Lila Abu-Lughod is Co-Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference.  She is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University, and Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her courses 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).

Mia Bay is a historian who teaches at Rutgers University, where she also serves as the Associate Director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity. The author of a number of works, including The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas about White People 1830-1925 (2000), she has recently completed a new book entitled To Trouble the Waters Freely: The Life and Times of Ida B. Wells (2009).

Laura Ciolkowski 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). She 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.

Mary Marshall Clark is Director of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia.  Over the past decade, Clark has interviewed notable individuals such as Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and the late Congresswoman Bella Abzug among many others. Currently, she is working on the Malcolm X – Dr. Betty Shabazz Oral History Project, which will record interviews with their surviving siblings and close relatives, prominent civil rights, labor, business and community leaders from Harlem and throughout black America.

Prior to her work at Columbia, Clark was involved with the "New York Times History Project," an effort to compile oral histories of Times employees, and has served as a consultant for internationally award-winning documentary films. She has developed other oral history projects in New York, including programs for public and private schools and museums. She is vice-president and president-elect of the United States Oral History Association and has served on the Executive Council of the International Oral History Association. She teaches a graduate oral history course at Columbia and directs the Columbia University Summer Institute on Oral History. Clark has lectured and delivered seminars at Columbia University's Teachers College, Barnard College, Sarah Lawrence College, the City University of New York and many other institutions. In addition, she has lectured in Brazil and the Netherlands on topics related to oral history and memory.

Since joining Columbia Law School's faculty in 2001 Professor Franke's research and teaching have increasingly focused on gender and racial equality and well as the regulation of sexuality in domestic, transnational and international contexts. In Sexual Tensions of Post Empire Professor Franke examined two contemporary cites - Cairo and Zimbabwe - in which state efforts to eradicate the traces of empire and to resurrect an authentic post-colonial nation have produced sexual subjects that serve as a kind of existential residue and remainder of a demonized colonial past and absence. Professor Franke was both a member of the Board of Directors, including serving as Chair of the Board, of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission from 1997 to 2003.

Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies; Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. Publications include: "Who Set You Flowin'?:" The African-American Migration Narrative. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York: The Free Press, 2001.); Book-in-progress Miles Davis and John Coltrane (tentative title) co-authored with Salim Washington. (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2005)

Kim Hall is the recipient of numerous academic and professional honors, including an ACLS fellowship, multiple Mellon and Folger Fellowships, and a NEH/Newberry Fellowship. She is the author of countless articles and of two books: Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, named a Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book for 1996; and Othello: Texts and Contexts (St. Martin’s). 

Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Women's and Gender Studies. B. A., Wesleyan University (1984); Ph.D., Yale University (1992). Professor Hartman's major fields of interest are African American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, and performance studies. She is on the editorial board of Callaloo. She has been a Fulbright, Rockefeller, Whitney Oates, and University of California President's Fellow. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press,1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). She has published essays on photography, film and feminism. She is beginning a new project on photography and ethics.

Anne Higonnet teaches and writes about nineteenth century art, childhood, and collecting. A Harvard College B.A, she received her PhD from Yale University in 1988. She has published three books and dozens of articles on topics ranging from Impressionism to contemporary photography. Her many awards include Guggenheim, Getty, and Social Science Research Council fellowships, as well as grants from the Mellon, Howard, and Kress Foundations. She enjoys teaching at every level of the curriculum, and anchors the team-taught Introduction to the History of Art from the Renaissance to the Present. 

Marianne Hirsch is Co-Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference.  She is also 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.

