Lisa Carnoy

Lisa Carnoy

New York

Lisa Carnoy is the Chief Financial Officer for AlixPartners, the global consulting firm.  She leads the finance, acquisition, and procurement functions and serves on the Management Committee.  AlixPartners focuses on high impact client work in four areas:  Turnaround and Restructuring, Enterprise Improvement, Financial Advisory, and Digital – and has 26 offices in 14 countries.

Prior to joining AlixPartners in 2018, Lisa spent 23 years at Merrill Lynch/Bank of America, most recently as Division Executive for USTrust, the private bank within Bank of America, and as BoA’s New York City Market President.   She served on the Global Wealth and Investment Management leadership team, as well as Bank of America’s Operating Committee.  Prior to her move to Global Wealth & Investment Management, Lisa served as Head of Global Capital Markets for Bank of America Merrill Lynch and was a member of the Global Corporate and Investment Banking Operating Committee.   In this role, she led Capital Markets Professionals across Equity Capital Markets, Debt Capital Markets, Leveraged Finance, and Origination of Corporate Derivatives and FX.

Lisa has been a passionate advocate for diversity – and co-founded several organizations including the Women’s Leadership Council at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and at Columbia, both the Women’s Leadership Council for Athletics and the Dean’s Advisory Circle.  She was named among the 25 most influential women for the 25th anniversary of the Columbia-Barnard Athletic Consortium, and Women in Science at Columbia have named a leadership award in Lisa’s honor.    Prior to becoming a Trustee, Lisa was actively engaged as an alumna, as a board member for the Columbia College Alumni Association and Board of Visitors.

Carnoy is an independent director of the U.S. Soccer Federation and serves on the boards of the United Way of New York City and Rodeph Sholom School. She has been named to American Banker’s list of “Most Powerful Women in Finance,” and in 2013, she received the Merit Award from the Women’s Bond Club. She also has received Columbia’s John Jay Award for professional achievement, the College’s Alumna Achievement Award, and the University’s Alumni Medal.

Noni Carter

Noni Carter

PhD Candidate, Department of French and Romance Philology, Columbia University

Noni Carter is a historical and speculative fiction author. She has published work in RSA Journal, Kweli Journal (forthcoming August 2019), and is the author of the YA historical fiction novel, Good Fortune (Simon & Schuster, 2010), winner of the Parent’s Choice Gold award. She is a 2016 graduate of Voices of Our Nation and the recipient of the 2019 PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship for her work-in-progress novel Womb Talk. 

Noni is currently finishing a PhD in French and Francophone studies with a focus on memory, gender, and slavery in the literary traditions of the Black diaspora, specifically the French Caribbean. She works as editorial assistant with Small Axe Journal and as rapporteur for Columbia’s Cultural Memory Seminar. She served as a 2018-2019 grad fellow for the Institute on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She has a forthcoming essay in volume 2 of theComparative Literary History of Modern Slavery book project.

Working Group Affiliation

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

Leonard Cassuto

Leonard Cassuto

Professor of English, Fordham University

Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University, has been teaching and writing about disability since Rosemarie Garland-Thomson lighted his path into the field more than fifteen years ago.  His most recent piece is “Disability Studies 2.0,” which appeared in American Literary History in 2010.

Elizabeth Castelli

Elizabeth Castelli

Professor of Religion and Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Barnard College

Elizabeth A. Castelli is Professor of Religion and Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women at Barnard College. She is a cultural historian of late ancient Christianity and a translator. She is the author of Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making and Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power; co-author, as a member of the Bible and Culture Collective, of The Postmodern Bible; and editor of Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader; Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence (with Janet Jakobsen); Reimagining Christian Origins (with Hal Taussig); and special issues of the Journal of the History of Sexuality, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, and Scholar and Feminist Online. She is the translator of the authorized English translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Saint Paul. She is on the board of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and the advisory board of the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. She is a collective member and volunteer at Word Up Community Bookshop/Libreria Comunitaria, a volunteer-run and multi-lingual community bookshop and arts space in Washington Heights.

