N. D. B. Connolly
Dr. N. D. B. Connolly is Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University, where he occupies the Herbert Baxter Adams chair and sits on the boards for the Center for Africana Studies and the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism.
Prof. Connolly’s 2014 book, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida, received awards from the Urban History Association, the Southern Historical Association, and the Organization of American Historians. He has also helped build digital archives as a three-year co-hosting of the US History podcast, BackStory, which enjoyed over 6 million downloads its final year and entered the Library of Congress American Archive of Public Broadcasting. In 2015, Prof. Connolly co-founded Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America. The go-to source for maps of government housing discrimination in the 1930s, this website now stands as part of the Library of Congress, through its Manuscript Division Web Archive. A frequent contributor to public debates on historical and current events, Connolly’s editorials and review essays have appeared in the Washington Post, The New York Times, Dissent, Public Books, and elsewhere.
Working Group Affiliation:
Director of Black Archipelago and the Crisis of Place
Brandi T. Summers
Brandi T. Summers, PhD is Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Director of Graduate Studies at Columbia University. Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure, and architecture. Her first book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), explores how competing notions of blackness organize efforts to structure economic relations and develop land in gentrifying Washington DC. Her forthcoming book, Oakland Afterlives: How Black Cities Survive Their Unmaking (University of California Press, 2027), traces the systematic destruction and persistent resistance of Black Oakland across six decades of "Black urbicide," the intentional killing of Black urban space. Through the concept of the "spectral city," Summers examines how Black Oakland exists simultaneously as a disappearing demographic reality and an omnipresent cultural force, haunting the landscape even as displacement accelerates.
Dr. Summers was Principal Investigator of the Mellon Foundation-supported Archive of Urban Futures (2022-2024), in collaboration with the Oakland, California-based housing justice organization, Moms 4 Housing. Alongside Dr. Nathan D.B. Connolly (Johns Hopkins University), Dr. Summers is co-director of the Black Archipelago working group, supported by the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) at Columbia University.
Dr. Summers is a Contributing Writer for Places Journal and has published several articles and essays that analyze the relationship between race, power, aesthetics, and urbanization that appear in both scholarly and popular publications, including New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Antipode.
Working Group Affiliations
Director of Black Archipelago and the Crisis of Place
Nadia Abu El-Haj
Professor, Department of Anthropology, Barnard College
Nadia Abu El-Haj is professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies. She is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012), both published by the University of Chicago Press.
Nadia Abu El-Haj
Professor, Department of Anthropology, Barnard College
Nadia Abu El-Haj is professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies. She is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012), both published by the University of Chicago Press.
Abu El-Haj's work straddles the disciplines of anthropology and history of science. Concerned most generally with the relationships among scientific practices, social imaginaries and political regimes, she has examined the work of specific historical sciences within the context of their own historical and disciplinary conditions of possibility. In turn, Abu El-Haj has sought to understand how the epistemological commitments and empirical facts (and “things”) presupposed and generated by those disciplines have shaped the historical and political “common-sense” of a settler-nation, the racial imaginary of a national-/diasporic politics, and particular understandings and practices of the self. Her two books to date have focused on historical sciences (Israeli archaeology, and genetic history), and she is currently working on the field of military psychiatry, exploring the complex ethical and political implications of shifting psychiatric and public understandings of the trauma of soldiers. Provisionally titled, The Ethics of Trauma: Moral Injury, Combat, and U.S. Empire, this book examines the myriad forms and legacies of violence that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have unleashed, and how it is that so many of their attendant horrors remain hidden in plain sight.
Working Group Affiliation
Thea Abu El-Haj
Professor, Department of Education, Barnard College
Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Professor in Education, is an anthropologist of education. Prior to joining Barnard College, she was an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. She currently serves as the President of the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association. Abu El-Haj’s research explores questions about belonging, rights, citizenship, and education raised by globalization, transnational migration, and conflict.
Thea Abu El-Haj
Professor in Education and Education Program Director/Chair, Barnard College
Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Professor in Education, is an anthropologist of education. Prior to joining Barnard College, she was an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. There, she co-founded and co-directed the GSE’s Urban Teaching Fellows Program, and directed the Ph.D. program in Theory, Organization, and Policy.
