Visiting Speakers

Patrick Wiley is an American writer, filmmaker and advocate for the Roma people. He co-founded the Romani Media Initiative alongside its creator George Eli and has provided key creative direction to many of its projects. Patrick has been a friend of the Roma People's Project at Columbia University since its inception and has aided the project as an advisor and contributor. In addition, he is a graduate student at Yale University pursuing a degree in Archaeological studies.

Richard Wittman specializes in the cultural history of architecture and town planning in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Europe. His primary interest lies in the emergence of modern configurations of space, society, and publicness, which he approaches through the history of architectural theory, criticism, and public discourse; the emergence of the modern public; and the evolution of architectural patronage in changing political contexts.

Molly Worthen’s research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history, particularly the ideas and culture of conservative Christianity. Her most recent book examines American evangelical intellectual life since 1945. Worthen teaches courses in global Christianity, North American religious and intellectual culture, and the history of politics and ideology. In 2017 she received the Manekin Family Award for Teaching Excellence in Honors Carolina. She is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and has written about religion and politics for the New Yorker, Slate, the American Prospect,Foreign Policy, and other publications.

Gillian Wylie did her MA and PhD at the University of Aberdeen in the fields of Politics and International Relations. She has been working in TCD since 2001. Her primary research interest lies in the area of human trafficking for sexual and labour exploitation in the context of globalisation. She is also interested in questions of gender as they shape war and peace. She is currently supervising PhD students in the areas of migration ethics; border politics; women, peace and security; feminist peace activism; responding to gender-based violence; gender, peacebuilding and human needs and gendered indicators for the impact of development aid. She is a member of the international editorial board of the Journal of Human Trafficking.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2016), an examination of the history and politics of Black America and the development of the social movement Black Lives Matter in response to police violence in the United States. Taylor has received the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book.

My research and teaching focus on the novel from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the history of gender and sexuality, and the relations of literature to the visual arts. As a teacher and critic, I am concerned with the way works of art both respond to and imaginatively transform their culture.  I also enjoy writing on a variety of literary and other topics for a wider public in the London Review of Books and elsewhere.  Among my recent books, Art of the Everyday (2007) concerns seventeenth-century Dutch painting as a model for literary realism and includes chapters on Balzac, George Eliot, Hardy, and Proust.  Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names (2015) asks how the naming of pictures has shaped their reception from the Renaissance to the present day.

Emrah Yıldız is 2016-17 College Fellow of the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East & North African Studies at Northwestern University. His work is a historical anthropology of routes of mobility between Iran, Turkey and Syria. His research lies at the intersection of historiography and ethnography of borders and their states; ritual practice, saints and visitation in Islam; as well as paper currency and contraband commerce in trans-regional political economy.