Faculty

Saskia Hamilton joined the Barnard faculty in 2002. She is the author of As for Dream (Graywolf Press, 2001), Divide These (Graywolf, 2005), and Canal: New and Selected Poems (Arc Publications [UK], 2005).

Professor Edwards specializes in African-American and African diasporic literature, 20th-century poetry, Francophone literature, translation theory and jazz.

Professor Higgins works at the intersection of motivation and cognition and is most recently interested by the general question, "Where does value come from?" and the more specific question, "What makes a decision good?"

David Johnston's research interests include theories of justice, the liberal tradition of political theory, and the history of political thought.

Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University; Research Associate, Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge University; and, since 2012, President of the Social Science Research Council. He served as President of the American Political Science Association in 2005-06, as Chair of the Russell Sage Foundation Board of Trustees from 1999-2002, and as President of the Social Science History Association in 1997-98.

Seth Kimmel studies the literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. Before joining Columbia’s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures in 2012, Seth spent two years as a member of Stanford University’s Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities, where he taught classes on theories of secularism and religion, the history of reading, and cultural exchange and conflict among Iberian Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

Adam Kosto specializes in the institutional history of medieval Europe, with a focus on Catalonia and the Mediterranean. He received his M.Phil. from Cambridge (1990), and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1996. He is the author of Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000-1200 (Cambridge UP, 2001) and  Hostages in the Middle Ages (Oxford UP, 2012), and co-editor of The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe , 950-1350 (Ashgate, 2005), Charters, Cartularies, and Archives: The Preservation and Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West (PIMS, 2002), and Documentary Practices and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge UP, 2012).

Dorothea Lasky is the author of Thunderbird, Black Life, and AWE, all out from Wave Books. She is also the author of several chapbooks, including Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Press, 2010), The Blue Teratorn (YesYes Books, 2012), and Matter: A Picturebook (Argos Books, 2012). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and Boston Review, among other places. She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney's, 2013) and is a 2013 Bagley Wright Lecturer on Poetry. She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania and has studied at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Washington University.