Maria Fantinato

Maria Fantinato

PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Ethnomusicology, Columbia University

Maria Fantinato received her MA in Communication and Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, with a thesis on the relationship between music, communication and aesthetics among local experimental musicians. As a PhD candidate at Columbia University she works at the intersection of sound studies, anthropology of the senses, Brazilian ethnomusicology and queer theories of the sensorial, focusing on the sonic as formative of the political. In her work, listening is a conceptual-political entry point to understand violent and transforming processes that take place in Amazonian territories in the name of “development”.

Working Group Affiliation

Environmental Justice, Belief Systems, and Aesthetic Experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean, Graduate Assistant

Chloé Samala Faux

Chloé Samala Faux

Chloé Samala Faux is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her dissertation, “African Renaissance as Primal Scene: Fantasies of Death and Rebirth after Apartheid,” interrogates the historical and emergent dilemmas of black reproductivity in post-apartheid South Africa by way of black critical thought,  political economy and the institutional and intellectual developments of anthropology and psychoanalysis. Remarking a homology between originary accumulation, the incest taboo, and Frantz Fanon’s elaboration Negro Myth, the manuscript turns ethnographic scrutiny to the specters of sexual violence, illegal abortion, and the occult that dominate contemporary thematizations of South Africa’s crises in social reproduction. By way of the conjoined and redoubling discourses of psychoanalysis and anthropology, she interrogates the psychosexual and sociopolitical (re)-structuring of the family, to understand both the failures of 'transition' in South Africa and the insufficiencies of the culturalism that animates much black radical criticism.  Chloé is also affiliated  with The Institutes for Comparative Literature and Society and the Study for Sexuality and Gender. 

Working Group Affiliations:

Recovery

Transnational Black Feminisms

Lia Mary Farrell

Lia Mary Farrell

Lia attended the University of Pittsburgh and graduated with a degree in psychology. Afterward, she worked as a research coordinator in obstetric anesthesiology, looking at the effect of pain on postpartum depression. Before starting the post-bac program at Columbia, she traveled for a year, backpacking through Asia and working in a refugee camp in Greece.

Working Group Affiliation

On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics

Seth Fein

Seth Fein

Seth Fein's work studies international and transnational histories, much of it focused on  audiovisual culture in the Americas.  It has moved from the page to the screen.  In 2014-2015 he is a Fellow in Multimedia History at Harvard's Charles Warren Center, where he will develop Our Neighborhood, a documentary that examines Washington's intervention in Latin American television as cultural counterinsurgency against the Cuban Revolution across the 1960s; he has published an essay from this research – “Entre Nuestro Barrio y Un pueblo en vilo" ­– which also generated insights about the Bush administration's use of television in the Middle East.  In 2014 he completed a video installation – outerspace innerborough unisphere@50 – which transhistoricizes the tension between international ideology and transnational sociality as evoked by this New York icon over the last half century.  He currently is completing a documentary about innerborough radio-controlled car subculture in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens.

Fein has written widely on crossborder film culture in the Americas.  His book ­– Transnational Projections: The United States in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema – will be published by Duke.  His other publications include: "Producing the Cold War in Mexico: The Public Limits of Covert Communications" in In From the Cold: (2008); "Proyectando la relación especial: México-Estados Unidos durante la Guerra Fría" in ¿Somos especiales? (2006); "New Empire into Old: Making Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way," Diplomatic History 28.5 (2004); “Culture across Borders in the Americas,” History Compass 1.1 (2003); and chapters in Culture and International History (2003), Fragments of a Golden Age (2001), Visible Nations (2000), Mexico's Cinema (1999), Close Encounters of Empire (1998), Horizontes del segundo siglo (1998), México-Estados Unidos, encuentros y desencuentros en el cine (1996); and articles in Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 17, Objeto Visual 7, Nuevo Texto Crítico 10.21, Film-Historia 4.2, Secuencia 34, Historia y grafía 4. Among the grants that have supported his research are awards from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Fein was a professor US-World Relations (2002-2010) at Yale, where among his awards were the university's Graduate Mentor Prize, its Poorvu Prize for Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Instruction, and a McCredie Fellowship for Innovation in Instructional Technology.  From 2011-2013 he was Graduate Director of Columbia's Institute of Latin American Studies and a visiting professor of history at Barnard, where his courses included Projecting American Empire on Film and the Idea of the Western Hemisphere.