Henry Castillo

Henry Castillo

Cultural Studies, NYU

Henry Castillo is a doctoral student in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He holds a B.A. in Applied Linguistics (Honors) fromt he University of California--Los Angeles and an M.A. in Performance Studies form New York University. His research interests include race and ethnicitiy; women, gender, and sexuality; memory and "Intangible Cultural Heritage" in the Americas; Blackness in Latin America; and Afro-Colombian "heritage" practices and performance. Outside academia, he is an actor and former member of the Colombian avant-garde theatre group Teatro Experimental de Cali and was led by the late Maestro Enrique Buenaventura. Henry also collaborates with the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics as Editorial Assistant of digital books.

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory

Luca A Castro Figari

Luca A Castro Figari

Masters Student in Performance Studies, New York University

Luca A Castro Figari is a performance and cultural theorist, organizer, survivor and healer, and multimedia artist specializing in behavioral, ideological, and intimacy control structures. They've received awards in poetry and creative writing, perform and play-write professionally, are recording their first album, publish film and social criticism, and were Peruvian National Champion in Tae-Kwon-Do. Zadie Smith personally selected them for her months-long master class, making them the only participant who doesn't speak English as their first language, and they're currently working with the Red Cross on a play. They've received scholarships to study in Paris, New York, Abu Dhabi, and to share their work in London. They're completing a Masters in Performance Studies at New York University.

Social Engagement Project Affiliation

Zip Code Memory Project

Rana Zincir Celal

Rana Zincir Celal

Senior Program Manager

As Senior Program Manager at Columbia Global Centers | Istanbul, Rana Zincir Celal is the Deputy Director of the Atlantic Fellows programme at the London School of Economics. Previously, worked with Columbia University faculty to design and implement collaborative programs in Turkey. In Cyprus, she was involved in establishing the Home for Cooperation, producing art exhibitions on contested histories, developing educational materials on enforced disappearance with The Elders and the International Center for Transitional Justice, and advocating for a gender perspective in the peace process. Between 2005 and 2009, she served as Vice-President of Programs for Chrest Foundation, leading its grantmaking in Turkey. She also launched programs on social justice philanthropy and cultural cooperation with the Third Sector Foundation of Turkey, Anadolu Kültür and the Christensen Fund.  Before relocating to Turkey in 2002, Rana was based with the Ford Foundation's Economic Development Program in New York as a Program Associate. Rana is currently a trustee of Greenpeace International, board member of Greenpeace Mediterranean, advisor to the European Cultural Foundation 'Connected Action for the Commons Program,' member of the Greek Turkish Forum and Anadolu Kültür’s Executive Committee.  She has also served on the European Cultural Foundation's Princess Margriet Award Jury and the Hrant Dink Foundation International Human Rights Award Committee. She holds degrees from Columbia University (BA, Political Science) and the London School of Economics (MSc, Development Studies). 

Laura Charney

Laura Charney

Master’s student, Human Rights, Columbia University

Laura Charney is a Master’s student in Human Rights at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. She completed her undergraduate degree in Archaeology, Anthropology, and Creative Writing at the University of Toronto, where she wrote her thesis on Imperial Feminism and Islamophobia in Post-Communist Europe and the United States. Laura has previously conducted archaeological fieldwork in northern Peru and worked in the Yukon Territory in museum programming. She is thrilled to join the Unpayable Debt working group as Graduate Assistant.

Working Group Affiliation

Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy, Graduate Assistant

Sohini Chattopadhyay

I am a historian of South Asia. My research spans from colonialism to its aftermath, with particular interests in the comparative studies of urban history, labor histories, and the history of science and technology.

My current book project studies the intersections between Science and Technology Studies and South Asian history through the history of the crematorium, as the object transformed working class death rites and community histories in Bombay and Calcutta (present day Mumbai and Kolkata). I argue for the need to study the disjunctive and regionally varied colonial histories of science and technology in British India, and I demonstrate that the regional variations were necessary (and often strategic) outcomes of colonial science's engagement with labor, caste, and community hierarchies.

