Darshan Vigneswaran
Fellow, Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam
Darshan Vigneswaran is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Centre for Urban Studies , University of Amsterdam. He is also a Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society, WITS University. In 2008, he was a British Academy Fellow at the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford where he continues to serve as the reviews editor on the working paper series.
Darshan Vigneswaran
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam
Darshan Vigneswaran is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Centre for Urban Studies , University of Amsterdam. He is also a Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society, WITS University. In 2008, he was a British Academy Fellow at the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford where he continues to serve as the reviews editor on the working paper series. From 2010-12 he was a Research Fellow at Max Planck where he co-coordinates an international working group on Public Space and Diversity.
His research aims to understand and explain deep changes in the structure of international politics. His work is primarily interested in how the state's claim to territory has been reconfigured in response to changing patterns of human mobility. Since completing his doctoral studies at Monash in 2006, he has authored Territory, Migration and the Evolution of the International System (2013), co-edited Slavery, Migration and Contemporary Bondage in Africa (2013) and Mobility Makes States (forthcoming 2014), and published peer-reviewed articles in journals including Political Geography, Environment & Planning, Review of International Studies, and Policing & Society. Darshan has also provided expert consultation for INTERPOL, the EU and the South African Police Service and comment for Reuters, the BBC, and the New York Times. His profile and publications can be found at academia.edu and google scholar
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
Paromita Vohra
Fellow, Filmmaker, British Council-Saregama India Screenwriting Workshop 2008
Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker, writer and curator whose work has focuses on urban life, popular culture, gender, politics and art. Her films have been widely screened in festivals, galleries and popular screening spaces, besides being included in university syllabi around the world.
Paromita Vohra
Filmmaker
Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker, writer and curator whose work has focuses on urban life, popular culture, gender, politics and art. Her films have been widely screened in festivals, galleries and popular screening spaces, besides being included in university syllabi around the world.
Her films as director are Partners in Crime (2011), a documentary on culture, markets and the arts Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: A Thrilling Tale (2007), a documentary on tabloid TV news and moral policing (Best Short Documentary, Int.Video Fest, Trivandrum), Q2P,(2006) a film on toilets and the city (Best Documentary IFFLA and Bollywood and Beyond, Stuttgart); Where’s Sandra?(2005), a playful exploration of stereotypes of Catholic girls from a Bombay suburb; Work In Progress (2004) an impressionistic portrait of the World Social Forum held in Mumbai; Cosmopolis: Two Tales of a City,(2004), a short film which explores Bombay’s cosmopolitan self image through land and food politics, which won an award for mixing fiction and non-fiction at the Digital Film Festival, Un-limited Girls (2002), a personal take on engagements with feminism in urban India (Feminist News Award, Women’s Film Festival in Seoul; Best Film Award, Aaina Film Festival, India); A Short Film About Time (2000), a fiction short about the funny-sad relationship between a young woman with a broken heart, her psychotherapist and his watch;A Woman’s Place,(1999) an hour-length documentary for PBS looking at how women in India, South Africa and the USA negotiate the space between law and custom; andAnnapurna (1995), about a women food worker’s cooperative in Bombay’s textile mill area.
Retrospectives of her work have been held at the Lille 3000 (2006) festival and Persistence/Resistance (2007), a festival of political documentary in India. Her films have also been screened at the Tate Modern and will feature in an upcoming exhibition at the Wellcome Art Gallery in London.
Her films as writer are the internationally released feature Khamosh Pani/Silent Waters directed by Sabiha Sumar(Golden Leopard, Locarno Film Festival, 2003, Best Screenplay, Kara Film Festival, 2003), the documentaries A Few Things I Know About Her (Silver Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival 2002), If You Pause: In a Museum of Craft, The Stuntmen of Bollywood and the faux-documentary Skin Deep (dir: Reena Mohan).
