Noted physicist and acclaimed author named to professorships

April 13, 2004

NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. – Gabriel Kotliar, a noted physicist, and Michael Warner, a prize-winning author, were named Board of Governors Professors in physics and English, respectively, during Thursday’s meeting of the Board of Governors of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Kotliar, who lives in Highland Park with his wife and two children, specializes in materials theory, specifically strongly correlated materials. These materials have important technological applications in such areas as energy transport and storage, computer electronics, communications and nuclear energy.

Kotliar was educated at Princeton and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and joined Rutgers’ department of physics and astronomy in 1988. He is credited with originating “Dynamical Mean Field Theory,” a set of concepts and a methodology for predicting the physical properties of correlated materials, for which he was honored with a Guggenheim fellowship and the status of Fellow of the American Physical Society. Kotliar also has been a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and a recipient of a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award.

In addition to his research, Kotliar, as the faculty member in charge of physics high-performance computing, is developing new computational capabilities in his department. He is a recipient of a Graduate School-New Brunswick Teaching Award.

A professor in the department of English in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences-New Brunswick, Warner earned his professorial honor for his accomplishments in the fields of queer theory, political theory, American literary studies and American culture. He has flourished as a scholar, gaining international recognition for his study of early American literature as well as gay and lesbian culture.

Warner is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including “The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life,” “The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America” and “Publics and Counterpublics.” He twice won the Foerster Prize for best essay in the publication “American Literature” and was a contributor to and editor of “Fear of a Queer Planet.”

Warner, a Manhattan resident, has contributed to a numerous journals, magazines and newspaper articles. He has been a research fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities/American Antiquarian Society and a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University.

A member of the Rutgers faculty since 1990, Warner earned his bachelor’s degree from Oral Roberts University and his master’s and doctoral degrees from John Hopkins University. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin. His primary fields of research are colonial and 19th-century America and queer theory.

“Professors Warner and Kotliar’s talents may lie in vastly different fields, but the quality of their scholarship speaks to a shared commitment to academic goals and ideals all Rutgers faculty strive to meet,” said Holly Smith, executive dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers-New Brunswick. “Through their research and teaching, each has earned an international reputation for his work. It is fitting that the university honors them by naming them both Board of Governors Professors.”

Rutgers is America’s eighth oldest institution of higher learning and one of the nation’s premier public research universities. The Board of Governors Professorship was established in 1989 to recognize exceptional scholarship and accomplishment by a faculty member at the full professorial rank.

Contact:
MarkMaben
(732)932-7084, ext. 604
E-mail: mmaben@ur.rutgers.edu