Gisele Feldman

Gisele Feldman

Kevin Fellezs

Kevin Fellezs

Assistant Professor of Music, Columbia University

Kevin Fellezs is an Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University, where he shares a joint appointment in the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. His book titled Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion (Duke University Press) is a study of fusion (jazz-rock-funk) music of the 1970s, which won the 2012 Woody Guthrie Book Award.   Fellezs has published articles in Jazz Perspectives, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Popular Music History, and the Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter, as well as essays in a number of edited anthologies.  In addition to the Pacific Climate Circuits grant, Fellezs has been awarded the Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant, the Provost’s Program for Junior Faculty Who Contribute to the Diversity Goals of the University Grant, and the Tsunoda Senior Fellowship at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan.  Fellezs received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness (American Studies), 2004). In 2004-6, he received a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is currently writing a book on a transnational study of ki ho'alu (Hawaiian slack key guitar) performers, both native Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian, in Hawai'i, California and Japan.

Working Group Affiliation

Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics, Project Director

Susanna Ferguson

Susanna Ferguson

Susanna Ferguson is a PhD Student in the History Department at Columbia University, where she focuses on the history of the modern Middle East, particularly on questions of women and gender. She is also a certificate candidate at Columbia's Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality (IRWAGS). Prior to beginning her doctoral work at Columbia, Susanna graduated magna cum laude from Yale University with a BA in History and received a Master's degree from NYU's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Susanna's MA thesis traced the circulation of human and women's rights discourse in Damascus, Syria, between 2009 and 2011. The deep attachments she found to the projects of human and women's rights in Syria raised questions about what other languages of justice might have historically shaped discussions about politics in general, and feminist politics in particular, in the region. Following this, Susanna's current research focuses on the concept of tarbiya in Arab thought from Egypt and the Levant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a way of tracing the history of one such alternative language.

Corinne Field

Corinne Field

Lecturer, Corcoran Department of History and Women, Gender, Sexuality Program, University of Virginia

Cori Field has been an adjunct faculty member in the Department of History and the Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Virginia since 2007. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, race, and age in the nineteenth-century United States. She is currently co-editing a volume on the historical significance of chronological age for New York University Press. Her monograph, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America, will be published by University of North Carolina Press in 2014. Her next project explores the history of generational conflict within Anglo-American feminism from the 1870s to the 1930s, focusing in particular on the deep connections between age prejudice and racial prejudice in arguments for women’s empowerment.

She has recently been a fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Field received her Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University in 2008 and her B.A. from Stanford in 1997. Before entering graduate school, she worked as a Production Assistant at WGBH TV in Boston. Cori is an alumni trustee at Phillips Academy Andover, where she has served on the Strategic Planning Task Force, and is on the Board of the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers.

FIELDS AND SPECIALTIES

U.S. gender and race; childhood and adulthood

Ph.D. Columbia University 2008

B.A. Stanford University 1987

PUBLICATIONS

The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America, forthcoming University of North Carolina Press, Gender and American Culture Series, 2014.

Co-editing with Nicholas Syrett, Chronological Age in American History, a collection of essays that will explore how age mattered in the development of citizenship, work, education, and culture.  Under Contract at New York University Press.

 “Frances E. W. Harper and the Politics of Intellectual Maturity,” in Black Women’s Intellectual and Cultural History, edited by Farah Griffin, Mia Bay, Martha Jones, and Barbara Savage.  University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2015.

“‘Made Women of When They are Mere Children’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Critique of Eighteenth-Century Girlhood,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (Spring 2011): 197-222.

“‘Are Women . . . All Minors?’: Woman’s Rights and the Politics of Aging in the Antebellum United States,” Journal of Women’s History (Winter 2001): 113-137.

“Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Gendered Politics of Aging,” Iris: A Journal About Women (Spring 2001): 28-31.

BOOK REVIEWS

 Alison Parker, Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010) in The Journal of the Civil War Era(forthcoming September 2012).