Her writings, fiction and non-fiction have been included in various anthologies, among them Bombay Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai, Electric Feather: the Tranquebar Book of Erotica, Recess: The Penguin Book of Schooldays, Dreaming Different: New Feminist Writings from Around the World, Signs (Spring 209) and First Proof: Penguin New Writing from India. She contributes to several publications including Outlook, India Today, Tehelka, Time Out,Mumbai and currently writes a popular column in Sunday Mid-day a Mumbai newspaper.
She was principal mentor of the British Council-Saregama India Screenwriting Workshop 2008 and teaches writing for film as visiting faculty in numerous universities in India and abroad.
As part of A Woman’s Place project – a collective of women using media for social change- she has worked extensively with young people through workshops focusing on creativity, politics and media, especially the Girls Media Group, a media exchange project between teen girls in New York and Mumbai. As part of the artist’s collective @Culture she has been engaged with making culture an important political part of the World Social Forum process.
In the past few years she has been curating documentary and alternative film programs from time to time, among them a program on films about the city for the National Gallery of Modern Art (2002) and a program of films from Films Division, the government documentary producer, at the International Video Festival of Trivandrum (2010) as well as a program on the history of the Indian Music video for the Film South Asia festival in Kathmandu (2007).
Leti Volpp
Fellow, Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley Law
Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley Law
Leti Volpp
Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley Law
Leti Volpp is Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law and the Faculty Director of the Center for Race and Gender at University of California Berkeley Boalt School of Law. Volpp, is scholar of both law and the humanities, writes about citizenship, migration, culture and identity. Her most recent publications include “Immigrants Outside the Law: President Obama, Discretionary Executive Power, and Regime Change” in Critical Analysis of Law(2016), “The Indigenous As Alien” in the UC Irvine Law Review (2015), “Saving Muslim Women” in Public Books (2015), “Civility and the Undocumented Alien” in Civility, Legality, and Justice in America (Austin Sarat, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2014), “The Boston Bombers” in Fordham Law Review (2014), “Imaginings of Space in Immigration Law” in Law, Culture and the Humanities (2012), the edited symposium issue “Denaturalizing Citizenship: A Symposium on Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and the Alien and Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery” in Issues in Legal Scholarship (2011), and “Framing Cultural Difference: Immigrant Women and Discourses of Tradition” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2011). She is the editor of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). She is also the author of “The Culture of Citizenship” in Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2007), “The Citizen and the Terrorist” in UCLA Law Review (2002),“Feminism versus Multiculturalism” in the Columbia Law Review(2001), and many other articles.
Working Group Affiliation
Aditi Surie von Czechowski
Junior Research Fellow, Churchill College
Aditi Surie Von Czechowski is Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. She recently received her PhD from the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her work focuses on the intersection of humanitarianism and human rights and theories of the human.
Aditi Surie von Czechowski
Junior Research Fellow, Churchill College
Aditi Surie Von Czechowski is Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. She received her PhD from the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her work focuses on the intersection of the anthropology of development and humanitarianism, human rights, and black feminist theory. From 2013-15, she conducted research on humanitarian aid and gender-based violence in Tanzania. Her article “Humanitarianism: Histories, Erasures, Repetitions” was published in the Journal of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and her article “Together in the Flesh” (2019) appeared in Cultural Anthropology’s forum “Theorizing the Contemporary Fieldsights.” She is the author of “Commoditising Architecture” in Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (2013), among other earlier articles and she is currently working on a book entitled “Being Human”: Humanitarian Confinement, Refugee Bodies, and Human Rights.
Working Group Affiliation
Emmanuel Von Schack
Doctoral Student, Art History, Hunter College
Emmanuel von Schack is a deaf art history graduate student at Hunter College; his master's thesis focuses on German artists who were veterans of the First World War and the works of art they created during and after the War. By interweaving disability theories with Foucauldian feminist and queer theories, he explores the complex relationship between masculinity and disability as conveyed in Weimar culture and art. He works as an educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R.
Emmanuel Von Schack
Art History, Hunter College
Emmanuel von Schack is a deaf art history graduate student at Hunter College; his master's thesis focuses on German artists who were veterans of the First World War and the works of art they created during and after the War. By interweaving disability theories with Foucauldian feminist and queer theories, he explores the complex relationship between masculinity and disability as conveyed in Weimar culture and art. He works as an educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and he is the director of ArtASL, a project he founded to develop art lexicon in American Sign Language. He also collaborates with European and American professionals on other projects intended to increase museum access for deaf people.
