Yasmin El-Rifae

Yasmin El-Rifae

Media Fellow, Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence

Yasmin El-Rifae is a writer, researcher and cultural producer. She lives in New York and Cairo. Yasmin is a Middle East and North Africa research associate at the Committee to Protect Journalists. Previously, she worked in journalism and human rights in Egypt, focusing on the struggle against sexual harassment. She holds a B.A. in Political Science from The American University of Cairo and a graduate diploma in Law from the City University in London.

Working Group Affiliation

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence, Media Fellow

Abigail Elbaum

Abigail Elbaum

New York

Abby Elbaum is a Co-Founder and Principal of Ogden CAP Properties, a real estate management, development and investment firm with assets in New York and Washington, D.C.  She began her career at JPMorgan Chase in the Private Bank.  Abby is a Trustee of Columbia University and a member of the Steering Committee of Columbia College's Core to Commencement Campaign.  She is also active in other organizations including The New York City Police Foundation and the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter. 

Noémie Elhadad

Noémie Elhadad

Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University

Noémie Elhadad is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, affiliated with Computer Science Department and Data Science Institute at Columbia University. Her research is at the intersection of machine learning, technology, and medicine. She leads Even, the Data-Powered Women's Health Research Initiative at Columbia University as well as the Citizen Endo project. Both are research initiatives with the goal of designing novel data science approaches to advance the field of women's health.

Working Group Affiliation

Menstrual Health and Gender Justice

Janice Reals Ellig

Janice Reals Ellig

New York

As the head of the Ellig Group, Janice is dedicated to increasing the placement of women and diverse candidates on corporate boards and in C-suites by 2025. Janice joined the legacy firm in 2000 and became Co- Chief Executive Officer in its transition to Chadick Ellig in 2007; she assumed sole ownership of the company as the Ellig Group in 2017 with a new focus on Reimagining Search. Prior to her career in executive search, Janice spent 20 years in corporate America at Pfizer, Citi and Ambac Financial Group, an IPO from Citibank, where she was responsible for Marketing, Human Resources, and Administration.

Heralded by Bloomberg Businessweek as one of “The World’s Most Influential Headhunters,” Janice is often consulted for her expertise and her commitment to gender parity, inclusion, and diversity. She frequently appears at speaking engagements and as a media guest, and she has penned multiple articles for outlets such as Directors & Boards, Directorship, Corporate Director, The Huffington Post, and Forbes.com. Janice also co- authored two books: Driving The Career Highway and What Every Successful Woman Knows, acknowledged by Bloomberg Businessweek as “the best of its genre.”

A tirelessly active member of the industry and champion of her causes, Janice is Founder of the Women’s Forum of New York’s Corporate Board Initiative and its signature event, Breakfast of Corporate Champions. Since 2011, Janice continues to spearhead this event to honor companies committed to board diversity and to encourage CEOs to sponsor board-ready women for the Women’s Forum database. (LINK: www.womensforumny.org).

Janice is personally committed to several NFP organizations: Chair (2020) of the University of Iowa Center for Advancement (UICA); Board Director of the National YMCA and Past Chair of the YMCA Board of Greater New York; Trustee Emeritus of the Actors Fund and Committee For Economic Development (CED); Women’s Forum of New York Past President and Chair of the Corporate Board Initiative; member of the Steering Committee, US 30% Club and The Economic Club of New York.

In recognition for her many philanthropic activities, Janice received the University of Iowa Distinguished Alumni Award in 2011 and the Association of Executive Search Consultants (AESC) Eleanor Raynolds Award for Volunteerism in 2008. Named one of the “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” by Women’s eNews, she was also a recipient of the Channel 21 Award In Excellence for her contribution to “Excellence in the Economic Development for Women.”

Julie Passanante Elman

Julie Passanante Elman

Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU

Julie Passanante Elman is a Visiting Assistant Professor in New York University's Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies within the interdisciplinary Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. While at NYU, Elman has developed the university's first-ever undergraduate course in disability studies and served as a member of the NYU Council for the Study of Disability. Elman received her Ph.D. in American Studies from The George Washington University in 2009. Her research focuses broadly on 20th century media and cultural history, American literature, queer theory and disability studies. Elman's current book project, Troubling Teen: Disability, Sexuality, and the Rehabilitation of American Youth is a cultural history of the "developing teenager" that reveals the centrality of rehabilitation in the establishment of American norms of self-regulating citizenship, embodiment, sexuality, and emotional maturity in the late 20th century. Her work has appeared in Television & New Media and is forthcoming in The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. For additional information about her research and teaching, see www.juliepelman.com and her course blog Cripping the City, a forum for her students' work about accessibility issues in New York City.

