Marita Sturken

Marita Sturken

Professor and Chair, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and Co-Director of the Visual Culture Program, NYU

Marita Sturken is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she teaches courses in visual culture, cultural memory, and consumerism. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (University of California Press, 1997), and Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (with Lisa Cartwright, Oxford University Press, second edition 2009), and Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism From Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Duke University Press, 2007).

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory

Sergio Suiama

Sergio Gardenghi Suiama

Public Prosecutor, Office of Cultural Heritage in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Sergio Suiama is a Federal Prosecutor in Brazil and a Columbia Law LL.M. alumnus (class of 2009-2010). Also, he holds a master in World Heritage and Cultural Projects for the Development from University of Turin.

Graduated from University of Sao Paulo Law School, he has worked in the Brazilian prosecution service since 2002, and at the Office of Cultural Heritage and Environment in Rio de Janeiro since 2014. Currently, he serves as well as the Ombudsperson for Human Rights in the State and coordinates the Working Group on LGBTQ’s rights at the Office of the Federal Ombudsman.  

As a senior legal professional, he has for more than 20 years litigated, written and lectured on topics such as racial equality, transitional justice, cultural rights, freedom of expression and rights of LGBTQ.

For his work in investigating and prosecuting perpetrators of crimes against humanity committed during the last Brazilian dictatorship he received  in 2014 the Special Achievement Award from the International Association of Prosecutors, and the Chico Mendes Medal from Grupo Tortura Nunca Mais (Brazil).

Mayssoun Sukarieh

Mayssoun Sukarieh

Lecturer in Anthropology and Development Studies

Mayssoun Sukarieh is co-convener of the MA degree in Political Economy of the Middle East. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and a MA and BA from the American University of Beirut. Since then she has lectured in anthropology and development studies in universities around the Arab region (American University of Beirut; American University of Cairo) and the United States (Columbia & Brown Universities). Her research interests focus on youth, education, development and social movements in the Arab region, with a particular interest in studying the political, economic, cultural and social structures and processes that tie the region in complex and contradictory ways to the larger global political economy. Her first book, Youth Rising? The Politics of Youth in the Global Economy (co-authored with Stuart Tannock) was published earlier this year by Routledge's Critical Youth Studies series. In 2015, she was also appointed as a Fellow of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung.

Working Group Affiliation

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence

Kirsten Swinth

Kirsten Swinth

Associate Professor of History, Fordham University

My research interests center on the social and cultural history of the U.S. since World War II, but I have also written on the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras.  My focus is the intersections among gender, cultural, and labor and economic history.  I have a strong background in U.S. visual and popular culture as well, and have recently been teaching the history of American photography.  My training is in American Studies and I rely on an interdisciplinary approach in my work.

I am currently at work on The Rise of the Working Family: The Reshaping of Care and Competition in Postindustrial America.  This book traces the rise of the working family in the second half of the twentieth century.  The Rise of the Working Family thus reshapes historians’ understandings of postwar American history by providing an integrated narrative of two of the most fundamental historical changes of the last fifty years—simultaneous gender and economic revolutions.

The key to unlocking the rise of the working family is the working mother.  Historians understand the unskilled male industrial worker to be the emblem of industrial capitalism; they have yet to understand how the working mother is the emblem of the postindustrial order. With the new service economy, working mothers moved front and center.  They dominated popular conceptions of the labor force and occupied growing sectors of the economy, particularly the expanding “care” sector.  I show the roots of—and cultural politics behind—many common catchphrases for the nation’s new social and economic reality: supermom, second shift, the balancing act, juggling, mommy wars, and mommy track.

My earlier scholarship explored gender, culture, and labor in the art world at the turn of the century.  In Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930 (2001), I traced the careers of two generations of American women artists who flooded the art world starting in the 1870s.  I explored the significance of culture to social reform with an edited document collection, “How Did Settlement Workers at Greenwich House Promote the Arts as Integral to a Shared Social Life?,” for Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (2006).

My work has been featured on CNN.com, The Christian Science Monitor, the Huffington Post, and on public radio’s “To the Point.”  I lecture regularly on the women’s movement, postwar America, and the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras.

Working Group Affiliation

Social Justice After the Welfare State

Nafeesa Syeed

Nafeesa Syeed

Media Fellow, Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence

Nafeesa Syeed is an award-winning multimedia journalist with a decade of full-time experience on four continents in spot news and enterprise reporting, editing and producing. She works as a National Security Reporter for Bloomberg News based in Washington, D.C. Nafeesa has held positions at the Dubai Bureau and Al Jazeera America. She holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and a B.A. in Arabic and Government from Georgetown University.

Working Group Affiliation

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence, Media Fellow

Didier M. Sylvain

Didier M. Sylvain

Doctoral Candidate, Ethnomusicology, Columbia University

Didier Michel is a sound artist and PhD student in Ethnomusicology. His work focuses on the spiritual or phenomenological dimensions of “black” engagement with sound technology among Afrofuturist-identified music-makers and listeners in Haiti and the United States. He engages with dialogs on Afrofuturism and the speculative arts; ritual healing, self-transformation and embodiment; human-machine interaction and improvisation; histories and aesthetics of sound and media; and the relation between the virtual and the everyday.
 
In addition to his graduate pursuits, Didier serves as Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed music journal, Current Musicology, where he is publishing a special issue on Race, Sound, and Technology (Spring 2017), featuring an interdisciplinary group of scholars writing on the mediations of racial formation in society. In Spring 2015 he collaborated with the Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life to organize “Tomorrow is the Question: Afrofuturism, Sound and Spirit”—a symposium of artists and scholars exploring what an “Afro-future” might sound like and mean today. Beyond Columbia, Didier’s professional career has centered on facilitation and the art of listening to elicit creative leadership in organizations and people across creative, entrepreneurial, philanthropic, and business communities.

Working Group Affiliation

The Digital Black Atlantic

Neferti X. M. Tadiar

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

Reframing Gendered Violence

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

Madiha Tahir

Madiha Tahir

Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University

Madiha Tahir has a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and is a writer, filmmaker, and former journalist focusing on drone warfare, surveillance, and empire. She is the director of Wounds of Waziristan, a short documentary essay film on survivors of drone attacks. Her work has appeared in several media outlets including Al-Jazeera, Vice, Funambulist, Foreign Affairs, Caravan, Democracy Now!, Costs of War, Guernica, PRI and BBC’s “The World,” and elsewhere. Tahir is the co-founder of the bilingual, online journal Tanqeed, with Mahvish Ahmad, and the co-editor of Dispatches from Pakistan, a volume of essays in a series on timely issues spearheaded by Vijay Prashad. She is collaborating on a film project on Pakistani movements and a research grant on questions of data and political violence.

Working Group Affiliation

Insurgent Domesticities

Kian Tajbakhsh

Kian Tajbakhsh

Kian Tajbakhsh (Ph.D. Columbia 1993) is a Senior Advisor at Columbia Global. In this role, Dr. Tajbakhsh works on university-wide initiatives focused on global migration and is the Coordinator of the Committee on Forced Migration. He is also a Fellow and professor of International Relations with Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought where since 2017 he has taught the core course in the Global Thought MA program “Globalization and the Problems of World Order.” From 2016-2018 he was Visiting Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia. His book Creating Local Democracy In Iran: State-Building and the Politics of Decentralization was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Shahla Talebi

Shahla Talebi

Associate Professor, Arizona State University

Shahla Talebi is an Associate Professor at Arizona State University. She earned her bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley in sociocultural  anthropology and her master’s and doctoral degrees also in anthropology from Columbia University. Currently, she is on the faculty of  religious studies and the anthropology of religion of the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Her book,Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran (2011, Stanford University Press), won the 2011 Outstanding Academic Title Award given by Choice Magazine, and was the co-winner (Gold Medal) of the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards, among other awards.. Dr. Talebi’s work has also appeared in various academic journals, including Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and edited books. Her article on revolutions in recent Iranian history was published in the Oxford Handbook series in July 2018. She was the 2017-2018 Anthony E. Kaye fellow at National Humanities Center fellow where she worked on her book about contested memories of martyrdom in post-revolutionary Iran

Working Group Affiliation

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence

Jade Tan

Jade Tan

Health Policy Management and Infectious Disease Epidemiology

Jade Tan is a graduate student in Public Health at Columbia University, concentrating in Health Policy Management and Infectious Disease Epidemiology. She has a B.A. from the University of Virginia in Political Philosophy, Policy, and Law (PPL), as well as Biomedical Ethics. Her work and interests focus on human genetic engineering ethics, precision medicine technology, neuroscience, synthetic biology, philosophy of mind, jurisprudence and constitutional law, and the ethical, philosophical, sociopolitical, legal, and deeply human dimensions of future technologies. She has been a research analyst consultant for multiple institutions, edited for several print and online publications, and the strategic director of a successful biotech startup. Jade enjoys grappling with complex intellectual puzzles and engaging in rousing cross-disciplinary debate. She takes pleasure in subverting the humanities versus STEM binary and includes coffee as a main food group. She spends time thinking about the big questions in the morning like: if we had teleportation, would she have been able to sleep in for another 30 minutes?