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).
David Wasserman
Fellow, Ethics, Yeshiva University
David Wasserman is Director of Research at the Center for Ethics at Yeshiva University. He oversees the research and scholarly activities of the Center with an emphasis on the philosophical aspects of bioethics, health care ethics, and disability studies. His current projects focus on prenatal selection and parental role-morality. He publishes widely on these and other topics. At Yeshiva University, Mr. Wasserman presents his research at faculty seminars and a variety of student events. He also presents his work at a wide range of national and international conferences.
David Wasserman
Director of Research, Center for Ethics, Yeshiva University
David Wasserman is Director of Research at the Center for Ethics at Yeshiva University. He oversees the research and scholarly activities of the Center with an emphasis on the philosophical aspects of bioethics, health care ethics, and disability studies. His current projects focus on prenatal selection and parental role-morality. He publishes widely on these and other topics. At Yeshiva University, Mr. Wasserman presents his research at faculty seminars and a variety of student events. He also presents his work at a wide range of national and international conferences. Prior to joining the Center, Mr. Wasserman was a Research Scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He has a J.D. from the University of Michigan (Magna Cum Laude), an M.A. in psychology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a B.A. in philosophy from Yale University.
Amy Weissenbach
PhD Student, Sociology, Columbia University
Amy Weissenbach is a first-year PhD student in sociology at Columbia University. She is interested in the sociology of knowledge and expertise, cultural sociology, and law and society. She aims to understand dynamics among individuals and institutions shaping notions of social responsibility in tech, and in biotech in particular. She holds an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine from Cambridge University and a B.A. from Stanford University.
Amy Weissenbach
PhD Student, Sociology, Columbia University
Amy Weissenbach is a first-year PhD student in sociology at Columbia University. She is interested in the sociology of knowledge and expertise, cultural sociology, and law and society. She aims to understand dynamics among individuals and institutions shaping notions of social responsibility in tech, and in biotech in particular. She holds an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine from Cambridge University and a B.A. from Stanford University.
Working Group Affiliation
Delia Duong Ba Wendel
Assistant Professor of Urban Studies, the School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Delia Duong Ba Wendel is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies in the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-editor of Spatializing Politics, an anthology of essays on power and place (2015). Her book manuscript Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage is a spatial history of genocide memory that accounts for how a past gains presence, is authorized, and persists as a form of sociopolitical regulation.
Delia Duong Ba Wendel
Assistant Professor, Urban Studies, the School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Delia Duong Ba Wendel is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies in the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-editor of Spatializing Politics, an anthology of essays on power and place (2015). Her book manuscript Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage is a spatial history of genocide memory that accounts for how a past gains presence, is authorized, and persists as a form of sociopolitical regulation. Her book manuscript The Ethics of Stability explores post-genocide peacebuilding as a socio-spatial endeavor defined and challenged in the design of homes, settlements, and civic space. Her research engages how communities recover and rebuild after conflict.
Working Group Affiliation
Insurgent Domesticities, Co-Director
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.
Laura Wexler
Fellow, Women’s and Gender Studies, Yale University
Laura Wexler is co-Principal Investigator of the Women, Religion and Globalization project. She is the author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Pregnant Pictures (Routledge, 2000), co-authored with Sandra Matthews. Tender Violence was awarded the 2001 annual Joan Kelley Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book in women’s history and/or feminist theory.
