Brent Edwards

Brent Edwards

Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Brent Hayes Edwards is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and was runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia UP 2004). Edwards has three books forthcoming in early 2017: his monograph Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, which will be published by Harvard University Press; the scholarly edition of Claude McKay’s recently discovered last novel, Amiable with Big Teeth, co-edited with Jean-Christophe Cloutier and to be published by Penguin Classics; and Edwards’s translation of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 Phantom Africa (Seagull Books), for which Edwards was awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Edwards’s current projects include a monograph titled “Art of the Lecture,” for which he was awarded a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Working Group Affiliations

The Digital Black Atlantic

The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories

Elizabeth Emens

Elizabeth Emens

Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia University

Elizabeth Emens is an Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Her principal areas of research and teaching include disability law, family law, anti-discrimination law, contracts law, and law and sexuality. Her publications about disability law and theory include Intimate Discrimination: The State’s Role in the Accidents of Sex and Love (Harvard Law Review, 2009); Integrating Accommodation (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2008); Shape Stops Story (Narrative, 2007); and a work in progress entitled Framing Disability.

Emens was the Bigelow Fellow and lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School from 2003 to 2005. She clerked for Judge Robert D. Sack, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, from 2002 to 2003. She is a member of the New York State Bar Association and American Bar Association. Elizabeth Emens earned her J.D. from Yale University; her Ph.D. from King's College, Cambridge, where she was a Marshall Scholar; and her B.A. from Yale University.

Katherine L. Ender

Katherine L. Ender

Assistant Professor, Pediatric Hematology, Oncology, and Stemcell Transplantation, Columbia University Medical Center

Dr. Katie Ender is a pediatric hematologist and assistant professor in the Division of Pediatric Hematology, Oncology, and Stem Cell Transplantation at Columbia University Medical Center.   Her primary clinical expertise and research experience have focused on sickle cell disease.  She has a Master’s of Science in Clinical Investigation from Northwestern University and is currently pursuing a Master’s of Science in Bioethics at Columbia University.  Dr. Ender sees pediatric hematology patients at Columbia University Medical Center/Children’s Hospital of New York as well as at community affiliates Harlem and Lincoln Hospital Centers. In addition to teaching pediatric fellows and residents in the hospital and outpatient clinics, Dr. Ender is also faculty in the Foundations of Clinical Medicine course and Major Clinical Year Foundations program at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.  She continues to collaborate with colleagues in clinical research that aims to improve the treatment of patients with sickle cell disease and is eager to begin contributing scholarly work in the field of Bioethics.  She is a member of the Pediatrics Ethics Committee, the Program in Women & Children’s Bioethics Committee, and has just joined the Pediatric Clinical Ethics Consultation team.   Dr. Ender is interested generally in the critical application of bioethical principles to medical care and policy and is especially excited to join the conversation about ethical considerations in the rapidly emerging field of Precision Medicine. 

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture

Yasmine Ergas

Yasmine Ergas

Professor, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

Yasmine Ergas is Director of the Specialization on Gender and Public Policy, Lecturer in International and Public Affairs, and Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. A lawyer and sociologist, she has worked on issues regarding gender and women’s rights as a policy analyst and advisor, scholar and advocate. She has served as a consultant to international and domestic policy organizations, including the OECD, UNESCO, the Millennium Villages Project, the New York City Commission on Human Rights, and CENSIS, a major applied social research institute in Italy, and been on the staff of the Social Science Research Council. Her recent work has focused on the emergence of an international market in reproductive services, the transformations of ‘motherhood’ and the impacts of human rights programs and policies.  Previous relevant work centered on feminist movements and their interactions with public policies; the implications of the concept of ‘gender’ for feminist politics; child care policies in international and comparative perspective; educational policies and the social implications of HIV/AIDS.  