She currently serves as the President of the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association. Abu El-Haj’s research explores questions about belonging, rights, citizenship, and education raised by globalization, transnational migration, and conflict. She is currently working on two research projects. She is conducting a collaborative ethnographic study of public kindergartens in Beirut, Lebanon, that focuses on questions of conflict and refugee policy. With the support of a Spencer Foundation grant, she is the principal investigator of a U.S. national interview study exploring the civic identities and civic practices of youth from Muslim immigrant communities.
Her second book, an ethnographic account of young Palestinian Americans grappling with questions of belonging and citizenship in the wake of September 11, 2001, won the 2016 American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Award (Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth after 9/11, University of Chicago Press, 2015). Other publications about this research have appeared in Anthropology and Education Quarterly; Harvard Educational Review; Educational Policy; and Theory into Practice. Her first book, Elusive Justice: Wrestling with Difference and Educational Equity in Everyday Practice (Routledge, 2006), offers a critical account of the range of justice claims at play inside real schools, exploring several different, important dimensions of educational equity that are often ignored in contemporary educational policy debates.
Working Group Affiliation
Migrant Personhood and Rights: Crises of Recognition, Project Director
Lila Abu-Lughod
Interim Director
Lila Abu-Lughod
Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science
Lila Abu-Lughod teaches anthropology and gender studies at Columbia University. She is a former director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Center for the Study of Social Difference, and the Middle East Institute, all at Columbia. A leading voice in the debates about gender, Islam, and global feminist politics, her books and articles have been translated into 15 languages. Her scholarship, strongly ethnographic, has focused on the relationship between cultural forms and power; the politics of knowledge and representation of the Arab and Muslim worlds; and the dynamics of gender and the question of human and women’s rights in the Middle East. Her award-winning books include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society; Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories; Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East; and Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Her most recent book, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, was published by Harvard University Press in 2013. Her most recent publication is The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism (2023). Lila Abu-Lughod was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.
Lila Abu-Lughod's Academic Website
Working Group Affiliations
Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence, Project Director
Gender, Religion & Law in Muslim Societies, Project Director
Liberalism’s Others, Project Director
Book publications
Do Muslim Women Need Saving?
Harvard University Press, 2013.
Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt
Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.(American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize, 2007)
Other English Editions: American University in Cairo Press, 2005.
Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories
University of California Press, 1993 (Victor Turner Prize, 1994). Fifteenth Anniversary Edition with new preface, 2008.
Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society
University of California Press, 1986 (IUAES Silver Medal; Chicago Folklore Prize, honorable mention). Second edition, updated with a new preface, 2000. 30th Anniversary Edition, with a new Afterword, September 2016.
Other English Editions: American University in Cairo Press, 1987.
Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media.
Amsterdam University Press, Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World Papers. 2006.
Edited Books
The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism
Co-edited with Rema Hammai and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.
Duke University Press, 2023.
On the Move: Reframing Nomadic Pastoralism
Edited Exhibition Catalogue. Skira, National Museum of Qatar, and Qatar Museums. 2022.
Nakba: Palestine, 1948 and the Claims of Memory
Co-edited with Ahmad H. Sa`di.
Columbia University Press, The Cultures of History Series, 2007.
Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain
Co-edited with Faye Ginsburg and Brian Larkin.
University of California Press, 2002.
Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East
Edited. Princeton University Press, Series in Culture/Power/History, 1998.
Other English Editions: American University in Cairo Press, 1998.
Language and the Politics of Emotion
Co‑edited with C. Lutz.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Rachel Adams
Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Rachel Adams is the director of the “Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture.” She is Professor of English and American Studies at Columbia University, where she specializes in 19th- and 20th-century literatures of the United States and the Americas, media studies, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, medical humanities and disability studies.
Rachel Adams
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Rachel Adams is the director of the “Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture.” She is Professor of English and American Studies at Columbia University, where she specializes in 19th- and 20th-century literatures of the United States and the Americas, media studies, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, medical humanities and disability studies. Her most recent book is Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery, published by Yale University Press in 2013. She is the author of Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2001). She is co-editor (with David Savran) of The Masculinity Studies Reader (Blackwell Press, 2001) and (with Sarah Casteel) a special issue of Comparative American Literature on "Canada and the Americas." She is editor of a critical edition of Kate Chopin's The Awakening (Fine Publications, 2002). Her articles have appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, American Quarterly, Minnesota Review, Camera Obscura, GLQ, Signs, Yale Journal of Criticism and Twentieth-Century Literature. She has also written for the The New York Times, Salon, Chronicle of Higher Education, Gastronomica, and the Times of London and blogs for The Huffington Post. In 2010, she won the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.
