Board approves 12 new faculty appointments

The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of 12 faculty members, including three full professors and nine assistant professors.

Professor

Arzoo Osanloo, in anthropology, specializes in law, societies and justice. Her appointment is effective Aug. 1.

Osanloo comes to Princeton from the University of Washington, where she has taught since 2002. She directed the Middle East Center at the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies from 2015 to 2023.

Prior to that, she was a visiting fellow in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) Program in Law and Public Affairs from 2011 to 2012, as well as New York University’s International Center for Advanced Study from 2005 to 2006.

Before her academic career, Osanloo was a practicing attorney in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Her research interests include the examination of mercy and forgiveness in the Iranian criminal justice system, among other topics across disciplines including anthropology, ethnography, Islamic studies, law and religion.

Osanloo has held board positions and other prominent posts at the American Anthropological Association, the Association for Iranian Studies, the Law and Society Association and the Middle East Studies Association. She is also a member of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies and the International Society for Islamic Legal Studies.

She serves on the editorial boards or committees of the Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences, the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, the Journal of Legal Anthropology, and the Law and Society Review. She is also a peer reviewer for numerous journals including American Anthropologist and American Ethnologist.

She has authored more than 30 journal articles, book review essays and edited volumes, in addition to two books, “The Politics of Women’s Rights in Iran” (2009) and “Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law, and Victims' Rights in Iran” (2020), both from Princeton University Press. “Forgiveness Work” won the Law and Society Association’s 2021 Herbert Jacob Book Prize.

Osanloo has presented at numerous conferences and institutions around the world, including Princeton’s Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies. Her academic honors include multiple grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

She earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University, a J.D. from American University and a B.A. from the University of Colorado.

Charles M. Schroeder III, in chemical and biological engineering, specializes in soft matter dynamics, molecular electronics and bioelectronics. His appointment is effective Sept. 1.

Schroeder comes to Princeton from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he has taught since 2008, most recently as the James Economy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. He was named the Ray and Beverly Mentzer Faculty Scholar in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in 2017 before his appointment to the James professorship in 2020.

In addition to affiliations within scientific departments and research centers at the school, he was a faculty member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, where he led its AI for Materials Discovery (AIM) working group.

Prior to that, Schroeder was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the University of California-Berkeley, as well as a visiting associate in the division of chemistry and chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology.

His research on using single-molecule biophysics techniques to analyze individual molecules in polymers and create new soft materials has received grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. He is among the researchers chosen to establish the new NSF Center for the Creation of Abiotic Replicating Materials and Assemblies.

Schroeder is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Society of Rheology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Among his many awards and honors are an NSF Career Award, the Arthur B. Metzner Early Career Award from the Society of Rheology and a Packard Fellowship from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. He also serves on the editorial boards at the Journal of Rheology and Scientific Reports and the advisory board of the Soft Matter Association of the Americas.

Schroeder is the author of more than 100 papers in journals including Science, Nature Communications, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He holds four patents.

He earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University.

Richard Ashby Wilson, in anthropology, specializes in the anthropology of law and human rights. His appointment is effective Sept. 1.

Wilson comes to Princeton from the University of Connecticut, where he was associate dean of the School of Law from 2021 to 2023 and has taught since 2004, most recently as the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Law and Anthropology and Gladstein Distinguished Chair of Human Rights. He is the founding director of the university’s Human Rights Institute.

Prior to that, he was a professor at the University of Sussex from 1994 to 2003 and an assistant professor at the University of Essex from 1990 to 1994. He was a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study from 2014 to 2015, as well as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research and the Free University-Amsterdam.

Wilson is a member of the American Anthropological Association, the American Bar Association, the Connecticut Bar Association and the American Society of International Law, among others. He previously served as the editor of the Journal of Anthropological Theory and the associate editor of the Journal of Human Rights, as well as a member of the scientific oversight board to the International Nuremberg Principles Academy.

Wilson has served on the state of Connecticut’s Hate Crimes Advisory Council since 2021, having previously chaired the Connecticut State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 2009 to 2013. He is on the community advisory board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and advises the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen's University-Belfast.

His research interests include international human rights, social and legal anthropology, hate crimes and speech, among others. Wilson is the author or editor of 11 books, including "Incitement on Trial: Prosecuting International Speech Crimes" (2017) and “Writing History in International Criminal Trials” (2011), both for Cambridge University Press. He has written over 80 journal articles, book chapters and policy reports, and his writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian.

Wilson earned a Ph.D. and a B.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Assistant professor

Beatrice Adams, in history, joins the faculty in September. Adams specializes in African American history and comes to Princeton from the College of Wooster, where she has been an assistant professor since 2021. She holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Fisk University.

Dagmara Kraus-Cavaillès, in German, joins the faculty in September. Kraus-Cavaillès specializes in postwar and contemporary literature and culture and comes to Princeton from the Universität Hildesheim, where she has been an assistant professor since 2021. She holds a Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin, an M.A. from Université Paris 8 and a B.A. from Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig.

Laura Kathryn Nelson, in English, joins the faculty in July. Nelson specializes in media studies and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.St. and M.Sc. from the University of Oxford and a B.A. from the University of Virginia. She was a lecturer at Harvard University from 2021 to 2022.

Aleksei Oskolkov, in economics, joins the faculty in July. Oskolkov specializes in macroeconomics and international finance and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, an M.A. from the New Economic School and a B.A. from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

John Sigmier, in art and archaeology, joins the faculty in September. Sigmier specializes in the visual and material culture of the Roman world and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.St. from the University of Oxford and an A.B. from Harvard University.

Aviram Uri, in physics, joins the faculty in September. Uri specializes in interacting topological quantum phases and holds a Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science and a B.S. from Tel Aviv University.

Madeline Woker, in history, joins the faculty in July. Woker specializes in modern European history and holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, an M.S. from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an M.A. from Sciences Po Paris.

Xiaoyu Xia, in East Asian studies, joins the faculty in July. Xia, who specializes in modern Chinese film and media, holds a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and an M.A. and B.A. from Fudan University in Shanghai. She has been a lecturer at Princeton since 2023.

Noah Zucker, in politics, joins the faculty in September. Zucker specializes in international relations and comes to Princeton from the London School of Economics, where he has been an assistant professor since 2023. He holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. from Columbia University and a B.A. from the University of Southern California.