Photo (left to right):  President Bollinger, Former CCASD Director and Professor of English and Comparative Literature Jean Howard, Co-Directors Marianne Hirsch and Lila Abu-Lughod

The Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference (CCASD) has named Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, and Marianne Hirsch, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, co-Directors of CCASD, effective July 1, 2009. Neferti Tadiar, Professor and Chair of Women’s Studies (Barnard), directed the Center in 2008-09.

CCASD is an advanced study center that promotes innovative interdisciplinary scholarship on the role of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race in global dynamics of power and inequality.  The Center serves as the research arm of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. 

Professors Abu-Lughod and Hirsch are both former directors of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and were instrumental in launching CCASD in spring 2008.    Professor Abu-Lughod also co-directs (with Professors Katherine Franke, Elizabeth Povinelli, Anupama Rao and Neferti Tadiar) the CCASD working project “Liberalism and its Others” and Professor Hirsch co-directs (with Professors Jean Howard and Saidiya Hartman) the CCASD working project “Engendering the Archive.”  Please see the Center’s website (www.socialdifference.org) for additional information about the Center and its projects.