Working Group Affiliations
Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture, Project Director
The Future of Disability Studies, Project Director
Vanessa Agard-Jones
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
Vanessa Agard-Jones is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, where she maintains affiliations with the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, the Center for Science and Society, the Earth Institute, and the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. At its most expansive, Agard-Jones’ work asks how coloniality is made material: in social forms, in human and nonhuman bodies, and in the landscapes in which we live.
Vanessa Agard-Jones
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
Vanessa Agard-Jones is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, where she maintains affiliations with the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, the Center for Science and Society, the Earth Institute, and the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. At its most expansive, Agard-Jones’ work asks how coloniality is made material: in social forms, in human and nonhuman bodies, and in the landscapes in which we live. With a focus on Black life in the Atlantic world, she conducts historical and ethnographic research on racialization, environmental degradation and the politics of gender and sexuality. In Body Burdens: Toxic Endurance and Decolonial Desire in the French Atlantic (in preparation), Agard-Jones reframes the concept of body burden to account for the accretion of toxicities in Martinique, a French territory in the Caribbean. Focused on material exposures to a pesticide called kepone/chlordécone and on immaterial exposures to racism, sexism, and homophobia, Body Burdens asks how contemporary debates about sovereignty on the island are articulated through the prism of ideas about porosity and contamination. Agard-Jones is a member of the Social Text Collective, Scholars for Social Justice and serves on the editorial boards of PoLAR: the Political and Legal Anthropology Review and Environment and Society: Advances in Research.
Working Group Affiliations
Black Atlantic Ecologies, Project Director
Marcel Agüeros
Professor, Department of Astronomy, Columbia University
Marcel Agüeros is an associate professor of astronomy at Columbia University. A native New Yorker and a Columbia College alumnus, Marcel received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2006, returned to
Columbia as a National Science Foundation Astronomy & Astrophysics Post-doctoral Fellow that year, and joined the faculty in 2010. Marcel is an observational astrophysicist who uses new approaches to address classic questions in stellar evolution.
Marcel Agüeros is an associate professor of astronomy at Columbia University. A native New Yorker and a Columbia College alumnus, Marcel received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2006, returned to
Columbia as a National Science Foundation Astronomy & Astrophysics Post-doctoral Fellow that year, and joined the faculty in 2010. Marcel is an observational astrophysicist who uses new approaches to address classic questions in stellar evolution. He is the author of more than 70 peer-reviewed publications and has received more than $4 million in grants for his work. He is also committed to increasing the numbers of women and underrepresented minorities in the sciences. In 2016, Marcel received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Obama for "his groundbreaking research in stellar astrophysics, and for his restless desire to ensure that minority students in sciences become tomorrow's leaders."
Alexander Alberro
Professor, Department of Contemporary Art History, Barnard College and Columbia University
Alexander Alberro, Virginia B. Wright Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University, is the author and editor of numerous books, including Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth Century Latin American Art (2017); Luis Camnitzer In Conversation with Alexander Alberro (2014) and What is Contemporary Art Today? (2012).
Alexander Alberro
Virginia B. Wright Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University
Alexander Alberro, Virginia B. Wright Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University, is the author and editor of numerous books, including Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth Century Latin American Art (2017), Luis Camnitzer In Conversation with Alexander Alberro (2014); What is Contemporary Art Today? (2012); John Miller: The Ruin of Exchange (2012); Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists Writings (2009); Art After Conceptual Art (2006); Museum Highlights (2005); Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (2003); Recording Conceptual Art (2001); Two-Way Mirror Power (1999); and Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (1999). He has also published in a broad array of journals and exhibition catalogues, and delivered many lectures internationally. Alberro is presently completing a book-length study, "Spaces of Contemporary Art," that focuses on the relationship between current art and the geography of globalization.
Working Group Affiliation
Environmental Justice, Belief Systems, and Aesthetic Experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean
Zeynep Çelik Alexander
Zeynep Çelik Alexander is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her work focuses on the history and theory of architecture since the eighteenth century. She is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), the recipient of the 2019 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award.
Zeynep Çelik Alexander
Zeynep Çelik Alexander is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her work focuses on the history and theory of architecture since the eighteenth century. She is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), the recipient of the 2019 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. The book is a history of an alternative mode of knowing—non-propositional, non-linguistic, and based on the movements of the body—that gained saliency in the nineteenth century and informed the epistemological logic of modernism in the German-speaking world.