Working Group Affiliations

Menstrual Health and Gender Justice

Social Justice After the Welfare State

Katherine Pratt Ewing

Katherine Pratt Ewing

Professor of Religion, Columbia University

Katherine Pratt Ewing is Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan, Turkey, and India, and among Muslims in Europe and the United States.  Her research has focused on debates among Muslims about the proper practice of Islam in the modern world, the place of Muslims within the German national imaginary, and sexualities, gender, and the body in South Asia. She is currently writing a book on the politics of sex change surgery within India’s middle class with Baishakhi Taylor and is PI on an ACLS-funded project “Sufis, Salafis and the Public Square” with Alexander Stille.  Recent articles and chapters include “The Ungendered Self: Sex Reassignment, The Third Gender, and Gender Fluidity in India” (forthcoming, with Baishakhi Taylor), “Murder in Chapel Hill: Muslims, the Media, and the Ambivalence of Belonging” (forthcoming), “‘Islam is Not a Culture:’ Reshaping a Muslim Public for a Secular World” (2015), “From German Bus Stop to Academy Award Nomination:  The Honor Killing as Simulacrum” (2013), and “Naming our Sexualities: Secular Constraints, Muslim Freedoms” (2011). Her previous books include Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and Islam (1997), Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (2008), and the edited volumes Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam (1988) and Being and Belonging: Muslim Communities in the US since 9/11 (2008).   

Working Group Affiliations

Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies, Project Director

Reframing Gendered Violence

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence

Gil Eyal

Gil Eyal

Professor, Department of Sociology, Columbia University

Gil Eyal is the director of the Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture Project. He is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Gil Eyal's work deals with sociology of expertise, intellectuals and knowledge, in particular as it relates to broader political processes and to the interstitial spaces between fields. In two early books he has dealt with the transition from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe, and the role played by intellectuals, technocrats and in particular economists in the process. (With Ivan Szelenyi and Eleanor Townsley) Making Capitalism without Capitalists. (London: Verso, 1998); The Origins of Post-Communist Elites: From the Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). A later book dealt with expertise about Arab affairs and the role it plays in Israeli society, government and the military: The Disenchantment of the Orient. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). His latest book provides a sociological explanation for the current autism epidemic, and traces the blurring of boundaries between experts and laypeople that play a role in the dynamics leading to the epidemic. (With Brendan Hart, Emine Onculer, Neta Oren and Natasha Rossi) The Autism Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). The approach applied in this book is developed further in his recent article: "For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic,” AJS Vol. 118, No. 4 (January 2013), pp. 863-907.

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture, Project Director

Matthew Engelke

Matthew Engelke

Professor of Religion; Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, Columbia University

Matthew Engelke is an anthropologist with research interests in Christianity, secular humanism, media, materiality, semiotics. He has conducted fieldwork in Zimbabwe and in Britain. He is currently working on a book about secularity and death, based on research among humanist funeral celebrants in London.

Before joining the Columbia faculty in 2018, Engelke taught in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science for 16 years. He received his BA from the University of Chicago in 1994 and his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2002.

Engelke is the editor of Prickly Paradigm Press, a section editor at Public Books, former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and former deputy editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa. Engelke has served on the board of trustees of both the Royal Anthropological Institute and the London School of Economics, as well as vice-chair of the LSE’s Ethics Policy Committee.

The author or editor of several books, Engelke has also published articles in many journals, including American Ethnologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Current Anthropology. Beyond his scholarly writing, Engelke has written for the Guardian and Tate Modern. 

Kevin Fellezs

Kevin Fellezs

Assistant Professor of Music, Columbia University

Kevin Fellezs is an Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University, where he shares a joint appointment in the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. His book titled Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion (Duke University Press) is a study of fusion (jazz-rock-funk) music of the 1970s, which won the 2012 Woody Guthrie Book Award.   Fellezs has published articles in Jazz Perspectives, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Popular Music History, and the Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter, as well as essays in a number of edited anthologies.  In addition to the Pacific Climate Circuits grant, Fellezs has been awarded the Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant, the Provost’s Program for Junior Faculty Who Contribute to the Diversity Goals of the University Grant, and the Tsunoda Senior Fellowship at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan.  Fellezs received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness (American Studies), 2004). In 2004-6, he received a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is currently writing a book on a transnational study of ki ho'alu (Hawaiian slack key guitar) performers, both native Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian, in Hawai'i, California and Japan.