Jean E. Howard is the George Delacorte Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University where she teaches Renaissance literature and feminist studies. She has published numerous articles on early modern drama as well as on aspects of contemporary critical theory, including new historicism, Marxism, historical formalism, and issues in feminism. Her books include Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration: Stagecraft and Audience Response (1984); Shakespeare Reproduced; The Text in History and Ideology, edited with Marion O'Connor (1987); The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994); with Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (1997); Marxist Shakespeares, edited with Scott Shershow (2000); four generically organized Companions to Shakespeare, edited with Richard Dutton (2003); and Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642 (2007), the winner of the 2008 Bernard Hewitt Prize for the year's outstanding book of theater history. In addition, she is one of the four editors of The Norton Shakespeare (2nd ed. 2008) and General Editor of the Bedford Contextual Editions of Shakespeare. Professor Howard has been the recipient of Guggenheim, NEH, Mellon, Folger Library, Huntington Library, and Newberry Library Fellowships, and has twice been honored with prizes for her work as a teacher and mentor of graduate students. She is currently writing a book about the contemporary feminist dramatist, Caryl Churchill, as well as a study of the stage technologies underpinning early modern tragedy.  In all of her scholarly work Howard is interested in how one archives the ephemeral art of the stage and in the dynamic relationship between present concerns and the recovery/invention of the past through textual and sensory traces.  From 1996 to 1999 Professor Howard directed the Institute for Research on Women and Gender; in 1999-2000 she was President of the Shakespeare Association of America; and from 2004 to 2007 she served as Columbia's first Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives.  She is now serving as the Chair of Columbia's Department of English and Comparative Literature.

Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he served as founding director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society (1998-2003). He chaired the Department of Germanic Languages from 1986-92 and again as of 2005. He is one of the founding editors of New German Critique, the leading journal of German Studies in the United States (1974-) and he serves on the editorial boards of October,Constellations, Germanic  Review, Transit, Key Words (UK), and Critical Space (Tokyo). In 2005, he won Columbia’s coveted Mark van Doren teaching award. His research and teaching focus on 18th-20th-century German literature and culture, international modernism, Frankfurt School critical theory, postmodernism, cultural memory of historical trauma in transnational contexts, and, most recently, urban culture and globalization. 

Huyssen has published widely in German and English and his work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Japanese and Chinese. His books include Drama des Sturm und Drang (1980), After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), Postmoderne: Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels (ed. with Klaus Scherpe, 1986), Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism (ed. with David Bathrick, 1989), Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1995), Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003), and the forthcoming edited volume on the culture of non-Western cities entitled Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing World (Duke UP, 2008). He also works on a book project on modernist miniatures, a little studied experimental form of modernist writing, widespread in French and German modernism from Baudelaire to Rilke, Benn, Kafka, Kracauer, Musil, and Benjamin.

Art historian Dr. Kellie Jones is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latino/a and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory.

Dr. Jones was named an Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellow in 2008 for her lifetime of writing on visual art.  The fellowship commemorates the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954 which struck down legal segregation; it recognizes candidates whose work honors and furthers the spirit of the statute. In 2005 she was the inaugural recipient of the David C. Driskell Award in African American Art and Art History from the High Museum of Art, Atlanta and a Scholar-in-Residence, at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. 

Dr. Jones’s writings have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and the journals NKA, Artforum, Flash Art, Atlantica, and Third Text among others.  Current book projects include, Taming the Freeway and Other Acts of Urban HIP-notism: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (forthcoming from The MIT Press), and  Eye-Minded, a book of collected essays and family collaborations (forthcoming from Duke University Press).  Dr. Jones has also worked as a curator for over two decades and has more than twenty-five major national and international exhibitions to her credit. She has organized shows for the Johannesburg Biennale (1997) and São Paulo Bienal (1989), the latter of which, featuring the work of Martin Puryear, won the grand prize for best individual exhibition.  Her most recent exhibition was “Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980” at The Studio Museum in Harlem (April-July 2006). 

Natasha Lightfoot, Assistant Professor, Columbia University Department of History, teaches within the fields of Caribbean, Atlantic World, and African Diaspora History on the subjects of slavery, emancipation, race, and labor relations. She received her B.A.in History from Yale University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from New York University. Her current book project focuses on black working people's resistance in colonial British Antigua after emancipation.

Claudio Lomnitz works on the history, politics and culture of Latin America, and particularly of Mexico. He received his PhD from Stanford in 1987, and his first book, Evolución de una sociedad rural (Mexico City, 1982) was a study of politics and cultural change in Tepoztlán, Mexico. After that he developed an interest in conceptualizing the nation-state as a kind of cultural region, a theme that culminated in Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National Space (California, 1992). In that work, he also concentrated on the social work of intellectuals, a theme that he developed in various works on the history of public culture in Mexico, including Modernidad Indiana (Mexico City, 1999) and Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minnesota, 2001). He is currently working on the historical anthropology of crisis and recently published Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2005), a political and cultural history of death in Mexico from the 16th to the 21st centuries. He serves as editor of the journal Public Culture and writes a weekly column in Excelsior, a paper in Mexico City. Publications include: Death and the Idea of Mexico (2005); "Times of Crisis: Historicity, Sacrifice, and the Spectacle of Debacle in Mexico City," Public Culture (2003); "The Depreciation of Life During Mexico City's Transition into the Crisis," in J. Schneider and I. Susser (Eds.), Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World (2003); Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (2001); "Elusive Property: The Personification of Mexican National Sovereignty," in F. Myers (Ed.), The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture (2001)

Sharon Marcus works at the intersections of literature and history, feminist and queer theory.  