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture

Amina Tawasil

Amina Tawasil

Lecturer of Anthropology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

Amina Tawasil's current research focus is on the intersection of women and Islamic education. With the support of the International and Transcultural Studies program at Teachers College, Columbia University, in the summer of 2008 she traveled to Tehran, Iran to conduct a two-month pilot study on the education of seminarian women in Iran, which became the main focus of her dissertation research. From September 2010 to December 2011, with the support of the Earth Institute Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4), and the Middle East Institute, Columbia University, she conducted ethnographic research on seminarian women (zanan-e howzeh) in Tehran. And finally, from the generous support of the American Association of University Women she has completed her dissertation entitled, "The Howzevi (seminarian) Women of Iran: Constituting and Reconstituting Paths". She has degrees in anthropology and education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and was the 2013 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, Middle East North African Studies program.

Working Group Affiliation

Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies

Alexei "Lex" Taylor

Alexei “Lex” Taylor (Independent) is an award-winning chef, cookbook author, TV personality, and explorer. Through BBQ, bushcraft, leather craft, knife making, and foraging, Lex explores traditional knowledge, skills, and how the understanding of these principles forges a strong bond and appreciation for the natural world. As a chef, he hosts private, forest-table tasting menus in alternative spaces such as in the forest, barns, and even abandoned castles. He is the author of Grill Fire (Sterling Epicure 2016) and The Unofficial Bridgerton Cookbook (Simon & Shuster, 2021). He has made several appearances on Food Network, Esquire, and Sponsored Media Tours. As an explorer, Lex has travelled extensively throughout the world, learning and working with cultures who still rely on ancestral knowledge for survival. From the Sahara and Atacama deserts, to the jungles of Central America, West Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and as far north as Inuit hunting villages on Baffin Island, his quest is not just to learn but to share that knowledge back home through field guides, workshops, and lectures with the outdoor company, Fjällräven (Field guide and spokesman since 2016).

Diana Taylor

Diana Taylor

University Professor, Performance Studies and Spanish and Founding Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYU

Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), which won the Best Book Award given by New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Mention in the Joe E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama; of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, Duke U.P., 1997; and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke U.P., 2003), which won the ATHE Research Award in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy and the Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for the best book in Latin American and Spanish Literatures and Culture (2004).  The Archive and the Repertoire has been translated into Portuguese by Eliana Lourenço de Lima Reis (Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais 2012) and Spanish by Anabelle Contreras (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2015.)  Her Acciones de memoria: Performance, historia, y trauma, was published in Peru by Fondo Editorial de la Asamblea Nacional de Rectores (2012). Performance, first published in Spanish in Buenos Aires (Asuntos Impresos, 2012), was revised and published in English with Duke U.P. 2016, and in Polish (Performans, Universitas, 2018). ‘PerformancePerformance’ and ‘퍼포먼스퍼포먼스’. Soeul: Rasun Press, is forthcoming, 2021. Performance, politica e memoria culturale, edited by Fabrizio Deriu (Rome: Editoriale Artemide) came out in 2019. ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence, Duke University Press 2020, ¡Presente! La política de la presencia! translated into Spanish by Ana Stevenson,  Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Chile), 2021,¡Presente!, A Política da Presença, translated into Portuguese by Adelaine La Guardia, Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, forthcoming 2022.

She is co-editor of Estudios avanzados de Performance (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011), Stages of Conflict: A Reader in Latin American Theatre and Performance (Michigan U.P., 2008), Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform (Duke U.P.,2004), Defiant Acts/Actos Desafiantes: Four Plays by Diana Raznovich (Bucknell U. P., 2002), (Duke U.P., 1994), and The Politics of Motherhood: Activists from Left to Right, (University Press of New England, 1997). She has edited five volumes of critical essays on Latin American, Latino, and Spanish playwrights, and several digital books such as What is Performance Studies (co-edited with Marcos Steuernagle) and Dancing with the Zapatistas (Duke U.P. 2016) Her articles on Latin American and Latino performance have appeared in journals such as PMLA, Profession, Critical Inquiry, TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, e-misférica, Performing Arts Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, Estreno, Gestos, Signs, MLQ and other scholarly journals. She has also been invited to participate in discussions on the role of new technologies in the arts and humanities in important conferences and commissions in the Americas (i.e. ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure).