Drawing from my interest in bodies and technologies, my second book project focuses on the business and social histories of sanitary napkins in colonial to Cold War era South Asia.

Working Group Affiliation

Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City, Graduate Assistant

Rita Charon

Rita Charon

Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons

The Future of Disability Studies

Rita Charon is Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. A general internist with a primary care practice in Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Charon took a Ph.D. in English when she realized how central is telling and listening to stories to the work of doctors and patients. She directs the Narrative Medicine curriculum for Columbia's medical school and teaches literature, narrative ethics, and life-telling, both in the medical center and Columbia's Department of English. Her literary scholarship focuses on the novels and tales of Henry James. Her research projects center on the outcomes of training health care professionals in narrative competence and the development of narrative clinical routines to increase the capacity for clinical recognition in medical practice.

She is currently Principal Investigator on an NIH project to enhance the teaching of social science and behavioral science in medical schools. Her work in narrative medicine has been recognized by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American College of Physicians, the Society for Health and Human Values, the American Academy on Healthcare Communication, and the Society of General Internal Medicine. She is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residence and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She has published and lectured extensively on the ways in which narrative training helps to increase empathy and reflection in health professionals and students. She is author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness and co-editor of Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine and Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics.

Ruchi Chaturvedi

Ruchi Chaturvedi

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Hunter College

Ruchi Chaturvedi received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2007. Ruchi’s research focuses on questions of political violence, popular politics and its contentious relationship with the ideology and institutions of liberal democracy. The lifeworlds of local level political workers of the Marxist Left and Hindu Right in Kerala, South India, their acts and experiences of violence, and the criminal courts where these workers have been tried have been Ruchi’s key ethnographic resources so far. Duke University Press has contracted to publish her book Democratic Dark Side: The Work of Politics, Violence, and Law in South India.

Ruchi’s second project concentrates on so-called lumpens active in popular and party politics in various towns of North India. At Hunter College, she teaches courses on Power and Politics, Anthropology of War, Legal Anthropology and Violence and Ethnic Conflict in South Asia.

Amy Chazkel

Amy Chazkel

Amy Chazkel, Bernard Hirschhorn Associate Professor of Urban Studies, is a historian of Brazil with broad interests in the urban humanities, law and society, crime and justice, policing, slavery, abolition, and post-abolition societies in the Atlantic world. In her own research and writing, she has principally explored the urban and legal history of post-colonial Brazil.

She is the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Modern Public Life in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2011), a study of petty crime, urban culture, and the historical roots of the informal sector in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazil, and a translated and adapted version of that book, Leis da sorte: A construção da vida pública urbana(Editora da Unicamp, 2015) and is co-editor of The Rio Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2016), an anthology of primary sources on the history of Rio de Janeiro.

Over the past eighteen years, she has pursued her interest in the cultural and social context of the law both in her scholarship and as a volunteer researcher and Portuguese-English interpreter with US-based law clinics and human rights organizations. Her work in progress includes a book project, supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society, that explores the social, cultural, and legal history of the urban nighttime, focusing on Rio de Janeiro during the long nineteenth century. 

Working Group: Refugee Cities

Edited Books

Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Modern Public Life in Brazil  Duke University Press, 2011.

Leis da sorte: A construção da vida pública urbana Editora da Unicamp, 2015.

The Rio Reader: History, Culture, Politics  Co-Edited with Knauss, Paulo, and Daryle Williams. Duke University Press, 2016

Lilian Chee

Lilian Chee

Associate Professor, Architecture, the National University of Singapore

Lilian Chee is an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore. She is the author of Architecture and Affect: Precarious Spaces (2019) and co-editor of Asian Cinema and The Use of Space (2015). She conceptualized, researched, and collaborated on the award-winning architectural essay film about single women occupants in Singapore’s public housing 03-FLATS (2014). Her work is situated at the intersections of architectural representation, gender and affect in a contemporary interdisciplinary context. A writer, academic, designer, curator, and award-winning educator, her research explores the emergence of architecture through everyday encounter, often in domestic spaces.

