Christopher L. Miller, who has taught at Yale since he earned his doctorate from the University in 1983, has been named the Frederick Clifford Ford Professor of French and African American Studies by vote of the Yale Corporation.

Miller's scholarly and teaching interests include African and Caribbean literature in French, French literature, literary and anthropological theory, and film. He has led the students in his classes on explorations of the novel and film in the Francophone postcolonial world, Francophone African literature and models of identity, among other subjects.

Miller has published three books, the most recent of which is "Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture." His other works are "Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa," which was a finalist in 1991 for the Melville Herskovits Prize Competition of the African Studies Association, and "Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French." He has also written numerous articles and reviews for such publications as "The Encyclopedia of Sub-Saharan Africa," "A New History of French Literature," the International Journal of African Historical Studies and "Literary Theory and African Literature," among others.

Miller earned his undergraduate degree in French language and literature from Boston University in 1975 and then served for two years with the Peace Corps in Zaire, where he was an instructor of English at the Institut Bondoyi in Muene Ditu. As a graduate student at Yale, he was a researcher for the Ménil Foundation Idea of Blackness Project, conducted jointly by Yale and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris under the direction of Henry Lewis Gates. Miller studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris 1981-82 and received Yale's Marguerite A. Peyre Prize for his doctoral dissertation in 1983.

Upon completing his doctoral work, Miller joined the Yale faculty as an assistant professor. He was appointed the Charles B.G. Murphy Associate Professor of French and of African and Afro-American Studies in 1987 and was promoted to full professor in 1990.

Miller has been chair of the French department since 1997 and earlier served briefly as its acting chair. He has also been director of both graduate and undergraduate studies in French. Over the years, he has been a member of numerous University committees, and has served on the editorial boards of Yale French Studies and the Yale Journal of Criticism. His activities beyond Yale include serving on a review committee for the National Endowment for the Humanities and as a manuscript reviewer for several publishing companies and university presses.

Miller has received several fellowships for his research, including work in France and Africa. Among these are the Morse Fellowship in the Humanities, Fulbright Africa Research Fellowship and a Yale Senior Faculty Fellowship. He has also been a fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center.

Miller's professional affiliations include the Modern Language Association, African Studies Association, Mansa, the Mande Studies Association, the Society of African Philosophy in North America and the West African Research Association.

Sociologist Ivan Szelenyi is appointed
the William Graham Sumner Professor

Ivan Szelenyi, who recently joined Yale's departments of sociology and political science and serves as chair of the former, has been appointed the William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology by vote of the Yale Corporation.

A noted scholar of the comparative sociology of post-communist Europe, Szelenyi joined the Yale faculty this year. His other research and teaching interests include the history of social thought, macro-sociology, urban sociology, socialist and post-communist societies, Marx and Weber, critical
theory and theories of urbanization, and class analysis.

The sociologist has authored dozens of articles, book chapters and books. The latter include "The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power," "Urban Inequalities under State Socialism," "Social Conflicts of Post-communist Transitions," "Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary," (which was co-winner of the 1989 C. Wright Mills Award), and his most recent book, "Making Capitalism without Capitalists." His edited books include "Privatizing the Land -- Rural Political Economy in Post-Communist Societies," "Cities after Socialism," "Cities in Recession" and "Urban Sociology."

A native of Hungary, Szelenyi holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and a D.Sc. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and a M.A. in economics from the University of Economics in Budapest. He began his career at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Sociology, where he was head of the department of regional sociology. After serving for a year in 1975 as a visiting research professor at the University of Kent in England, he was appointed the Foundation Professor of Sociology and chair of the department at The Flinders University in South Australia, where he taught until 1980.

Szelenyi joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981 and was named the Karl Polanyi Professor of Sociology there in 1985. He left in 1986 to become the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for Social Research at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, where he was also executive officer of the sociology program. Two years later, he joined the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) as professor of sociology. He chaired the sociology department 1992-95.

The sociologist has served on the editorial boards of numerous publications, including the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Eastern European Politics and Societies, the Journal of Comparative Family Studies and Social Forces. He has been senior editor of Theory and Society since 1987.

Szelenyi was president of the American Sociological Association in 1991. He has also served as executive director of the Society for Comparative Social Research, and has been on the boards of the American Association of the Advancement of Slavic Studies and the Joint Committee on Eastern Europe of the American Learned Societies, among others.

The recipient of the Luckmann Distinguished Teaching Award from UCLA in 1997, Szelenyi was elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1995. His research has been funded by grants from the Ford, Luce and MacArthur foundations, as well as the National Science Foundation, among others.

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