Faculty

Elizabeth Hutchinson is interested in the relationship between the visual culture of a variety of North American groups and its viewers. Taking as a starting point the ongoing impact of the colonial history of the Americas, her work uses the tools of close visual analysis, feminist and postcolonial theory, and cultural history to bring out objects' contributions to historical and current cultural debates. Key issues motivating her work include visuality and modernity, transculturation in the arts of the Americas, and comparative analyses of the visual culture of the United States and other colonial cultures. She has explored these topics in relationship to photography, painting, film, illustration, the built environment and the decorative arts.

Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974 and specializes in the study of African history and politics. His works explore the intersection between politics and culture, a comparative study of colonialism since 1452, the history of civil war and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, and the history and theory of human rights. Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, Mamdani was a professor at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania (1973-79), Makerere University in Uganda (1980-1993), and the University of Cape Town (1996-1999).  He has received numerous awards and recognitions, including being listed as one of the 'Top 20 Public Intellectuals' by Foreign Policy (US) and Prospect (UK) magazine in 2008. From 1998 to 2002 he served as President of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa). His essays have appeared in the New Left Review and the London Review of books, among other journals.

Professor Safwan M. Masri is Executive Vice President for Global Centers and Global Development at Columbia University, and a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA)

Tey Meadow is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality. Her scholarship spans the domains of law, politics, the family, sexuality and gender, with a specific focus on the creation and maintenance of social classifications.

Alberto Medina specializes in XVIIIth-century studies, contemporary Spanish literature and film, and transatlantic studies. 
He is the author of Exorcismos de la memoria: políticas y poéticas de la melancolía en la España de la transición, and Espejo de sombras: sujeto y multitud en la España del siglo XVIII. His articles have been published in journals such as Hispania, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Iberoamericana and Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.

Christia Mercer studied art history in New York and Rome, before going to graduate school in philosophy (PhD, Princeton University, 1989). Among other awards, she has received a Fulbright Scholarship (1984-85), Humboldt Fellowship (1993-94) and NEH Fellowship (2002). She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2012-13) and, along Seamus Heaney, a Resident Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (Spring, 2013). Most recently, she is the recipient of an ACLS (2015-16), Folger Library Fellowship (2016), a Senior Visiting Professor at Harvard University's Villa I Tatti Library, Florence, Italy (2015), and Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2018-19). Mercer is proudest of her teaching awards. She won the 2008 Columbia College Great Teacher Award, and the 2012 Mark van Doren Award, which annually recognizes a professor for “commitment to undergraduate instruction, as well as for humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership.” She is also the Director of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy.

B.A. Columbia, 1994; M.Phil. (Intellectual History and Political Thought) Cambridge, 1996; Ph.D.  (English) Yale, 2004.  Molly Murray teaches and writes about the non-dramatic literature of early modern England.  Her main scholarly interests lie at the intersection of religion, politics, and poetic form; additional interests include autobiography, intellectual history, and the history of criticism.  Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in English Literary History, Studies in English Literature, Huntington Library Quarterly, Renaissance and Reformation, and Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, 2007).  She is also a contributor to the Blackwell Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, and the Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of St. Augustine.  She is the author of a monograph, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge, 2009), and is currently at work on a book-length study of literature and imprisonment from Wyatt to Milton.

Kate Orff’s activist and visionary work on design for climate dynamics has been shared and developed in collaboration with arts institutions, governments, and scholars worldwide. She is an Associate Professor at Columbia GSAPP and Director of the Urban Design Program, where she coordinates complex interdisciplinary studios centered on urban systems of the future. Her design studios and seminars aim to discover new ways of integrating social life, infrastructure, urban form, biodiversity and community-based change.