Faculty

Conrad Schirokauer is a Professor Emeritus of History at the City University of New York. He studied at Yale (BA) and Stanford (PhD) as well as a year in Paris, and conducted research mostly in Kyoto but also in China. His published papers and articles are mostly on Zhu Xi and Hu Hong.

Shelly Silver is is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts in the School of the Arts, Columbia University. Her work in film, video, installation and photography is funny, poetic and formally beautiful, seducing the viewer into pondering such difficult issues as the cracks in our most common assumptions, the impossibility of a shared language, and the ambivalent and yet overwhelming need to belong—to a family, a nation, a gender, an ideology. 

Pamela Smith's research interests include Early modern European history and the history of science; attitudes to nature in early modern Europe and the Scientific Revolution; and craft knowledge and historical techniques.

Anders Stephanson, Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Professor of History, specializes in 20th-century American foreign relations as well as history and theory.

Professor Stille graduated with a B.A. from Yale University and earned an M.S. at Columbia. He has worked as a contributor to The New York Times, La Repubblica, The New Yorker magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Correspondent, U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, and The Toronto Globe and Mail.

Chemistry Professor James J. Valentini was appointed Interim Dean of the College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education on Sept. 2, 2011. A member of Columbia’s faculty since 1990, Professor Valentini led Columbia’s Chemistry Department as chair from 2005 until 2008 and served as director of the Chemistry Department’s Undergraduate Studies Program, Summer Session Chemistry Program, and National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates Program from 2007 until 2011.

Professor Wennerlind specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, with a focus on intellectual history and political economy.

Josh Whitford is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Columbia University's Department of Sociology. His research interests include economic sociology, organizations, theory, political economy, comparative capitalisms, work and occupations, economic geography, and local and regional economic development.