Silvina Der-Meguerditchian

Silvina Der-Meguerditchian

Artist

Portrait by Hervé Thouroude

The artist is the granddaughter of Armenian immigrants to Argentina, since 1988 she lives in Berlin.

Her artistic work deals with issues related to the burden of national identity, the role of minorities in society and the potential of a space "in between." Der-Meguerditchian is interested in the impact of migration on the urban texture and its consequences. Reconstruction of the past and the building of archives are a red thread in her artistic research. Her work is multidisciplinary and uses different medias. Since 2010 she has been the Artistic Director of Houshamadyan, a project to reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life. In 2014/15 she was awarded a fellowship at the Kulturakademie Tarabya, a residency program of the German Foreign Ministry and the Goethe Institute in Istanbul. Further, she participated in "Armenity,” the Pavilion awarded with the Golden Lion at the 56th Venice Biennial for the best national participation. Her work has been shown in many exhibitions around the world, including, among others, Germany, Argentina, the US and Turkey. Her last initiated and coordinated collective project "Grandchildren, new geographies of belonging" (DEPO Cultural Center- Istanbul) was supported by the Goethe Institut and the German Foreign Ministry in 2015. In 2018 she participated in Hello World Revising a Collection, a critical inquiry into the collection of the Nationalgalerie and its predominantly Western focus at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Since 2014 she has worked with Women Mobilizing Memory. She is represented by Kalfayan Galleries in Athens.

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory

Lauren J. DeVaughn

Lauren J. DeVaughn

DNP Candidate in Nurse Midwifery, Columbia University

Lauren is a DNP candidate in Nurse Midwifery at Columbia University. Her passion for improving Black maternal and infant outcomes both locally and globally is driving her to the field. She is a recent graduate from Columbia’s Master Direct Entry Program in Nursing, and is the current President of Columbia’s Black Student Nurses. Lauren earned a BA in Sociology, minoring in African American Studies.

Working Group Affiliation

On the Frontline: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics, Graduate Assistant

Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Professor of French and Philosophy, Columbia University

Souleymane Bachir Diagne specializes in history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature, and received his academic training in France. An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure, he holds an agrégation in Philosophy (1978) and he took his Doctorat d’État in philosophy at the Sorbonne (1988) where he also took his BA (1977). Before joining Columbia University in 2008 he taught philosophy for many years at Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar (Senegal) and at Northwestern University. His field of research includes history of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature. His book Bergson postcolonial. L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal, Paris, Editions du CNRS, 2011) was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011 and on that same year he received the Edouard Glissant Prize for his work. Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s current teaching interests include history of early modern philosophy, philosophy and Sufism in the Islamic world, African philosophy and literature, twentieth century French philosophy.

Working Group Affiliation

Bandung Humanisms

Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo

Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo

Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo (she/her) is a Fulani, Norwegian and Danish, black feminist ethnographer. Oda-Kange is currently finishing her PhD in Gender Studies at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. Her research focuses on conceptualizations of blackness, community building and black study among African-Norwegian youth. Her work is grounded in black-queer-feminist liberatory approaches to learning. Recent publications include a chapter in the anthology “Rasisme: forskningen, fenomenet, erfaringene” (Universitetsforlaget, 2022) and two articles with a zine published in Teaching Anthropology Journal on “Decolonizing the Anthropological Classroom” (2021), co-authored with Nico Miskow Friborg.

Matthew Dias

Matthew Dias

Graduate Student, Bioethics, Columbia University

Matthew Dias is a researcher at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and graduate student in Columbia’s bioethics program. Matt’s scholarship focuses on clinical research ethics and advances in medicine that intersect law and public policy. He is actively involved in various healthcare innovation and precision medicine initiatives in New York City and beyond. To this end, Matt looks forward to sharing his distinct perspectives and insights with the Precision Medicine Project and its affiliates.

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture

Deborah Dinner

Deborah Dinner

Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law

Deborah Dinner is a legal historian whose scholarship examines the interaction between social movements, political culture, and legal change. Dinner’s research focuses in particular on how law responds to vulnerabilities that derive from familial and employment relationships, at home and at work. Her courses and curricular interests include Property, the Fourteenth Amendment, Family Law, Employment Discrimination, and Legal History.

