Faculty

Lila Abu-Lughod is Director of the Center for the Study 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 have been translated into more than 13 languages.

Carlos J. Alonso came to the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia in fall 2005 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the Edwin B. and Leonore R. Williams Professor of Romance Languages. Prof. Alonso became Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in July 2011.

Etienne Balibar is currently Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris-Nanterre and Emeritus Professor of Humanities at UC Irvine, Visiting Professor (French and Comp Lit) at Columbia (2012-2014)

Elazar Barkan is Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, Director of SIPA's Human Rights Concentration, and Director of Columbia's Institute for the Study of Human Rights.  His research interests focus on human rights and on the role of history in contemporary society and politics and the response to gross historical crimes and injustices.

Emily Bell was director of digital content for Britain's Guardian News and Media from 2006 to 2010. Previous to that post, Bell was editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited from 2001 to 2006

Professor Bergdoll's broad interests center on modern architectural history, with a particular emphasis on France and Germany between 1750 and 1900. Trained in art history rather than architecture, he has an approach most closely allied with cultural history and the history and sociology of professions. He has studied questions of the politics of cultural representation in architecture, the larger ideological content of nineteenth-century architectural theory, and the changing role of both architecture as a profession and architecture as a cultural product in nineteenth-century European society.

Volker Berghahn, Seth Low Professor of History, 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). He taught in England and Germany before coming to BrownUniversity in 1988 and to Columbia ten years later. 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); Der Tirpitz-Plan (1971); Europe in the Era of Two World Wars (2006); and most recently Industriegesellschaft und Kulturtransfer, Goettingen (2010).

Akeel Bilgrami is Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He earned his BA from Bombay and Oxford and his PhD from Chicago.