Faculty

Dr. Lifton, psychiatrist and scholar, is chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of war and political violence. He is a National Book Award winner, and is the author of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Witness to an Extreme Century, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, and other books.  

Gregory Mann is an historian of francophone West Africa. He is currently working on a book project entitled The End of the Road: Nongovernmentality in the West African Sahel. Drawing on research conducted primarily in Mali, the project analyzes the rise of novel forms of political rationality among governments and non-governmental organizations in the Sahel from 1946 to the late 1970s. His award-winning book Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the 20th Century was published by Duke University Press in 2006. Mann's articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of African History and Politique Africaine, among other publications. His writing on contemporary West African politics has appeared in Foreign Policy, the Review of African Political Economy, and in various media outlets. He blogs periodically with the Africa Is a Country collective (Africasacountry.com).

Sharon Marcus is Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University as well as the co-founder and co-editor in chief of Public Books, a bimonthly review of books, arts, and ideas.

Mark Mazower is a historian and writer, specialising in modern Greece, 20th century Europe, and international history.

Malgorzata Mazurek specializes in modern history of Poland and East Central Europe. Her interests include twentieth-century social sciences, international development, social history of communism and Polish-Jewish relations.

Hlonipha Mokoena's main area of interest is South African intellectual history. One of the defining characteristics of South Africa is that it is a society that ostensibly lacks a collective history or shared philosophical and political traditions. The main objective of Professor Mokoena's teaching is to introduce students to the contested histories of South African political ideas and traditions. Some of the themes and topics examined in her courses include: othering discourses and the emergence of a Cape discourse; slavery, free labour and the history of paternalism; frontier violence and resistance to conquest; and the emergence of African and Afrikaner nationalisms.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and scholar. She is the recipient of Ford, Truman, Scripps Howard, Rockefeller, and Pew fellowships as well as a Social Science Research Council and Andy Warhol Foundation grants. She is the editor of several books, including Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Nationalism and Colonialism; None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era, and Sovereign Acts.

Alondra Nelson is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. An interdisciplinary social scientist, she writes about the intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality. Nelson is the author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press), which was recognized with four scholarly awards, including the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award from the Eastern Sociological Society and the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association (Section on Race, Gender and Class).