Dinner’s book-in-progress Contested Labor: Gender and the Law in Neoliberal America(forthcoming Cambridge University Press)examines debates about the meaning of sex equality in the late twentieth century. The book argues that neoliberal ideology, the rise of the New Right, and the transition from an industrial to a service economy foreclosed feminists’ efforts to achieve greater state protection for workers and caregivers, even as women made significant strides toward equal employment opportunity. Dinner’s most recent article “Beyond ‘Best Practices’: Employment Discrimination in the Neoliberal Era,” published in the Indiana Law Journal, shows that the rise of antidiscrimination ideals in the late twentieth century was intertwined with the deregulation of labor and with cutbacks in the welfare state.  Her article “The Divorce Bargain: The Fathers’ Rights Movement and Family Inequalities” offers the first legal history of the fathers’ rights movement and analyzes its consequences for class-differentiated experiences of fatherhood. The article was selected for presentation at the 2014 Yale/Stanford/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum and was published by Virginia Law Review in 2016. Dinner has published several other articles on the legal history of gender, work, and the welfare state in the Washington University Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, and Law & History Review.

Dinner joined Emory in 2015, after serving as an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. Dinner earned her JD and PhD in history at Yale. Following law school, she clerked for Judge Karen Nelson Moore of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and served as the Raoul Berger–Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellow at Harvard University and the Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law.

Working Group Affiliation

Social Justice After the Welfare State

Mamadou Diouf

Mamadou Diouf

Director, Institute for African Studies, Columbia University

Mamadou Diouf is the Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and the Director of Columbia University's Institute for African Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He was Head of the Research, Information, and Documentation Department of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and faculty member of the History Department of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal. His research interests include urban, political, social and intellectual history in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Publications include: Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal (ed. 2013); New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration, Wealth, and Power (with Mara A. Leichtman, 2009); La Construction de l’Etat au Sénégal (with M. C. Diop & D. Cruise O’Brien, 2002); Histoire du Sénégal: Le Modèle Islamo-Wolof et ses Périphéries (2001); Histoires et Identités dans la Caraïbe: Trajectoires Plurielles (with Ulbe Bosma, 2004); Les Jeunes, Hantise de l’espace public dans les sociétés du sud? (with R. Collignon, 2001); Les figures du politique : Des pouvoirs hérités aux pouvoirs élus (with M. C. Diop, 1999); L'Historiographie indienne en débat. Sur le nationalisme, le colonialisme et les sociétés postcoloniales (ed., 1999); Academic Freedom and Social Responsibility of the Intellectuals in Africa (with Mahmood Mamdani, 1994); Le Sénégal sous Abdou Diouf (with M.C. Diop, 1990); and La Kajoor au XIXe siècle : Pouvoir Ceddo et Conquête Coloniale (1990). 

Working Group Affiliations

Bandung Humanisms

The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories

Jennifer Dohrn

Jennifer Dohrn

Associate Professor of Nursing and Assistant Dean of Global Initiatives, Nursing at Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Jennifer Dohrn is the director of the Office of Global Initiatives and an assistant professor at Columbia Nursing where she teaches community health. She oversees collaboration with Columbia Global Centers and leads the Columbia Nursing WHO Collaborative Health Center for Advanced Practice Nursing. Dohrn has worked as a nurse educator and nurse midwife for more than two decades. She previously served as the program director of the Nurse Midwifery program at Columbia Nursing and as project director for the ICAP Nurse Capacity Building Program/Nursing Education Partnership Initiative Coordinating Center at Mailman School of Public Health. For more than a decade at ICAP, she worked to improve the infrastructure for nurses and nurse midwives in 12 Sub Saharan African countries. She continues to contribute to the ICAP program and works at a community health center in the Bronx. She received MS and DNP degrees from Columbia Nursing.

Working Group Affiliation

On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics, Project Director

Elizabeth J. Donaldson

Elizabeth J. Donaldson

Associate Professor of English, New York Institute of Technology

Elizabeth J. Donaldson is Associate Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses in American literature, writing, and medical humanities. She has published essays on mental illness in film, antipsychiatry in Lauren Slater’s memoirs, physiognomy and madness in Jane Eyre, teaching Melville online, and the poetry of Amy Lowell, among other subjects.  She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disabilities Studies and is co-editor (with Catherine J. Prendergast) of a recent special issue, “Emotion and Disability.” Her current research project focuses on schizophrenia and psychotomimesis: the imitation and representation of psychosis in medicine and literature.

