Katherine Neimeyer

Katherine Neimeyer

Graduate Student, Narrative Medicine, Columbia University

Katie Neimeyer is a graduate student in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University, where she also works as a research coordinator in the Taub Institute and Sergievsky Center on several neurogenetic studies. As an intern in the Summer Internship for Indigenous Peoples in Genomics Canada (SING Canada) 2019 program at the University of Alberta, she participated in a dialogue about Indigenous bioethics and approaches to genomic sciences. She plans on pursuing a career in genetic counseling after she completes her M.S. in Narrative Medicine.

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture

Alondra Nelson

Alondra Nelson

Professor of Sociology and Women and Gender Studies, Columbia University

Alondra Nelson is the author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), which was recognized with four scholarly awards, including the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award from the Eastern Sociological Society and the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association (Section on Race, Gender and Class). A finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award, Body and Soul is the first book-length exploration of the radical organization’s health-focused activities. Through its activism, Nelson argues, the Black Panther Party advanced a “social health” frame—a distinctive, expansive conceptualization of well-being that articulated biological wellness with both economic justice and racial equality and that would anticipate contemporary debates about racial health disparities.

Her next book, The Social Life of DNA: Race and Reconciliation after the Genome (forthcoming from Beacon Press), traces how claims about ancestry are marshaled together with genetic analysis in a range of social ventures. She takes up these themes in several recent publications that are among the earliest empirical scholarly investigations of direct-to-consumer genetic testing: “Bio Science: Genetic Ancestry Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry” (Social Studies of Science 38, 2008), "The Factness of Diaspora: The Social Sources of Genetic Genealogy" (inRevisiting Race in a Genomics Age, Rutgers University Press, 2008), and "DNA Ethnicity as Black Social Action?"(Cultural Anthropology 28, 2013).

Nelson has also edited three anthologies: Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee; Rutgers University Press, 2012); Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (with Thuy Linh N. Tu; New York University Press, 2001) and "Afrofuturism," a special issue of Social Text.

Nelson's research explores the production of knowledge about human difference in biomedicine and technoscience and the circulation of these ideas in the public sphere: Her research focuses on how science and its applications may shape the social world, including aspects of personal identification, racial formation, and collective action. In turn, she also explores the ways in which social groups reject, challenge, engage and, in some instances, adopt and mobilize conceptualizations of race, ethnicity, and gender derived from scientific and technical domains.

Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. From 2006-2007, she was an external fellow at the W.E.B Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She has also been a visiting fellow at the International Center for Advanced Study at New York University, the BIOS Centre at the London School of Economics, the Bavarian-American Academy in Munich, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and the Academy of Advanced African Studies at the University of Bayreuth. Prior to joining Columbia University, Nelson was on the faculty of Yale University, where she received the Poorvu Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching Excellence.

Professor Nelson received her B.A. (magna cum laude), from the University of California at San Diego, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned her Ph.D. from New York University in 2003.

Vasuki Nesiah

Vasuki Nesiah

Legal Scholar, NYU Gallatin School of Law

Vasuki Nesiah is a legal scholar with a focus on public international law at NYU Gallatin School of Law. Her main areas of research include the law and politics of international human rights and humanitarianism, with a particular focus on transitional justice. She has published widely on the history and politics of human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal law, international feminisms and colonial legal history. These continue to be areas of research and writing but the primary focus of her current research is reparations. A volume which she co-edited with Luis Eslava and Michael Fakhri, A Global History of Bandung and Critical Traditions in International Law will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year. This work reflects her continued interest in critical approaches to international law that find their intellectual and political home in the global south and in the grappling with decolonization. She is one of the founding members of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and has continued as an active participant in this global network of scholars for over two decades. Nesiah teaches human rights, law and social theory, and the politics of war and memory at NYU. She also continues as core faculty in Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP); In this capacity, she has taught for six years in the IGLP summer and winter workshops in Cambridge, Doha, Capetown, Madrid and Bangkok. Currently, she is also a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School where she taught a course on human rights, gender and development in a visiting capacity. Prior to joining Gallatin, Professor Nesiah taught in the International Relations and Gender Studies concentrations at Brown University where she also served as Director of International Affairs. Formerly, she taught at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She serves on the international editorial committees of the journals Feminist Legal Studies and the London Review of International Law and on the International Advisory Board of the Institute of International Law and the Humanities at the University of Melbourne; she is also an Associate Fellow with the Asia Society in New York. Before entering the academy full time, Professor Nesiah spent over seven years in practice at the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), where she worked on law and policy issues in the field of post-conflict human rights. Originally from Sri Lanka, she earned her BA in Philosophy and Government at Cornell University, was a visiting student in the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program at Oxford University, and earned her JD and SJD, an interdisciplinary doctorate in public international law, at Harvard Law School. She was awarded a fellowship for a post-doctoral program in human rights at Columbia Law School.

