Sonia Tolani
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Dr. Tolani received her medical degree with honors from New York University School of Medicine. She completed her internship, medical residency and her fellowship in cardiovascular medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. Dr. Tolani the co-Director of the Women’s Heart Center At Columbia University and a part of the Hypertension Center. As part of her cardiology fellowship, Dr. Tolani spent several years studying the interplay of cholesterol and inflammation and how this interaction impacts atherosclerosis.
Sonia Tolani, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Dr. Tolani received her medical degree with honors from New York University School of Medicine. She completed her internship, medical residency and her fellowship in cardiovascular medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. Dr. Tolani the co-Director of the Women’s Heart Center At Columbia University and a part of the Hypertension Center. As part of her cardiology fellowship, Dr. Tolani spent several years studying the interplay of cholesterol and inflammation and how this interaction impacts atherosclerosis. Her research has been published in core journals including Atherosclerosis, Journal of Clinical Investigation and Journal of Immunology. In addition to being a full-time clinician, she frequently appears in local and national media as an expert on preventative cardiology and women’s health. She has been featured on Morning Edition on NPR and the Dr. Oz Show. She also actively donates her time to community outreach programs aimed at educating women on the signs and symptoms of cardiovascular disease. Dr. Tolani's areas of expertise include consultative cardiology, preventative medicine and women's health. She is board certified in Internal Medicine, Cardiology and Echocardiography.
Working Group Affiliation
Women’s Heart Disease Awareness: Digital Intervention, Creating Change, Project Director
Anja Tolonen
Assistant Professor of Economics, Barnard College
Anja Tolonen is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University. She works on economic development and gender. One strand focuses on health and gender, including menstruation and school absenteeism, stigma around menstruation, and household health investment and knowledge.
Anja Tolonen
Assistant Professor of Economics, Barnard College
Anja Tolonen is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University. She works on economic development and gender. One strand focuses on health and gender, including menstruation and school absenteeism, stigma around menstruation, and household health investment and knowledge. Another strand focuses on the local welfare effects of natural resource extraction in Africa, including effects on women’s employment, gender norms, health and criminality. Her research methods include quasi-experimental analysis and randomized control trials, and she often uses large datasets. She has peer-reviewed publications in World Development, The Economic Journal and Ambio. At Barnard, she teaches Empirical Development Economics and Econometrics. She is an affiliated faculty at the Center for Development Economics and Policy at Columbia University. Prof. Tolonen is an external research member at Oxford Center for Analysis of Resource Rich Economies (University of Oxford), and UNESCO and The World Bank has funded her research. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from University of Gothenburg in 2015 and has been a visiting researcher at University of Oxford and University of California at Berkeley. During the academic year 2017-2018 she will be on an academic sabbatical at Princeton University (fall 2017) and New York University (spring 2018).
Working Group Affiliations
Carole S. Vance
Mailman School of Public Health and Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
Carole S. Vance, PhD, works on integrating sexuality with human rights frameworks and rights-based health interventions. She has written widely on sexuality, science, gender, and policy; policy controversies about sexual expression and imagery; and sexuality theory and research methods. For the past ten years, she has directed a program on sexuality, gender, health and human rights, which advances policy-relevant scholarship and facilitates exchange between researchers and advocates on sexual health and rights issues.
Carole S. Vance
Mailman School of Public Health and Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
Carole S. Vance, PhD, works on integrating sexuality with human rights frameworks and rights-based health interventions. She has written widely on sexuality, science, gender, and policy; policy controversies about sexual expression and imagery; and sexuality theory and research methods. For the past ten years, she has directed a program on sexuality, gender, health and human rights, which advances policy-relevant scholarship and facilitates exchange between researchers and advocates on sexual health and rights issues.
Dr. Vance has extensive experience in training students from developing countries, particularly on research methods in sexuality, and the practical application of sexuality research in a range of cultural, national, and policy contexts. Dr. Vance currently is involved in research on trafficking into forced prostitution, also known as sex trafficking, with particular focus on the ways in which ethnographic research can inform policy, as well as health and rights interventions. Dr. Vance edited the landmark collection, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, and is completing the edited volume, Ethnography and Policy: What Do We Know about Trafficking?, with publication in 2007. In 2005, Dr. Vance received the David R. Kessler Award for lifetime contributions to studies of sexuality.
Working Group Affiliations
Gauri Viswanathan
Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities, Department of English & Comparative Literature
Gauri Viswanathan has published widely on education, religion, and culture; nineteenth-century British and colonial cultural studies; and the history of modern disciplines. She has held numerous visiting chairs, among them the Beckman Professorship at Berkeley, and was recently an Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and a Visiting Mellon Scholar at the University of Cape Town. She has received Guggenheim, NEH, and Mellon fellowships, and was a fellow at various international research institutes. Viswanathan’s current work is on genealogies of secularism and the writing of alternative religious histories. She has published extensively on the cultural influence of Theosophy, with two recent articles appearing in PMLA.
