Faculty

Emmanuelle Saada’s main field of research and teaching is the history of the French empire in the 19th and 20th century, with a specific interest in law.

Michael Schudson is an American academic sociologist working in the fields of journalism and its history, and public culture.

David Scott's work, especially since Refashioning Futures (1999) and Conscripts of Modernity (2004), has been concerned with the reconceptualization of the way we think the story of the colonial past for the postcolonial present. This has involved a variety of kinds of inquiry (taking the Caribbean as his principal “field” of engagement), into tradition and generations, dialogue and criticism, self-determination and sovereignty, tragedy and temporality, and transitional justice and liberalism.

Elaine Sisman is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University, where she has taught since 1982, serving six years as department chair (1999-2005) and was President of the American Musicological Society. The author of Haydn and the Classical Variation, Mozart: The 'Jupiter' Symphony, and editor of Haydn and His World, she specializes in music of the 18th and 19th centuries, and has written on such topics as memory and invention in late Beethoven, ideas of pathétique and fantasia around 1800, Haydn's theater symphonies, the sublime in Mozart's music, and Brahms's slow movements. 

Joseph Slaughter specializes in literature, law, and socio-cultural history of the Global South (particularly Latin America and Africa). He’s especially interested in the social work of literature—the myriad ways in which literature intersects (formally, historically, ideologically, materially) with problems of social justice, human rights, intellectual property, and international law.

Andie Tucher, a historian and former journalist, is professor of journalism and director of the Communications PhD program. She is working on a history of fake news in the US for the Columbia University Press and plans to teach a seminar on the topic in the spring. She writes widely on the evolution of truth-telling conventions in journalism, photography, personal narrative, and other nonfiction forms.

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.

Chris Washburne is Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University and the founder and director of Columbia’s Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program. He has published numerous articles on jazz, Latin jazz, and salsa. His newest book, Sounding Salsa: Performing Latin Music in New York was published in 2008 by Temple University Press.  He co-edited the volume Bad Music(Routledge, 2004) and is currently working on a book on Latin jazz which will be published by Oxford University Press.