Faculty

One of the nation's leading constitutional theorists, Professor Bobbitt's interests include not only constitutional law but also international security and the history of strategy. He has published seven books: Tragic Choices (with Calabresi) (Norton, 1978), Constitutional Fate (Oxford, 1982), Democracy and Deterrence (Macmillans, 1987), U.S. Nuclear Strategy (with Freedman and Treverton) (St. Martin's, 1989), Constitutional Interpretation (Blackwell, 1991), The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (Knopf, 2002), and, most recently, Terror and Consent (Knopf, 2008).

Richard Brilliant, Professor Emeritus of Art History and Archaeology, and Anna S. Garbedian Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, has taught a variety of courses on Greek and Roman art, visual narrative, portraiture, and the theory of art history. He received his B.A. in Classics from Yale, LL.B. from Harvard, and M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale, as well as numerous fellowships and awards that have brought him to Rome for several years of study and residence.  

Christopher L. Brown, professor, specializes in the history of eighteenth century Britain, the early modern British Empire, and the comparative history of slavery and abolition, with secondary interests in the age of revolutions and the history of the Atlantic world.

Professor Cavallo has been on the faculty of Columbia's Department of Italian since 1988. Her field of specialization is the Renaissance romance epic (primarily Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso). Other courses she has taught in the department include Petrarch and Boccaccio, fifteenth century civic humanism and Neoplatonism, Machiavelli, Castiglione, the history of the Italian language, Italian cinema, allegorical literature, political literature, and forgotten best-sellers of the Renaissance. In 1995, she founded the Columbia University Summer Program in Scandiano, which she directed for seven consecutive years. She has taught Literature Humanities regularly since 1993 and more recently has team-taught the two-semester interdisciplinary colloquium "Nobility and Civility."

Mark Churchland's area of study includes Cognitive/Systems Neuroscience, Motor Systems, Theoretical Neuroscience with a specialization in Neural control of movement, neural prosthetic systems, computational analysis of neural data, and neural variability.

Patricia Dailey specializes in medieval literature and culture (English, Dutch, French, and Italian) and critical theory, focusing on women's mystical texts, visions, Anglo-Saxon poetry and prose, medieval rhetoric, hermeneutics, and theology.

Jeremy Dauber's research interests include older Yiddish literature, Yiddish and Hebrew literature of the Jewish Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, and Yiddish theater.

Professor de Bary's scholarly work has focused on the major religious and intellectual traditions of East Asia, especially Confucianism in China, Japan, and Korea. He began his career as a teacher at Columbia in 1949 when he undertook to develop the undergraduate general education program in East Asian Studies.