Publications:

• Chee, Lilian. Architecture and Affect: Precarious Spaces. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2023. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315604565.

• Chee, Lilian. ‘Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture’. In The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History, edited by Duanfang Lu, 185–201. Routledge, 2023. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315674469.

• Jane Simon, Sophia Maalsen, Lilian Chee & Cathy Smith (2023). Reflections on, and from, Feminist Practice: Introduction to the ‘Home’ Special Issue, Australian Feminist Studies, DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2023.2267178

• Audrey Yue, Lilian Chee, Jane M. Jacobs & Natalie Pang (2023). Making do: young people and mobilities at home, Journal of Youth Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2023.2261859

• Lilian Chee (2022). ‘Housing and Domesticity’, Architecture and Culture, 10:3, 554-558, DOI: 10.1080/20507828.2022.2121898  

• Lilian Chee, Silvia Federici and Daniela Ortiz dos Santos. “Domestic Work and the Architecture of Emancipation.” Contemporary Feminist Spatial Practice, Arch+ v.246, (February 2022), 66-75.

• Chee, Lilian, Jane M. Jacobs, Audrey Yue, and Natalie Pang. ‘Foundations for Home-Based Work: A Singapore Study (A Project Funded by the Social Science Research Council)’. Singapore: Foundations for Home-based Work (NUS), 2022. https://foundationsforhomebasedwork.com.

• Mun, Ian and Lilian Chee. Objects for Thriving. Documentary. Singapore: NUS and Roving Productions, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYtBmE4_Qrk.

• Chee, Lilian. ‘Keeping Cats, Hoarding Things: Domestic Situations in the Public Spaces of the Singaporean Housing Block’. The Journal of Architecture 22, no. 6 (18 August 2017): 1041–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2017.1362024.

• Lei, Yuan Bin and Lilian Chee. 03-FLATS. Architectural Essay Film. Singapore: National University of Singapore and 13 Little Pictures, 2014, http://www.03-flats.com/

Anelise Chen

Anelise Chen (Assistant Professor of Fiction in the School of Arts) recently served as Director of Undergraduate Studies in Creative Writing. Her books include the experimental novel So Many Olympic Exertions, a VCU Cabell Award Finalist, and her forthcoming hybrid memoir is an investigation into metaphors of shell-making. She is a “5 under 35” National Book Foundation honoree, and has received a Junior Faculty Provost Grant, a Hettleman Grant, and fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Blue Mountain Center, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

Working Group

Seeds of Diaspora

Stephanie Chen

Stephanie Chen

Graduate Student, Clinical Psychology, Teachers College, Columbia University

Stephanie Chen, B.A., is currently working at the Center for OCD and Related Disorders on studies relating to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) at New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI). Stephanie graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in Psychology in 2012. Prior to joining the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at NYSPI, she coordinated a joint-project study on medication adherence at Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia University. Stephanie’s research interest is finding the most effective treatments for anxiety disorders. After completing her M.A. degree in Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, Stephanie hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.

Working Group Affiliation

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture

Anne Cheng

Anne Cheng

Professor of English and the Associate Chair in the Department of English, Princeton

Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English and the Associate Chair in the Department of English and a core faculty in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She specializes in race studies and psychoanalytic theory and works in twentieth-century American literature, with special focus on Asian American and African American literatures. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Assimilation, Psychoanalysis, and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press), which explores the notion of racial grief at the intersection of culture, history, and law. She is currently completing a manuscript on Josephine Baker and the intimate relationship between the theatricalization of racialized skin in the early twentieth century and the Modernist ideal of the denuded surface.