Working Group Affiliation

The Future of Disability Studies

Elsa Dorlin

Elsa Dorlin

 Professor of Political and Social Philosophy, Vincennes/St. Denis Paris 8 University (France)

Elsa Dorlin is Professor of political and social philosophy at the department of political science and involved in the department of women’s studies and gender and sexuality studies at Vincennes/St. Denis Paris 8 University (France). Dorlin specializes in feminist philosophy and theory and historical epistemology of sexuality. Dorlin’s research also focuses on critical theory and postcolonial studies. She is the author of several books and articles in French, including La Matrice de la Race: Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la nation française (Paris, La Découverte, 2006), Sexe, genre et sexualité (Paris, PUF, 2008), and the editor of Black Feminism: Anthologie du féminisme africain américain 1975-2000 (Paris, L’Harmatta, 2007) and Sexe, race, classe: Pour une épistémologie de la domination (Paris, Puf, 2009). Her last book Defenseless: Violence, Body and Subjectivity will be available next September.

Samar Dudin

Samar Dudin

Regional Director and Head of Programs, Ruwwad Al Tanmeya

Samar Dudin is the Regional Director and Head of Programs for Ruwwad Al Tanmeya, a not for profit community & youth empowerment organization. She develops creative community and youth educational experiences and organizes community led campaigns which focus on social change through grass roots leadership development. Samar is an independent theatre director and educator since 1993.  In 2006 she founded Takween Open Spaces for Enlightenment & Creativity initiative in Amman, Jordan which focuses on creating experiential learning contexts to engage youth and children in exploring pluralism and diversity as the means and meaning for a better world.  She has been a fellow of the Leadership program of the International Women's Forum (IWF) since 2003. She was selected as an Ashoka Fellow for her Takween citizenship initiative on Youth Identity & Cultural diversity in Amman in 2009, An Aspen Leadership fellow and moderator since 2010. She sits on the Advisory Committee for the Arab Education Forum, a foundingboard member of Al Ballad Theatre, a founding member of Mujtama3i for Arab Community organizers and a committed volunteer trainer on women's leadership with IWF–Jordan's chapter since 2005. She is a graduate of Santa Clara University in California and holds a Bachelor degree in theatre arts.

Lisa Duggan

Lisa Duggan

Journalist, Activist, Professor, Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University

Lisa Duggan is a journalist, activist, and Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University.  She is author of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Sensationalism and American Modernity and Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy, co-author with Nan Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, and co-editor with Lauren Berlant of Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest.  Her new book Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and Neoliberal Greed is forthcoming this spring in the series she is co-editing with Curtis Marez for University of California Press, American Studies Now. She was president of the American Studies Association during 2014-2015.

Working Group Affiliation

Queer Aqui

Sarah Dugger

Sarah Dugger

Graduate Student, Genetics and Development, Columbia University

Sarah Dugger is a PhD student in the Department of Genetics & Development, who is working in the laboratory of Dr. David Goldstein in the Institute for Genomic Medicine.  Sarah is originally from Akron, Ohio and obtained her undergraduate degree in Biology and a Masters degree in Genetic Counseling from Case Western Reserve University. She was a practicing full time prenatal genetic counselor for four years at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio—an experience that sparked her interest in precision medicine research. As a graduate student, she is now working to understand the underlying pathogenic mechanisms of a single patient’s severe, genetic form of epilepsy, with the long-term goal of identifying a potential treatment.

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture

Natanya Duncan

Natanya Duncan

Assistant Professor of History and Geography, Morgan State University

Dr. Natanya Duncan received her PhD from the University of Florida in 2009. Her areas of research include a focus on the development of Black Nationalist practices prevalent amongst female members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and subsequent derivative groups which she has termed as an “Efficient Womanhood.” Using this framework, which she asserts refers to the “blending of nationalist and gendered concerns without the sacrificing of one for the other amongst African American women during the long freedom struggle,” Dr. Duncan is presently revising her dissertation into a manuscript entitled, Crossing Waters, Fighting Tides: The `Efficient Womanhood’ of the Universal Negro Improvement Association 1919-1930. As a recipient of a Post Doctoral Fellowship at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, Natanya Duncan used the time to start her second full length book project which will focus on the life work of Queen Mother Audley More. Presently, she is an Assistant Professor at Morgan State University.

