Laura McTighe

Laura McTighe

Graduate Student, Religion, Columbia University

Laura McTighe is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. She comes to her doctoral studies through nearly twenty years of grassroots activism to end state violence and advance community healing. Her research examines the co-constitution of race and religion, of gender and governance, in the American and Global South today by ethnographically centering women’s geographies and archives of struggle. Her dissertation project, “This Day, We Use Our Energy for Revolution”– Black Feminist Ethics of Survival, Struggle, and Renewal in the new New Orleans, has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Institute for Religion, Culture, & Public Life. She is also completing a book-length project on HIV, gender, and Islam with South African scholar/activist Farid Esack. To date, her writings have been published in Beyond Walls and Cages: Bridging Immigrant Justice and Anti-Prison Organizing in the United States (2012), the International Journal for Law and Psychiatry (2011), Islam and AIDS: Between Scorn, Pity and Justice (2009), and a variety of community publications. McTighe is the Co-Founder of the Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans, and serves as a Board Member to Men & Women In Prison Ministries in Chicago and Reconstruction, Inc. in Philadelphia.

Working Group Affiliation

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence

Frank Mecklenburg

Frank Mecklenburg

Director of Research and Chief Archivist, Leo Baeck Institute

Dr. Frank Mecklenburg is Director of Research and Chief Archivist at Leo Baeck Institute, a research library and archive that documents the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry, primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries, but also including documents dating back to the middle ages. LBI was founded in 1955 as a repository for the books, papers, photos and documents that were salvaged from Central Europe after World War II and donated to the Institute.

As Chief Archivist, Dr. Mecklenburg is responsible for overseeing the acquisition of new collections for the Institute’s extensive archival holdings. In this capacity, he works closely with community organizations to identify potential donors and liaises directly with donors and their families to arrange the gift of their personal papers and artifacts. As Director of Research, he oversees the award of grants to scholars through the Institutes’ various fellowship programs.

Dr. Mecklenburg is also responsible for ensuring the preservation of the Institute’s archival holdings and expanding access to them. Dr. Mecklenburg played an instrumental role in the conception, development, and implementation of the Institute’s digitization project, called DigiBaeck, which put the majority of LBI archival holdings online by 2012.

He joined Leo Baeck Institute in 1984 as an archivist and took on his current role in 1996. He supervises the Berlin Branch of the LBI Archives at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and he represents LBI New York in the LBI International Executive Committee, which coordinates the efforts of the international Leo Baeck Institutes.

Born and educated in Berlin, Germany, Dr. Mecklenburg lives in Manhattan with his wife Atina Grossmann, a professor of History at NYU. They have two adult children.

Education
Ph.D. in Modern German History – Technische Universität Berlin

Languages
German, native speaker
English, fluent written and spoken

Associations
German Studies Association
Jewish Studies Association

Tey Meadow

Tey Meadow

Assistant Professor, Sociology Department, Columbia University

Tey Meadow is assistant professor of sociology at Columbia. She is the author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century, and the coeditor of Other Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology. Her work has appeared in Gender & Society, Sexualities, Contemporary Ethnography, Race & Ethnic Studies, Politics & Society and a number of edited volumes.

Working Group Affiliation

Queer Aqui

Susan Meiselas

Susan Meiselas

Photographer

Susan Meiselas received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.A. in visual education from Harvard University. She joined Magnum Photos in 1976.  She is the author of three books: Carnival Strippers, Nicaragua, and Pandora's Box and editor of five collections: Learn to See, El Salvador: The Work of 30 Photographers, Chile from Within., Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History and Encounters with the Dani.  She has co-directed two films: "Living at Risk" and "Pictures from a Revolution" with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti. In 1998 she developed akaKURDISTAN, an innovative online website for collective memory and cultural exchange. Her retrospective book and recent exhibition In History was produced with the International Center for Photography, New York.

Meiselas' coverage of human rights violations and the insurrections in Central America was widely published throughout the world. One-woman shows include: Whitney Museum for American Art; FOAM, Amsterdam; Hasselblad Center, Sweden; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum Folkwang, Germany. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow. Her work is included in American and international collections. Meiselas is presently serving as the President of the Magnum Foundation.