Working Group Affiliation

Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics, Project Director

Andrea Flynn

Andrea Flynn

Andrea Flynn is Senior Director at the Insight Center. Prior to joining Insight, she spent eight years at the Roosevelt Institute, where she was most recently the Director of Health Equity. She is the co-author of The Hidden Rules of Race (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She frequently writes and speaks about the race and gender dimensions of economic inequality, reproductive health and justice, and health equity. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Ms. Magazine, The New Republic, Time, Teen Vogue, and Cosmopolitan. Her research has examined the legacy and impact of gendered racism in our economy and the role of economic policy in driving racial and gender health disparities.

Andrea teaches courses on reproductive and sexual health, public policy, and economic inequality at the Mailman School for Public Health at Columbia University. She received her MPA and MPH from Columbia University, and her BA in journalism and women’s studies from Syracuse University. You can follow Andrea on Twitter @dreaflynn.

Katherine Franke

Katherine Franke

Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia Law School

Katherine Franke is the Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where she also directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and is the faculty director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project. She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, a member of the Steering Committee for the Center for the Study of Social Difference, and an Affiliated Faculty member for the Center for Palestine Studies.  She is among the nation's leading scholars writing on law, religion and rights, drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory.

Her most recent book, Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality, NYU Press, 2015, considers the costs of winning marriage rights for same sex couples today and for African-Americans at the end of the Civil War. Franke was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 to undertake research for Wedlocked. In addition to her work at the Law School, she works regularly in Palestine, most recently serving as an academic mentor for the human rights faculty at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, and sits on the steering committee of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace. She also chairs the board of directors of the Center for Constitutional Rights, based in New York City.

Before coming to the Law School, Franke was an associate professor at Fordham Law School and the University of Arizona College of Law. From 1990 to 1991, she was the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. Prior to that, she worked for the New York City Commission on Human Rights and founded the AIDS and Employment Project.

Working Group Affiliations

Queer Aqui

Reframing Gendered Violence

Science and Social Difference

Lynn Freedman

Lynn Freedman

Professor Population and Family Health, Columbia University Medical Center

Lynn P. Freedman, JD, MPH, currently directs the Mailman School of Public Health Averting Maternal Death and Disability (AMDD) Program, a global program of research, policy analysis, and technical support that, since 1999, has worked with UN agencies, NGOs, and governments in more than 50 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to reduce maternal mortality. Before joining the faculty at Columbia University in 1990, Professor Freedman worked as a practicing attorney in New York City. Professor Freedman has published widely on issues of maternal mortality and on health and human rights, with a particular focus on gender and women's health. She also serves on the advisory boards of maternal health projects and human rights projects with programs in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

Working Group Affiliation

Menstrual Health and Gender Justice

Meredith Gamer

Meredith Gamer

Fellow, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University

Meredith Gamer specializes in the visual and material culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, with a focus on Britain and the British Empire. Her research and teaching interests include the relationship between art and violence, print culture, medical illustration, and representations of race and slavery. Professor Gamer’s current book project, The Sheriff’s Picture Frame: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century Britain, centers on the spectacle of punishment in Britain’s long eighteenth century. She is also at work on a new book-length study, which examines the visual culture of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in the British Atlantic world. Gamer is the recipient of a 2018-2019 Faculty Mentoring Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), Huntington Library, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and Woodrow Wilson Foundation, among other institutions.

Working Group Affiliation

Motherhood and Technology

Irwin Garfinkel

Irwin Garfinkel

Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Contemporary Urban Problems, Columbia School of Social Work

Irwin Garfinkel is the co-founding director of the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC). Of the 37 population research centers funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), CPRC is the only one to have been founded within a school of social work. Its signature area is children, youth, and families. Previously, Professor Garfinkel was the director of the Institute for Research on Poverty (1975-1980) and the School of Social Work (1982-1984) at the University of Wisconsin.

Between 1980 and 1990, he was the principal investigator of the Wisconsin child support study. His research on child support and welfare influenced legislation in Wisconsin and other American states, the U.S. Congress, Great Britain, Australia, and Sweden.

In 1996, Professor Garfinkel, in conjunction with his wife, Sara McLanahan, the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. initiated the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Nearly 5,000 children in 20 large American cities were enrolled in the study at birth and are now adolescents. A recent study found that harsh parenting increased in the wake of the Great Recession.

