Nancy King Reame

Nancy King Reame

Mary Dickey Lindsay Professor (Emerita) of Health Promotion and Risk Reduction, School of Nursing

Nancy King Reame, MSN, PhD, FAAN authored the chapter "Toxic Shock Syndrome and Tampons: The Birth of a Movement and a Research Vagenda" in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies (Bobel et al) 2020. The handbook, which is free and down-loadable can be found here: https://link-springer-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/book/10.1007%2F978-981-15-0614-7. In 2020, she was a member of the National Academy of Medicine committee that published the consensus study report on The Clinical Utility of Compounded Bioidentical Hormone Therapy in response to a request by the Food and Drug Administration. Nancy Reame provides ongoing commentaries for the journal Menopause, on such issues as the safety and efficacy of new breakthrough drugs for the treatment of menopausal hot flashes: KNDY neuron antagonists (Reame, April 2020), estetrol (August, 2020), and the effects of COVID on the management of menopausal symptoms (July, 2021). She continues to serve as a regular member of the screening panel for the prestigious Kavli Prize in Science Journalism, the annual international award program begun in 1945 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for excellence in science journalism for the public.

Working Group Affiliations

Menstrual Health and Gender Justice

Motherhood and Technology

Natalie Reinhart

Project Coordinator
Working Group: Insurgent Domesticities

Natalie Reinhart is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York. She is the managing editor of PREE Literary Magazine in Kingston, Jamaica, and worked as an editorial assistant for Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism from 2016-2019.  Her dissertation thesis is funded by the Lindt Dissertation Completion Fellowship.  

Her dissertation focuses on the "uncontrollable" law in Jamaica, and constructs a socio-legal genealogy of the legislation to argue that such offenses were integral to Jamaica's colonial state formation immediately following Emancipation. She interrogates how such laws have become a discursive staging ground where Caribbean postcolonial modernity, national identity, and international human rights are debated— mobilized around the double-edge of an “uncontrollable” girl’s perceived social vulnerability and threat. Building on work in vagrancy, which positions the runaway as an intervention in the literature and theory of the flâneur, she thinks through girlhood as a critical category and an intellectual tradition.

Michael Rembis

Michael Rembis

Director of the Center for Disability Studies and Professor of History, University at Buffalo

Michael A. Rembis is the Director of the Center for Disability Studies and an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He came to Buffalo from the University of Notre Dame, where he was a visiting scholar in the Department of American Studies and the Department of History. His work, which has appeared in many journals and edited collections, has won several awards, including the 2008 Irving K. Zola Award, awarded annually by the Society for Disability Studies to emerging scholars. His first book, Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890-1960, is available from University of Illinois Press. He is currently working on a disability history anthology co-edited with Susan Burch, forthcoming from University of Illinois Press and an Oxford University Press Handbook on Disability History, which he is co-editing with Kim Nielsen and Cathy Kudlick. In 2012, Rembis and co-editor Kim Nielsen launched the Disability Histories book series also with University of Illinois Press.

Since completing the PhD in history, Rembis has served as co-founder and member of the Disability Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona, where he helped to create an undergraduate curriculum in Disability Studies. He also spent two-years working with faculty and administrators at the University of Notre Dame, building their Disability Studies Forum. Most recently, Rembis has been fortunate to benefit from a close collaboration with David Gerber (Distinguished Professor of History) at the University at Buffalo, where they have worked to establish the Center for Disability Studies and create a formal master’s level (MA) degree concentration in Disability Studies. He serves on the American Historical Association’s Task Force on Disability and the Board of Directors of the Society for Disability Studies.

Jason Resnikoff

Jason Resnikoff is a Core Lecturer in the History Department at Columbia University, and formerly an organizer for the United Auto Workers. He specializes in labor history, the history of global capitalism, intellectual history, and the history of technology. His book, Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work, explores the ideological origins of automation in the US in the middle of the twentieth century.

Andrew Ressler

Andrew Ressler

PhD Student, Columbia University 

Andrew Ressler is a PhD Candidate in the department of Systems Biology. Andrew is currently a researcher in the Institute for Genomic Medicine in Dr. David Goldstein’s lab. He received his Bachelors of Science in Applied Math and Biology from Brown University in 2013. After graduating, Andrew worked as an associate in finance at Amgen for two years before beginning his PhD at Columbia University in 2015. As a graduate student, Andrew’s research focuses on developing methods to model and characterize neuropsychiatric disease using human stem cell derived cultured neuronal networks.