Hoda Elsadda

Hoda Elsadda

Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University

Dr. Elsadda is a leading scholar of women’s rights in Egypt and the Arab World, and a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University. With degrees from both Cairo University and the American University, she taught Comparative Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester from 2005 to 2011. In the past, she fought for changes in the country’s marriage laws and was member of the 50- committee for drafting the constitution in 2013. She is currently Chair of the Board of the Women and Memory Forum and Vice-President of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party.

Elizabeth Emens

Elizabeth Emens

Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia University

Elizabeth Emens is an Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Her principal areas of research and teaching include disability law, family law, anti-discrimination law, contracts law, and law and sexuality. Her publications about disability law and theory include Intimate Discrimination: The State’s Role in the Accidents of Sex and Love (Harvard Law Review, 2009); Integrating Accommodation (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2008); Shape Stops Story (Narrative, 2007); and a work in progress entitled Framing Disability.

Emens was the Bigelow Fellow and lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School from 2003 to 2005. She clerked for Judge Robert D. Sack, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, from 2002 to 2003. She is a member of the New York State Bar Association and American Bar Association. Elizabeth Emens earned her J.D. from Yale University; her Ph.D. from King's College, Cambridge, where she was a Marshall Scholar; and her B.A. from Yale University.

Katherine L. Ender

Katherine L. Ender

Assistant Professor, Pediatric Hematology, Oncology, and Stemcell Transplantation, Columbia University Medical Center

Dr. Katie Ender is a pediatric hematologist and assistant professor in the Division of Pediatric Hematology, Oncology, and Stem Cell Transplantation at Columbia University Medical Center.   Her primary clinical expertise and research experience have focused on sickle cell disease.  She has a Master’s of Science in Clinical Investigation from Northwestern University and is currently pursuing a Master’s of Science in Bioethics at Columbia University.  Dr. Ender sees pediatric hematology patients at Columbia University Medical Center/Children’s Hospital of New York as well as at community affiliates Harlem and Lincoln Hospital Centers. In addition to teaching pediatric fellows and residents in the hospital and outpatient clinics, Dr. Ender is also faculty in the Foundations of Clinical Medicine course and Major Clinical Year Foundations program at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.  She continues to collaborate with colleagues in clinical research that aims to improve the treatment of patients with sickle cell disease and is eager to begin contributing scholarly work in the field of Bioethics.  She is a member of the Pediatrics Ethics Committee, the Program in Women & Children’s Bioethics Committee, and has just joined the Pediatric Clinical Ethics Consultation team.   Dr. Ender is interested generally in the critical application of bioethical principles to medical care and policy and is especially excited to join the conversation about ethical considerations in the rapidly emerging field of Precision Medicine. 

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture

Pınar Ensari

Pınar Ensari

Pınar Ensari did her undergraduate study at Boğaziçi University and graduated from departments of Philosophy and Political Science and International Relations (double major program) in 2010.  She finished her graduate study in the Cultural Studies MA program at Sabancı University in 2012 with a thesis titled “At the Crossroads of Eduation and Politics: Kurdish Women Studens in İstanbul”. Currently, she is working as a teaching assistant at Sabancı University, while also pursuing my studies in research areas such as ethnicity, gender, urban studies and anthropology of youth.

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory

Randi Hutter Epstein

Randi Hutter Epstein

Lecturer, English Department, Yale College, Writer in Residence, Yale University School of Medicine, and Adjunct Professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Randi is a medical writer and a reporter for the London Bureau of the Associated Press and was the London bureau chief of Physicians’ Weekly. Randi’s writing focuses on the interplay between medicine and society. In other words, how cultural attitudes influence medical treatment, public health and research, and vice versa. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, Guardian Parents, More, and other national publications. She is also the author of Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank (released by W.W. Norton, Jan 2010) and AROUSED:  The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything (W.W. Norton, 2018).  Randi earned a B.S. from The University of Pennsylvania where she studied the history and sociology of science; an M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; an M.D. from Yale University School of Medicine, and an M.P.H. from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.  

