The following are among the new faculty members at the University. Others will be introduced periodically in this space.
T.R. Kidder joined the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences as professor. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Tulane University and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1988. He had been a member of the faculty at Tulane since completing his Ph.D., and in 2002-03 served as interim dean of Tulane College. Kidder is interested in North American archaeology and ethnohistory, particularly the prehistoric and historic Indian cultures of the Southeast. His work concerns subsistence studies, paleoecology, geoarchaeology, the formation of hierarchical social systems, ceramic analysis, and the archaeology of European contact.
Martin Jacobs joined the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor of rabbinic studies. He also holds a joint appointment in the program in Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies. He earned a habilitation (2002) and Ph.D. (1994) in Jewish studies from the Free University of Berlin. His research interests span Jewish literature and history from the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism in Roman Palestine through its encounter with Islam in medieval and early modern times. He was as a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1999-2001, and a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania in 2001-02.
Vladimir Birman joined the Department of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2000 and a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina-Charlotte in 1995. His research interests lie in the area of synthetic organic chemistry and include total synthesis of bioactive natural products and rational design of ligands and catalysts for asymmetric chemical transformations. He recently completed postdoctoral studies at Columbia University, during which he accomplished the first total synthesis of merrilactone A, a potent neurotrophic agent that may be useful in the treatment of neuro-degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.