Cynthia Eller, Gentlemen and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011) in The Women’s Review of Books (forthcoming).

James Schmidt, Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) in The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (Spring 2012): 323-27.

WORK IN PROGRESS

 Currently researching a monograph that will explore the history of generational conflict within Anglo-American feminism from the 1870s to the 1930s, focusing in particular on the deep connections between age prejudice and racial prejudice in arguments for women's empowerment.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

University of Virginia, Adjunct Faculty, Department of History, 2010-present

University of Virginia, Adjunct Faculty, Studies in Women and Gender, 2007-2009

Columbia University, Preceptor, Contemporary Civilization, 1996-1997

COURSES TAUGHT

Coming of Age in America: A History of Youth

 History of Women in America, 1600-1865

 History of Women in America, 1865-Present

 Gender and Race in US History

Women’s Rights in America From the Revolution to the Right to Vote

Feminism in America, 1910-Present

 Contemporary Civilization

FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS

Fellow in Residence, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Fall 2010-Spring 2011

Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia, Spring 2010

Fellow, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Fall 2009

Finalist, 2009 Organization of American Historians’ Lerner-Scott Dissertation Prize

Nominated by the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for the 2010 ACLS New Faculty Fellowship

Nominated by the Department of History, Columbia University, for the 2009 Bancroft Dissertation Prize

Letter of Teaching Recognition, The Lantern Society, University of Virginia, 2009

Radcliffe Dissertation Grant, Schlesinger Library, 1996-1997

Licia Fiol-Matta

Licia Fiol-Matta

Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University

Licia Fiol-Matta is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She received an AB from Princeton University and a PhD from Yale University, both in Comparative Literature. Prior to joining NYU she taught at Barnard College and the City University of New York. She is the author of A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minnesota) and The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music (Duke). Fiol-Matta is co-editor of the series New Directions in Latino American Cultures (Palgrave) and The Puerto Rico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (under contract, Duke). She is the recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Great Woman Singer was awarded the 2018 Frank Bonilla Award for Best Book in Puerto Rican Studies. Fiol-Matta writes on Latin American cultural studies, women's and gender studies, and music. 

Working Group Affiliation

Queer Aqui

Antonio Carlos Firmino

Antonio Carlos Firmino

Geographer, Social Action Padre Anchieta (ASPA)

Antonio Carlos Firmino is a founding member of the Sankofa Museum of Memory and History of Rocinha. He is a geographer, and coordinator of one of the oldest institutions of the Favela da Rocinha, the Social Action Padre Anchieta (ASPA). For over 12 years, he has coordinated the Point of Culture Center of Culture and Playful Education of Rocinha (International Center for Study and Research on Childhood-CIESPI / PUC-Rio), acted as TUXAÚA (articulated by the Rio de Janeiro State Points of Culture Forum), and participated in the Rocinha sem Fronteiras and Rocinha Resiste collectives. He is a member of the Social Museology Network of the State of Rio de Janeiro. 

Working Group Affiliation

Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City

Sibylle Fischer

Sibylle Fischer

Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Comparative Literature, NYU

Ph.D. 1995 (Comparative Literature/Spanish and Portuguese), Columbia University; M.A. 1987 (Latin American Studies, Philosophy, German Literature), Freie Universität Berlin

Areas of Research/Interest: Caribbean literature and culture; Spanish American Independence; the Haitian Revolution; culture and politics in the nineteenth century; the history of political thought.

External Affiliations: Modern Language Association, Latin American Studies Association, Caribbean Philosophical Association Fellowships/Honors 2006 Bryce Wood Award of the Latin American Studies Association for Outstanding book on Latin America in the Humanities and Social Sciences for Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution; 2006 Katherine Singer Kovacs Award from the Modern Language Association for Outstanding book on Iberian and Latin American literatures and cultures for Modernity Disavowed; 2005 Frantz Fanon Award of the Caribbean Philosophical Association for Modernity Disavowed

Publications: Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Forthcoming Duke University Press 2004)

Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill. Trans. Helen Lane. Introduction and notes. Oxford University Press (forthcoming Oxford UP).