Sarah Chinn

Sarah Chinn

Associate Professor of English, Hunter College, CUNY

Sarah Chinn teaches nineteenth century literature at Hunter College, CUNY.  Her work primarily explores questions of race, embodiment,  sexuality, and gender in U.S. literature and culture, particularly in the 19th century. She is the author of Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence (Continuum, 2000) and The Invention of Modern Adolescence: Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (Rutgers University Press, 2008).  She is currently working on two book-length projects: Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage, and Feeling Our Way: The Ethics of Lesbian Writing.

Working Group Affiliation

The Future of Disability Studies

Yvette Christiansë

Yvette Christiansë

Professor of English and Africana Studies, Barnard College

Yvette Christiansë is a South African-born poet, novelist, and scholar. She is the author of two books of poetry: Imprendehora (published in South Africa by Kwela Books/Snail Press 2009) and Castaway (Duke University Press, 1999). Imprendehora was a finalist for the Via Afrika Herman Charles Bosman Prize in 2010 and Castaway was a finalist in the 2001 PEN International Poetry Prize. Her novel Unconfessed (Other Press, 2006; Kwela Books, 2007; Querido, 2007) was a finalist for the Hemingway/PEN Prize for first fiction and received a 2007 ForeWord Magazine BEA Award. It was also shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2008, and nominated for the Ama Ata Aidoo Prize 2010. Her poetry has been published in the U.S., South Africa, Australia, Canada, France and Italy. She is also the recipient of The Harri Jones Memorial Prize for poetry (Australia).

Christiansë teaches poetry and prose of former English colonies (with an emphasis on South Africa, the Caribbean and Australia), narratives of African Diaspora, 20th Century African American Literatures, poetics and creative writing. Her research interests include the nexus between theories of race and gender, class and postcoloniality. She has been a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Duke University's John Hope Franklin Center and a Visiting Professor at Princeton University's Center for Creative and Performing Arts. She has also been a National Research Council Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand and a visiting writer at the University of Cape Town. Her manuscript on Toni Morrison's poetics and is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. She is currently writing a book on representations of Liberated Africans or Recaptives between 1807 and 1886. 

Michelle Chouinard

Michelle Chouinard

Human Rights and Humanitarian Policy Concentration Coordinator, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

Michelle Chouinard is the Human Rights and Humanitarian Policy Concentration Coordinator at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). She is also the New York Regional Representative for the coalition organization Human Rights Educators (HRE) USA. Prior to joining SIPA, Michelle served as the Education Program Coordinator for the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. Michelle received her MA degree in Human Rights Studies at Columbia University with a specialization in localization efforts of international human rights law in the United States. She holds a BA in anthropology and gender studies from the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Working Group Affiliation

Menstrual Health and Gender Justice, Coordinator

Laura Ciolkowski

Laura Ciolkowski

Senior Lecturer, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Laura Ciolkowski’s teaching and research interests include gender & sexuality studies, feminist pedagogies, social justice movements, literary and cultural theory, the literature and theory of mass incarceration, and sexual and gender-based violence.  Her work has been published in a range of journals, including: Twentieth Century Literature; Studies in the Novel; Genders;Novel: A Forum on Fiction; Public Books; and Victorian Literature and Culture. Her "Rape Culture Syllabus," published inPublic Books, was widely shared and circulated by scholars and activists across the country.  In addition to her scholarly research, Laura is a writer and book critic whose articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker Magazine, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, theInternational Herald Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Laura has taught a wide range of WGSS courses over the last 15+ years as a faculty member at Columbia University, where she was also Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Laura is especially interested in and passionate about prison education and, as a faculty member at the Center for Justice at Columbia, she taught humanities and WGSS courses at Taconic Correctional Facility, a medium security women’s prison in Bedford, NY, in a program for incarcerated students pursuing a college degree.

Laura received her PhD and MA in Literature from Brown University and graduated from Columbia University, Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, with a BA in English and Comparative Literature.

Working Group Affiliation

Reframing Gendered Violence