Working Group Affiliation

Motherhood and Technology

Yasmine Ergas

Yasmine Ergas

Professor, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

Yasmine Ergas is Director of the Specialization on Gender and Public Policy, Lecturer in International and Public Affairs, and Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. A lawyer and sociologist, she has worked on issues regarding gender and women’s rights as a policy analyst and advisor, scholar and advocate. She has served as a consultant to international and domestic policy organizations, including the OECD, UNESCO, the Millennium Villages Project, the New York City Commission on Human Rights, and CENSIS, a major applied social research institute in Italy, and been on the staff of the Social Science Research Council. Her recent work has focused on the emergence of an international market in reproductive services, the transformations of ‘motherhood’ and the impacts of human rights programs and policies.  Previous relevant work centered on feminist movements and their interactions with public policies; the implications of the concept of ‘gender’ for feminist politics; child care policies in international and comparative perspective; educational policies and the social implications of HIV/AIDS.  

Working Group Affiliations

Menstrual Health and Gender Justice

Social Justice After the Welfare State

Fernando Ermiro

Fernando Ermiro

Fernando Ermiro is a resident of Rocinha. He is currently completing a Master's degree at Fundação Getúlio Vargas. He completed his undergraduate degree in History at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Currently, he is the coordinator of the Sankofa Museum of Memory and History of Rocinha, and organizer of the book “Tales of Rocinha: Female Memory in Three Times.” He received the Creative Favela Award for his project Rocinha Histórica, in which he develops and expands knowledge about the history of Rocinha. The Sankofa Museum of Rocinha is a social movement that is formalized and composed of Rocinha residents and supporters since 2007 who act in the cause of the social memory of this centennial and iconic favela.

Working Group Affiliation

Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City

Basak Ertur

Basak Ertur

Başak Ertür is a Reader at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths and a Research Fellow at Forensic Architecture. She is the author of Spectacles and Specters: A Performative Theory of Political Trials (2022) which was awarded the 2024 SLSA Socio-Legal Theory and History Prize. Her work is engaged with questions of legal violence, legal performativity, and more broadly with law's epistemologies and aesthetics. Her writing has appeared in Critical Times, Law & Critique, Theory & Event, Aut aut and across several edited volumes. Ertür's edited collections include Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said (2008), Manual for Conspiracy (2011), and Something Is Rotten in the State (2016), a special issue of Theory & Event. She has held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2023-24), was a CAPES/PRINT Visiting Professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in 2022, and received the Association for the Study of Law Culture and the Humanities Julien Mezey Dissertation Award in 2016.

Yasmine Espert

Yasmine Espert

Doctoral Candidate, Department of Art History and Archaeology

Yasmine Espert is an Art History doctoral candidate at Columbia University. Her research interests include the cinematic medium, the Caribbean, and diaspora. She is the Graduate Fellow for the Digital Black Atlantic Project, a working group supported by the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. Yasmine is also an alumna of the Fulbright U.S. Student program.

Working Group Affiliation

The Digital Black Atlantic

Katherine Pratt Ewing

Katherine Pratt Ewing

Professor of Religion, Columbia University

Katherine Pratt Ewing is Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan, Turkey, and India, and among Muslims in Europe and the United States.  Her research has focused on debates among Muslims about the proper practice of Islam in the modern world, the place of Muslims within the German national imaginary, and sexualities, gender, and the body in South Asia. She is currently writing a book on the politics of sex change surgery within India’s middle class with Baishakhi Taylor and is PI on an ACLS-funded project “Sufis, Salafis and the Public Square” with Alexander Stille.  Recent articles and chapters include “The Ungendered Self: Sex Reassignment, The Third Gender, and Gender Fluidity in India” (forthcoming, with Baishakhi Taylor), “Murder in Chapel Hill: Muslims, the Media, and the Ambivalence of Belonging” (forthcoming), “‘Islam is Not a Culture:’ Reshaping a Muslim Public for a Secular World” (2015), “From German Bus Stop to Academy Award Nomination:  The Honor Killing as Simulacrum” (2013), and “Naming our Sexualities: Secular Constraints, Muslim Freedoms” (2011). Her previous books include Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and Islam (1997), Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (2008), and the edited volumes Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam (1988) and Being and Belonging: Muslim Communities in the US since 9/11 (2008).   