Working Group Affiliation

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence

Lara Nettelfield

Lara Nettelfield

Senior Lecturer, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University

Lara J. Nettelfield is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. She is currently working on an oral history project, The New Humanitarians, about the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East. Her research interests include human rights, forced migration, transitional justice, technology and society, and social movements.

In 2015, she published a co-authored manuscript, Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide (Cambridge University Press). This book reveals how interactions between local, national and international interventions - from refugee return and resettlement to commemorations, war crimes trials, immigration proceedings and election reform - have led to subtle, positive effects of social repair, despite persistent attempts at denial. Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide received Honorable Mention for the International Studies Association's Ethnicity, Migration and Nationalism (ENMISA) Distinguished Book Award (2015) and was shortlisted for the 2015 Rothschild Prize of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN).  In 2015, Senado Kreso translated it into Bosnian for the Institute for History (Sarajevo).

Nettelfield is also the author of Courting Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Hague Tribunal's Impact in a Postwar State (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which former Hague prosecutor Richard Goldstone has called “essential reading, well-balanced, and realistic.” Courting Democracy won the 2011 Marshall Shulman prize of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).

A political scientist by training, Nettelfield received Ph.D., M.Phil. and M.A. degrees from Columbia University and an A.B. degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She also completed a certificate at Columbia's Harriman Institute. She has worked for international organizations such as the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, in addition to serving as an advisor for non-governmental organizations. She has served on the editorial board of the British International Studies Association’s (BISA) flagship journal Review of International Studies (RIS), East European Politics, and the Sarajevski žurnal za društvena pitanja (Sarajevo Social Science Review). She frequently contributes to the press, including the New York Times, the Guardian, Buzzfeed, Foreign Policy, the BBC, the Edmonton Journal, OpenDemocracy, NBC, the Detroit Free Press, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) (UK).

Mae Ngai

Mae M. Ngai

Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, Columbia University

Mae M. Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. She is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in the histories of immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and the Chinese diaspora. She is author of the award-winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004); The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (2010); and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021). Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, the Nation, and Dissent. Before becoming a historian she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now writing Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea (under contract with Princeton University Press).

Stephen Nicholas

Stephen Nicholas

Professor, Population and Family Health and Pediatrics, Columbia University Medical Center

Dr. Nicholas, an academic general pediatrician, is a pioneer in the care of HIV-infected children and an advocate for the medically underserved in Harlem, Washington Heights, and the Dominican Republic, where his work has primarily taken place over the past 25 years. He has created innovative community-based educational experiences for medical and public health students and resident physicians. He was director of pediatrics at Harlem Hospital Center from 2000-2006, during which time he started the Harlem Children's Zone Asthma Initiative, funded by the Robin Hood Foundation. In 1999, Dr. Nicholas founded the Columbia University International Family AIDS Program, which introduced the first AIDS treatment for pregnant women (1999) and long-term AIDS care and treatment for families (2004) in the Dominican Republic. Today, its program in the province of La Romana has lowered the rate of mother-to-child HIV transmission to a rate comparable with New York's, and its clinic is one of the largest providers of care and treatment for children and adults in the Dominican Republic. Dr. Nicholas teaches "The Elimination of Pediatrics AIDS: A Global Approach" for graduate students at Mailman. He also participates in the organization of the summer practicum program for public health students in La Romana, Dominican Republic, and serves as a faculty mentor for the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health.

Working Group Affiliation

On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics

Nancy Nicholls

Nancy Nicholls

History, Pontificia Universidad de Chile / History, Universidad Academia di Humanismo Cristiano

La profesora Nancy Nicholls se ha especializado en las temáticas de historia y memoria, e historia del tiempo presente, utilizando entre otras, la metodología de la historia oral. Actualmente participa como co-investigadora en el Proyecto Fondecyt Regular ‘Antropología e historia de la industria ballenera en Chile (1935-1983)’, dirigido por Daniel Quiroz. Participa, en calidad de asesora e investigadora, del proyecto de creación del ‘Archivo Testimonial de víctimas de la Represión, 1975-1990’, de la Fundación de Ayuda Social de las Iglesias Cristianas, FASIC.

El enfoque multidisciplinario ha guiado parte de las investigaciones que realiza, haciendo confluir en el análisis de las problemáticas históricas del tiempo presente, los enfoques y herramientas provenientes de la historiografía, pero también de la antropología, el teatro, el cine y la literatura. La utilización de fuentes orales, literarias y audiovisuales, ha posibilitado la exploración, en sus trabajos, del vasto campo de la subjetividad, la representación y el imaginario en relación a los fenómenos históricos.