Melissa Fisher

Melissa Fisher

Visiting Scholar, New York University Institute for Public Knowledge
New York

Melissa Fisher, a cultural anthropologist, is a Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge and a Principal Research Fellow at the Conference Board. She is also an adjunct professor in International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Her first book, a co-edited volume, Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Duke University Press, 2006), explored the social and cultural landscape of business. Wall Street Women (Duke Press, 2012), her second book, examines the first generation of women in finance (1956-2010). Her current book project is on the future of work in the wake of social movements (such as Me Too and Black Lives Matter) as well as crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

Melissa has given numerous key notes talks nationally and internationally. Her book on Wall Street women received over 25 reviews in academic journals. In addition, her research has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, CNBC, NPR and the BBC. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Bloomberg and Bill Moyer’s Group Think. She appeared in the 2014 PBS documentary Makers: Women in Business. She also played an advisory role in the first female financial thriller film, Equity, a 2016 Sony Classic Pictures release. She is currently a US Delegate to the Women’s 20 that advises the G20 on gender issues.

Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia, Melissa was the Laurits Andersen Professor in Business and Organizational Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She has also been a faculty member in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU and the Department of Anthropology at Georgetown University. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology at Columbia University and her B.A. in English at Barnard College.

Working Group Affiliation

Social Justice After the Welfare State

Mia Cecily Florin-Sefton

Mia Cecily Florin-Sefton

Ph.D. candidate, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Mia Florin-Sefton is a Ph.D. candidate and University Writing Instructor in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University, where she specializes in 20th and 21st century transatlantic anglophone literatures and culture; with a focus on how narratives of succession mediate and explicate the shifting relationship between biological and economic theories of heredity and inheritance. She is also currently at work on a project that looks at the history of sex glands and early history of hormone replacement therapy in the context of theories of racial degeneration and eugenics post-World War I. She is a contributing writer for the medical humanities journal: Synapsis and was previously the Graduate Fellow for Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University.

Working Group Affiliations

Queer Aqui

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

Andrea Flynn

Andrea Flynn

Andrea Flynn is Senior Director at the Insight Center. Prior to joining Insight, she spent eight years at the Roosevelt Institute, where she was most recently the Director of Health Equity. She is the co-author of The Hidden Rules of Race (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She frequently writes and speaks about the race and gender dimensions of economic inequality, reproductive health and justice, and health equity. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Ms. Magazine, The New Republic, Time, Teen Vogue, and Cosmopolitan. Her research has examined the legacy and impact of gendered racism in our economy and the role of economic policy in driving racial and gender health disparities.

Andrea teaches courses on reproductive and sexual health, public policy, and economic inequality at the Mailman School for Public Health at Columbia University. She received her MPA and MPH from Columbia University, and her BA in journalism and women’s studies from Syracuse University. You can follow Andrea on Twitter @dreaflynn.

Isadora Lins França

Isadora Lins França

Isadora Lins França is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and researcher of the Pagu Center for Gender Studies, both at the University of Campinas, Unicamp (Brazil). She is currently a fellow of the Summer Program in Social Sciences from the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), at Princeton, and visiting scholar in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies (LAIC) at Columbia University in the City of New York.

Isadora França has been working with gender and sexuality in the last decades, dedicating herself tothe articulation between differences and inequalities in the production of categories and subjects. In the last ten years, she has been working with mobilities, gender and sexuality, conducting fieldwork in Brazil, Spain and United States with queer migrants and refugees. 

Working Group: Refugee Cities

Gabriel Franco

Gabriel Franco

Undergraduate Student, Latin American and Caribbean Studies & Political Science, Columbia College, Columbia University

Gabriel Franco is an undergraduate student at Columbia University in the fields of Latin American & Caribbean studies and political science. His areas of focus are Brazilian slavery and race studies and public security in Brazil, especially regarding drug policy and dynamics of urban violence as part of the "war on drugs" mentality. Gabriel is an assistant at the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies of the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS/Columbia). He is currently participating in an exchange program at PUC-Rio, where he is doing research on public security for his senior thesis and assisting other fellows of Geographies of Injustice with a project on oral history and music in favelas.

Working Group Affiliation

Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City

Katherine Franke

Katherine Franke

Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia Law School

Katherine Franke is the Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where she also directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and is the faculty director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project. She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, a member of the Steering Committee for the Center for the Study of Social Difference, and an Affiliated Faculty member for the Center for Palestine Studies.  She is among the nation's leading scholars writing on law, religion and rights, drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory.

Her most recent book, Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality, NYU Press, 2015, considers the costs of winning marriage rights for same sex couples today and for African-Americans at the end of the Civil War. Franke was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 to undertake research for Wedlocked. In addition to her work at the Law School, she works regularly in Palestine, most recently serving as an academic mentor for the human rights faculty at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, and sits on the steering committee of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace. She also chairs the board of directors of the Center for Constitutional Rights, based in New York City.

Before coming to the Law School, Franke was an associate professor at Fordham Law School and the University of Arizona College of Law. From 1990 to 1991, she was the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. Prior to that, she worked for the New York City Commission on Human Rights and founded the AIDS and Employment Project.

Working Group Affiliations

Queer Aqui

Reframing Gendered Violence

Science and Social Difference

Lynn Freedman

Lynn Freedman

Professor Population and Family Health, Columbia University Medical Center

Lynn P. Freedman, JD, MPH, currently directs the Mailman School of Public Health Averting Maternal Death and Disability (AMDD) Program, a global program of research, policy analysis, and technical support that, since 1999, has worked with UN agencies, NGOs, and governments in more than 50 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to reduce maternal mortality. Before joining the faculty at Columbia University in 1990, Professor Freedman worked as a practicing attorney in New York City. Professor Freedman has published widely on issues of maternal mortality and on health and human rights, with a particular focus on gender and women's health. She also serves on the advisory boards of maternal health projects and human rights projects with programs in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

Working Group Affiliation

Menstrual Health and Gender Justice

Anette Freytag

Anette Freytag is a Professor of Landscape Architecture (History, Theory and Design) at Rutgers University and an award-winning scholar, educator, and critic. Her research focuses on designed landscapes from the 19th century to the contemporary practice with a particular emphasis on topology, phenomenology and walking. In her latest book The Landscapes of Dieter Kienast (Zurich: gta Verlag 2021) she shows how this Swiss landscape architect renewed the aesthetics for designing with nature in the city through his love for spontaneous vegetation and his doctorate in phytosociology. After the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s, Kienast reoriented the profession of landscape architecture with form driven designs while reinforcing plant knowledge. Anette Freytag’s books have been honored with a J. B. Jackson Book Prize, a European Garden Book Award, a DAM Architectural Book Award and many more. Before joining Rutgers University, Anette has taught at ETH Zurich, the University of Basel and the University of Innsbruck. In 2019, co-founded the AIR Collaborative (Arts Integration Research Collaborative) which prioritizes creative placemaking to foster spatial justice through projects that seek safe access to nature for all.

Zeynep Gambetti

Zeynep Gambetti

Associate Professor, Political Science & International Relations, Boğaziçi University

Zeynep Gambetti is Associate Professor of political theory at Boğazici University. She obtained her Ph. D. at the University of Paris VII in 1999. Her work focuses on collective agency, ethics, and public space. She has carried out extensive research on the transformation of the conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement, with particular emphasis on space as a vector of relationality. She collaborated with Joost Jongerden to edit the special issue of The Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies on the spatial dimensions of the Kurdish question in Turkey. She has also published several theoretical articles and book chapters on Hannah Arendt’s political thought and subjectivity, in particular, “The Agent Is the Void! From the Subjected Subject to the Subject of Action,” Rethinking Marxism (2005) and “Conflict, ‘commun-ication’ and the role of collective action in the formation of public spheres” in Seteney Shami (ed), Publics, Politics and Participation: Locating the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa (SSRC Publications, 2009). She is the co-editor of Rhetorics of Insecurity: Belonging and Violence in the Neoliberal Era (New York University Press, 2013), and of The Kurdish issue in Turkey: A Spatial Perspective, London/New York, Routledge, 2015. Among her forthcoming publications are Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (eds), Vulnerability in Resistance: Politics, Feminism, Theory, Durham, NC., Duke University Press, 2016.

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory