The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of seven faculty members, including one full professor and six assistant professors.
Professor
Melissa Schwartzberg, in politics and the University Center for Human Values, specializes in political theory. Her appointment is effective July 1.
Schwartzberg comes to Princeton from New York University, where she has taught since 2013. She has held multiple appointments at NYU, including as the Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of Politics and as affiliated faculty with the school’s Department of Classics and School of Law.
Prior to that, she was an associate professor at Columbia University from 2006 to 2013 and an assistant professor at George Washington University from 2002 to 2006.
Schwartzberg’s work spans the disciplines of politics, law, philosophy and classics. Her research interests include ancient and modern political thought, theory and institutions with a focus on the historical origins of rules and decision-making in Athenian democracy, as well as constitutionalism and democratic theory.
She is the author or co-author of the books “Democratic Deals: A Defense of Political Bargaining” (Harvard University Press, 2024) with Jack Knight, “Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule” (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and “Democracy and Legal Change” (Cambridge, 2007).
“Democratic Deals” won the American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory Section’s 2025 David Easton Award. “Counting the Many” won the 2016 David and Elaine Spitz Prize for the best book in democratic and/or liberal theory. Schwartzberg has written more than 40 journal articles, book chapters and book reviews, and her writing has also appeared in The Washington Post and Vox.
Her academic honors include a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in political science, a 2020 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and a 2013 Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship. She was a Laurance S. Rockefeller visiting faculty fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values from 2016 to 2017.
Schwartzberg serves as an associate editor at the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy and on the editorial boards or committees of the Annual Review of Political Science, the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science, as well as Politics, Philosophy & Economics, where she was also an associate editor from 2019 to 2023.
She edited seven volumes of NOMOS, the annual yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, from 2014 to 2021.
Schwartzberg has given numerous invited talks, including at Princeton, and presented at conferences around the world. She chaired the American Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting Committee from 2023 to 2024.
She earned a Ph.D. from New York University and an A.B. from Washington University in St. Louis.
Assistant professor
Beeta Baghoolizadeh, in Near Eastern studies, joins the faculty in September. Baghoolizadeh specializes in Middle East studies, African studies and slavery. She was an associate research scholar at Princeton’s Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies from 2022 to 2025 and an assistant professor at Bucknell University from 2018 to 2022. Baghoolizadeh holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. from the University of California-Los Angeles. She has been an associate research scholar at Columbia University’s Middle East Institute since 2025.
Supratik S. Baralay, in classics, joins the faculty in July. Baralay specializes in Greek and Parthian history and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, as well as an M.Phil. and B.A. from the University of Oxford.
Mark Letteney, in religion, joins the faculty in July. Letteney specializes in Ancient World history and archaeology and comes to Princeton from the University of Washington, where he has taught since 2023 as an assistant professor of history and affiliated faculty in Jewish studies and comparative religion. Letteney holds a Ph.D. from Princeton, an M.A.R. from Yale University Divinity School and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Stan Palasek, in mathematics, joins the faculty in September. Palasek, who specializes in partial differential equations, holds a Ph.D. from the University of California-Los Angeles and an A.B. from Princeton. Palasek has been a Veblen Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting fellow at Princeton since 2025, as well as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton from 2024 to 2025.
Jordan A. Rudinsky, in politics, joins the faculty in August. Rudinsky specializes in public law and comes to Princeton from the Universidad Católica de Chile, where he has been an assistant professor since 2024. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge and an A.B. from Georgetown University.
Mingjia Zhang, in mathematics, joins the faculty in July. Zhang specializes in arithmetic geometry and holds a Ph.D. from Bonn University and a B.S. from Peking University. Zhang has been a von Neumann Fellow in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study since 2025.