Her first book, APARTMENT STORIES: CITY AND HOME IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PARIS AND LONDON (University of California Press, 1999), used literature and archives of urban history and everyday life to restore to view the forms that domestic life took in the age of cities.  

Her second book, BETWEEN WOMEN: FRIENDSHIP, DESIRE, AND MARRIAGE IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND (Princeton University Press, 2007), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for best book in LGBT Studies, was a contribution to the history of sexuality and the history of women that drew on lifewriting, novels, legal discourse, fashion magazines, early work in anthropology, and other sources.  While most historians of same-sex relations have emphasized the importance of secrecy, silence, and restoring a hidden past to view, Professor Marcus called attention to the many important ways that relationships between women appeared directly on the archives surface -- in the letters women wrote to each other, the memoirs they composed about one another, and the literary narratives they developed that made women's bonds of evident importance.

Professor Marcus has just begun research for a book on Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and the nineteenth-century culture of theatrical celebrity. 

Hlonipha Mokoena's main area of interest is South African intellectual history. One of the defining characteristics of South Africa is that it is a society that ostensibly lacks a collective history or shared philosophical and political traditions. The main objective of Professor Mokoena's teaching is to introduce students to the contested histories of South African political ideas and traditions. Some of the themes and topics examined in her courses include: othering discourses and the emergence of a Cape discourse; slavery, free labour and the history of paternalism; frontier violence and resistance to conquest; and the emergence of African and Afrikaner nationalisms.

Professor Mokoena's current research is on Magema M. Fuze, author of the Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona (1922) / The Black People and Whence They Came (1979). As an author and an aspirant historian, Magema Fuze represents a set of questions about the emergence and arrested development of a black intelligentsia and literati in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Africa. His life and writings reveal both his singular attempt to create, under adverse cultural, political and social conditions, a literary career and a body of knowledge while also participating in the constitution of a discourse community or a public sphere of Zulu-speaking intellectuals.

Rosalind Morris focuses her fieldwork in two main areas: Thailand and South Africa. Over the past decade, she has devoted her attention to thinking about a number of inter-related issues and questions concerning: the history of modernity in Southeast Asia and the place of the mass media in its development; the relationships between value and violence; the sexualization of power and desire; the theorization of gender; and the history of anthropological thought and social theory. In her writings on all of these issues, she attends to questions of representation. Her writings include monographs on spirit mediumship and the mass media in Northern Thailand, the archive of visual anthropology, and the afterlife of apartheid in South Africa’s mining towns. Other essays have addressed the history of fetishism, the violence of culture in anthropological theory, translation and radicalism, mediatic war, photography and its discontents, sex, gender and sexuality, and art in South Africa. She is a former Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Associate Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society, and the former co-editor of CONNECT: art, politics, theory, culture.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and scholar. She is the recipient of Ford, Truman, Scripps Howard, Rockefeller, and Pew fellowships. She is the editor of three books, Shouting in a Whisper: Latino Poets in Philadelphia; Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Nationalism and Colonialism; and None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era. She is the author of Anatomy of a Smile and Other Poems and Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (winner, 2004 CHOICE Award). Among Negrón-Muntaner's films are AIDS in the Barrio, and Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican. She is currently completing two documentaries on the relationship between the military and civilians in Guam and Vieques. Negrón-Muntaner is also the founder of Miami Light Project's Filmmakers Workshop, and a founding board member and current chair of NALIP, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. In 2005, she was named as 1 of "100 Most Influential Hispanics" by Hispanic Business magazine.

Associate Professor of Sociology

Elizabeth Povinelli's writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism. This critical task is grounded in theories of the translation, transfiguration and the circulation of values, materialities, and socialities within settler liberalisms. Her first two books focused on impasses within liberal systems of law and value as they meet local Australian indigenous worlds, and the effect of these impasses on the development of legal and public culture in Australia. Her most recent book examines how a set of ethical and normative claims about the governace of lowve, sociality, and the body circulate in liberal settler colonies in such a way that life and death, rights and recognition, goods and resources are unevenly distributed there.

Professor Povinelli diverges from most contemporary approaches to sexuality, gender and the legacy of European colonialism in so far as she brackets sexuality in the first moment and, instead, looks at how the distinction between individual freedom and social bondage subtends and animates most theories and practices of sexuality in postcolonial liberalisms.

Anu Rao specializes in the historical anthropology of caste; anthropology of violence; history of gender; political theory; colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism.  Her work has focused on theorizing caste subalternity, and in exploring the critical role of anti-caste thought (and its thinkers) in producing alternative genealogies of political subject-formation through the vernacularization of political universals. Her book, The Caste Question, addresses the relationship between caste and democracy, between stigmatized personhood and acts of political commensuration, even as it explores their relevance for rewriting the history of secular liberalism in colonial and postcolonial India. She has also written on the themes of colonialism and humanitarianism, and on non-Western histories of gender and sexuality. Recent publications include: Discipline and the Other Body (Duke University Press, 2006); “Death of a Kotwal: Injury and the Politics of Recognition,” Subaltern Studies XII; co-editor of “Violence, Vulnerability and Embodiment” (a special issues of Gender and History, 2004), and Gender and Caste: Issues in Indian Feminism (Kali for Women, 2003).

Neferti Tadiar is Professor of Women's Studies at Barnard College and Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference.  Her academic interests include transnational and third world feminisms; postcolonial theory; critical theories of race and subjectivity; literary and social theory; cultural studies of the Asia Pacific region; and Philippine studies. Her work concerns the role of cultural practice and social imagination in the production of wealth, power, marginality and liberatory movements in the context of global relations. While her research focuses on contemporary Philippine and Filipino cultures and their relation to political and economic change, she addresses, more broadly, questions of gender, race, and sexuality in discourses and material practices of nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization. She is currently working on a book-project entitled: Discourse on Empire: Living Under the Rule of Permanent War and beginning a new research project entitled Schooling National Subjects: Experience and Education in US Colonial Philippines. Recent publications include Things Fall Away: Philippine Literatures, Historical Experience and Tangential Makings of Globality (Duke University, forthcoming); Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation, co-edited with Angela Y. Davis (Palgrave Press, 2005); Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong University Press/ Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2004), Winner of the Philippine National Book Award (2005); “Challenges for Cultural Studies Under the Rule of Global War”, Kritika Kultura, no. 4 (March 2004): 34-47; "In the Face of Whiteness as Value: Fall-out of Metropolitan Humanness”, Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 143-182; "Filipinas ‘Living in a Time of War’" in Body Politics: Essays on Cultural Representations of Women’s Bodies, ed. Odine Ma. de Guzman (Quezon City: Center for Women's Studies, University of the Philippines, 2002). Reprinted in Melinda L. de Jesus, Pinay Power (Routledge, 2005).

Mabel O. Wilson navigates her multidisciplinary practice between the fields of architecture, art, visual cultural analysis, and American studies. Her scholarly and design research investigates space and cultural memory in black America, race and visual culture, and new technologies and the social production of space. Her scholarly essays have appeared in numerous journals and books on critical geography, cultural memory, art and architecture. She is currently completing the book Progress and Prospects – Black Americans and the World of Fairs and Museums that studies how ideologies of race, social uplift, and nationalism shaped black American sites of memory. Her collaborative design practices (KW: a and Studio 6Ten) have worked on speculative and built projects. Her practice has been a competition finalist for several important cultural institutions including lower Manhattan’s African Burial Ground Memorial and the Smithsonian’s National Museum for African American History and Culture (with Diller Scofidio +Renfro.) The Wexner Center for the Arts, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s Triennial, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and SF Cameraworks have exhibited her installations. She is currently compiling Progress and Prospects’ rich photographic archive into an experimental exhibit and database as part of the Visible History Project. She is also developing an urban history database for use through mobile technologies by residents in African cities. She directs the GSAPP’s program for Advanced Architectural Research and the HBCU Design Leadership Project.