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture

Anna Simone Reumert

Anna Simone Reumert

Anna Simone Reumert is a political anthropologist and a gender studies scholar. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The New School's Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, and holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Mashriq&Mahjar, Merip, Rusted Radishes, Kohl journal for Body and Gender Research, Jadaliyya, among other journals. She is currently working on two research projects. Her book manuscript Future Returns: Labor, Revolution and Sudan in the Middle East follows Sudanese migrant workers in Lebanon and migrant returnees in subsistence farming communities in Sudan during a time of economic and political upheaval in both countries. Her second project, “Sex and the Civil War”, examines the political economy of sex in the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990).

Chazelle Rhoden

Chazelle Rhoden

Ph.D. Student, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University

Chazelle Rhoden is a third-year doctoral student of anthropology at Columbia University. She conducts research through a transnational black feminist lens on the relationship between climate change conservation and race in Brazil. She is a recipient of Jamaica’s Governor General Award and has published in the fields of paleoclimatology and reggae studies.

J.T. Roane

J.T Roane

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Cincinnati

J.T. Roane is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He is also part of the University’s urban futures initiative. Roane is broadly concerned about matters of geography, sexuality, and religion in relation to Black communities. He is at work on a manuscript, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia, which historicizes multiple modes of insurgent spatial assemblage Black communities articulated in Philadelphia in the second half of the twentieth. 

Working Group Affiliation

Science and Social Difference

Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jr.

Dr. Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jr., PhD, is Associate Professor of History (Columbia University School of the Arts and Sciences) and Sociomedical Sciences (Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health), and is also a former Director of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS). Dr. Roberts writes, teaches, and lectures widely on African-American urban history, especially medicine, public health, and science and technology. His widely acclaimed book, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), is an exploration of the political economy of race and the modern American public health state between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, a period which encompasses the overlapping and mutually-informed eras of Jim Crow segregation and modern American public health practice.

Roberts currently is researching and writing a book-length project on the United States’s troubled history of race and recovery, examining the social and political history of heroin addiction treatment from the 1950s to the early 1990s. This project traces urban policy at the beginning of the postwar heroin epidemic, the emergence of therapeutic communities, the politics of state-run addiction rehabilitation facilities, the adoption of methadone maintenance treatment in the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of “radical recovery” movements and harm reduction and syringe exchange in the 1980s and 1990s.

Working Group:

Recovery

Camille Robcis

Camille Robcis

Associate Professor of History and French

Camille Robcis specializes in modern European intellectual history, with a focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. Her interests have circled around three issues: the historical construction of norms, the intellectual production of knowledge, and the articulation of universalism and difference in modern French history. Prior to coming to Columbia, she taught at Cornell for ten years.

Robcis is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France which was published by Cornell University Press and which won the 2013 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize. It examines how and why French judges and legislators turned to structuralism – and more specifically, to some of the most difficult and abstract concepts of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan – to reassert the centrality of the heterosexual family in political debates around bioethics, same-sex unions, single-parent households, family names, surrogacy, and adoption.

Her second book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in France, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press. It traces the history of institutional psychotherapy, a movement born in France during the Second World War that called for the profound transformation of the theory and practice of psychiatric care, through the lens of Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. According to institutional psychotherapy, the asylum could function as a microcosm for society at large, as a space to promote non-hierarchal and non-authoritarian political and social structures, as a template to better understand alienation and offer perspectives for “disalienation.” My book explores the intersections of psychiatry, philosophy, and politics in the works of several figures for whom institutional psychotherapy was important, including François Tosquelles, Jean Oury, Félix Guattari, Frantz Fanon, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Paul Éluard, and Jean Dubuffet. 

Robcis is currently working on a new project, tentatively titled The Gender Question:
Populism, National Reproduction, and the Crisis of Representation in which she tries to make sense of the protests against the so-called “theory of gender” that have raged in various parts of the world since the 1990s, especially in their conceptual links to populism.

