Faculty Finder

David Blight is one of the leading historians of the American Civil War era, slavery, and historical memory. His biography of Frederick Douglass won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2019. He directs the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

John Lewis Gaddis holds the appointment of Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military & Naval History at Yale. Research interests include cold war, grand strategy, us foreign policy, international history.

Beverly Gage holds the appointment of John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale. Research interests include 20th century america, surveillance, political history, grand strategy.

Joanne Freeman specializes in the political culture of the early American republic, focusing on honor, dueling, and violence in political life. "The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War" illuminates the brutal world of antebellum politics.

Carlos Eire is a scholar of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the history of death and the afterlife in early modern Europe. His memoir "Waiting for Snow in Havana" won the National Book Award in 2003.

Odd Arne Westad is a Norwegian historian of the Cold War, modern China, and global history, jointly appointed in History and the Jackson School of Global Affairs. "The Global Cold War" won the Bancroft Prize. His current research traces the origins of China's late-20th-century economic reforms and their global consequences.

David Engerman is a historian of 20th-century U.S. and Soviet history specializing in the geopolitics of international development. "The Price of Aid" examines Cold War development assistance to India, and "The Apostles of Development" traces six economists who shaped the Global South.

Elizabeth Hinton is one of the nation's leading scholars on policing and mass incarceration. "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime" traces federal policy's role in creating mass incarceration, and "America on Fire" examines the history of uprisings against police violence. She leads Yale's Institute on Incarceration and Public Safety.

Destin Jenkins is a historian of the political economy of capitalism, debt, and Black governance after the Civil Rights movement. His book "The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City" won the Ellis W. Hawley Prize and the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

Langdon Hammer is a scholar of 20th-century American poetry and a celebrated teacher. His biography "James Merrill: Life and Art" is the definitive account of the poet's life. His Modern Poetry lecture course, distributed through Open Yale Courses, has reached audiences worldwide.

David Bromwich is a distinguished literary critic and political commentator who writes on English Romantic poetry, Burke, and Hazlitt. Known for rigorous close reading and engagement with political thought, his books include "The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke."

Pericles Lewis holds the appointment of Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English, Dean of Yale College at Yale. Research interests include modernism, comparative literature, religion & literature, european novel.

Raffaella Zanuttini is a syntactician whose research focuses on the grammatical encoding of meaning, particularly in the areas of mood, clause type, and negation. She studies multiple Romance dialects and uses cross-linguistic comparison to uncover universal properties of the grammar-meaning interface.

Jing Tsu is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Guggenheim Fellow who studies modern Chinese literature, the history of technology in China, and diaspora. Her book "Kingdom of Characters" (2022) was among the New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She is also a Senior Fellow at Yale's Paul Tsai China Center.

Tina Lu is a scholar of late imperial Chinese fiction (ca. 1550–1750) whose books "Persons, Roles and Minds" and "Accidental Incest" examine identity, kinship, and narrative in the Ming and Qing periods. She served as MLA President 2025–26.

Eckart Frahm is a world authority on Assyrian and Babylonian history and cuneiform scholarship. He co-directs the NEH-funded Cuneiform Commentaries Project and is the author of a comprehensive history of ancient Mesopotamia and a landmark study of Babylonian hermeneutics.

John Coleman Darnell directs the Theban Desert Road Survey and has discovered some of the most important early writing in human history, including the Wadi el-Hol alphabetic inscriptions and the Scorpion tableau recording Egyptian state formation. His fieldwork spans the Egyptian Western Desert across four decades.

Shawkat Toorawa publishes extensively on classical and medieval Arabic literature, the Qur'anic lexicon, and Indian Ocean literary cultures. He is executive editor of the Library of Arabic Literature series, directing the editing and translation of premodern Arabic texts.

Harvey Weiss founded the Yale Tell Leilan Project in Syria and pioneered the study of how a 2200 BCE abrupt climate change caused the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations across the Near East. His work bridges archaeology, paleoclimatology, and the environmental history of ancient societies.

Shelly Kagan is one of the most prominent moral philosophers in the United States. His Yale course on "Death" became one of the first Open Yale Courses and has been viewed by millions. His books "The Limits of Morality" and "Death" are foundational texts in normative ethics.

Keith DeRose is a leading epistemologist known for developing contextualism about knowledge attributions. "The Case for Contextualism" is a central text in contemporary epistemology. He also writes on religious epistemology and the problem of evil.

Tamar Szabó Gendler holds the appointment of Vincent J Scully Professor of Philosophy; Professor of Psychology at Yale. Research interests include philosophy of mind, cognitive science, imagination, belief & action.

L.A. Paul works on metaphysics, decision theory, and philosophy of mind. "Transformative Experience" introduced an influential concept: experiences that change who you are in ways that prevent rational advance deliberation. She also writes on causation, time, and personal identity.

John Geanakoplos is known for contributions to general equilibrium theory, game theory, and financial economics. His theories on leverage cycles illuminate the dynamics of financial crises. He also pursues mathematical economics that bridges pure theory and financial practice.

Pinelopi Goldberg is an expert in international trade and development economics. She served as Chief Economist of the World Bank Group from 2018 to 2020. Her research examines how trade liberalization affects wages, firm behavior, and economic growth in developing countries.