Taylor was the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship, 2013-14, and a Research Fellowship at the Institut d’Etudes Avancée de Paris, 2016-2017. She was President of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 2017. Diana Taylor is Founder and Past Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, funded by the Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller, Rockefeller Brothers and Henry Luce Foundations. In 2018, Diana Taylor was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science. . In 2021 she was awarded the Edwin Booth Award for “outstanding contribution to the NYC theatre community, and to promote integration of professional and academic theatre.”

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory, Project Director

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project, Project Director

Diana Taylor

Diana Taylor

New York

Ms. Diana L. Taylor has been the Senior Adviser at Wolfensohn Fund Management, L.P. since 2007 and served as its Managing Director from March 2007 to 2014. Diana Taylor joined Solera Capital LLC as a vice chair in 2014. She previously served as managing director of Wolfensohn Fund Management L.P. Prior to Wolfensohn, she served as New York State superintendent of banks and chairwoman of the New York State Banking Board. Taylor serves on the boards of Citigroup, Brookfield Asset Management, and Sotheby’s. She also serves on several charitable boards and chairs the boards of ACCION International, Hot Bread Kitchen and the Hudson River Park Trust. Taylor earned an AB from Dartmouth College, MBA from the Columbia School of Business, and MPH from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia.

Aylin Tekiner

Aylin Tekiner

Artist

Aylin Tekiner (b. 1978, Nevsehir, Turkey) is a New York/Istanbul based artist and activist. She undertook her B.A. and M.A. at Hacettepe University Fine Arts, Sculpture Department in Ankara, Turkey. In 2008 she received her PhD at Ankara University, Institute of Educational Sciences, Cultural Fundamentals of Education Department. Her book "Ataturk Statues: Cult, Esthetics, and Politics" evolved from her PhD thesis and was published by Iletisim Yayinlari (Turkey) in 2010. Aylin has had solo shows and participated in the group exhibitions in Turkey and New York. She taught New Media, Art, and Activism at Long Island University, New York. She is a member of Collective Memory Platform, which was formed by the families of 28 victims of the political murders in modern Turkey.

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory

Temi Odumosu

Temi Odumosu

Temi Odumosu is an interdisciplinary scholar and curator at the University of Washington Information School, with a teaching focus on critical and creative approaches to understanding information technology’s role within society, particularly how unfinished colonial histories and their inequalities haunt data, uses of information and technology design. Her research and curatorial work are engaged with the visual and affective politics of slavery and colonialism, racial coding in popular culture, postmemorial art and performance, image ethics and cultural heritage digitization. Overall, she is focused on the ways art can mediate social transformation and healing. Dr. Odumosu is author of the book Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes White Humour (2017).

Davia Temin

Davia Temin

New York

Davia Temin is CEO of Temin and Company, a boutique management consultancy that helps corporations and other institutions create, enhance and save their reputations with a focus on crisis and risk management, corporate governance, and leadership coaching at the CEO and board levels. Temin and Company works with clients to create socially responsible, brand-distinguishing thought leadership and best practices in governance and corporate leadership, as well as to promote women’s leadership, provide ethically based marketing, media and social media strategy and execution, and create cultures supportive of gender equity. Davia serves as a spokesman for organizations during crises, strategist, and leadership and communications coach at the board, CEO and executive committee levels. Davia attended Columbia University for her Masters Degree and is an Honors graduate of Swarthmore College. Davia serves as Chair of the Board of global NGO Video Volunteers, an international media and human rights NGO founded in 2003 that promotes community media to enable citizen participation in marginalized and poor communities around the world. Previously, Davia served for 9 years as the First Vice Chair of the Board of Girl Scouts of the USA and Chair of their National Fund Development Committee, and for 10 years as board member, and head of the committee on Visibility and Leadership in Higher Education of Swarthmore College. In addition to Columbia’s Women Creating Change Leadership Council, Davia also serves on the boards or advisory boards of Girl Scouts of Greater New York, The Knight-Bagehot Fellowship Program of Columbia Journalism School, Harvard Women’s Leadership Board, and ProPublica, among others. Davia writes the “Reputation Matters” column for Forbes.com and recently penned “Chaos Leadership: When Does Global Crisis Turn Into Chaos and How Do We Survive It?.”   

Dennis Yi Tenen

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

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

Queer Aqui

Reframing Gendered Violence, Project Director