Working Group Affiliation

Queer Aqui

Leticia Robles

Leticia Robles

Performance Studies, NYU

Leticia Robles-Moreno is a PhD student at New York University’s Department of Performance Studies.. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Humanities with emphasis in Linguistics and Literature from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She also holds a Master’s degree in Latin American Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and has taught Spanish, Latin American culture, and Writing classes in several college levels. In addition to her academic background, Leticia studied Theater Arts in the Club de Teatro de Lima, and has participated in various workshops on improvisational theater, storytelling, and Theater of the Oppressed techniques. Her MA thesis, “Staging Real Time: Absent Presences in Forging/Inhabiting Fragmented Bridges through Video Chat Connections,” explored the ways in which new technologies might be used to generate alternative political subjects, communities, and spaces of belonging. She has published articles in Latin American Theatre Review and Contemporary Theatre Review. Her doctoral research is focused on the role of theater groups of "creación colectiva" in recent Latin American socio-political contexts -- particularly in Peru (Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani), Colombia (Teatro La Candelaria), and Ecuador (Teatro Malayerba) -- exploring their networked practices as strategies of survival, from a combined Performance Studies and Affect Studies perspective. She is always lost in translation.

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory

Huáscar Robles

Huáscar Robles

Author and Photographer 

Huáscar Robles  is an author and photographer from Caguas, Puerto Rico. He has written about the revitalization of Santurce, Puerto Rico through tax incentives and the impact of the economic crisis on the Island’s middle class. His current research details the the impact of the municipal bond debt of Puerto Rico’s culture. 

Huáscar's photo and miltimedia exhibits in the US and Puerto Rico include The Country Under My Skin, Los silencios de Santurce, and Portraits of Marassa.  He also directed The Invisible Coast, a documentary about Haitian merchants’ struggle in Loíza, Puerto Rico. His collection Country Under My Skin was acquired by the Rhode Island Historical Society’s Permanent Gallery in 2010.

Huáscar is author of Puertos príncipes: temblemos todos, a journal and photo book on Haiti after the earthquake. He has published in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune’s Hoy, and The San Juan Star among others.

Working Group Affiliation

Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy

Julia Miele Rodas

Julia Miele Rodas

Assistant Professor of English, City University of New York

Julia Miele Rodas is assistant professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY). She teaches writing at CUNY’s Bronx Community College and is on the faculty of the Master’s program in Disability Studies at the CUNY School of Professional Studies. Her writing has appeared in Victorian Literature & Culture, Dickens Studies Annual, the Victorian Review, the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, the Explicator, and other venues. She has also served as a contributing editor of the Encyclopedia of American Disability History (Facts on File, 2009) and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. She is currently working on a book—Autistic Disturbances—that theorizes the role of autistic rhetoric and aesthetic in literature.

Akira Drake Rodriguez

Akira Drake Rodriguez

Assistant Professor, Stuart Weitzman School of Design and School of Social Policy and Practice, University of Pennsylvania

Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School in the Department of City & Regional Planning.  Her research examines the politics of urban planning, or the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. Dr. Rodriguez’s forthcoming manuscript, Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing (University of Georgia Press 2021), explores how the politics of public housing planning and race in Atlanta created a politics of resistance within its public housing developments.  This research offers the alternative benefits of public housing, outside of shelter provision, to challenge the overwhelming narrative of public housing as a dysfunctional relic of the welfare state. Dr. Rodriguez was recently awarded a Spencer Foundation grant to study how parent and educational advocates mobilize around school facility planning processes in Philadelphia.    

Working Group Affiliation

Insurgent Domesticities, Co-Director

Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco

Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco

Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University

Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco teaches Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Columbia. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Universidad de Salamanca, Université de Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle), and the École Normale Supérieure (Lettres et Sciences Humaines). Among his publications are books and articles on Medieval and Early Modern knighthood, history of the book and reading, medieval political theory, law and culture, Occitan poetry, etc. He is one of the executive directors of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies and a member of the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions. He was the recipient of the 2010 John K. Walsh award for his article "La urgente presencia de las Siete Partidas". His most recent publication is Order and Chivalry. Knighthood and Citizenship in Late Medieval Castile (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

Leah Rosen

Leah Rosen

Graduate Student, Narrative Medicine, Columbia University

Leah Rosen was raised in Denver, CO and graduated from Duke University in Durham, NC. At Duke, she created her own interdisciplinary major titled "Illness and Identity" and completed that in conjunction with the standard pre-med curriculum. She would describe the "Illness and Identity" curriculum as a medical humanities approach to patient-centered care--pulling from disciplines including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, religious studies, and biology. Beyond her courses, she had the opportunity to work as a research assistant in the Duke Eating Disorder Research Lab and Health Humanities Lab. She is excited to pursue a degree in Narrative Medicine at Columbia and then hopefully continue onto medical school.