Professor Garfinkel received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. A social worker and an economist by training, he has authored or co-authored over 200 scientific articles and 16 books and edited volumes on poverty, income transfers, program evaluation, single parent families and child support, and the welfare state, including, most recently, Wealth and Welfare States: Is America Laggard or Leader?

Working Group Affiliation

Social Justice After the Welfare State

Abosede George

Abosede George

Abosede George is the Tow Associate Professor of History at Barnard College  and Columbia University in New York. She teaches courses in urban history, the history of childhood and youth in Africa, and the study of women, gender, and sexuality in African History. Her book, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development was published in 2014 by Ohio University Press and received the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize in 2015 from the Women's Caucus of the African Studies Association, as well as Honorable Mention from the New York African Studies Association. She is currently at work on The Ekopolitan Project, a digital forum dedicated to historical research on migrant communities in nineteenth- and twentieth century Lagos, West Africa.

Working Group: (formerly) Refugee Cities and Insurgent Domesticities

Ralph Ghoche

Ralph Ghoche

Ralph Ghoche is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Barnard College, specializing in nineteenth-century architectural, urban, and environmental history. 

His research and teaching are dedicated to clarifying two major subject areas: colonialism and environmentalism. His work on the interventions of the Catholic Church in Algiers during the French colonial period examines how the Church reshaped urban space through the construction, conversion, and erasure of buildings to advance its aim of resurrecting Augustinian Christendom in North Africa. Simultaneously, Ghoche is involved in a research project examining stone quarries and mineral extraction across Algeria. The broader objective of this project is to clarify how Western architecture's material reality is inscribed within global networks of extraction and exchange. 

For the last decade, Ghoche has taught a lecture class in environmental history titled “City, Landscape & Ecology.” The course looks at changing attitudes to the natural world from the eighteenth century to the present, tracing significant historical shifts in considering nature across multiple fields and disciplines. His recent publications on environmentalism include “A Commons for Whom? Racism and the Environmental Movement,” co-authored with Udoh Unyimeabasi and published in Transforming Education for Sustainability (Springer, 2023) and a co-edited special issue (v. 17) of the French peer-reviewed journal, Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale urbaine et paysagère, titled “How Environmentalist Mobilizations Shape Buildings, Cities and Landscapes.” 

Ghoche holds a professional degree in architecture from McGill University and a Ph.D. in architectural history and theory from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia. He is co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar, Beyond France, and is a member of the editorial board of Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale, urbaine et paysagère.

Working Group: Seeds of Diaspora

Alex Gil

Alex Gil

Digital Scholarship Coordinator for the Humanities and History Division, Columbia University Library

Alex Gil is Digital Scholarship Coordinator for the Humanities and History Division at Columbia University Library, Affiliate Faculty of the English and Comparative Literature Department, and one of the founders of the Studio@Butler, a technology atelier for faculty, students and librarians. He has published in journals across the Atlantic and the Americas, while sustaining an open and robust online research presence on the subject of digital humanities, textual scholarship, and Caribbean Studies. In 2010-2012 he was a fellow at the Scholars' Lab and NINES at the University of Virginia. Among other roles, he now serves as vice-chair of the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities initiative, and is actively engaged in digital humanities projects at Columbia University and around the world. 

Working Group Affiliation

The Digital Black Atlantic

Eileen Gillooly

EILEEN GILLOOLY

Eileen Gillooly directs the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, where she holds an appointment in English and Comparative Literature, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Institute for Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her work as a center director has led to partnerships with other centers and institutions on projects that promote public engagement and scholarship, including the Justice-in-Education Initiative, for which she serves as Principal Investigator and which has been supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 2015.

