Visiting Speakers

Prof. Golob teaches courses in both International Relations (The United States in an Age of Globalization) and Comparative Politics (Politics of the Third World, Latin American and Caribbean Political Systems). Similarly, her major research interest – sovereignty under globalization, with a specialization in the Western Hemisphere – occupies the intersection of these two subfields. Prof. Golob has two ongoing research projects, the first on regional integration in the NAFTA Triad (Canada-U.S.-Mexico), and the second on the globalization of ‘rule of law’ ideas and their impact on legal and judicial culture in post-authoritarian Chile and Spain. 

Rigoberto González was born in Bakersfield, California and raised in Michoacán, Mexico. He is the author of several poetry books, including So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks (1999), a National Poetry Series selection; Other Fugitives and Other Strangers (2006); Black Blossoms (2011); and Unpeopled Eden (2013), winner of a Lambda Literary Award. He has also written two bilingual children’s books, Soledad Sigh-Sighs (2003) and Antonio’s Card (2005); the novel Crossing Vines (2003), winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Fiction Book of the Year Award; and a memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (2006); and a book of stories Men without Bliss (2008). 

Philip S. Gorski (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley 1996) is a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods and in modern and early modern Europe.

Cristiana Grigore is a research scholar and the founder of the Roma People's Project at Columbia University, an initiative that spotlights Roma peoples and expands Roma studies by examining topics such as identity and stigma, mobility and displacement, and archival research and digital scholarship. Herself a Roma—a member of Europe's largest minority— she has firsthand experience internalizing stigma and concealing one's ethnicity.

Jan T. Gross studies modern Europe, focusing on comparative politics, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, Soviet and East European politics, and the Holocaust. After growing up in Poland and attending Warsaw University, he immigrated to the United States in 1969 and earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University (1975). His first book, Polish Society under German Occupation, appeared in 1979. Revolution from Abroad (1988) analyzes how the Soviet regime was imposed in Poland and the Baltic states between 1939 and 1941. 

Yifat Gutman is a sociologist and culture researcher at Ben-Gurion University and an Associate Research Fellow in the Truman Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is coeditor of Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics, and Society.

David Hajdu is the music critic for The Nation and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Before joining The Nation in January 2015, he served for more than ten years as the music critic for The New Republic. He is currently at work on a "fictional work of nonfiction," a biography of a nonexistent songwriter. He is also completing the libretto for a music-performance piece about Orson Welles. Hajdu is the author of four books of nonfiction and one collection of essays: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (2001), The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008), Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (2009), and Love for Sale: Pop Music in America (Fall 2016).

Since being awarded the Hellenic Foundation Prize for her Oxford doctorate (1988), Edith has held posts at Cambridge, Oxford, Durham and London Universities.  She has published twenty books. She is Co-Founder and Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama at Oxford and Chairman of the Gilbert Murray Trust.