Working Group Affiliations

Women Mobilizing Memory

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

Sonia Mendoza-Grey

Sonia Mendoza-Grey

PhD Student, Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University

Sonia Mendoza-Grey is a PhD student in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Mailman School of Public Health. Mendoza-Grey employs her human biology, sociology, and qualitative research training to her dissertation research that examines precision medicine implications for the Latinx population. Specifically, her work investigates how recruitment and analysis of the Latinx population shapes and informs understandings of Latinidad, and how researchers’ work with Latinx populations illuminates the assembled connections among genetics, ethnicity, and race through contemporary bioscience. This project engages science and technology literature, critical ethnic and race theory, as well as with health disparities research among minorities.

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture

Christia Mercer

Christia Mercer

Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University

Christia Mercer is the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, general editor of Oxford Philosophical Concepts, and co-editor of Oxford New Histories of Philosophy, a book series devoted to making philosophy more inclusive. As a part-time activist, she teaches in prison as part of Columbia University’s Justice-in-Education Initiative and publishes regularly on the need to make higher education more widely available and on justice reform.

Working Group Affiliation

Pedagogies of Dignity, Project Director

Ariel Merkel

Ariel Merkel

Sociology, The New School for Social Research

Ariel Merkel is a Sociology PhD candidate at the New School for Social Research, with a focus on disability studies.  She earned her MA at NSSR in May 2011, and holds a BA (cum laude) in Cultural Anthropology from Wells College, a small women’s college in the Finger Lakes region of New York State.  Upon graduation in 2005, she was awarded the Carter A. Woods Prize for her thesis, which analyzed the strategies of Kanaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiian) activists involved in the Cultural Revitalization Movement.  Ariel supplemented this research with a six-week ethnographic study in O’hau and the Big Island where she conducted interviews with “houseless” Kanaka Maoli, who reside in beach-tents as a result of the land-struggle throughout the islands.  Prior to returning to graduate school, Ariel worked for People Inc., a non-profit agency that serves the developmentally disabled, where she spent four years administrating and managing residential facilities (IRA and SIRA) and served as a Medicaid Service Coordinator (MSC) for the northern region of Buffalo, NY.  She was also involved in Deaf Adult Services during her time in Buffalo, and enrolled in several American Sign Language courses and is able to have basic conversations in ASL.  Her current research stems from her previous nonprofit work with people with disabilities, specifically feminist disability theory.  She is fascinated by how disability, a malleable identity which shifts spatially and temporarily and yet is so deeply rooted to the body and literally embedded in bone, intersects with other identities that are typically conceptualized as socially constructed performances.

Working Group Affiliation

The Future of Disability Studies

Sally Engle Merry

Sally Engle Merry

Silver Professor of Anthropology, New York University

Sally Engle Merry is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University.  She is also a Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law, and past president of the American Ethnological Society. Her recent books include Colonizing Hawai‘i (Princeton, 2000), Human Rights and Gender Violence (Chicago,  2006), Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (Blackwell, 2009) and The Practice of Human Rights, (co-edited with Mark Goodale; Cambridge, 2007). Her most recent book, The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) examines indicators as a technology of knowledge used for human rights monitoring and global governance. She has co-edited two books on quantification, The Quiet Power of Indicators, with Kevin Davis and Benedict Kingsbury (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and A World of Indicators, with Richard Rottenburg, Song-Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler (Cambridge University Press 2015), 2015. She is the author or editor of fifteen books and special journal issues. She received the Hurst Prize for Colonizing Hawai‘i in 2002, the Kalven Prize for scholarly contributions to sociolegal scholarship in 2007, and theJ.I. Staley Prize for Human Rights and Gender Violence in 2010. In 2013 she received an honorary degree from McGill School of Law and was the focus of an Author Colloquium at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. She is an Honorary Professor at Australian National University. 

Working Group Affiliations

Reframing Gendered Violence

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence

Lynn Mestel

Lynn Mestel

New York

Lynn Mestel, Esq. is Non-Executive Chairman of the Board at Mestel & Company.  She founded the company in 1987 and served as its CEO, President, and Chairman of the Board through February 2017.  Lynn expanded Mestel & Company in 1993 by establishing Hire Counsel to meet the high business demands of the ever-evolving legal industry.

