Selected professor, to start from July 1.

By The American Bazaar Staff

NEW YORK: Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri will join the faculty of Princeton University next month, as a professor of creative writing at the esteemed Ivy League institution.

Lahiri was named alongside 16 other individuals as the university’s newest faculty members, of which four, including Lahiri, will become “full professors”; the other 13 were given assistant professor positions at Princeton. As a professor of creative writing, Lahiri will be part of the school’s Lewis Center for the Arts, and will officially begin work on July 1.

This is not Lahiri’s first time working at an educational institution. Currently, Lahiri is a writer in residence at the John Cabot University in Rome, a position she has also held at Vassar College and Baruch College, both of which are located in New York City.

The other three individuals selected for full professorships at Princeton University – which is routinely ranked as the #1 higher education institution in the entire US – are: Judith Hameira (Texas A&M University professor of dance), Ilyana Kuziemenko (Columbia University professor of economics), and Aasaf Naor (New York University professor of mathematics). This makes Lahiri the only person from those selected who is not already an instructor at another university to be granted a full professorship at Princeton.

Lahiri is perhaps best known as the writer of “The Namesake,” the novel which was subsequently made into a critically and commercially successful film that was directed by Mira Nair and starred Kal Penn, Irrfan Khan, and Tabu. The book and film were both feted with several awards at the times of the respective debuts.

Her first published work, the short story collection “Interpreter of Maladies,” earned her the Pulitzer Prize – the most prestigious award a writer in the US can be given. Last year, Lahiri released just her second novel, “The Lowlands,” which was short-listed for several high-profile awards, including the Man Booker Prize and the US National Book Award.

Lahiri earned a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College at Columbia, a master’s degrees in English literature, creative writing and comparative studies in literature and the arts from Boston University (BU), and a Ph.D. in Renaissance studies from BU.