She co-edited, with John May (Harvard University), Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Daniel Abramson (Boston University) and Michael Osman (UCLA) for Aggregate, Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). She has also published in numerous venues, including Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, New German Critique, Harvard Design Magazine, Log, e-flux, Grey Room, Journal of Design History, and Centropa as well as several edited volumes. She is currently completing a book titled Imperial Data: An Architectural History (University of Chicago, 2022), an account of nineteenth-century storehouses of information in the British Empire. The book visits several buildings constructed by the Office of Works in London at the height of the expansion of British bureaucracy in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Working Group: Extractive Media
Dima Amso
Professor, Department of Psychology, Columbia University
Dima Amso is a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. She has a BS in psychology from Tufts University, was trained at Cornell University and received a PhD in psychology from New York University in 2005. She served on the faculty at the Weil Medical College of Cornell University before joining the faculty at Brown University in 2010 and Columbia University in 2020. Her research examines the development of attention, executive functions, and memory, with an emphasis on how environmental variables shape these trajectories.
Dima Amso is a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. She has a BS in psychology from Tufts University, was trained at Cornell University and received a PhD in psychology from New York University in 2005. She served on the faculty at the Weil Medical College of Cornell University before joining the faculty at Brown University in 2010 and Columbia University in 2020. Her research examines the development of attention, executive functions, and memory, with an emphasis on how environmental variables shape these trajectories. She has authored over 80 papers on the topic. Dr. Amso’s research has been funded by National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, the Simons Foundation, Norman Prince Neuroscience Institute, the Hassenfeld Child Health Institute, and Wellcome Trust. She is a recipient of the James S. McDonnell Scholar Award and is an elected Fellow of the American Psychological Society.
Anca D. Askanase
Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Dr. Askanase completed her fellowship in Rheumatology at New York University School of Medicine/NYU Hospital for Joint Disease and continued there as an investigator where she participated in multiple NIH and industry sponsored clinical trials, and gained extensive experience with SLE patients. She is currently the Director of the Lupus Center and Director of Rheumatology Clinical Trials at Columbia University Medical Center.
Anca D. Askanase, M.D., M.P.H.
Associate Professor of Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Dr. Askanase completed her fellowship in Rheumatology at New York University School of Medicine/NYU Hospital for Joint Disease and continued there as an investigator where she participated in multiple NIH and industry sponsored clinical trials, and gained extensive experience with SLE patients. She is currently the Director of the Lupus Center and Director of Rheumatology Clinical Trials at Columbia University Medical Center and is involved in investigator-initiated studies in SLE, including potential use of several serum markers to diagnose disease flares and identify SLE-specific atherosclerosis risk factors. She has had a long-standing interest in the cardiac and vascular manifestations of lupus and in improving current CVD risk stratification with the potential to prevent the excess morbidity and mortality associated with cardiovascular outcomes in lupus.
Working Group Affiliation
Women’s Heart Disease Awareness: Digital Intervention, Creating Change
Delali Margaret Badasu
Fellow, Geography, University of Ghana
Delali Margaret Badasu is a Senior Research Fellow at the Regional Institute for Population Studies, University of Ghana. She specializes in demography, geography, and medical geography.
Delali Margaret Badasu
Delali Margaret Badasu is Senior Research Fellow, Regional Institute for Population Studies, University of Ghana. She holds a Ph.D in Geography and Resource Development, an M.A in Population Studies and a B.A. in Economics/Geography from the University of Ghana. She also holds an M.A. in Geography from the University of Alberta, Canada. She specializes in demography, geography, and medical geography. She has researched and published a number of works on population and development and health-related issues. Her current research focuses on socio-cultural dimensions of health, using mainly qualitative research methods. Her major works in this regard are on Ghana’s health policy and tertiary health care for children. She has just completed a study on care for children with chronic diseases at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital. She has published on population and health related issues in the African Studies Research Review, Bulletin of the Ghana Geographical Association, Health Transition Review, and African Population Studies. She is a member of the Union for African Population Studies and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP).
Working Group Affiliation
The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories
Michelle Ballan
Assistant Professor, Department of Social Work, Columbia University
Dr. Ballan's research, teaching and service is dedicated to individuals with disabilities. Her research focuses on prevention and treatment interventions for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She is the recipient of the prestigious 2010 Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award. She has received the Texas Excellence Teaching Award, the Services for Students with Disabilities Faculty Award and twice, Columbia students bestowed her with the excellence in teaching award.
