thrilled for opportunities to teach neurobiology to interested audiences of non-specialists. Her efforts in this realm include reaching tens of thousands of people through her Twitter (@NeuroMOOC), her blog, and open online courses through Coursera.

Omar M. McRoberts is currently an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the College. McRoberts' scholarly and teaching interests include the sociology of religion, urban sociology, urban poverty, race, and collective action. His first book, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood is based on an ethnographic study of religious life in Four Corners: a poor, predominantly black neighborhood in Boston containing twenty-nine congregations. It explains the high concentration, wide variety, and ambiguous social impact of religious activity in the neighborhood. It won the 2005 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. McRoberts currently is conducting a study of black religious responses to and influences on social welfare policy since the New Deal, culminating with George W. Bush's Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives. He is also initiating an ethnographic project on cultures of death and dying among black congregations in low-income urban contexts. Read an interview with Omar McRoberts on the enriching experience of ethnography.

Stephen Meredith is a professor in pathology and the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. Meredith never abandoned his passion for literature during his academic training in the biological sciences. His familiarity with James Joyce, Thomas Aquinas, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky would later merge with his scientific teaching career at Chicago. Meredith developed an undergraduate course on literary and philosophical reflections on disease. Popular acclaim from his students brought an invitation to teach other courses. He received the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 1994 and the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2005.

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Mark Miller is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Chicago. He is in the early stages of a book project called The Drive of Psychoanalytic Theory: A Reintroduction to Freud and Lacan. He also teaches and writes about medieval literature and culture, especially Chaucer and other fourteenth century English writers. In 2004, he received the Mark B. Ashin Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Click here to read about Mark Miller's sample class, "Some Versions of the Apocalypse."

Larry Rothfield is an associate professor in the Department of English, Department of Comparative Literature, and is a research affiliate in the Cultural Policy Center. His research focuses on the way in which literature, criticism, and other cultural activities are caught up within epistemic and political struggles.

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Amy Dru Stanley is an associate professor in UChicago’s history department. Her research and teaching focus on US history, from the early Republic through the Progressive Era. She is especially interested in the history of capitalism, slavery, and emancipation, and the historical experience of moral problems. Methodologically, she works at the intersections of intellectual, social, and legal history. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, from institutions including the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Museum of American History, the American Bar Foundation, and the New York University Law School. She has also been awarded the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2009 and a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring in 2005.

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Michael S. Turner is the theoretical cosmologist who coined the term dark energy. He helped establish the interdisciplinary field that combines together cosmology and elementary particle physics to understand the origin and evolution of the universe. His research focuses on the earliest moments of creation, and he has made contributions to inflationary cosmology, particle dark matter and structure formation, the theory of big bang nucleosynthesis, and the nature of dark energy.

William Veeder is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College. He has taught courses on American and British Gothic literature of the nineteenth century, contemporary fiction, and on specific figures such as Henry James and Ambrose Bierce. He is the author or coauthor of various books such as Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: the Fate of Androgyny; Henry James, the Lessons of the Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century; The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883; and Henry James: Lessons of the Master, as well as essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century Anglo-American gothic texts, psychoanalysis, gender issues, and popular culture.

David Wray is is an associate professor in the Department of Classics, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the College. He is the author of Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (Cambridge 2001), a coeditor of Seneca and the Self (Cambridge 2009), and is currently writing Ovid at the Tragic Core of Modernity. His research and teaching interests include Hellenistic and Roman poetry (especially Apollonius Rhodius, Catullus, Lucretius, Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, and Statius); Greek epic and tragedy; Roman philosophy; ancient and modern relations between literature and philosophy; gender; theory and practice of literary translation; and the reception of Greco-Roman thought and literature, from Shakespeare and Corneille to Pound and Zukofsky. He is a member of the Poetry and Poetics program.