New Faculty

Four full professors are joining the Princeton faculty, including Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who will become a member of the creative writing program in July 2015. The others, who begin teaching this fall, are:

Judith Hamera, the program in dance, from Texas A&M University, where she has been a professor since 2005. She previously taught at California State University-Los Angeles. Hamera’s research focus is performance studies, and she is the author of three books and co-editor of a volume in the field. The Lewis Center for the Arts said her hiring signals a deepened commitment to dance studies by adding faculty with expertise in the history, theory, and criticism of dance.

Ilyana Kuziemko, economics, from Columbia University. Kuziemko was an assistant professor at Princeton from 2007 to 2012 and took leave to serve as deputy assistant treasury secretary in 2009–10. A research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Kuziemko studies public, labor, and health economics, including redistribution of wealth, risk and health-care costs, and demand for health insurance.

Assaf Naor, mathematics, from New York University, where he has taught since 2006. He previously worked at Microsoft Research. Naor’s research focuses on analysis, probability, and quantitative geometry and their applications to combinatorics, mathematical physics, and theoretical computer science. He won the Blavatnik Award of the New York Academy of Sciences for young scientists in 2012 and the Bôcher Memorial Prize for an outstanding paper in analysis in 2011.

Lahiri is a writer in residence at John Cabot University in Rome; she has held the same position at Vassar College and Baruch College. Her 1999 collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize, and her 2013 novel The Lowland was a National Book Award finalist.

About 40 assistant professors also are joining the faculty.