Faculty

Deborah R. Coen is a historian of science whose research focuses on the modern physical and environmental sciences and on central European intellectual and cultural history. She earned an A.B. in Physics from Harvard, an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard, where she was also a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows. Before coming to Yale, she taught for ten years in the History Department at Barnard College and was Director of Research Clusters for the Columbia Center for Science and Society. At Yale she is also a member of the steering committee of the Environmental Humanities Initiative.

Julie Crawford works on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture. She has written on Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Margaret Cavendish, the Sidneys, Anne Clifford, Margaret Hoby, and  Mary Wroth, as well as on post-Reformation religious culture, the history of reading, and the history of sexuality. Her articles have appeared in Studies in English Literature, English Literary History, Renaissance Drama, PMLA, Early Modern Culture, Huntington Library Quarterly, The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare, The Oxford Companion to Popular Print Culture,  The History of British Women’s Writing, 1500-1610, and  in a wide range of edited collections. Her book, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2005, and her new book, Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England, was published by Oxford UP in 2014. She is currently completing a book entitled Margaret Cavendish's Political Career.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne received his academic training in France. An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure, he holds an agrégation in Philosophy (1978) and he took his Doctorat d’État in philosophy at the Sorbonne (1988) where he also took his BA (1977).

I am a historian of modern France and its empire, with a broad training in cultural and intellectual history. My research has led from original interests in labor history, political economy and Marxist thought to the history of medicine, war, and colonialism. My first book, What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (Chicago, 2017) explores how people once died of nostalgia in order to tell a larger story about social transformation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A work of archival research, the book develops a theory of practice as a way of grounding the history of changing concepts and emotions. I am currently coediting a multi-volume Histoire de la guerre for the Editions du Seuil and researching the extraordinary “family romance” of a French revolutionary-era citizen-soldier based on his correspondence. With this last project, tentatively titled When Emile Went to War, I wish to explore what the history of fantasies and emotions can do for a renewed interest in micro-history in our global age.

William Dougherty is an American composer whose works have been performed internationally by ensembles including the Orchestre National de Lorraine (Metz), the Lemanic Modern Ensemble (Geneva), the London Chorus (London), Ensemble Phoenix (Basel), the Mivos Quartet (New York), and Talea Ensemble (New York). His music has been performed in festivals such as the Donaueschinger Musiktage (2017), New Music Miami (2017), Tectonics Festival New York (2015), the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (2015), the 47th Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt (2014), the New York Philharmonic Biennale (2014), and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Dougherty has received recognitions and awards from the Aaron Copland House, SEAMUS/ASCAP, BMI, PARMA Recordings, the PRS for Music Society, the American Composers Forum, the Philadelphia Orchestra Association, and was recently nominated for a 2018 Gaudeamus Award. William has been invited to attend composition courses at Acanthes, Fontainebleau, Royaumont, and IMPULS.

Kathy H. Eden, Chavkin Family Professor of English Literature and Professor of Classics, specializes in renaissance humanism, history of rhetoric, hermeneutics, ancient literary theory, and history of classical scholarship. B.A., Smith (1974); Ph.D., Stanford (1980). Professor Eden began teaching at Columbia in 1980. She studies the history of rhetorical and poetic theory in antiquity, including late antiquity, and the Renaissance, within the larger context of intellectual history and with an emphasis on the problems of reception.

From 2012-14 Anthony Fort was the Musician in Residence at Bedford School, UK. During this time he was also a Supervisor at the University of Cambridge, and a Deputy Musicianship Teacher at the Royal College of Music Junior Department in London. From 2009-12 he studied Music at Girton College, Cambridge, where he was an Organ Scholar. 

Alex Gil specializes in twentieth-century Caribbean literature and Digital Humanities, with an emphasis on textual studies. His recent research in Caribbean literature focuses on the works and legacy of Aimé Césaire.