The National Law Journal named Lynn in their inaugural list of “50 Business of Law Trailblazers & Pioneers,” and she was honored by The Women’s Venture Fund in 2013 as one of the leading women entrepreneurs in the U.S. Lynn was named in Law Dragon’s “100 Leading Legal Consultants and Strategists” twice, most recently in 2016. She is a recipient of the Brava Award from Smart CEO honoring top female CEO’s for entrepreneurial leadership and social commitment. The American Lawyer, Crain’s, Forbes, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal recognize her as one of the preeminent professionals in her field.

Lynn holds a J.D. from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and a B.A. from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, where she was elected Phi Beta Kappa. She is a member of The Economic Club of New York and the Women’s Forum of New York. Lynn also studied music at The Juilliard School. She lives with her husband in New York City near her children and grandchildren.

John Michalczyk

John Michalczyk

Sociology, The New School for Social Research

John Michalczyk is a doctoral student in Sociology at the New School for Social Research, currently working on a project exploring disability in virtual worlds. His other interests include social interaction, ethnography, and identity formation. John combines his academic research in Sociology on disabilities, hidden and visible, with his interest in documentary filmmaking. His work includes a short documentary on Keith Jones, a musician and disabilities advocate (Keith Jones: Un-Rapping Disability) and a nearly completed documentary on the artist, Edwina Sandys (Recreating Life in Art). His current film project focuses on music and disabilities.

Jennifer Middleton

Jennifer Middleton is a Lamont Assistant Research Professor in the geochemistry division of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. Her research seeks to better understand the inner workings of Earth’s climate system using the chemical fingerprints of present-day phenomena and geologic records of Earth’s climate history. This work helps guide predictions for the way the oceans, atmosphere, ice sheets, and land surface will continue to respond to human-driven emissions of greenhouse gases. Middleton is committed to the promotion of justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and in considerations of society’s best paths forward in the face of modern climate change.

Website: https://wings.ldeo.columbia.edu/people/jennifer-middleton

Susan Michaels-Strasser

Susan Michaels-Strasser

Assistant Professor, Epidemiology, CUMC and Senior Director, Human Resources for Health Development, ICAP

Photo courtesy of ICAP @ Columbia University

Dr. Strasser is a public health professional with 30 years of experience in nursing and public health. She is the senior director for human resources for health (HRH), providing leadership, guidance and direction for the development, implementation, and assessment of programs to develop human resources for health across ICAP's portfolio of programs. This work focuses on improving acute and chronic health care as well as management and mitigation of disease outbreaks. She is the Principal Investigator for CDC and HRSA-funded programs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Zambia. She has served at senior management and training levels at various locations throughout Southern Africa. Her areas of expertise include pediatric care and support, nurse training, and use of point of care diagnostics. She is a pediatric nurse practitioner, a member of the Sigma Theta Tau Honor Society for Nurses, a member of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. Dr. Strasser holds a MPH and MSc in nursing from Yale University and a PhD in public health from the University of Cape Town.

Working Group Affiliation

On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics

Nara Milanich

Nara Milanich

Professor of History, Barnard College

Nara Milanich, Professor of History, joined the faculty of Barnard in 2004. Her scholarly interests include modern Latin America, Chile, and the comparative histories of family, gender, childhood, reproduction, law, and social inequality.

Professor Milanich teaches courses ranging from the Modern Latin American History survey to a comparative seminar on the Global Politics of Reproduction. She works closely with PhD students in Latin American History at Columbia.  Professor Milanich has also taught in and directed the Masters in Latin American Studies (MARSLAC) based in the Institute for Latin American Studies.

Her research and scholarship have been supported by the Fulbright Commission for Educational Exchange, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Unesco, and the American Council of Learned Societies. 

Professor Milanich writes and publishes in both Spanish and English.

Guilherme Estermann Meyer

Ph.D. candidate, Department of English, New York University and SSHRC

I’m a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of English at New York University. My dissertation project deals with prophetic utopianism, which is a mode of utopianism that engages in prophetic denunciation-annunciation as a means to sustain revolutionary praxis. I turn to the work of Paulo Freire to theorize this mode of utopianism as one that took shape in the context of the development of liberation theology in Latin America and to explore the continued relevance of a prophetic-utopian impulse in practices of artists and social movements in Brazil from the 1970s to the present. I’m a co-chair of the Marxism working group in the Department of English and an organizer in the union for graduate workers at NYU, GSOC-UAW Local 2110.

