Our Staff

Co-Director, Lila Abu-Lughod

Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science and Professor of Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies at Columbia University.  Her courses on focus on gender politics and nationalism in the Muslim world and on liberalism, culture, and the politics of human and women's rights.  A leading voice in debates about gender, Islam, and global policy, her books and publications in major journals, public media, and on the web have been translated into more than 10 languages.  Abu-Lughod's early work was on emotion, poetry, and gender ideology in a Bedouin community in Egypt. As an anthropologist of the Middle East, Professor Abu-Lughod was concerned about the politics of re-presentation and so began to think about ethnographic writing itself, developing a critique of the concept of culture. Interests in gender in the Arab world and in postcolonial theory led to some work on the history and contemporary politics of Middle Eastern feminisms. She returned to the study of popular culture in ethnographic work on Egyptian television soap operas as they relate to national pedagogy, class politics, religious and gender identity, and modern subjectivities. This project led her to reflect on theoretical and methodological questions in the anthropology of media, but especially regarding the cultural production of nations. Questions of national identification, violent disruption, and memory are at the center of work Professor Abu-Lughod is beginning now on the Palestinian experience of 1948. Publications include: Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (1986), Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories (1993) and Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (2005).

Co-Director, Marianne Hirsch

Marianne Hirsch is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and a former Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She has recently published a number of essays and book chapters on cultural memory and gender in twentieth and twenty-first century culture, particularly on the representation of World War Two and the Holocaust in literature, testimony and photography. She is the author of Beyond the Single Vision: Henry James, Michel Butor, Uwe Johnson (1981); The Mother / Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1989); and Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997). She has edited or co-edited eight volumes: Feminist Readings: French Texts/American Contexts, Special Issue of Yale French Studies (1982); The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (1983); Conflicts in Feminism (1991); Ecritures de femmes: Nouvelles cartographies (1996); The Familial Gaze (1999); Time and the Literary: Essays from the 1999 English Institute (2002); Gender and Cultural Memory (2002), a special issue of Signs; and Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (2004). Her co-authored book with Leo Spitzer Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory and History is forthcoming. Professor Hirsch has been a Guggenheim, ACLS, National Humanities Center, Rockefeller Foundation, and Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellow.

 

Associate Director, Laura E. Ciolkowski

Laura E. Ciolkowski, PhD is Associate Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and is on the faculty of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWaG). Laura has taught in the English Department and the Women's Studies Program at Yale University, and the English Department at Wesleyan University, Barnard College and NYU, where she is currently on the faculty of the interdisciplinary Gallatin School for Individualized Study. Her teaching and research interests include feminist theory and cultural studies, nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, and travel literature. Courses include: "Writing and Politics"; "Genealogies of Feminism and Feminist Activism"; "Bodily Fictions and Feminist Theory"; "Gender and Technology"; "Travel Literature and Theory"; "Imperial Fantasies: The Literature of English Empire"; "Reinventing Literary History: Legacies of the Mediterranean"; and "From Streetwalking to Housekeeping: Women and Work in America." Her work has been published in a range of journals, including: Twentieth Century Literature; Studies in the Novel; Genders; Novel: A Forum on Fiction; and Victorian Literature and Culture. She has recently written the introduction to a new edition of Charles Dickens' American Notes for General Circulation and has edited a collection of the Christmas stories of Louisa May Alcott.  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 and the San Francisco Chronicle.