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture

Victoria Rosner

Victoria Rosner

Dean of Academic Affairs for the School of General Studies; Adjunct Associate Professor 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).  With Nancy K. Miller, she edits the Gender and Culture book series for Columbia University Press.  She is currently completing a book on interarts modernist aesthetics, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Rosner completed her bachelor of arts at Columbia College and her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Rosner previously held a tenured position in the Department of English at Texas A & M University, where she worked closely with undergraduates and spearheaded a revision of the English department’s undergraduate curriculum. She has played a number of key administrative roles in her efforts to promote the quality of education and enhance the student educational experience.

Working Group Affiliation

On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics, Project Director

Harilyn Rousso

Harilyn Rousso

Writer and Activist

Harilyn Rousso is a writer, painter, educator, social worker, psychotherapist and activist who has worked in the disability rights field, with a particular emphasis on issues of women and girls with disabilities, for more than twenty-five years. She is the founder of the Networking Project for Disabled Women and Girls of the YWCA/NYC, a unique mentoring program that has been replicated widely, and the President of Disabilities Unlimited Consulting Services, which provides education and training on disability equity issues.

In addition to her memoir, Don’t Call Me Inspirational: A Disabled Feminist Talks Back,Rousso is the author of numerous publications on gender and disability, including Disabled, Female and Proud! and Strong Proud Sisters: Girls and Young Women with Disabilities (available online at http://www.centerwomenpolicy.org/pdfs/dis3.pdf and is the co-editor of Double Jeopardy, and Addressing Gender Equity in Special Education. She is also the executive producer of the award-winning documentary Positive Images: Portraits of Women with Disabilities, which was shown on PBS.

Rousso is a former board member of the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the Center for Women Policy Studies, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Sister Fund and Educational Equity Concepts, and a former commissioner with the New York City Commission on Human Rights. In 2003, she was selected by the National Women’s History Project as an honoree for National Women’s History Month.  http://www.nwhp.org/resourcecenter/biographycenter.php

Rousso’s educational background includes a B.A. in economics from Brandeis University, graduate work in economics at Harvard University, a Masters in Education from Boston University, a Masters in Social Work from New York University, and a Certificate in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from the New York School for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.  

Working Group Affiliation

The Future of Disability Studies

Jon S. Sensbach

Jon S. Sensbach

Professor of History, University of Florida

Professor Jon Sensbach received his Ph.D. in 1991 in early American history from Duke University, his B.A. in 1980 from the University of Virginia. He joined the University of Florida Department of History in 1998 after teaching at the College of William and Mary and the University of Southern Mississippi. He teaches the Department’s foundation graduate course on early America and has recently taught a graduate seminar on the Black Atlantic as well as undergraduate courses on the Atlantic slave trade, colonial America, and the American Revolution. Professor Sensbach has been an NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center and an NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture. His most recent book is Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Harvard, 2005), and he is also the author of A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840 (North Carolina 1998). He is at work on a study of religious awakenings in the early South and Atlantic world.

Garnett Russell

Garnett Russell

Assistant Professor of International and Comparative Education, Teacher’s College, Columbia University

Garnet Russell’s research explores how countries rely on the education system to promote peacebuilding and transitional justice and how they use global models around human rights and citizenship. She draws on a sociological disciplinary perspective and mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate questions related to education in post-conflict contexts, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Rwanda and South Africa. Russell has also conducted research on human rights and diversity in New York high schools and the right to education for urban refugees in Ecuador, Lebanon, Kenya and other countries in the global south.
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She is a co-founder and former co-chair of the Education, Conflict, and Emergencies Special Interest Group (SIG) of the ​​Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). Russell also serves on the editorial board of the​ ​Journal on Education in Emergencies (JEiE) and the International Journal of Human Rights Education.