Professor, Department of Anthropology, Barnard College

Nadia Abu El-Haj is professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies. She is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012), both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Thea Abu El-Haj

Professor, Department of Education, Barnard College

Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Professor in Education, is an anthropologist of education. Prior to joining Barnard College, she was an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. She currently serves as the President of the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association. Abu El-Haj’s research explores questions about belonging, rights, citizenship, and education raised by globalization, transnational migration, and conflict.

Lila Abu-Lughod

Interim Director

Rachel Adams

Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Rachel Adams is the director of the “Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture.” 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.

Vanessa Agard-Jones

Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University

Vanessa Agard-Jones is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, where she maintains affiliations with the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, the Center for Science and Society, the Earth Institute, and the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. At its most expansive, Agard-Jones’ work asks how coloniality is made material: in social forms, in human and nonhuman bodies, and in the landscapes in which we live.

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Marcel Agüeros

Professor, Department of Astronomy, Columbia University

Marcel Agüeros is an associate professor of astronomy at Columbia University. A native New Yorker and a Columbia College alumnus, Marcel received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2006, returned to
Columbia as a National Science Foundation Astronomy & Astrophysics Post-doctoral Fellow that year, and joined the faculty in 2010. Marcel is an observational astrophysicist who uses new approaches to address classic questions in stellar evolution.

Alexander Alberro

Professor, Department of Contemporary Art History, Barnard College and Columbia University

Alexander Alberro, Virginia B. Wright Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University, is the author and editor of numerous books, including Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth Century Latin American Art (2017); Luis Camnitzer In Conversation with Alexander Alberro (2014) and What is Contemporary Art Today? (2012).

Zeynep Çelik Alexander

Zeynep Çelik Alexander is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her work focuses on the history and theory of architecture since the eighteenth century. She is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), the recipient of the 2019 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award.

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Dima Amso

Professor, Department of Psychology, Columbia University

Dima Amso is a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. She has a BS in psychology from Tufts University, was trained at Cornell University and received a PhD in psychology from New York University in 2005. She served on the faculty at the Weil Medical College of Cornell University before joining the faculty at Brown University in 2010 and Columbia University in 2020. Her research examines the development of attention, executive functions, and memory, with an emphasis on how environmental variables shape these trajectories.

Anca D. Askanase

Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Dr. Askanase completed her fellowship in Rheumatology at New York University School of Medicine/NYU Hospital for Joint Disease and continued there as an investigator where she participated in multiple NIH and industry sponsored clinical trials, and gained extensive experience with SLE patients. She is currently the Director of the Lupus Center and Director of Rheumatology Clinical Trials at Columbia University Medical Center.

Michelle Ballan

Assistant Professor, Department of Social Work, Columbia University

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.

Christopher Baswell

Professor, Department of English, Barnard College

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.

Carol Becker

Professor, Department of Arts, Columbia University School of Arts

Carol Becker is Dean of Faculty and Professor of the Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts. She was previously Dean of Faculty and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs as well as Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned her B.A. in English literature from State University of New York at Buffalo and her PhD in English and American literature from the University of California, San Diego.

Natalie Bello

Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center

Natalie Bello is a clinician scientist at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center where she practices cardiology with a specialty in multimodality imaging. She received her BS from Cornell University, her MD from University of Rochester, and a MPH degree from Harvard University. Dr. Bello is the director of research for the Columbia Women’s Heart Center and her broad scholarly interest is elucidating gender differences in cardiovascular health and disease.

Helen Benedict

Professor, Department of Journalism, Columbia University

Helen Benedict is a novelist and journalist specializing in social injustice and war. Her most recent writings have focused on women soldiers, military sexual assault, and Iraqi refugees, and she is credited with breaking the story about the epidemic of sexual assault of military women serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Volker Berghahn

Professor, Department of History, Columbia University

Volker Berghahn specializes in modern German history and European-American relations. He received his M.A. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1961) and his Ph.D. from the University of London (1964). His publications include: America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (2001); Quest for Economic Empire (ed., 1996); Imperial Germany (1995); The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945-1973 (1986); Modern Germany (1982); and Europe in the Era of Two World Wars (2006).

Nina Berman

Associate Professor, Department of Journalism, Columbia University

Nina Berman is Associate Professor of Journalism at Columbia University. She is a documentary photographer with a primary interest in the American political and social landscape. She is the author of two acclaimed monographs “Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq,” portraits and interviews with wounded veterans, and “Homeland,” an exploration of post September 11 America.

Sheri Berman

Professor, Department of Political Science, Barnard College

Sheri E. Berman is professor of political science. Her main interests are European politics and political history, democracy and democratization, globalization, and the history of the left. Her two books, The Social Democratic Moment; Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europe and The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century have examined the role played by social democracy in determining political outcomes in 20th-century Europe. Her book Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From Ancien Regime to the Present Day is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Elizabeth Bernstein

Associate Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Sociology, Barnard College

With Janet Jakobsen, Elizabeth Bernstein is currently serves as co-director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s project on Gender, Justice, and Neoliberal Transformations, a comparative and synthetic interdisciplinary project comprising researchers from ten countries. She is the author of Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Hiba Bou Akar

Assistant Professor, Department of Urban Planning, Columbia University

Hiba Bou Akar is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia GSAPP. Her research focuses on planning in conflict and post-conflict cities, the question of urban violence, and the role of religious political organizations in the making of cities.

Jordan T. Camp

Visiting Scholar in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University

Jordan T. Camp is the author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (University of California Press, 2016), co-editor (with Christina Heatherton) of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016), and co-editor (with Laura Pulido) of the late Clyde Woods’ Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia Press, 2017).

Tina Campt

Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College

Tina Campt's work theorizes gender, memory and racial formation among African Diasporic communities in Europe and Germany in particular. She is the author of Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), which examines the mutual constitution of racial and gendered formations among German Blacks in the Third Reich. Her new project, Imaging Black Europe: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora, studies how Black Britons and Black Germans used photography as an expressive cultural practice to create forms of identification and community in the first half of the twentieth century in Germany and the UK.

Elizabeth Castelli

Professor, Department of Religion, Barnard College

Elizabeth A. Castelli 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.

Rita Charon

Professor, Department of Clinical Medicine, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons

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.

Amy Chazkel

Professor, Department of History, Columbia University

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.

Anelise Chen

Yvette Christiansë

Professor, Department 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 (2009) and Castaway (1999). Her novel Unconfessed (2006) was a finalist for the Hemingway/PEN Prize for first fiction and received a 2007 ForeWord Magazine BEA Award. Her poetry has been published in the U.S., South Africa, Australia, Canada, France and Italy. She 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.

Mary Marshall Clark

Senior Research Scientist, INCITE (Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics), Director, Columbia Center for Oral History Research

In addition to being the Director of the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research in INCITE, Mary Marshall is the co-founding director of Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) degree program (with Peter Bearman) created in 2008-09, the first oral history master’s program in the United States. Mary Marshall has been involved in the oral history movement since 1991, and was president of the United States Oral History Association from 2001-2002.

Skye Cleary

Associate Director, The Center for New Narratives in Philosophy, Columbia University

Skye C. Cleary PhD MBA is the Associate Director of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy at Columbia. She also teaches at Columbia, Barnard College, and City College of New York.

Sarah Cole

Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley (1997); B.A., Williams College (1989). Sarah Cole specializes in British literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, with an emphasis on the modernist period. Areas of interest include war; violence, sexuality and the body; history and memory; imperialism; and Irish literature of the modernist period.

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