Faculty

Alisa Solomon directs the Arts & Culture concentration in the M.A. program at the Journalism School. She came to Columbia in 2005 after nearly 20 years as a professor of English/Journalism at Baruch College-CUNY and as a professor in the PhD programs in Theater and in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Benjamin Steege joined the Department of Music as Assistant Professor in 2012, having previously taught at Stony Brook University. He specializes in the history of music theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to early modernism, the history of psychology, and the history of listening.

Benjamin Taylor is the author of a book of essays, Into the Open, and two novels, Tales Out of School, winner of the Harold Ribalow Prize, and The Book of Getting Even, a 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award Finalist, a 2008 Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year, and a Ferro-Grumley Prize Finalist.

Gauri Viswanathan is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.  She has published widely on education, religion, and culture; nineteenth-century British and colonial cultural studies; and the history of modern disciplines.

Christopher Washburne is an Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance program at Columbia University. He has published numerous articles on jazz, Latin jazz, and salsa topics, and his book, Sounding Salsa was published in 2008 by Temple University Press.

Jonathan Weiner majored in English at Harvard. He learned to write about science in the early 1980s while working at the magazine the Sciences. In 1985, Jonathan left the magazine to write his first book, Planet Earth, the companion volume to a seven-part PBS television series. He spent twenty years as an independent writer, and joined the School of Journalism in 2005.

Pauline Yu became president of the American Council of Learned Societies in July 2003, having served as dean of humanities in the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Los Angeles and professor of East Asian languages and cultures from 1994-2003.