EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
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.
Professor, Department of Religion, Barnard College
Elizabeth A. Castelli is a cultural historian of late ancient Christianity and a translator. She is the author of Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making and Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power; co-author, as a member of the Bible and Culture Collective, of The Postmodern Bible; and editor of Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader; Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence (with Janet Jakobsen); Reimagining Christian Origins (with Hal Taussig); and special issues of the Journal of the History of Sexuality, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, and Scholar and Feminist Online.
Professor, Department of Religion, 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.
Professor, Department of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University
Ana M. Ochoa Gautier is Professor and Chair of the Department of Music, and faculty member at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. Her recent book, Aurality, Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Duke University Press, 2014) was awarded the Alan Merriam Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology. She is also the author of Músicas locales en tiempos de globalización (Buenos Aires: Norma 2003) and Entre los Deseos y los Derechos: Un Ensayo Crítico sobre Políticas Culturales (Bogotá: Ministerio de cultura, 2003).
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.
Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam’s first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. Her 1998 book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders.
William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Columbia University
Marianne Hirsch, former Director of Columbia University's Center for the study of Social Difference is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former President of the Modern Language Association of America. She was born in Romania, and educated at Brown University where she received her BA/MA and Ph.D. degrees. Hirsch’s work combines feminist theory with memory studies, particularly the transmission of memories of violence across generations.
Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, Columbia University
Lauren C. Houghton, PhD, takes a biosocial and life course approach to breast cancer prevention. Using tools from biological anthropology and molecular epidemiology, she focuses on hormones as the mechanism that links what happens above the skin with that beneath the skin.
Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Jean E. Howard is the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University where she teaches early modern literature, Shakespeare, feminist studies, and theater history. Howard has authored over fifty essays; and her books include Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (1984); The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994); Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (1997), co-written with Phyllis Rackin; Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642 (2007), which won the Barnard Hewitt Prize for the outstanding work of theater history for 2008, and Marx and Shakespeare in the Great Shakespeareans series (2012), co-written with Crystal Bartolovich.
Associate Professor, Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University
Ana Paulina Lee is Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. She is the author of Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford University Press).
Associate Professor, Department of Africana Studies and History, Barnard College
Celia E. Naylor explores the multifaceted connections between African-Americans, Black Indians and Native Americans in the U.S. Her book, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in May 2008 (John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture). This work charts the experiences of enslaved and free Blacks in the Cherokee Nation from the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma’s entry into the Union in 1907. Her interests include African-American and Caribbean history; Native American history; women's history and literature in the African Diaspora; and colonialism and neocolonialism in the Americas.
Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is a filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and professor at Columbia University, where she is also the founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive. Among her books and publications are: Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award, 2004), The Latino Media Gap (2014), and Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism in Native Nations and Latinx America (2017). Her most recent films include Small City, Big Change (2013), War for Guam (2015) and Life Outside (2016).
Professor, Department of Asian American Studies and History, Columbia University
Mae M. Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.
Associate Professor, Department of History, Columbia University
Anupama Rao has research and teaching interests in the history of anti-colonialism; caste and race; historical anthropology, social theory and intellectual history, and comparative urbanism. She is Senior Editor, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She has served as President, Society for the Advancement of South Asian History (American Historical Association), and on the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. Her work has been supported by fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford) and the National Humanities Center (North Carolina), and by grants for the American Institute for Indian Studies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Victoria Rosner specializes in modernist literature and culture, with particular interests in architecture and design, gender and sexuality studies, and life writing. She is the author of Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (Columbia UP, 2005), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. She is also the editor ofThe Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group (Cambridge UP, 2014) andThe Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (Columbia UP, 2012; with Geraldine Pratt).
Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, Columbia University
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Barnard College, Columbia University, and co-editor of “Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration” (2020) and Spatial Violence (2016). Her book manuscript Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement analyzes the history, visual rhetoric, and spatial politics of the Dadaab refugee camps in Northeastern Kenya.
Associate Professor, Department of Journalism, Columbia Journalism School
Alisa Solomon directs the Arts & Culture concentration in the M.A. program at the Journalism School. She came to Columbia in 2005 after nearly 20 years as a professor of English/Journalism at Baruch College-CUNY and as a professor in the Ph.D. programs in Theater and in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition to contributing occasionally to The Nation, The Forward, The New York Times, and other publications, she was on staff at The Village Voice for 21 years, where she was a regular theater critic and cultural and political reporter, winning awards for stories on reproductive rights, electoral politics, women's sports, and immigration policy. Solomon's book, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender, won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.
Assistant Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College
Marisa Solomon is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, where she is affiliated with The Earth Institute. Her work draws upon Black feminist Marxism, queer of color critique, feminist intersectional science studies, and standpoint epistemologies to explore how scales of racial and ecological injury are linked from the body, to the neighborhood, to the region, to the Black Atlantic.
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.
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.