Michelle Ballan
Assistant Professor of Social Work, Columbia University
Dr. Ballan's research, teaching and service is dedicated to individuals with disabilities. Her research focuses on prevention and treatment interventions for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She is the recipient of the prestigious 2010 Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award. She has received the Texas Excellence Teaching Award, the Services for Students with Disabilities Faculty Award and twice, Columbia students bestowed her with the excellence in teaching award. Dr. Ballan is a mentor for international human rights disability advocates affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. She convenes the Columbia University Seminar on Disability Studies and is the Faculty Advisor for the Disability Caucus. Dr. Ballan is the recipient of the 2010 Association on Higher Education and Disability Recognition Award for her outstanding contributions to campus programs for students with disabilities. She is the 2011 recipient of the Early Career Award from the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.
Dr. Ballan serves on the editorial board of Social Work and is an ad-hoc reviewer for journals in the fields of disability studies and sexuality. She is a board member for Services for the Underserved and has held positions on the Council on Disability and Persons with Disabilities through the Council of Social Work Education. Dr. Ballan has worked as a practitioner and educator in various community settings with individuals with disabilities including the New Jersey Brain Injury Association, Women Helping Women, Safeplace and schools.
Christopher Baswell
Professor, Department of English, Barnard College
Professor Baswell rejoins the faculty at Barnard and Columbia after a period as Professor of English and Associate Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA, 2001-2008. Baswell’s earliest research was in the reception and transformation of classical literature, especially narratives of empire and dynastic foundation, in the vernacular cultures of the European Middle Ages. He has approached these issues through the optic of original manuscripts, and in the light of the multilingualism of medieval France and England.
Christopher Baswell
Anne Whitney Olin Professor of English, Barnard College
Professor Baswell rejoins the faculty at Barnard and Columbia after a period as Professor of English and Associate Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA, 2001-2008. Baswell’s earliest research was in the reception and transformation of classical literature, especially narratives of empire and dynastic foundation, in the vernacular cultures of the European Middle Ages. He has approached these issues through the optic of original manuscripts, and in the light of the multilingualism of medieval France and England. Some of this research resulted in Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge UP 1995), which won the 1998 Beatrice White Prize of the English Association. Further work on foundation narratives has led to articles and a forthcoming monograph on narratives of female foundation and their challenge to a dominant tradition of founding fathers. Baswell is also at work on new research on the cultural imagination of disability in the Middle Ages. He has held fellowships from the NEH, the ACLS, the National Humanities Center, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Baswell is co-editor of the medieval volume of the Longman Anthology of British Literature. He is General Editor of the series Cursor Mundi: Viator Studies of the Medieval and Early Modern World (Brepols).
Working Group Affiliation
Carol Becker
Professor, Department of Arts, Columbia University School of Arts
Carol Becker is Dean of Faculty and Professor of the Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts. She was previously Dean of Faculty and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs as well as Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned her B.A. in English literature from State University of New York at Buffalo and her PhD in English and American literature from the University of California, San Diego.
Carol Becker
Dean of Faculty and Professor of the Arts, School of the Arts, Columbia University
Carol Becker is Dean of Faculty and Professor of the Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts. She was previously Dean of Faculty and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs as well as Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned her B.A. in English literature from State University of New York at Buffalo and her PhD in English and American literature from the University of California, San Diego. With research interests that range from feminist theory, American cultural history, the education of artists, art and social responsibility, to South African art and politics, she has published numerous articles and books on cultural criticism including: The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change (translated into seven languages); The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility; Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety; Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art and Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production. She lectures extensively in the U.S. and abroad and is the recipient of numerous awards. She also is a member of the Global Agenda Council on the Role of Art in Society for the World Economic Forum.
Working Group Affiliation
Natalie Bello
Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center
Natalie Bello is a clinician scientist at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center where she practices cardiology with a specialty in multimodality imaging. She received her BS from Cornell University, her MD from University of Rochester, and a MPH degree from Harvard University. Dr. Bello is the director of research for the Columbia Women’s Heart Center and her broad scholarly interest is elucidating gender differences in cardiovascular health and disease.
Natalie Bello, M.D., M.P.H
Victoria and Esther Aboodi Assistant Professor of Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center
Natalie Bello is a clinician scientist at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center where she practices cardiology with a specialty in multimodality imaging. She received her BS from Cornell University, her MD from University of Rochester, and a MPH degree from Harvard University. Dr. Bello is the director of research for the Columbia Women’s Heart Center and her broad scholarly interest is elucidating gender differences in cardiovascular health and disease.
Dr. Bello’s research focuses on understanding the mechanisms through which hypertensive disorders of pregnancy such as preeclampsia impact future cardiovascular risk in women. She is an expert in the measurement of blood pressure during pregnancy, and has been invited to present her findings at numerous national and international scientific meetings. She is currently examining the acceptability and implementation of blood pressure self-measurement during pregnancy as a strategy to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality amongst English and Spanish speaking women in Northern Manhattan.
Dr. Bello has been awarded research funding from the American College of Cardiology, National Institutes of Health/National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, and the Katz Foundation. Her research has been published in leading journals including Circulation Heart Failure, European Journal of Heart Failure, Hypertension, and Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Working Group Affiliation
Women’s Heart Disease Awareness: Digital Intervention, Creating Change, Project Director
Helen Benedict
Professor, Department of Journalism, Columbia University
Helen Benedict is a novelist and journalist specializing in social injustice and war. Her most recent writings have focused on women soldiers, military sexual assault, and Iraqi refugees, and she is credited with breaking the story about the epidemic of sexual assault of military women serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Helen Benedict
Professor of Journalism, Columbia University
Helen Benedict is a novelist and journalist specializing in social injustice and war. Her most recent writings have focused on women soldiers, military sexual assault, and Iraqi refugees, and she is credited with breaking the story about the epidemic of sexual assault of military women serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Her articles and books on this subject – the novel “Sand Queen” (2011, Soho Press) and the non-fiction book, "The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq," (2009 and 2010, Beacon Press) -- won her the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism in 2013, when she was also named one of the “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” by Women’s eNews. In 2015, she was a finalist for the U.K. Liberty Human Rights Arts Award for her play, “The Lonely Soldier.” In 2010, her work also won the Exceptional Merit In Media Award from the National Women's Political Caucus, and the Ken Book Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Benedict's non-fiction book, “The Lonely Soldier,” inspired a class action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of women and men who were sexually assaulted in the military and also inspired the 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary about sexual assault in the military, “The Invisible War.” Her earlier book, “Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes” is widely taught in journalism and law schools and has helped to change the way several newspapers cover sexual assault, while her book, “Recovery: How to Survive Sexual Assault” is used by rape crisis centers around the country. She has testified twice to Congress as an expert on sexual assault in the military.
Volker Berghahn
Professor, Department of History, Columbia University
Volker Berghahn specializes in modern German history and European-American relations. He received his M.A. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1961) and his Ph.D. from the University of London (1964). His publications include: America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (2001); Quest for Economic Empire (ed., 1996); Imperial Germany (1995); The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945-1973 (1986); Modern Germany (1982); and Europe in the Era of Two World Wars (2006).
Volker Berghahn
Seth Low Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University
Volker Berghahn specializes in modern German history and European-American relations. He received his M.A. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1961) and his Ph.D. from the University of London (1964). He taught in England and Germany before coming to Brown University in 1988 and to Columbia ten years later. His publications include: America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (2001); Quest for Economic Empire (ed., 1996); Imperial Germany (1995); The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945-1973 (1986); Modern Germany (1982); Der Tirpitz-Plan (1971); Europe in the Era of Two World Wars (2006); and most recently Industriegesellschaft und Kulturtransfer, Goettingen (2010).
Working Group Affiliation
Nina Berman
Associate Professor, Department of Journalism, Columbia University
Nina Berman is Associate Professor of Journalism at Columbia University. She is a documentary photographer with a primary interest in the American political and social landscape. She is the author of two acclaimed monographs “Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq,” portraits and interviews with wounded veterans, and “Homeland,” an exploration of post September 11 America.
Nina Berman
Associate Professor, Department of Journalism, Columbia University
Nina Berman is Associate Professor of Journalism at Columbia University. She is a documentary photographer with a primary interest in the American political and social landscape. She is the author of two acclaimed monographs “Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq,” portraits and interviews with wounded veterans, and “Homeland,” an exploration of post September 11 America.
Her work has been recognized with awards in art and journalism from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the World Press Photo Foundation, the Open Society Institute Documentary Fund, Pictures of the Year International, and Hasselblad among others. Nina has exhibited still and video work in more than eighty venues including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Whitney Museum of American Art 2010 Biennial, and Dublin Contemporary.
Working Group Affiliation