May Niiya

May Niiya

May Niiya is a second-year MA student in American Studies at Columbia University. She is interested in the history of U.S. empire and Asian settler colonialism in her home state of Hawaiʻi. In addition to serving as the Graduate Coordinator for the “Refugee Cities: Urban Dimensions of Forced Displacement” Working Group, sponsored by the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference, she is also the Rapporteur for the Columbia University Seminar in American Studies.

Akemi Nishida

Akemi Nishida

Social Personality Psychology, CUNY

Akemi Nishida is a doctoral student in the social personality psychology PhD program and an adjunct lecturer in Psychology and Disability Studies at City University of New York. Using frameworks of social justice studies and critical disability studies, her work focuses on the politicization of disabled people and community building in relation to intersecting oppression and privilege. She is also a performer in a project ‘GIMP’ by Heidi Latsky Dance and a starting member of DISLABELEDtv, a media organization by disabled youth/young adults. Through her activism-oriented scholarship and art, she works toward disability justice and larger social justice.

Annette Mwansa Nkowane

Annette Mwansa Nkowane

Former Technical Officer of Nursing and Midwifery, World Health Organization (WHO) Headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland

Annette Mwansa Nkowane is a nurse and a midwife from Zambia. During the Ebola outbreak, Mwansa served as the Technical Officer of Nursing and Midwifery in the World Health Organization's Health Workforce Department in Geneva. Previously, she worked with other WHO departments including Mental Health and Substance Use and Gender and Women's Health. Mwansa trained as a community health nurse before completing a masters in human resource development. Prior to her position at the WHO, Mwansa worked with International Federation of the Red Cross in the Health Department. As part of Columbia University's On the Frontlines project, Mwansa conducted interviews with Ebola nurses in Sierra Leone and Liberia in August 2019.

Working Group Affiliation

On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics

Lorie Novak

Lorie Novak

Artist & Professor of Photography & Imaging, NYU

Lorie Novak’s photographs, installations, and Internet projects explore issues of memory and transmission, the relationship between the intimate and the public, the shifting cultural meanings of photographs, and how we can use archives to reframe the past and suggest new narratives. Her work has been in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Her collaborative collectedvisions.net, 1996-present, exploring how family photographs shape our memory, was one of the earliest interactive storytelling websites. Novak is the recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, a NEA Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center (Italy), Bogliasco Foundation, (Italy); ArtSway (England), Mac Dowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Djerassi Foundation. Her photographs are in numerous permanent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; The Jewish Museum, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, NY; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Novak is a Professor of Photography & Imaging at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and the founder and director of Future Imagemakers, a social practice project at Tisch Photography & Imaging that offers a free digital photography workshop to NYC area high school students. See www.lorienovak.com.

Working Group Affiliations

Engendering the Archive

Women Mobilizing Memory

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

Azure Nowara

Azure Nowara

Associate Director, the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, Mailman School of Public Health

Azure Nowara, MPH, is the Associate Director at the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, Mailman School of Public Health. Azure manages Center initiatives, programming, finance and communications. She coordinates the Certificate in Health Communication and organizes the Turning the Tide conference series. Azure has a background in education, nutrition and community health. She has experience working with policy-makers, community organizations and community members to advocate for healthier and more sustainable food environments in NYC. Azure received her MPH from the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health with a certificate in Health Promotion Research and Practice and a focus in urban health and chronic disease prevention. Before pursuing her Master’s degree at Mailman, Azure spent a year in Malaysia completing a Fulbright scholarship. There, she studied race relations within the public school system and taught English and health education in a low-income, public school high school.

Working Group Affiliation

Menstrual Health and Gender Justice

Ellen Nyman

Ellen Nyman is a trained actress and has a practice in theater, film, and television, in both Denmark and Sweden. Ellen is a PhD candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts, in the Acting Department with a focus on how black actors in Sweden and Denmark create strategies to navigate within the white gaze, a perspective that surrounds cultural institutions, aesthetic norms and the audience in a historical and national context. The aim is to shed light on the interplay between the conscious work with the body as a symbolic tool and the site-specific influence on how race / ethnicity is constructed. 

Nyman was a member of the Danish Arts Council 2007-2011 and returned to Stockholm in 2011. From 2016-18 she was an expert at the Nordic Culture Fund and at the moment, she is a member of the board of the Swedish Arts Council.