Laura Wexler
Professor of American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies, Yale University
Laura Wexler is co-Principal Investigator of the Women, Religion and Globalization project. She is the author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Pregnant Pictures (Routledge, 2000), co-authored with Sandra Matthews. Tender Violence was awarded the 2001 annual Joan Kelley Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book in women’s history and/or feminist theory. She also co-edited, along with Laura Frost, Amy Hungerford and John MacKay, the volume Interpretation and the Holocaust, a special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism. Professor Wexler’s many other publications include a recent essay entitled “’Laughing Ben’” on ‘The Old Plantation’,” in Photography and Race Forum, edited by Elizabeth Abel and Leigh Raiford, in English Language Notes 44.2 (Fall/Winter 2006); and a recent chapter entitled “The Fair Ensemble: Kate Chopin in St. Louis in 1904,” in Haunted by Empire; Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, edited by Ann Laura Stoler (Duke University Press, 2006). Her current research centers on visual representations of the gendered politics of race in the United States and includes forthcoming studies of the writer Kate Chopin and the photographers Diane Arbus and Roman Vishniac. She co-founded, and for the past eight years has directed, the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale. She has served on the editorial boards of American Quarterly, Genders, and the Yale Journal of Criticism. She is a member of the Steering Committee and of the Advisory Council of the Women Faculty Forum, and serves on the American Studies, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, International Affairs, and Judaic Studies Councils.
Working Group Affiliations
Engendering the Archive, Project Director
Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project, Project Director
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
Sarah Wilcox
Fellow, Sociology, Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Wilcox is Professor of Sociology, Sarah Lawrence College. She specializes in medical sociology, the sociology of science and knowledge, gender and sexuality, and the mass media. Her current research focuses on embodiment and biological knowledge, particularly how lay and expert knowledge intersect and when and how biological ideas become salient in embodied experience, personal identities, and popular culture.
Sarah Wilcox
Professor of Sociology, Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Wilcox is Professor of Sociology, Sarah Lawrence College. She specializes in medical sociology, the sociology of science and knowledge, gender and sexuality, and the mass media. Her current research focuses on embodiment and biological knowledge, particularly how lay and expert knowledge intersect and when and how biological ideas become salient in embodied experience, personal identities, and popular culture. She teaches courses on embodiment, medical technologies, health policy and health activism, gender and mass media, and she is developing a new course in disability studies.
Working Group Affiliation
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.
Deborah Willis
Fellow, Photography & Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
Deb Willis has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies. She was a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and Fletcher Fellow, and a 2000 MacArthur Fellow, as well as the 1996 recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation award. She has pursued a dual professional career as an art photographer and as one of the nation's leading historians of African American photography and curator of African American culture.
Deborah Willis
University Professor and Chair of Photography & Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
Deb Willis has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies. She was a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and Fletcher Fellow, and a 2000 MacArthur Fellow, as well as the 1996 recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation award. She has pursued a dual professional career as an art photographer and as one of the nation's leading historians of African American photography and curator of African American culture. Exhibitions of her work include: A Sense of Place, Frick, University of Pittsburgh, 2005; Regarding Beauty, University of Wisconsin, 2003; Embracing Eatonville, Light Works, Syracuse, NY, 2003-4; HairStories, Scottsdale Contemporary Art Museum, Scottsdale, AZ 2003-4; The Comforts of Home, Hand Workshop Art Center, Richmond, VA, 1999; Re/Righting History: Counternarratives by Contemporary African-American Artists, Katonah Museum of Art, 1999; Memorable Histories and Historic Memories, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1998; Cultural Baggage, Rice University, Houston, TX, 1995. Her curated Exhibitions include: Engulfed by Katrina: Photographs before and After the Storm, Nathan Cummings Foundation, and Imagining Families—Images and Voices and Reflections in Black. Other notable projects include The Black Female Body A Photographic History with Carla Williams (Temple University Press, Philadephia, 2002); A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. DuBois and the Photographs from the Paris Exposition (Amistad Press, 2003); Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers - 1840 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton); Visual Journal: Photography in Harlem and DC in the Thirties and Forties (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1996); Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (The New Press, New York, NY, 1994); and VANDERZEE: The Portraits of James VanDerZee (Harry Abrams Publishing, New York, NY, 1993). She was a MacArthur, Guggenheim, Richard D.Cohen, Hutchins Center and Harvard University Fellow. She is the author of Posing Beauty in African American Culture, among many other books.
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