Steven Berry specializes in industrial organization and econometrics. He is co-developer of the Berry-Levinsohn-Pakes (BLP) model, widely used to estimate demand for differentiated products in markets ranging from automobiles to healthcare. His work combines theory with structural econometric methods.

Giuseppe Moscarini is a macroeconomist and labor economist who studies job search, worker-firm matching, and business cycle dynamics. He has developed influential models explaining how unemployment and wages evolve as labor markets tighten and loosen.

Andrew Metrick directs the Yale Program on Financial Stability and is a leading scholar of financial regulation, systemic risk, and venture capital valuation. He created a widely-used method for calculating realistic valuations of startups and IPOs and has received over a dozen teaching awards.

Nicholas Barberis is one of the world's leading behavioral finance researchers, applying cognitive psychology — particularly the psychology of overextrapolation and belief formation — to explain asset price behavior. He co-founded the Yale Summer School in Behavioral Finance for PhD students.

Tobias Moskowitz is a financial economist studying asset pricing, momentum in returns, hedge fund performance, and the economics of sports betting as a laboratory for market efficiency. He received the American Finance Association's Fischer Black Prize for the top finance scholar under 40.

Bryan Kelly pioneers the use of machine learning in empirical asset pricing and financial econometrics, developing methods that use thousands of predictors to forecast returns. He is head of machine learning at AQR Capital Management and co-editor of the Journal of Financial Econometrics.

James Choi researches household finance and behavioral finance, with work on default options in 401(k) plans that has directly changed pension plan design at major U.S. corporations. He is a two-time recipient of the TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award for outstanding writing on lifelong financial security.

Stefano Giglio works on asset pricing and climate finance, developing financial instruments to hedge against climate risk and macroeconomic disasters. He received the Carlo Alberto Medal for outstanding Italian economists under 40 and the Moskowitz Prize for sustainable finance research.

Kelly Shue studies behavioral corporate finance, including the gender promotion gap — her research finds women are 13% less likely to be promoted than men, driving much of the gender wage gap — and non-proportional thinking in asset pricing. She was previously on the faculty at Chicago Booth.

Alp Simsek researches connections between financial markets and the macroeconomy, focusing on how heterogeneous beliefs and speculation generate asset price volatility and economic instability. He was previously a tenured professor at MIT and is a winner of the NSF CAREER Award.

William Goetzmann studies the long-run history of global capital markets, alternative investments, and the art market. His book "Money Changes Everything" traces the history of financial innovation across five millennia. He directs Yale SOM's International Center for Finance.

Amit Khandelwal studies the link between international trade and economic development using randomized controlled trials in Egypt, Myanmar, and Pakistan — among the first in trade research to use RCTs. His work on India's trade liberalization is among the most-cited studies in the field.

Ian Shapiro is a leading political theorist who writes on democracy, justice, and the conditions for good governance. "The Real World of Democratic Theory" examines democratic institutions in their actual functioning. He has also applied game theory to political science and written on South African political economy.

Nicholas Christakis is a physician and sociologist who studies social networks and their effects on human health and behavior. "Connected" (with James Fowler) and "Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society" have reached wide audiences. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale.

Philip Gorski is a historical and comparative sociologist who studies religion, nationalism, and civil society. "American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present" examines the role of religion in American political identity. He also writes on critical realism.

Elijah Anderson is one of the leading urban ethnographers in the United States. His studies of Philadelphia neighborhoods — "Streetwise" and "Code of the Street" — illuminate the sociology of race, class, and urban life. His concept of the "cosmopolitan canopy" describes interracial civility in public spaces.

Marcia Inhorn is a medical anthropologist specializing in Middle Eastern gender, religion, and reproductive health. Over 35 years she has studied assisted reproduction in Egypt, Lebanon, the UAE, and Arab America. Her 2023 book "Motherhood on Ice" examines egg freezing among diverse women. She received the 2025 AFA Career Award.

Catherine Panter-Brick is a medical anthropologist leading research on mental health, stress, and resilience among Afghan and Syrian refugees. Her work is showcased in the PBS documentary "Terror and Hope." She received the Lucy Mair Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Richard Bribiescas studies the evolutionary biology and endocrinology of human reproduction, aging, and metabolism, with extensive fieldwork among the Aché people of Paraguay. His books "Men" and "How Men Age" examine male biology and mortality from an evolutionary perspective. He is an elected fellow of the AAAS.

Phillip Atiba Solomon pioneered scientific experiments revealing how minds learn to associate Blackness with crime and co-founded the Center for Policing Equity. He hosts the National Justice Database, the world's largest collection of police behavioral data. He received the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest (2023).

Laurie Santos studies cognitive evolution by comparing the minds of humans and non-human primates. She heads Silliman College and runs the Comparative Cognition Lab. Her course "Psychology and the Good Life" became the most popular in Yale's history when first offered in 2018.

Marvin Chun holds the appointment of Richard M. Colgate Professor and Chair of Psychology and Professor of Neuroscience at Yale. Research interests include attention, visual memory, cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging.

Gary Brudvig is a bioinorganic chemist whose research focuses on the chemistry of photosynthesis and the development of artificial systems for solar energy conversion. He studies the oxygen-evolving complex in Photosystem II and designs synthetic catalysts for water oxidation, contributing to the field of solar fuels.