Tavia Nyong'o

Tavia Nyong’o

Professor, Performance Studies, Yale University

Tavia Nyong'o is a professor of performance studies at Yale University, where he teaches in the American Studies, African American Studies, Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Theater Studies programs. His books include The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009) and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018). He is working on two current research projects — a study of Samuel Delany and the emergence of queer of color speculation, and a set of essays considering cultural appropriation through the lens of queer East African aesthetic production. He is a longstanding member of the Social Text editorial collective and co-edits the Sexual Cultures book series with Ann Pellegrini and Joshua Chambers-Letson.

Working Group Affiliation

Queer Aqui

Christie Oliver

Christie Oliver

Graduate Student, School of Professional Studies, Columbia University

Christie Oliver will be starting at Columbia University, School of Professional Studies, as a graduate student in the Bioethics program in Fall 2017. She is from Edinburgh, Scotland and has a Bachelor’s degree with honors in Biomedical Science (Anatomy) from University of Aberdeen. Her thesis focused on fetal testosterone and the role it plays in the development of autism spectrum disorders. She is fascinated by the differences in health care systems globally and is passionate about the development of emerging medical fields. She is an active runner and loves to do yoga.

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture

Garnette Oluoch-Olunya

Garnette Oluoch-Olunya

Adjunct Lecturer, Literature, St. Paul’s University, Kenya,

Garnette Oluoch-Olunya is an adjunct Lecturer in Literature at St. Paul’s University, Kenya, a Strategic Consultant with the Godown Arts Centre in Nairobi, and holds a PhD in English from the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She was Senior Lecturer and founding Director of the Center for Creative and Cultural Industries at the Technical University of Kenya, building on the GoDown’s collaborative work with Natverkstan Institute of Sweden, the British Council, and Goldsmiths, University of London, in partnerships that sought to link academic research with arts practice. She sits on the editorial board of Jahazi, a Journal of Culture, Arts & Performance, and is a Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Scholarship (Ubuntu Project), University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Working Group Affiliation

Insurgent Domesticities, Co-Director

Isin Önol

Işın Önol

Curator, Educator, and Writer - New York, NY

Işın Önol is a curator and writer based in New York. She has been working as an independent curator (predominantly in the USA, Austria and Turkey) since 2009. Before that, she led the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art Istanbul as its director and curator. (2006-2009). Her curatorial research focuses on interconnecting archival information with oral histories to create platforms for collective memory through collaborative art practices. She is a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, and a lecturer at Montclair State University, Department of Art & Design. Önol co-founded and directs the Nesin Art Village, an independent art school in Turkey. Her recent exhibitions include Thinking Food Futures (New York), Women Mobilizing Memory (Istanbul, Vienna, New York, Madrid), and When Home Won’t Let You Stay (Vienna). She curated the International Sinop Biennial in 2012 and 2014. She has produced more than 50 exhibitions internationally, and published on the intersection of social justice and art. Önol holds an MFA from Sabanci University, Istanbul, a MAS from Zürich University of the Arts, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Isin Önol has been elected to the Board of Directors of Roberto Cimetta Fund for the period 2018-2021 and 2021-2024. https://isinonol.com/

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory

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

Ittai Orr

Ittai Orr

PhD Student, American Studies, Yale University

Ittai is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies. His dissertation is an intellectual history of intelligence and intellectual ability in 18th- and 19th-century America with a focus on popular literary texts. His other areas of expertise include the history of race, sexuality and gender studies, disability studies, and the history of capitalism. He has been a tutor for the undergraduate non-fiction writing course “Daily Themes,” a writing instructor, and an LSAT-prep tutor and instructor. His work has been published in American Quarterly and Public Books, and he has presented at the Modern and Contemporary Studies Initiative, American Studies Association and the Modern Language Association.

Working Group Affiliation

The Future of Disability Studies

Nana Osei-Kofi

Nana Osei-Kofi

Nana Osei-Kofi is Professor of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. A critical feminist scholar, her current research centers on the experiences and conditions faced by people of African descent in Europe generally and Sweden specifically. Osei-Kofi has published a wide range of articles and book chapters on the AfroSwedish condition and has a forthcoming single-authored book titled Identity and Kinship: AfroSwedish Places of Belonging. Osei-Kofi is also the editor of a forthcoming special issue of Meridians that will be available in early May 2023, and that highlights scholarship on European BIPOC Feminisms and Queer of Color Critiques. 

Jeremy Orloff

Jeremy Orloff

Premedical Post Baccalaureate Student, General Studies, Columbia University

Jeremy Orloff is a premed postbac student in the School of General Studies. Prior to his interest in medicine, he studied political science and history at Johns Hopkins University. He later worked in local New York City government relations. As a postbac, Jeremy has been involved in clinical research around obesity and related diseases. As part of his participation in On the Frontlines, Jeremy joined the group’s research trip to Sierra Leone and Liberia in August 2019.

Working Group Affiliation

On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics