6 Faculty Receive Endowed Professorships

In recognition of their career achievements, the following faculty members are being appointed to endowed professorships, effective July 1, 2019:

Frederick Cohan, professor of biology, is receiving the Huffington Foundation Professorship in the College of the Environment, established in 2010.

Susanne Fusso, professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies, is receiving the Marcus L. Taft Professorship of Modern Languages, established in 1880.

William Johnston, professor of history, is receiving a John E. Andrus Professorship of History, established in 1981.

Ethan Kleinberg, professor of history and professor of letters, is receiving the Class of 1958 Distinguished Professorship, established in 2008.

Tsampikos Kottos, professor of physics, is receiving the Lauren B. Dachs Professorship of Science and Society, established in 2008.

Daniel Krizanc, professor of computer science, is receiving an Edward Burr Van Vleck Professorship of Computer Science, established in 1982.

Brief biographies appear below:

Frederick Cohan arrived at Wesleyan in 1986 after completing his BS at Stanford University, his PhD at Harvard University, and a postdoctoral appointment at University of California, Davis. His research focuses on the origins of diversity in bacteria. His publications, which have been cited more than 8,000 times, recently include “How We Can All Share the Fight Against Infectious Disease” (Arcadia Political Review, Spring 2019) and “Systematics: The Cohesive Nature of Bacterial Species Taxa” (Current Biology, 2019). Cohan has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and he was elected to the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering in 2017.

Susanne Fusso received her BA from Lawrence University and her MA and PhD from Yale University. A specialist in 19th-century Russian prose, she has published three books, including Designing Dead Souls: An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol (Stanford University Press, 1993) and Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy: Mikhail Katkov and the Great Russian Novel (Northern Illinois Press, 2017), as well as book-length translations such as Sergey Gandlevsky’s Trepanation of the Skull (2014). In 2017, Fusso received the American Association for Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) Award for Excellence in Post-Secondary Teaching.

William Johnston arrived at Wesleyan in 1988 after receiving his BA from Elmira College and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. His research focuses on Japanese history and the history of disease and public health. Johnston is the author of two books, Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan (Columbia University Press, 2005) and The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan (Council on East Asian Studies Publications, Harvard University, 1995). He is currently working on a new book that will examine the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he is completing a photography book with renowned Japanese artist Eiko Otake.

Ethan Kleinberg joined the Department of History and the College of Letters in 2001 after completing his BA at University of California, Berkeley; a Fulbright scholarship in France; and his MA and PhD at University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include European intellectual history, critical theory, educational structures, and the philosophy of history. Kleinberg has published three books, most recently Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past (Stanford University Press, 2017). In 2018, he was Professeur Invité at Université Bordeaux Montaigne, and in Summer 2020 he will be the Reinhart Koselleck Guest Professor at Bielefeld University’s Zentrum für Theorien in der historischen Forschung.

Tsampikos Kottos joined Wesleyan’s Department of Physics in 2005. He received his BS, MS, and PhD from University of Crete in Greece. His research interests include non-Hermitial wave mechanics, linear and nonlinear optics, mesoscopic physics, wave chaos, and mathematical physics. He has published more than 150 papers on the understanding of wave propagation in complex media, which have received more than 7,000 citations. Kottos has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and he is currently the principal investigator on a $2.7 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Daniel Krizanc is a computer scientist who came to Wesleyan in 1999 after having served as a postdoctoral fellow at Centruum voor Wiskunde en Informatica in Amsterdam and receiving tenure at Carleton University. He holds a BS from the University of Toronto and a PhD from Harvard University. His research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms, especially as applied to distributed computing, networking, and computational biology. Krizanc has coauthored a book, The Mobile Agent Rendezvous Problem in the Ring (Morgan and Claypool Publishers, 2010), as well as hundreds of papers, book chapters, book reviews, and technical reports.