Faculty

Seth Kimmel studies the literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. Before joining Columbia’s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures in 2012, Seth spent two years as a member of Stanford University’s Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities, where he taught classes on theories of secularism and religion, the history of reading, and cultural exchange and conflict among Iberian Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

Dr. Klein specializes in the history of science and medicine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a special emphasis on the interactions among chymistry, medicine and atomism in German universities. He has a particular interest in chymical and medical correspondence in the early Republic of Letters, and focuses on the development of experimental concepts and culture among a diverse group of physicians in Wittenberg and Breslau. Before coming to Columbia, he had several pre-doctoral research fellowships and also worked on the Chymistry of Isaac Newton Project, where he encoded Newton’s handwritten manuscripts and recreated several of his alchemical experiments in the laboratory. He is currently at work expanding his dissertation into a monograph and working on the Making and Knowing Initiative of the Center for Science and Society.

Brian Larkin is the Director of Graduate Studies and a Professor of anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research focuses on the ethnography and history of media in Nigeria. Most broadly he examines the introduction of media technologies into Nigeria—cinema, radio, digital media—and the religious, political, and cultural changes they bring about. He explores how media technologies comprise broader networked infrastructures that shape a whole range of actions from forms of political rule, to new urban spaces, to religious and cultural life. 

Professor Lee received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Columbia University, and began her career at UCLA as a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow before joining the faculty at UC Irvine, where she rose to Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of Sociology.

Nicholas Lemann is the Dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a former New Yorker staff writer.

Dr. Lin studies metacognition and problem solving, and the ways that cultural interactions with the help of technology can facilitate domain subject learning and personal reflection. She develops technology-rich learning environments and explores how such environments influence cross-cultural collaboration and reflection. She finds that technologies make it possible for teachers and students from different cultures to collaborate in fundamentally new ways. This offers exciting opportunities for metacognitive awareness. Her most recent research explores the creation of 3D Virtual Learning Environments that permit teachers from different cultures to collaborate. She hopes that these studies will lead to design principles that can transform the obstacles of geographical and cultural distance into new opportunities for learning.

Reinhold Martin is Associate Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, where he directs the PhD program in architecture and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.

Mark Mazower is a historian and writer, specialising in modern Greece, 20th century Europe, and international history.