Madhusree Dutta

Madhusree Dutta

Madhusree is a filmmaker; also a curator, pedagogue, researcher, producer and activist. Though visual culture is the key to her works, multi-disciplinary initiatives and multi-layered representations frame her myriad engagements. Filmmaking, theatre, visual arts, literature, media products; students’ movement, feminist movement, movement against communalism, movement for democratisation of art practices; cultural literacy, art pedagogy, interfaces between genres, movements and disciplines form the path of Madhusree’s personal journey. Madhushree is the founder and executive director of Majlis, a centre for rights discourse and multicultural art initiatives in Mumbai, India. Retrospectives of Madhusree’s works were held in NGBK art gallery, Berlin in 2001; International women’s film festival, Trivandrum in 2005, Feminnale, Koln in 2006, Madurai Short Film Festival in 2007 and Persistent Resistance Film Festival, New Delhi in 2008. An alumni of Jadavpur University, Kolkata and National School of Drama, New Delhi Madhushree currently lives in Mumbai.

Matias Echanove

Matias Echanove

Matias Echanove is co-founder of the urbz collective along with Rahul Srivastava and Geeta Mehta, which has offices in Mumbai, Geneva and Bogota. He has studied government and economics at the London School of Economics, urban planning at Columbia University, and urban information systems at the University of Tokyo.

His writings have been published by the Oxford University Press, New Village Press, The New York Times, The Ruby Press, Strelka, The Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, The Times of India, Time Out Mumbai, Art India and Indian Architect and Builder among others.

urbz is an experimental action and research collective specialized in participatory planning and design. It works with citizens, organizations and municipalities. urbz’s work has been exhibited at MoMA in New York, MAXXI in Rome, MAK in Vienna, Sao Paulo Cultural Center and Bhau Daji Lad City Museum in Mumbai.

Brent Edwards

Brent Edwards

Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Brent Hayes Edwards is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and was runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia UP 2004). Edwards has three books forthcoming in early 2017: his monograph Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, which will be published by Harvard University Press; the scholarly edition of Claude McKay’s recently discovered last novel, Amiable with Big Teeth, co-edited with Jean-Christophe Cloutier and to be published by Penguin Classics; and Edwards’s translation of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 Phantom Africa (Seagull Books), for which Edwards was awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Edwards’s current projects include a monograph titled “Art of the Lecture,” for which he was awarded a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Working Group Affiliations

The Digital Black Atlantic

The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories

Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot

Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot

Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot is a postdoc in Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University and an abolitionist and trans liberation organizer in NYC. Focusing on the experiences of trans and cis working class women, primarily women of color, who use drugs, their work exposes how liberal imaginaries of rehabilitation actually function to extend carceral punishment under new, "gender-responsive," “therapeutic” guise.

Working Group:

Recovery

S.E Eisterer

S.E Eisterer

Assistant Professor, Architectural History and Theory, University of Pennsylvania.

S.E Eisterer is an Assistant Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, she is working on two forthcoming book projects. Her book manuscript Housing Cooperative: Politics and Architecture in Vienna, 1904-1954 elucidates the role of cooperatives in shaping architectural debates in the first half of the twentieth century. The history and translation project Memories from Resistance: Women, War, and the Forgotten Work of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, 1938-1989 illuminates the Austrian architect’s participation in the Communist resistance against the Nazi regime. Her scholarly work centers on modern architecture and urban culture in Austria, Germany, and the United States, with a focus on the history of social movements, environmental history, women’s and gender studies, and queer theory.

Working Group Affiliation

Insurgent Domesticites, Co-Director

Bikem Ekberzade

Bikem Ekberzade

Bikem Ekberzade is a photojournalist who focuses on forced migration in forgotten conflicts. She started her career as a videographer in United States, and soon continued her profession as a photojournalist in the U.S. and worldwide. She has worked for numerous international news outlets such as CNN International, Newsweek, Businessweek, Der Spiegel and The Christian Monitor.

She is interested in a combination of visual story telling and written documentation of witness accounts. She covered the Kosovo conflict, the refugee crises in Pakistan and post-9/11 intervention by the United States in Afghanistan. In 2003 she covered the Iraq conflict from across the border in southeastern Turkey, focusing on the human toll and the regional impact. The same year she started work on her first book, Illegal, which would take her 3 years to complete, and be published in Turkey in 2006. In 2005 she left for Darfur to cover the refugee crises in eastern Chad. West-end of the Border, her second book would be published in 2010, as an e-book of photography and free of charge.

In 2011 Ekberzade took a post with the United Nations in Iraq, and left to continue to pursue journalism a year later.

In an era of too much unreliable information, she still puts her faith in solid journalism based on facts and field work. Having witnessed the birth of the internet, she believes in the potential of global digital networks and likes to think of herself as a multimedia journalist.

She is based in and works out of Istanbul.