Working Group Affiliations

Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies, Project Director

Reframing Gendered Violence

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence

George Estreich

George Estreich

George Estreich's publications include a book of poems, Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body, which won the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books; the Oregon Book Award-winning memoir The Shape of the Eye; and Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories we Tell Ourselves, which NPR's Science Friday named a Best Science Book of 2019. Estreich has also published prose in The New York Times, Salon, The American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, Tin House, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon, with his family, where he teaches in Oregon State’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. More: georgeestreich.com

Working Group Affiliation

Motherhood and Technology

Gil Eyal

Gil Eyal

Professor, Department of Sociology, Columbia University

Gil Eyal is the director of the Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture Project. He is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Gil Eyal's work deals with sociology of expertise, intellectuals and knowledge, in particular as it relates to broader political processes and to the interstitial spaces between fields. In two early books he has dealt with the transition from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe, and the role played by intellectuals, technocrats and in particular economists in the process. (With Ivan Szelenyi and Eleanor Townsley) Making Capitalism without Capitalists. (London: Verso, 1998); The Origins of Post-Communist Elites: From the Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). A later book dealt with expertise about Arab affairs and the role it plays in Israeli society, government and the military: The Disenchantment of the Orient. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). His latest book provides a sociological explanation for the current autism epidemic, and traces the blurring of boundaries between experts and laypeople that play a role in the dynamics leading to the epidemic. (With Brendan Hart, Emine Onculer, Neta Oren and Natasha Rossi) The Autism Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). The approach applied in this book is developed further in his recent article: "For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic,” AJS Vol. 118, No. 4 (January 2013), pp. 863-907.

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture, Project Director

Matthew Engelke

Matthew Engelke

Professor of Religion; Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, Columbia University

Matthew Engelke is an anthropologist with research interests in Christianity, secular humanism, media, materiality, semiotics. He has conducted fieldwork in Zimbabwe and in Britain. He is currently working on a book about secularity and death, based on research among humanist funeral celebrants in London.

Before joining the Columbia faculty in 2018, Engelke taught in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science for 16 years. He received his BA from the University of Chicago in 1994 and his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2002.

Engelke is the editor of Prickly Paradigm Press, a section editor at Public Books, former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and former deputy editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa. Engelke has served on the board of trustees of both the Royal Anthropological Institute and the London School of Economics, as well as vice-chair of the LSE’s Ethics Policy Committee.

The author or editor of several books, Engelke has also published articles in many journals, including American Ethnologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Current Anthropology. Beyond his scholarly writing, Engelke has written for the Guardian and Tate Modern. 

Nadia Fadil

Nadia Fadil

Assistant Professor, Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Center, KULeuven

Nadia Fadil studied sociology and anthropology and works as an Assistant Professor at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Center at KULeuven. Her research interests are situated at the intersection of religion, subjectivity, secular and liberal governmentality and multiculturalism, with Islam in Europe as specific empirical focus. A first thread of her work investigates the question of subjectivity, in which she looks at the ethical self-cultivation of pious and secular Muslims in Belgium. A second thread of her work looks at the ways in which questions of multiculturalism and Islam impact upon the existing secular arrangements and she focuses more particularly on the debates on the funding of religious denominations.

Soledad Falabella Luco

Soledad Falabella Luco

Director, ESE:O

Professor Soledad Falabella Luco is the director of ESE:O, a non-profit organization which promotes performative writing projects, and the teaching and practice of writing to empower learning communities with effective skills for local and global participation in knowledge production and circulation. She teaches feminist critical theory, performance and poetry at the Magíster en Género y Cultura, Universidad de Chile. Dr. Falabella brings over fifteen years of experience in academia, and has taught and conducted research internationally. As an "academic and cultural activist" she is committed to developing creative ways to promote social change by combining pedagogy, research, activism, and the arts. Falabella holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature and Languages from the University of California, Berkeley. Books: ¿Qué será de Chile en el Cielo? - Poema de Chile de Gabriela Mistral (LOM Santiago, Chile 2003), Hilando en la Memoria: Curriao, Huinao, Millapan, Manquepillan, Panchillo, Pinda, Rupailaf, the first anthology of Mapuche women poets and Hilando en la Memoria, Epu Rupa (Cuarto Propio, Santiago 2006 and 2009 resp.), Cantando la infancia, Chile y la tierra Americana Poetic Anthology of Gabriela Mistral for boys and girls from 4-6 years old (Santiago, Ministry de Education 2008).

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory