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).

Rachel Adams is the director of the “Future of Disability Studies.” She is Professor of English and American Studies at Columbia University, where she specializes in 19th- and 20th-century literatures of the United States and the Americas, media studies, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, medical humanities and disability studies. She is currently writing a memoir about raising a child with Down syndrome called Aiming High Enough, which will be published by Yale University press. Her most recent book is Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (University of Chicago Press, 2009). She is also the author of Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2001). She is co-editor (with David Savran) of The Masculinity Studies Reader (Blackwell Press, 2001) and (with Sarah Casteel) a special issue of Comparative American Literature on "Canada and the Americas." She is editor of a critical edition of Kate Chopin's The Awakening (Fine Publications, 2002). Her articles have appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, American Quarterly, Minnesota Review, Camera Obscura, GLQ, Signs, Yale Journal of Criticism and Twentieth-Century Literature. She has also written for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Gastronomica, and the Times of London. In 2011, she won the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.

"The Future of Disability Studies" Project Director Rachel Adams in The Columbia Record 

Dr. Ballan's research, teaching and service is dedicated to individuals with disabilities.  Her research focuses on prevention and treatment interventions for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.  She is the recipient of the prestigious 2010 Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award.  She has received the Texas Excellence Teaching Award, the Services for Students with Disabilities Faculty Award and twice, Columbia students bestowed her with the excellence in teaching award. Dr. Ballan is a mentor for international human rights disability advocates affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Human Rights.  She convenes the Columbia University Seminar on Disability Studies and is the Faculty Advisor for the Disability Caucus. Dr. Ballan is the recipient of the 2010 Association on Higher Education and Disability Recognition Award for her outstanding contributions to campus programs for students with disabilities.  She is the 2011 recipient of the Early Career Award from the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.  Dr. Ballan serves on the editorial board of Social Work and is an ad-hoc reviewer for journals in the fields of disability studies and sexuality. She is a board member for Services for the Underserved and has held positions on the Council on Disability and Persons with Disabilities through the Council of Social Work Education.  Dr. Ballan has worked as a practitioner and educator in various community settings with individuals with disabilities including the New Jersey Brain Injury Association, Women Helping Women, Safeplace and schools.

Professor Baswell rejoins the faculty at Barnard and Columbia after a period as Professor of English and Associate Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA, 2001-2008.  Baswell’s earliest research was in the reception and transformation of classical literature, especially narratives of empire and dynastic foundation, in the vernacular cultures of the European Middle Ages.  He has approached these issues through the optic of original manuscripts, and in the light of the multilingualism of medieval France and England.  Some of this research resulted in Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge UP 1995), which won the 1998 Beatrice White Prize of the English Association.  Further work on foundation narratives has led to articles and a forthcoming monograph on narratives of female foundation and their challenge to a dominant tradition of founding fathers.  Baswell is also at work on new research on the cultural imagination of disability in the Middle Ages.  He has held fellowships from the NEH, the ACLS, the National Humanities Center, and the Institute for Advanced Study.  Baswell is co-editor of the medieval volume of the Longman Anthology of British Literature. He is General Editor of the series Cursor Mundi: Viator Studies of the Medieval and Early Modern World (Brepols).

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).

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. 

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.

Sayantani DasGupta, MD MPH Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics and Faculty, Master's Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University. Faculty, Health Advocacy Graduate Program and Fiction Writing Program, Sarah Lawrence College. Co-Author of "The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales," author of "Her Own Medicine: A Woman's Journey from Student to Doctor," and co-editor of an award winning collection of women's illness narratives, "Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write their Bodies." Teaches courses on illness and disability narratives and narrative, health and social justice. Co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Narrative, Health and Social Justice.

Elizabeth F. Emens is a Professor of Law at Columbia.  She teaches and researches in the areas of employment discrimination law, disability law, contracts, and law and sexuality.  She earned her BA and JD from Yale and her Ph.D. in English from King’s College, Cambridge.  Her articles about disability law and theory include Intimate Discrimination: The State’s Role in the Accidents of Sex and Love (Harvard Law Review, 2009); Integrating Accommodation (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2008); Shape Stops Story (Narrative, 2007); and a work in progress entitled Framing Disability.

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.

Marsha Hurst is on the faculty team of Columbia’s Program in Narrative Medicine and is a research scholar at Columbia University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, where she is coordinating a faculty seminar on narrative genetics. She is also a consultant on health advocacy programs, issues, and education with particular interest in women’s health and aging. She has consulted for the Medicare Rights Center and is adviser to their advocacy programs, and works with the women’s health reform coalition, Raising Women’s Voices. From 1998 through 2007, Hurst was the director of the graduate program in health advocacy at Sarah Lawrence College. The author of numerous publications, Hurst co-edited, with Sayantani DasGupta, Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, an anthology of women’s illness narratives (Kent State University Press, 2007). She is also cofounder and vice president of the Westchester End-of-Life Coalition, and is a member of the New York State Palliative Care Education and Training Council. Hurst earned a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, and completed a National Institute of Mental Health post-doctoral fellowship in community medicine and medical sociology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

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.

Janet R. Jakobsen is Director of the Center for Research on Women and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, where she has also served as Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development.  She is the author of Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics.  With Ann Pellegrini she is the author of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolearnce and editor of Secularism, and with Elizabeth Castelli she is editor of Interventions: Academics and Activists Respond to Violence.  Before entering the academy, she was a policy analyst and organizer in Washington, D.C. 

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). 

Jennie A. Kassanoff is an Associate Professor of English at Barnard College where she directs the Program in American Studies.  She is the author of Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge, 2004) and is currently working on an essay on stupidity in the fiction of Henry James and a book on voting in American literature.

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).

Maya Sabatello is the Director of the Disability Rights in Society Program at Columbia's Institute for the Study of Human Rights. Maya holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Southern California and an LL.B. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was appointed a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics (2011-12) at Harvard University’s Medical School. Maya has litigated cases of medical negligence and has worked as a legal advisor to national and international non-governmental organizations to promote health-related human rights and disability issues. As a permanent representative for a nongovernmental organization at the United Nations (UN), she also participated in the UN sessions on the formulation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Maya teaches at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights and at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs. Her research interests include comparative human rights, law and society, international law, politics of identity, disability studies, and bioethics. Maya has published in journals including Human Rights Quarterly, The Journal of Medicine and Law, Disability and Society, and the International Journal of Children’s Rights. She is author of Children's Bioethics: The International Bio-Political Discourse on Harmful Traditional Practices and the Right of the Child to Cultural Identity (Martinus Nijhoff/ Brill Publishing, 2009), and her book Voices From Within: Civil Society’s Involvement in the Drafting of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (co-edited), is forthcoming by Penn University Press.

Maura Spiegel has a joint appointment at Columbia University and Barnard College where she teaches literature, film and American Studies.  Associate director of the Program for Narrative Medicine at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, she teaches film to second-year medical students, as well as graduate students in the Master of Science Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia.  Recently she ran a writing workshop for the staff of the NYU/Bellevue Program for Survivor’s of Torture.  She is the co-author of The Grim Reader: Writings on Death, Dying and Living on (Anchor/Doubleday); she has recently edited new editions of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes for the Barnes & Noble Classics Series.  She co-edited the journal Literature and Medicine for seven years, has written for The New York Times, and has published essays on many topics.  She is currently writing a book about the films of Sidney Lumet. 

Neferti Tadiar is Professor and Chair of Women's Studies at Barnard College.  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 (with Jonathan L. Beller) entitled: Present Senses: Aesthetics, Affect, Asia in the Global, and beginning a new research project entitled Remaindered Life: Becoming Human in a Time of War. She is currently co-editor of the journal Social Text. Recent publications include Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (Duke University, 2009); 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); "Empire," "Collective History: Thirty Years of Social Text," Special Issue of Social Text, Volume 27, Number 3 100, Fall 2009: 112-117; "If Not Mere Metaphor...Sexual Economies Revisited," Special Issue of The Scholar and the Feminist Online, Issue 7.3 (Summer 2009); "Borders on Belonging," Introduction to "Borders on Belonging: Gender and Immigration," Special Issue of The Scholar and the Feminist Online, Issue 6.3 (Summer 2008); "Cultural Revolution Internationale?" with Jonathan L. Beller, "And Now China?" A Special Issue of Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art, No. 11 (March 2008);  "Popular Laments: Affective Literacies of Democratization and War," Cultural Studies, Volume 23, Number 1 (January 2009): 1-26; "By The Waysides of the Globopolis," Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art, 4 (January 2007) [Part of the International documenta 12 magazines project]. Translated into Spanish and republished in Filipinas: Arte, Identidad y Discurso Poscolonial, ed. Juan Guardiola (Ministerio de Cultural, Gobierno de España, 2009); "Metropolitan Life and Uncivil Death" PMLA, 122, 1 (January 2007): 1-9. 

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.