Gauri Viswanathan
Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities, Department of English & Comparative Literature
Gauri Viswanathan has published widely on education, religion, and culture; nineteenth-century British and colonial cultural studies; and the history of modern disciplines. She has held numerous visiting chairs, among them the Beckman Professorship at Berkeley, and was recently an Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and a Visiting Mellon Scholar at the University of Cape Town. She has received Guggenheim, NEH, and Mellon fellowships, and was a fellow at various international research institutes.
Viswanathan’s current work is on genealogies of secularism and the writing of alternative religious histories. She has published extensively on the cultural influence of Theosophy, with two recent articles appearing in PMLA. She is a network partner in the international research project "Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, Modernism, and the Arts," funded by the Leverhulme Trust in the U.K. As part of the three-year grant a major conference on Theosophy, literature, and history will be held at Columbia in 2015.
Her areas of interest include: intellectual history; education, religion, and culture; 19th-century British and colonial cultural studies; and history of disciplines. Viswanathan is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (Columbia, 1989; Oxford, 1998) and Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, 1998), which won the Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association, the James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association of America, and the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. She also edited Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (Vintage, 2001). Viswanathan coedits the book series South Asia Across the Disciplines, published jointly by the university presses of Columbia, Chicago, and California under a Mellon grant.
Working Group Affiliation
Wendy S. Walters
Wendy S. Walters (Associate Professor of Writing and Director of Non-Fiction) is a Creative Capital Awardee in literary nonfiction and the author of three books. Her current projects address intersections between writing and design. climate change and its reverberations, class and racial disquietude in the industrial Midwest, and organic forms in the essay. A recipient of fellowships from NYFA, the Ford Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institute, she has a broad history of engagements with writing in and about performative contexts. In a sustained collaboration with Elyse Nelson, Walters co-curated the exhibition, Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, at The Met, on view from March 10, 2022 to March 5, 2023. It was the first exhibition at The Met to examine Western sculpture in relation to the histories of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and empire. They have edited a collection of essays as a companion to the show, titled Fictions of Emancipation: Reconsidering Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! (The Met/Yale University Press).
Carl Wennerlind
History, Barnard College
Professor Wennerlind specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, with a focus on intellectual history and political economy. He is particularly interested in the historical development of money and credit, as well as attempts to theorize these phenomena. He is the author of Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720 (Harvard University Press, 2011) and is currently at work on two books -- one on the history of scarcity (tentatively titled A History of Scarcity: Humanity, Nature, and the World of Goods) and one on David Hume's political economy (tentatively titled Hume's Wordly Philosophy). In addition to his co-edited volumes David Hume’s Political Economy (with Margaret Schabas) and Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire (with Phil Stern), Wennerlind’s work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Perspectives, History of Political Economy, and Hume Studies.
Carl Wennerlind
History, Barnard College
Professor Wennerlind specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, with a focus on intellectual history and political economy. He is particularly interested in the historical development of money and credit, as well as attempts to theorize these phenomena. He is the author of Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720 (Harvard University Press, 2011) and is currently at work on two books -- one on the history of scarcity (tentatively titled A History of Scarcity: Humanity, Nature, and the World of Goods) and one on David Hume's political economy (tentatively titled Hume's Wordly Philosophy). In addition to his co-edited volumes David Hume’s Political Economy (with Margaret Schabas) and Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire (with Phil Stern), Wennerlind’s work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Perspectives, History of Political Economy, and Hume Studies.
His research has been supported by the NEH, American Philosophical Society, ACLS, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Magn. Bergvalls Stiftelse, Helge Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse, Sven och Dagmar Salens Stiftelse, and Jan Wallanders och Tom Hedelius Stiftelse. During the 2016-17 academic year, he was a fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University.
He has taught such courses as "Introduction to European History: Renaissance to the French Revolution"; "Filthy Lucre: A History of Money"; "Capitalism and the Enlightenment"; "Merchants, Pirates, and Slaves in the Formation of Atlantic Capitalism: 1600-1800"; "History of Capitalism"; "Commercial Practices, Commercial Imaginations in Europe, 1300-1750" (graduate seminar); and "History of Political Economy" (graduate seminar).
Working Group Affiliation
Jennifer Wenzel
Associate Professor, English and Comparative Literature and MESAAS, Columbia University
Jennifer Wenzel's areas of interest include: postcolonial theory and decolonization; African and South Asian literatures; environmental humanities; energy studies. Her book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, published by Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal in 2009, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. She is currently at work on two book manuscripts: "Reading for the Planet: World Literature and Environmental Crisis," and "Contrapuntal Environmentalisms: Nature, North and South." She has co-edited with Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger an anthology of keywords on energy.
Jennifer Wenzel
Associate Professor, English, Comparative Literature, MESAAS, Columbia University
Jennifer Wenzel's areas of interest include: postcolonial theory and decolonization; African and South Asian literatures; environmental humanities; energy studies. Wenzel received her B.A. in English and History from Austin College in 1990; her M.A. in English from Indiana University in 1992; and her Ph.D. in English/Ethnic and Third World Literatures from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998. Her book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, published by Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal in 2009, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Her essays on postcolonial theory, ecocriticism and environmental humanities, memory studies, postconsumerism, petrocultures, and African and South Asian literatures, have appeared in journals including Alif, Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture, Research in African Literatures, and Resilience. She has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, NEH, and Princeton University's Davis Center for Historical Studies. She is currently at work on two book manuscripts: "Reading for the Planet: World Literature and Environmental Crisis," and "Contrapuntal Environmentalisms: Nature, North and South." She has co-edited with Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger an anthology of keywords on energy, Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, forthcoming from Fordham University Press.
Working Group Affiliations
The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories
Paige West
Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University
Paige West, former Director of Columbia University's Center for the Study of Social Difference, joined the faculty at Barnard College and Columbia University in 2001, the year after earning her Ph.D. in cultural and environmental anthropology at Rutgers University. She is currently The Claire Tow Professor, an endowed chair in Anthropology. Dr. West has worked in Papua New Guinea since 1996 and has conducted over 90 months of field-based research in the country.
Paige West
Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University
Paige West, former Director of Columbia University's Center for the Study of Social Difference, joined the faculty at Barnard College and Columbia University in 2001, the year after earning her Ph.D. in cultural and environmental anthropology at Rutgers University. She is currently The Claire Tow Professor, an endowed chair in Anthropology. Dr. West has worked in Papua New Guinea since 1996 and has conducted over 90 months of field-based research in the country.
Dr. West’s broad scholarly interest is the relationship between societies and their environments. More specifically, she has written about the linkages between environmental conservation and international development, the material and symbolic ways in which the natural world is understood and produced, the aesthetics and poetics of human social relations with nature, and the creation of commodities and practices of consumption.
Dr. West is the author of three books and the editor of five more. She has also published many scholarly papers. In 2008 Dr. West founded the journal Environment and Society: Advances in Research. She currently serves as the journal’s editor. Dr. West’s most recent book, Dispossession and the Environment, is the winner of the 2017 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award.
In 2002 Dr. West received the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology and Environment Junior Scholar award for her work, in 2004 she received the American Association of University Women Junior Faculty Fellowship and the American Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellowship, in 2006 she received the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Fellowship, and in 2007 she was named a Fellow by the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania. In 2012 she became the Chair of the Ecology and Culture University Seminar at Columbia. Recently, she has served as the chair of the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania and is the past president of the Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association. In 2013 she delivered the Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures at Columbia University. In 2015 she became the co-director of the Pacific Climate Circuits project at the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. In 2016 she was named a Distinguished Scholar by the National Social Environmental Synthesis Center and an advisor to the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) Science for Nature and People Initiative (SNaP). Finally, in 2017 and 2018 Dr. West served as a Phi Beta Kappa distinguished national lecturer.
In addition to her academic work, Dr. West is the co-founder, and a board member, of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, a small NGO dedicated to building academic opportunities for research in Papua New Guinea by Papua New Guineans. Dr. West is also the co-founder of the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school in Papua New Guinea dedicated to teaching at the nexus of indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge.
Working Group Affiliations
Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics, Project Director
Reframing Gendered Violence, Project Director
Book Publications
Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea, Columbia University Press, 2016. Winner of the 2017 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award.
From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social Life of Coffee from Papua New Guinea, Duke University Press, 2012. Runner up for the 2013 Julian Steward Award from the American Anthropological Association.
Conservation is our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea, Duke University Press, 2012.
Lynnette Widder
Lynnette Widder works on sustainable, resilient and equitable built environment practice. Her architectural work has been featured in the New York Times, on HGTV and in other US, European, Asian and Australian publications; and currently focuses on low-embodied energy, low-carbon renovation of Modernist buildings, including an award-winning renovation of Kaneji Domoto's 1949-50 Lurie House.
Lynnette Widder
Image credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey 2022
Lynnette Widder works on sustainable, resilient and equitable built environment practice. Her architectural work has been featured in the New York Times, on HGTV and in other US, European, Asian and Australian publications; and currently focuses on low-embodied energy, low-carbon renovation of Modernist buildings, including an award-winning renovation of Kaneji Domoto's 1949-50 Lurie House. As curator, she has mounted exhibitions at the AIA Center for Architecture, SUNY Purchase, Georgia Institute of Technology and Washington University in St. Louis. Her research has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, the AIA New York Center for Architecture, the Graham Foundation, the German Academic Exchange (DAAD), Fulbright, the UN Development Programme in Guinea, Columbia World Projects and the Climate School at Columbia; and she has held fellowships from the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and MacDowell. She is the author of Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture (gta, 2022) and co-authored Architecture Live Projects: Pedagogy into Practice (Routledge, 2014) and Ira Rakatansky: As Modern as Tomorrow (William Stout, 2010). Her non-fiction writing has appeared in the Oxonian Review, Daidalos, Bauwelt, Architecture, Manifest, Kritische Berichte, the Journal of Industrial Ecology, and The Social Science Journal; and her fiction, in Northwest Review and Camera Obscura. She has also taught at Rhode Island School of Design, ETH Zurich, University of British Columbia, Cornell University, Cranbrook Academy of Art and City College of New York.
Working Group: Seeds of Diaspora
Patricia J. Williams
James L. Dohr Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Patricia J. Williams practiced as deputy city attorney in the Office of the Los Angeles City Attorney and as staff lawyer for the Western Center on Law and Poverty. She has served on the faculties of the University of Wisconsin School of Law, City University of New York Law School, and Golden Gate University School of Law. Williams has been at Columbia since 1991, and is a fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory, Dartmouth College, as well as the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She is published widely in the areas of race, gender, and law, and on other issues of legal theory and legal writing. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights; The Rooster's Egg; and Seeing a ColorBlind Future: The Paradox of Race.
Patricia J. Williams
James L. Dohr Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Patricia J. Williams practiced as deputy city attorney in the Office of the Los Angeles City Attorney and as staff lawyer for the Western Center on Law and Poverty. She has served on the faculties of the University of Wisconsin School of Law, City University of New York Law School, and Golden Gate University School of Law. Williams has been at Columbia since 1991, and is a fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory, Dartmouth College, as well as the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She is published widely in the areas of race, gender, and law, and on other issues of legal theory and legal writing. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights; The Rooster's Egg; and Seeing a ColorBlind Future: The Paradox of Race. She has been a columnist for The Nation and a MacArthur fellow, and sits on the Board of Trustees of Wellesley College. She earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1975 and her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1972.
Mabel O. Wilson
Nancy and George Rupp Professor in Architecture, Columbia University
Mabel O. Wilson, is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor in Architecture and also a professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. She also serves as the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-directs Global Africa Lab. With her practice Studio&, she is a collaborator in the architectural team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia.
Mabel O. Wilson
Nancy and George Rupp Professor in Architecture, Columbia University
Mabel O. Wilson, is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor in Architecture and also a professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. She also serves as the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-directs Global Africa Lab. With her practice Studio&, she is a collaborator in the architectural team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. She’s a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) a collective that advocates for fair labor practices on building sites worldwide. She has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2017) and Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012). She co-edited with Irene Cheng and Charles Davis Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). , With Sean Anderson she is co-curator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Working Group Affiliations
Edited Books
Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture Smithsonian Books, 2017
Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums University of California Press, 2012
Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today Co-Edited with Irene Cheng and Charles Davis University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Inga Winkler
Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights in the Department of Political Science, Columbia University
Inga Winkler is a lecturer in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Human Rights Program. Her research agenda is held together by her interest in socio-economic rights, development, gender, social justice and substantive equality. Her policy experience over the last years has enabled her to follow discussions at various levels from global processes to local challenges which is reflected in her research approaches. Current research projects focus on the Sustainable Development Goals and human rights, the UN Special Procedures, menstrual health and wellbeing, and the human right to sanitation.
Inga Winkler
Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights in the Department of Political Science, Columbia University
Inga Winkler is a lecturer in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Human Rights Program. Her research agenda is held together by her interest in socio-economic rights, development, gender, social justice and substantive equality. Her policy experience over the last years has enabled her to follow discussions at various levels from global processes to local challenges which is reflected in her research approaches. Current research projects focus on the Sustainable Development Goals and human rights, the UN Special Procedures, menstrual health and wellbeing, and the human right to sanitation.
Previously, she has been in residence as a visiting scholar the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU, at Stellenbosch (South Africa) and at Berkeley. She is an affiliate of the Economic and Social Rights Working Group at the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut.
Prior to joining Columbia, Inga was the Legal Adviser to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque, who was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council. Inga has consulted for various international organizations and NGOs including the European Parliament, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, WaterAid, and the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council.
Inga holds a German law degree and a doctorate in international human rights law (summa cum laude).
Working Group Affiliation
Menstrual Health and Gender Justice, Project Director
Amy Zhou
Amy Zhou is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Barnard College. Her research and teaching interests include healthcare, inequality, race/ethnicity, development, and science and technology studies. Professor Zhou's research has examined health inequalities in both the US and global setting.
Working Group: