Visiting Speakers

Timothy Nunan is a historian with a strong interest in 20th century international history, in particular that of Germany and the former Soviet Union with an emphasis on Eurasia.

Téa Obreht first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, was published by Random House in 2011. The novel was a National Book Award Finalist and a New York Times Bestseller. it was named one of the best books of the year by The Wall Street Journal, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Economist, Vogue, Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, Publishers Weekly, and by Alan Cheuse on NPR’s "All Things Considered."  

Katharine Park is Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her research and teaching focus on the history of science and medicine in medieval and early modern Europe, and on the history of gender, sexuality, and the body.

Cóilín Parsons was educated at the National University of Ireland, Syracuse University, and Columbia University, where he earned his PhD in English and Comparative Literature. Before coming to Georgetown he taught at Columbia University, New York University, and the University of Cape Town (South Africa). His research interests include Irish literature, Modernism, theories of geography and space, cartography, Victorian studies, and postcolonial literature and theory.

Professor Sonali Perera is the author of No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 2014), and is currently at work on her second book, Between Imperialism and Internationalism: World Literature and Human Rights. Much of her scholarship is based on the premise that postcolonial studies, as it was conceptualized by its rigorous, most skeptical practitioners, provides methodologies for parsing the changing meanings of political economy, sovereignty, and empire in today’s globalized world.

Magali García Ramis is a Puerto rican writer and teacher. She obtained her degree in history from the University of Puerto Rico in 1964. Soon after she began to publish work in the Spanish newspaper El world. In 1968 Ramis moved to New York to study journalism at Columbia University. In 1971, back in Puerto Rico, she began working for the literary magazine Avance and writing her first stories. After a short stay in Mexico, she began teaching in 1977 at the School of Communications of Puerto Rico. Her literary works include La familia de todos nosotros and Las noches de riel de oro. She has also published a collection of essays entitled La ciudad que me habita.

Asha Rosa Ransby-Sporn is an undergraduate student at Columbia College studying in the Institute for Research in African American Studies. She is also an Organizer with Students Against Mass Incarceration and the Black Youth Project 100. 

Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher and cultural critic. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, Founder and Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique in Paris, Directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie and Member of the Research Center “Sens et compréhension du monde contemporain” (Institut Mines-Télécom/Université Paris Descartes).