Visiting Speakers

Samuel Moyn is professor of law and history at Harvard University. He earned a doctorate in modern European history from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000 and a law degree from Harvard Law School in 2001.

Andrew Murphy’s research focuses on the interconnections between religious and political thought and practice, most particularly in the Anglo-American tradition. He is the author of Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11 (Oxford, 2009) and Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (Penn State, 2001).

As a political ecologist trained in geography's nature-society tradition, I seek to explain relationships between the material world (microbes, crops, and economies) and the way people understand that world (as mitigated through institutions, culture, and experience).  In particular, I research the interactions among local people and government or development workers, as well as between people and non-human actors like crops, nutrients, and witchcraft. This approach reveals that by paying attention to, for example, the addition of beetroot to gardens and cooking pots, the abandonment of long-standing healing rituals, and the failure of anti-tuberculosis campaigns, we can understand how local people and places shape state and international development initiatives.  In my research, I use a mix of methods including oral history collection, ethnography, household surveys, focus groups, participatory GIS, and archival research to understand local thinking and practices.  To understand non-human actors, I use epidemiological and ecological data and scientific work (with a critical eye to the social production of that work)

Ondaatje is one of the world's foremost writers – his artistry and aesthetic have influenced an entire generation of writers and readers. Although he is best known as a novelist, Ondaatje’s work also encompasses poetry, memoir, and film, and reveals a passion for defying conventional form. His transcendent novel The English Patient, explores the stories of people history fails to reveal by intersecting four diverse lives at the end of World War II. The bestselling novel won the Booker Prize and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film.  

Guy Ortolano is a historian of modern Britain. He teaches surveys of British and European history since the eighteenth century, and seminars on urban history and the history of science. He also offers a course on Britain since the Roman Empire for NYU’s College Core, as well as the History Department’s introduction to historical studies. Ortolano is currently Director of Undergraduate Studies in History, and Chair of the University Seminar in British History at Columbia University.

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. Her first two novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003), have been translated into 11 languages and published in 14 countries. Her most recent work, A Tale for the Time-Being (2013), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and will be published in over thirty countries.

Prabhat Patnaik is one of India’s most eminent economists

Julie Ezelle Patton is a New York City based poet and visual artist.  She is also the founder of an eco-arts housing & land conservation project based in a rust belt city orbiting the rock star Detroit. Poet Tree Mitigation Services, Salon des Refusé, Community Service Berry Jam are some of niches mined in this galaxy. She jams with Paul Van Curen, Daniel Carter, Brad Jones, Anne Waldman, Drew Gardner, mockingbirds and cats.