Working Group Affiliations

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

Ruth Milkman

Ruth Milkman

Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center

Ruth Milkman is a sociologist of labor and labor movements who has written on a variety of topics involving work and organized labor in the United States, past and present. Her early research focused on the impact on U.S. women workers of economic crisis and war in the 1930s and 1940s. She went on to study the restructuring of the U.S. automobile industry and its impact on workers and their union in the 1980s and 1990s; in that period she also analyzed the labor practices of Japanese-owned factories in California. More recently she has written extensively about low-wage immigrant workers, analyzing their employment conditions as well as the dynamics of immigrant labor organizing. She co-authored a 2013 study of California’s paid family leave program, focusing on its impact on employers and workers.

She was elected as the 2016 President of the American Sociological Association, where her presidential address focused on Millennial-generation social movements. She has also conducted extensive policy-oriented research on such topics as wage theft, unionization trends, paid sick leave, and the aging workforce.  After 21 years as a sociology professor at UCLA, where she directed the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment from 2001 to 2008, she returned to New York City in 2010.  She is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, where she teaches Labor Studies and also serves as Research Director.  

Working Group Affiliation

Social Justice After the Welfare State

Monica Miller

Monica Miller

Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana Studies and English, Barnard College, Columbia University

Monica L. Miller is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana Studies and English at Barnard College, Columbia University. A specialist in contemporary African American and Afro-diasporic literature and cultural studies, she is the author of the award-winning book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity.  A grantee from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, she is a frequent commentator in the media and arts worlds and teaches and writes about black literature, art, and performance, fashion cultures, and contemporary Black European culture and politics. She is at work on a book project, Blackness Swedish Style: Race and the Rhizomatics of Being, which considers cultural production by the emerging black community in Sweden and its connection to black European identity formation and cultural/political movements.

Working Group: Afronordic Feminisms

Books Edited:

Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity Duke University Press, 2009.

Nancy K. Miller

Nancy K. Miller

Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature, Graduate Center, CUNY

Nancy K. Miller is currently working on a project about the experience of girls and young women in the American 1950s, about private life and middlebrow culture; also a project on the nature of extreme experience and its recording in testimony and other documents. Continuing interests include questions of autobiography and memoir, feminist theory, women's writing, trauma and testimony.  Her publications include:  Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York and London: Routledge, 1991); French Dressing: Women, Men and Ancien Régime Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1995); and Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, paperback edition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

Tori Miller

Tori Miller

MA Candidate, Human Rights Studies, Columbia University

Tori Miller is a MA candidate in the Human Rights Studies program at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the medicalization and sanitization of menstruation within development organizations. She holds a B.A. from New York University where she double majored in English and American Literature and Journalism with a focus on documentary film making.

Working Group Affiliation

Menstrual Health and Gender Justice

Mara Mills

Mara Mills

Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

Mara Mills is Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She received her Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard. She is completing a book (On the Phone: Deafness and Communication Engineering) on the significance of phonetics and deaf education to the emergence of “communication engineering” in early twentieth-century telephony; this concept and set of practices later gave rise to information theory, digital coding, and cybernetics. Articles from this project can be found in Social Text, differences, and The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Her second book project, Print Disability and New Reading Formats, examines the reformatting of print over the course of the past century by blind and other print disabled readers, with a focus on Talking Books and electronic reading machines. Mills is the co-editor of a recent issue of Grey Room on the “audiovisual” and the recipient of the 2010 Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies.

Susannah B. Mintz

Susannah B. Mintz

Associate Professor of English, Skidmore College

Susannah B. Mintz is associate professor of English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. She is the author of Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity (2003) and Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities (2007), and co-editor with Lisa Johnson of On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs: A Critical Anthology (2011). Her current project is entitled Hurt and Pain: A Literary History. She has published and presented numerous papers on the intersections of disability representation and life writing, and has served on the executive committee of the MLA Division on Disability Studies for the past five years.