Elsa Stamatopoulou
Adjunct Professor, Department of Ethnicity and Race and Anthropology, Columbia University
Elsa Stamatopoulou is the Director of the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Program at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. Born in Athens, Greece, Stamatopoulou has devoted 21 years of her UN work to human rights, in addition to several years exclusively focusing on Indigenous Peoples rights. Most recently, she directed the work program of the Secretariat of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) as its first Chief from its inception in 2003 to 2010. She supervised the production of the first ever State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples publication of the United Nations (2010).
Elsa Stamatopoulou
Adjunct Professor, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race & Department of Anthropology
Elsa Stamatopoulou is the Director of the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Program at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. Born in Athens, Greece, Stamatopoulou has devoted 21 years of her UN work to human rights, in addition to several years exclusively focusing on Indigenous Peoples rights. Most recently, she directed the work program of the Secretariat of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) as its first Chief from its inception in 2003 to 2010. She also promoted the integration, at international and national levels, of UN policies on indigenous peoples’ issues in the areas of economic and social development, environment, health, human rights, education and culture. She supervised the production of the first ever State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples publication of the United Nations (2010).
She has written extensively on a variety of human rights themes. Her book Cultural Rights in International Law (2007) is a classic on the topic. She has also co-edited The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 50 Years and Beyond (1998) and Indigenous Peoples’ Access to Justice, Including Truth and Reconciliation Processes (2014). She has been teaching at Columbia University since 2011 and she obtained her J.D. from the University of Athens Law School and entered the Athens Bar Association. She has a Masters in the Administration of Criminal Justice from Northeastern University and a PhD. in Political Science and International Law from the Graduate Institute of International Studies, University of Geneva.
Rhiannon Stephens
Associate Professor, Department of History, Columbia University
Rhiannon Stephens is an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. She is the author of A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900 (2013), which traces the social institution and ideology of motherhood across over a millennium of Ugandan political, economic and social change, and co-editor of Doing Conceptual History in Africa (2018), which critically examines what it means to write conceptual history on the continent.
Rhiannon Stephens
Associate Professor, History, Columbia University
Rhiannon Stephens is an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. She is the author of A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900 (2013), which traces the social institution and ideology of motherhood across over a millennium of Ugandan political, economic and social change, and co-editor of Doing Conceptual History in Africa (2018), which critically examines what it means to write conceptual history on the continent. She specializes in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the late first millennium CE through the twentieth century. She is currently working a history of poverty and wealth as economic and social concepts in eastern Uganda over the past two thousand years.
Working Group Affiliation
Sarah Stillman
Professor, Department of Journalism, Columbia University
Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and has written on topics ranging from asset forfeiture abuse to the return of debtors prisons, and from Mexico's drug cartels to Bangladesh's garment factories. Her coverage of human trafficking on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan won the National Magazine Award, the Michael Kelly Award for the “fearless pursuit and expression of truth,” and the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism, among other prizes. Her current work focuses on the toll of Trump-era immigration enforcement: the human face of ICE raids, family detention, and asylum-seekers' expedited removals, including the gendered impacts of these policies. She is a 2016 MacArthur Fellow.
Sarah Stillman
Project Director, Global Migration Project, Columbia Journalism School
Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and has written on topics ranging from asset forfeiture abuse to the return of debtors prisons, and from Mexico's drug cartels to Bangladesh's garment factories. Her coverage of human trafficking on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan won the National Magazine Award, the Michael Kelly Award for the “fearless pursuit and expression of truth,” and the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism, among other prizes. Her current work focuses on the toll of Trump-era immigration enforcement: the human face of ICE raids, family detention, and asylum-seekers' expedited removals, including the gendered impacts of these policies. She is a 2016 MacArthur Fellow.
Neferti X. M. Tadiar
Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Professor of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Columbia University. She is the author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), and co-editor with Angela Y. Davis of Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation (2005).
Neferti X. M. Tadiar
Professor, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Professor of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Columbia University. She is the author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), and co-editor with Angela Y. Davis of Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation (2005). Her work examines the role of cultural practice and social imagination in the production of wealth, power, marginality, and liberatory movements in the context of global relations. She was co-director of the CSSD working group, “Gender & the Global Slum.”
Working Group Affiliations
Gender and the Global Slum, Project Director
Insurgent Domesticites, Co-Director
Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics
Edited Books
Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization Duke University Press, 2009
Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order
John Hopkins University Press, 2004
Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation James Madison University Press, 2005
Dennis Yi Tenen
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
His teaching and research happen at the intersection of people, texts, and technologies. Tenen received his doctorate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University under the advisement of Professors Elaine Scarry and William Todd. A co-founder of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, he is the author of Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation(Stanford University Press, 2017).
Dennis Yi Tenen
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His teaching and research happen at the intersection of people, texts, and technologies. Tenen received his doctorate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University under the advisement of Professors Elaine Scarry and William Todd. A co-founder of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, he is the author of Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation(Stanford University Press, 2017). His recent work appears on the pages of Modern Philology, New Literary History, Amodern, boundary2, Computational Culture, and Modernism/modernity on topics that include literary theory, the sociology of literature, media history, and computational narratology. His next book concerns the creative limits of artificial intelligence.
Working Group Affiliation
Data Algorithms and Social Justice, Project Director
Kendall Thomas
Nash Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Kendall Thomas is the Nash Professor of Law and co-founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture. His teaching and research interests include U.S. and comparative constitutional law, human rights, legal philosophy, feminist legal theory, Critical Race Theory and Law and Sexuality. A past Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School, and Visiting Professor in American Studies and Afro-American Studies at Princeton University, Thomas has taught or lectured in France, The Netherlands, England, The Czech Republic, Germany, Haiti and South Africa. His writings have appeared in several academic journals and volumes of collected essays.
Kendall Thomas
Nash Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Kendall Thomas is the Nash Professor of Law and co-founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture. His teaching and research interests include U.S. and comparative constitutional law, human rights, legal philosophy, feminist legal theory, Critical Race Theory and Law and Sexuality. A past Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School, and Visiting Professor in American Studies and Afro-American Studies at Princeton University, Thomas has taught or lectured in France, The Netherlands, England, The Czech Republic, Germany, Haiti and South Africa. His writings have appeared in several academic journals and volumes of collected essays. He is a co-editor of Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Founded the Movement (The New Press, 1996) and What's Left of Theory? (Routledge Press, 2000). Thomas was an inaugural recipient of the Berlin Prize Fellowship of the American Academy in Berlin, Germany and a member of the Special Committee of the American Center in Paris, France. He is a founding member of the Majority Action Caucus of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Sex Panic! and the AIDS Prevention Action League.
Working Group Affiliations
Reframing Gendered Violence, Project Director
Lilith Todd
Lilith Todd is a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia's Department of English and Comparative Literature, where she is studying 17th- and 18th-century British and Transatlantic literature. Broadly, her research interests include representations of domesticity, maternity, and bodily sensations, the histories of nursing, sex work, and surrogacy, and the various flows of water, bodily fluids, products, and poetic beats.
Lilith Todd
Lilith Todd is a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia's Department of English and Comparative Literature, where she is studying 17th- and 18th-century British and Transatlantic literature. Broadly, her research interests include representations of domesticity, maternity, and bodily sensations, the histories of nursing, sex work, and surrogacy, and the various flows of water, bodily fluids, products, and poetic beats. She has an article forthcoming from The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation on the nurse, washerwoman, and poet Mary Collier and her work with bodily fluids. Before coming to Columbia, she received her B.A. in English (with honors) and in History from Brown University.
Working Group Affiliation
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
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
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: