Mendelson Family Professor of American Studies
Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities
Email: ad19@columbia.edu
Andrew Delbanco, winner of the 2006 Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates, is the author of Melville: His World and Work (2005), The Death of Satan (1995), Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now (1997), The Real American Dream (1999), and The Puritan Ordeal (1989).
Professor Delbanco's essays appear regularly in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Raritan, and other journals, on topics ranging from American literary and religious history to contemporary issues in higher education. In 2001, he was named by Time Magazine as "America's Best Social Critic."
In February 2012, President Barack Obama presented Professor Delbanco with the National Humanities Medal for his writings on higher education and the place classic authors hold in history and contemporary life.
Associate Director
Chair, Board of Advisors
Department affiliation: Political Science
Email: rla2@columbia.edu
Chair, Committee on Civic Engagement
Director, Freedom and Citizenship Program
Founding Director, American Studies Program
Email: cb460@columbia.edu
Casey Nelson Blake is a professor in the Department of History. He specializes in modern U.S. intellectual and cultural history and American studies, with an emphasis on topics at the intersection of modernist art and politics in the twentieth century.
He is the author of several works including The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State and the forthcoming Public Art and the Civic Imagination in Modernist America and Crisis of Confidence: Politics, Culture and Social Thought in the 1970s.
Assistant Director
Email: amd44@columbia.edu
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BOARD OF ADVISORS
The Board of Advisors for American Studies includes Professors Delbanco and Amdur as well as those listed below.
Department affiliation: History
Email: jdd2002@columbia.edu
Joanna Dee is a PhD candidate in History at Columbia University, focusing on twentieth century cultural history, both US and international. She received her BA in Dance and History in 2005 from Columbia, and her MA in American Studies in 2008 from NYU. She was also a member of the Tze Chun dance company from 2006-2008, and has presented her own choreography at various theaters in New York City and St. Louis.
Department affiliation: English & Comparative Literature
Email: amd2114@columbia.edu
Alicia DeSantis is a Ph.D. candidate in English and American Literature at Columbia. She graduated from Harvard in 2000 and then moved to New York, where she worked as a graphic designer. She writes about literature, but also about photography, illustration and journalism, particularly in the 19th century.
Department affiliation: History
Email: mkd2102@columbia.edu
Megan Doherty completed her Ph.D. in the History department in 2011.
Her dissertation considered the ways writers from around the world
came together under the umbrella of the organization PEN International
between the years 1921-1970. Her research interests include
cross-cultural exchange, cultural diplomacy, and the construction of
American identity in relation to other nations. She currently serves
as a Lecturer teaching Contemporary Civilization in the Core
Curriculum. In her spare time she uses work for Big Onion Walking
Tours and the New-York Historical Society as an excuse to get out and
explore the history and street life of New York City."
Department affiliation: English & Comparative Literature
Email: jhl2152@columbia.edu
Jessica lee is a second year student in the History PhD program at Columbia. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 2008 where she majored in History and Italian Literature. Her current research interests include Italian and Latin American migration to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concerning questions of citizenship, patriotism, national identity, and gender.
Department affiliation: English & Comparative Literature
Email: jml2198@columbia.edu
Jared Lister is a Ph.D. candidate working on nineteenth century American literature and intellectual history. His research interests include pragmatism,
autobiography, and narrative and medicine. He received his B.A. in English from Stanford University in 2005.
Department affiliation: History
Email: tbm2105@columbia.edu
B.A., Duke University (2001); M.T.S., Harvard Divinity School (2005). Tamara Mann is a Ph.D. candidate in American History. Her research interests include philanthropic history, legal history, and American intellectual and cultural history. Tamara recently received the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for her dedication to teaching and mentorship.
Department affiliation: History
Email: dm2787@columbia.edu
B.A. Kenyon College (2006). David Marcus is a PhD candidate in the history department, where he studies American intellectual and political history. He is particularly interested in the rise of neoliberalism as a paradigm in social theory and public policy over the last quarter century and in the social thought and novels of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Outside of graduate school, David is an editor at *Dissent*, where he also occasionally contributes essays and book reviews. David's research interests include 19th and 20th century intellectual and political history; in particular, with the novels, social theories, art, and politics of the past four decades.
Associate Dean, Columbia College
Director, Center for the Core Curriculum
Email: rm63@columbia.edu
A.B., Columbia, (1995), M.A., Columbia (1996), Ph.D., Columbia (2004). Roosevelt Montás specializes in Antebellum American literature and culture, with a specific interest in citizenship and American national identity. His dissertation, "Rethinking America: Abolitionism and the Antebellum Transformation of the Discourse of National Identity," won the 2004 Bancroft Award. He is also Director of Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum, where he has taught both Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization. He is currently writing on the interrelated biographies Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Sumner. He also lectures and writes on the history and future of liberal arts education.
Department affiliation: English & Comparative Literature
Email: zjr2105@columbia.edu
Zachary Roberts is a Ph.D candidate in the department of English and Comparative Literature. He received his B.A. in English from Bowdoin College in 2008. His research interests include nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, modernism, and ecocriticism.
Department affiliation: English & Comparative Literature
Email: cms2197@columbia.edu
B.A., English and Art History, Swarthmore (2003). Christine Smallwood is a PhD candidate in English and American literature focusing on the 19th century novel. Her essays and reviews have been published in The Nation, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, The Baffler and other publications.
Department affiliation: English & Comparative Literature
Email: mls37@columbia.edu
Maura Spiegel teaches the Introduction to American Studies, and various courses in contemporary American Fiction, American literature of the Progressive Era and of the Nineteenth Century. She also teaches and writes about American film. She is the Co-Editor of the journal Literature and Medicine, and she is involved with the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia's School of Physicians and Surgeons. She has special interests in American photography, stand-up comedy, the city in literature and film and the dynamics between history and memory.
Department affiliation: English & Comparative Literature
Email: mlv2124@columbia.edu
B.A., Spanish Literature and Anthropology, University of Virginia (2005); M.A., English, University of Virginia (2008). Lindsay Van Tine is a PhD student in the department of English & Comparative Literature focusing on 19th- and 20th-century American literature and culture. She is particularly interested in comparative, hemispheric approaches to American Studies; research interests include national identity, migration, and translation.
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Disability in American Life; Food and American Life
Email: rea15@columbia.edu
B.A, University of California, Berkeley (1990); M.A., University of Michigan (1992); Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara (1997). Professor Adams specializes in 19th- and 20th-century literatures of the United States and the Americas, media studies, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, and disability studies. She is the author of Continental Divides: Reframing the Cultures of North America (2009) and Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (2001).
American Culture and Politics in the 1930s; Cultural Criticism in America
Chair, Committee on Civic Engagement
Director, Freedom and Citizenship Program
Founding Director, American Studies Program
Email: cb460@columbia.edu
Casey Nelson Blake is a professor in the Department of History. He specializes in modern U.S. intellectual and cultural history and American studies, with an emphasis on topics at the intersection of modernist art and politics in the twentieth century.
He is the author of several works including The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State and the forthcoming Public Art and the Civic Imagination in Modernist America and Crisis of Confidence: Politics, Culture and Social Thought in the 1970s.
History of the Supreme Court
Email: lynne_kosobucki@njd.uscourts.gov
Joseph A. Greenaway, Jr. received his commission from President Obama as the sixty- second jurist appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on February 12, 2010. Judge Greenaway was sworn in on February 24, 2010. He sits in Newark, New Jersey. Judge Greenaway earned his B.A. in history from Columbia College in 1978 and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1981.
Cultures of Harlem
Email: fjg8@columbia.edu
B.A., Harvard (1985); Ph.D.,Yale (1992). Professor Griffin's major fields of interest are African American literature, music, history and politics. The recipient of numerous honors and awards for her teaching and scholarship, in 1996-97 Professor Griffin was a fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin’: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995) and If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001). She is also the editor of Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus (Knopf, 1999) co-editor, with Cheryl Fish, of Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing (Beacon, 1998)and co-editor with Brent Edwards and Robert O'Meally of Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). She is currently Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies.
Gender History and American Film
Email: hah2117@columbia.edu
Ph.D., CUNY Graduate Center (2005); B.F.A. NYU (1990). Hilary Hallett is a U.S. cultural historian who taught at Rutgers University and the Johns Hopkins University before coming to Columbia as postdoctoral fellow in 2007. Her current research interests work at the intersection of gender history, popular and mass culture, and the history of the Modern American West. She is now completing her manuscript, tentatively titled, Go West! Young Women: Early Hollywood and the Rise of Sexual Modernism (under contract with the University of California press).
New York Intellectuals
Email: ak3111@columbia.edu
Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist for Tablet magazine. He is the author of two collections of poems, "The Thousand Wells" and "Invasions"; two books of poetry criticism, "The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets" and "The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry"; and a short biography, "Benjamin Disraeli." His essays and reviews appear regularly in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications.
Immigrant New York
Email: rk2351@columbia.edu
B.A. Yale University (1994); M.Phil. University of Pennsylvania (1995); Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania (2002). Rebecca Kobrin works in the field of American Jewish History. Professor Kobrin served as the Hilda Blaustein Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2002–2004) and the American Academy of Jewish Research Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University (2004–2006). Her area of specialty is Jewish immigration history, which she approaches through a transnational lens. Her research interests span from the fields of urban history to American religion and diaspora studies.
Equity in American Higher Education
Email: lehecka@columbia.edu
Roger Lehecka retired from a long career at Columbia University at the end
of 2004. Among other positions he held at the University, he was Dean of
Students for 19 years. He was a founder of Columbia's Upward Bound
Program in 1965, an experience that taught him more about the ways access
to college is not equally available to all talented youngsters. His three
years with Upward Bound led to a career in higher education that always
focused on expanding opportunity for those previously excluded from a
college education. He remains involved at Columbia in a number of ways and has been teaching the Equity in Higher Education seminar with Prof. Delbanco annually since 2007. In his current work Mr. Lehecka helps low-income students from New York City, rural Pennsylvania, and central Florida get admitted to good colleges and find the financial aid to attend. He continues to advise them throughout college, wherever they enroll, to help them through the
difficult times most students face. Mr. Lehecka attended New York City public schools before entering Columbia College. He has a Masters degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education as well as an A.B. and M.Phil. from Columbia University.
Transmedia
Paul Levitz was extensively involved in transmedia in his four decades with DC
Comics ending as President and Publisher from 2002-2009. His award-winning book, 75 Years of DC Comics, The Art of Modern Mythmaking, was published last fall, and a recent collection of his comics, Legion of Super-Heroes: The Choice, appeared on the New York Times Graphic Books bestseller list.
The Languages of America
Email: jm3156@columbia.edu
John McWhorter teaches linguistics in the Core program and in American Studies. He specializes in language contact and change, and has written What Language Is, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, and The Power of Babel. His work on race appears in the New Republic and The Root.com, at both of which he is Contributing Editor, and he is tha author of Losing the Race and Winning the Race. McWhorter has also done three audiovisual courses for The Teaching Company.
Philip Roth's America; The Problem of Class in American Literature and Culture; Blacks and Jews
Email: rp2045@columbia.edu
B.A. Kenyon, Ph.D. Johns Hopkins. Professor Posnock was Andrew Hilen Professor of American Literature at the University of Washington before teaching in the English department at New York University from 2000 to 2004. His books include Henry James and the Problem of Robert Browning (1985, University of Georgia Press); The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James and the Challenge of Modernity (1991, Oxford UP); and Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Harvard UP, 1998). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison (2005) and his book Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity was published by Princeton UP in 2006. He is series editor of Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture and is a contributing editor of Raritan and American Literary History. In 1994 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Race, Poverty, and American Criminal Justice
Email: cip1@columbia.edu
Cathleen Price is a 1992 graduate of Columbia College who presently practices law. She works on behalf of death-sentenced prisoners, offenders subject to excessively harsh punishments, and communities marginalized by
poverty and chronic discrimination. She is a 1996 graduate of Harvard Law
School, which in 2004 awarded her its Gary Bellow Public Service Award.
Hispanic New York
Email: cir2001@columbia.edu
Claudio Iván Remeseira received an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University (2002) and Licenciado en filosofía from Universidad de Buenos Aires (1990). He is a New York-based award-winning journalist, writer and cultural critic born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Editor of "Hispanic New York: A Sourcebook" (2010). Founder and director of the Hispanic New York Project, hosted by Columbia University American Studies Program, he is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Library & Archives of El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College, City University of New York. Curator of the Hispanic New York Film Festival, co-sponsored by Columbia University and Instituto Cervantes, in collaboration with The Film Society of Lincoln Center. His literary and journalistic work has appeared in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Salmagundi, Primera Revista Latinoamericana de Libros, Diario Rumbo, Hora Hispana (Daily News), El Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico), El País (Spain) and La Nación, Página/12, and Lilith magazine (Argentina), among other publications.
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AFFILIATED FACULTY
Allan Nevins Professor of American History
Provost Emeritus, Columbia University
Email: ab65@columbia.edu
B.A. Princeton University (1971); M.A - Harvard University (1975); Ph.D. Harvard University (1979). From 2003 to 2008, Alan Brinkley was University Provost, and for three years before that chair of the Department of History. He been at Columbia since 1991 and taught previously at M.I.T., Harvard, and the City University Graduate School. In 1998-99, he was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. His published works include Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (1982), which won the 1983 National Book Award; The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People (1992); The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995); Liberalism and Its Discontents (1998); Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2009); and The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (2010). His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in scholarly journals and in such periodicals as the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books. He has been the recipient of the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize at Harvard and the Great Teacher Award at Columbia. He is chairman of the board of trustees of the Century Foundation, a trustee of Oxford University Press, a trustee of the National Humanities Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
George Edward Woodberry Professor in Law, Literature and Criticism, School of Law
Email: raf2@columbia.edu
Harvard University B.A 1964; J.D. 1968; Ph.D. 1974. On the faculty of the University of Chicago, 1978-89; Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, 1987-89; has also taught at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford. Joined the Columbia faculty in 1989. Academic honors and prizes include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987-88), a Fellowship to the National Humanities Center (1994-95), and the Willard Hurst Award for Legal History from the Law and Society Association as well as the distinguished teaching awards at the University of Chicago (1982), Columbia University (1998), and Columbia Law School (2003).
Dewitt Clinton Professor of History
Email: ef17@columbia.edu
Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and 19th-century America. He is one of only two persons to serve as President of the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, and Society of American Historians. He has also been the curator of several museum exhibitions, including the prize-winning “A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln,” at the Chicago Historical Society. He is currently working on a book, "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery."
Professor of Journalism and Sociology
Chair, Ph.D. in Communications, School of Journalism
Email: tg2058@columbia.edu
Todd Gitlin attended New York City public schools, where he graduated as valedictorian of the Bronx High School of Science. He holds degrees in three different subjects: mathematics (B. A., Harvard), political science (M. A., Michigan), and sociology (Ph. D., Berkeley). Along the way, he became a political activist in the New Left of the 1960s, contributed to the so-called underground press, and began to write books. He's written twelve books, chiefly on media and recent America. He contributes to many newspapers and magazines, lectures frequently in the United States and abroad, is a member of the editorial board of Dissent,and is online regularly at TPMcafe.com and CJR.org.
R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower
Email: ak571@columbia.edu
Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History is also Professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Dr. Kessler-Harris specializes in the history of American labor and the comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of women and gender. She received her B. A. from Goucher College (1961) and her Ph.D. from Rutgers (1968). Her published works include: In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (2001); Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982); A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (1990); and Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview (1981). She is co-editor of Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe , Australia , and the United States , 1880–1920 (1995) and U.S. History as Women’s History (1995). Her most recent book, Gendering Labor History (2007), contains her essays on women’s work and social policy.
Professor of Religion
Email: wlp2@columbia.edu
Wayne Proudfoot (B.S., Yale, 1961; B.D., Harvard Divinity, 1965; Th.M., Harvard Divinity, 1966; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1972) is a Professor, specializing in the philosophy of religion. His research interests include contemporary philosophy of religion, the ideas of religious experience and mysticism, classical and contemporary pragmatism, and modern Protestant thought. He teaches courses on eighteenth and nineteenth century European religious thought, theories and methods for the study of religion, philosophy of religion, and pragmatism and religion. His publications include "God and the Self" and "Religious Experience". His current research is on pragmatism and American religious thought. He has published articles on Charles Peirce and William James and is working on a book on that topic.
Professor of History, Barnard College
Email: RRosenberg@barnard.edu
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Wayne Proudfoot
Rosalind Rosenberg