Introducing New Members of the Faculty

To help introduce to the Cornell community the new members of the university's faculty, the Cornell Chronicle is publishing brief, new-faculty profiles each week during the semester.

Anne M. Blackburn

Assistant professor, Asian studies
College: Arts and Sciences
Academic focus: History of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, with particular attention to the 18th century and forward; Buddhism under colonialism; Buddhist modernism; Buddhist education and formation of identity; and Buddhist textual traditions in Sinhala and Pali.
Previous position: Associate professor, 2002, and assistant professor, 1996-2002; both at the University of South Carolina.
Academic background: B.A., Asian studies, Swarthmore College, 1988; M.A., religious studies, 1990, and Ph.D., history of religions/South Asia, 1996, both from the University of Chicago.

Douglas Mao

Associate professor, English
College: Arts and Sciences
Academic focus: British and American poetry and fiction since about 1890; interdisciplinary study of modernism; literary theory; and gay, lesbian and bisexual studies. Current scholarship focuses on treatments of aesthetic environment and human development in early 20th-century literature.
Previous position: Assistant professor, English, Harvard University, 2000-02; assistant professor, English, Princeton University, 1993-2000.
Academic background: B.A., biology, Harvard University, 1987; and Ph.D., English, Yale University, 1993.

Annelise Riles

Professor of law and of anthropology
College: Law School, Arts and Sciences
Academic focus: Comparative and international law and East Asia-Pacific region legal studies. Riles is widely published in scholarly journals on law and sociology. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including a Ford fellowship in public international law at Harvard Law School, 1991-94. She did dissertation fieldwork among regional and international institutions and nongovernmental organizations in Fiji and at United Nations conferences attended by Pacific Islanders. She is director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture at Cornell.
Previous position: Professor, Northwestern University School of Law.
Academic background: A.B. with certificate in East Asian studies, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, 1988; M.Sc., social anthropology, London School of Economics, 1990; J.D., Harvard Law School, 1993; Ph.D, social anthropology, University of Cambridge, 1996.

Daniel H. Simon

Assistant professor, applied economics and management
College: Agriculture and Life Sciences
Academic focus: He conducts research on a variety of issues relating to competitive strategy, internet strategy and human resource management.
Previous position: Assistant professor at Lowry Mays College and Graduate School of Business, Texas A&M University.
Academic background: B.S., economics and history, University of Wisconsin, 1989; and MBA, 1994, and Ph.D., strategic management, 1999, both from the University of Maryland.

Jayanthi Sunder

Assistant professor, finance
College: Johnson Graduate School of Management
Academic focus: Research interests are in the area of corporate finance, focusing on capital structure choice, going-public decisions, venture capital financing and banking. Her teaching interests include corporate finance and valuation, entrepreneurial finance and financial institutions. Her dissertation is titled "Information Spillovers and Capital Structure: Theory and Evidence." She was a senior consultant with A.F. Ferguson & Co. (formerly the KPMG associate in India) and has taught a corporate finance topics course at New York University.
Previous position: Doctoral student, New York University.
Academic background: Bachelor's degree in commerce, Madras University, India, 1988; MBA, finance, Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, India, 1990; and Ph.D., finance, Stern School of Business, New York University, 2002.

October 10, 2002