Gillooly is the author of Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (1999), which was awarded the Perkins Prize, presented annually to the book that makes the most significant contribution to the study of narrative by the International Society for the Study of Narrative (2001). Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in such publications as Victorian Studies, ELH, Feminist Studies, and The NYT Book Review, as well as in edited collections. She is the editor or co-editor of four volumes, including Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (2007), with James Buzard and Joseph Childers, and Contemporary Dickens (2009; paperback, 2015; audiobook, 2019), with Deirdre David. She has been awarded research fellowships by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Whiting Foundation, St. Deiniol’s Library (UK), and the Moore Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway. A former member of the Executive Board of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (2005-2008) and the Executive Committee of the MLA Division for the Victorian Period (2009-2014), Gillooly currently serves on the advisory boards of the Sydney Policy Lab, the Council for European Studies, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. Ongoing projects include a book about parental feeling in nineteenth-century middle-class Britain and a digital, open-access critical edition of David Copperfield.

Edited Books

Contemporary Dickens Co- Edited with Deirdre David. The Ohio State University Press, 2008

Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace  Co-Edited with James Buzard and Joseph Childers University of Virginia Press, 2007

Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction University of Chicago Press, 1999

Kaiama Glover

Kaiama Glover

Associate Professor of French and Africana Studies, Barnard College

Kaiama L. Glover is Associate Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP 2010), first editor of Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine (Yale French Studies 2016), and translator of Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst (Archipelago Books 2014). Her work has appeared in The Journal of Haitian Studies, French Forum, The French Review, Research in African Literatures, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Public Books, Public Culture, and Small Axe, among other publications. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the PEN Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation. Current projects include a monograph "The Audacity of the 'I' - Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Self-Care," as well as forthcoming translations of Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano (Archipelago Books) and René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (Akashic Books). She is project director of the forthcoming multimedia platform In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Visual Cartography, founding Editor of sx archipelagos: a small axe journal of digital practice, and a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review.

Working Group Affiliations

Engendering the Archive

Reframing Gendered Violence, Project Director

The Digital Black Atlantic, Project Director

Suzanne B. Goldberg

Suzanne B. Goldberg

Herbert and Doris Wechsler Clinical Professor of Law

Suzanne Goldberg, one of the country’s foremost experts on gender and sexuality law and a leading advocate for the LGBTQ community, serves as the Herbert and Doris Wechsler Clinical Professor of Law. She also leads the Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and its Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic.

Goldberg joined the Law School’s full-time faculty in 2006. She previously served on the faculties of Rutgers School of Law­–Newark and Fordham Law School. In private practice, Goldberg served as a senior staff attorney at Lambda Legal, the country’s first legal organization focused on achieving full equality for lesbian and gay people. During her time at Lambda, she served as co-counsel for the defendants in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas.

In 2015, Goldberg was appointed to serve as Columbia University’s first executive vice president for university life. In this role, she works to reinforce and broaden the university’s commitment to respect, inclusion, and ethical leadership among students, faculty, and administrators. Goldberg is a frequent commentator and analyst for news media on sexuality and gender law, and on discrimination law and litigation issues. Her commentary has been featured on 20/20, CNN, and other national television networks, as well as on radio and news outlets around the world.

Goldberg graduated with honors from Brown University, and went on to serve as a Fulbright Fellow at the National University of Singapore. She earned her J.D. at Harvard Law School and later clerked for Justice Marie Garibaldi of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Goldberg is a recipient of the Law School’s Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

Rishi Goyal

Rishi Goyal

Assistant Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine and the Institute of Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Rishi Goyal, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and the Institute of Comparative Literature at Columbia University where he is the Director of the Medicine, Literature and Society Major.  Dr. Goyal is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Humanities at the University of Southern Denmark.

Dr. Goyal received his MD (2001) and his PhD in English and Comparative Literature (2010) from Columbia University. He was Chief Resident in Emergency Medicine at New York-Presbyterian Hospital (2009-10).  Dr. Goyal’s research, writing and teaching focuses on the reciprocal transformations that result when new ideas about health, disease and the body find forms of expression in fiction and memoirs. His most recent work explores the political, aesthetic, and social dimensions of the representation of physical trauma in literature. His writing has appeared in The Living Handbook of Narratology, Aktuel Forskning. Litteratur, Kultur og Medier, and The Los Angeles Review of Books among other places. He is a co-founding editor of the online journal, Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, and is the recipient of multiple grants and awards including a recent NEH grant.

Working Group Affiliation

Motherhood and Technology, Project Director