British Studies at Columbia University

PhD Cornell 1987; BA Oxford (Rhodes Scholar) 1979; SB Literature and Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1977. Author of Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Cornell, 1995), named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book, and A History of Victorian Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). From 1993-2000 he co-edited Victorian Studies, where he remains a member of the Advisory Board. He is currently at work on a project entitled The Uses of Inheritance: Identity and Agency in Britain, 1789-1895.

DPhil Balliol College, Oxford 1994; BA Yale 1990. Author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Research Interests include eighteenth-century Britain and the history of the British Empire from 1550-1850, with special attention to the British Atlantic, the history of the imperial state, and the comparative history of slavery and abolition.

PhD Harvard 2001; BA Yale 1993. Author of The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (2007). Now at work on an essay on "Trollope and America" for the Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope. Research interests include: Realism and naturalism; trans-Atlanticism.

PhD University of California, Berkeley 1997; BA Williams College 1989. Author of Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge, 2003) Research interests include 20th-century British literature; modernism and empire; gender studies; war.

PhD Harvard 1998; BA Washington University 1992. Author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (Oxford, 2001); The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford, 2007) Research interests include 19th-century British fiction; histories of the book and of reading; nineteenth-century theories of mind.

PhD Yale 1999; BA Harvard-Radcliffe 1993. Author of Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge, 2004) Research interests include Eighteenth-century British literature and culture; cultural and intellectual history, especially history of science; the contemporary novel in English. (Blog)

PhD Columbia 1993; BA Scripps College 1977. Author of Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Univ. of Chicago, 1999); co-editor of Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (Univ. of Virginia, 2007) and of Contemporary Dickens (Ohio State, forthcoming). Current projects: a book about parental feeling in 19th-century middle-class Britain and an edition of David Copperfield (Norton Critical Edition). Research interests: 19th-century literature and culture in Britain and its colonies; 19th-century moral psychology; gender, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory.

PhD Princeton 2000; BA Cambridge 1994. Author of The Poetry of Indifference: From the Romantics to the Rubáiyát (Massachusetts, 2005) and the editor of Tennyson's In Memoriam (Norton, 2004) and Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book 2 (Hackett, 2006). Research interests include Romantic and Victorian poetry; poetry and poetics; English literature and the classics.

PhD Princeton University 2000; BA Hampshire College 1992. Co-author of Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield (2003) and co-editor of a collection of primary documents and captivity narratives related to the same event entitled Captive Stories (2006). Research interests include religion, politics, cross-cultural relations, comparative colonialism, frontier studies, witchcraft, warfare, the slave trade, and the history of the book in the early modern Atlantic World.

PhD New York University 2007; BA Yale 1999. Natasha Lightfoot specializes in emancipation, race, and labor studies within the fields of Caribbean, Atlantic World, and African Diaspora History. She is currently working on a project tracing grassroots resistance and identity formation among emancipated people in Antigua.

PhD Johns Hopkins 1995; BA Brown University 1986. Author of Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999); Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton University Press, 2007) Research interests include 19th-century British and French fiction; urban and architectural history; feminist and queer theory.

JD Harvard 2001; PhD Berkeley 2000; BA Washington University 1994. Samuel Moyn works primarily on modern European intellectual history, with special interests in France and Germany, political and legal thought, historical and critical theory, and Jewish studies. Currently, he is working on a study provisionally entitled A New Theory of Politics: Claude Lefort and Company in Contemporary France and also on the recent history of human rights. He is the co-director of the New York area Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History.

PhD Harvard 1989; BA Harvard 1982. Author of Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (2004); Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (co-ed., 2005); Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France , 1914-1945 (1993); and After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain (co-ed., 1994). (Web Site)

PhD European University Institute, Florence 1989. Author of Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (University of Chicago Press 2006); Mill on Democracy: from the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (University of Chicago Press, 2002; Italian translation by Laterza 2006), which received the David and Elaine Spitz Prize as the best book in liberal and democratic theory published in 2002. She edited with Alex Zakaras a collection of essays, John Stuart Mill's Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment (Cambridge University Press 2007), has published several books in Italian, and edited Carlo Rosselli, Liberal Socialism (Princeton University Press, 1994) and Piero Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution (Yale University Press, 2000). She co-edited Le socialisme libéral. Une anthologie: Europe-Ëtats-Unis with Monique Canto-Sperber (Éditions Esprit, 2003; Italian translation by Marsilio/Reset 2004). Research interests include democratic theory; anti-democratic thought; theories of representation and sovereignty; ancient and modern political thought; theory of resistance and consent.

PhD Brandeis 1982; BA Harvard 1975. Author of Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England (1985); The First Industrial Woman (1995); contributions to A Companion to Gender History (2004) and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History (2003), as well as essays and articles on social class and poverty. Her latest book, The Social Life of Money in the English Past, appeared in 2006. Research interests include 18th- and 19th-century British history.

PhD University of Texas 1999. Coeditor of David Hume's Political Economy (Routledge); author of Money, Magic, and Death: Histories of the Financial Revolution (forthcoming, Harvard). Research interests include economic history, history of political economy.

PhD Cambridge 2005; MPhil Cambridge 1999; BA Cambridge 1998. Author of "German fresco painting and the new Houses of Parliament at Westminster, 1834-51" The Historical Journal, 47 (2004), pp. 291-329 and "Between Louis and Ludwig: from the culture of French power to the power of German culture, c. 1789-1848" in H. Scott and B. Simms, eds., Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 348- 68. Research interests include the cultural and intellectual history of late-eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain and Germany, particularly the concept of taste, processes of taste-making, and the role of tastemakers; cultural change, intercultural transfer, and trans-national exchange; nationalism and the construction of national cultures; state promotion of the arts, aesthetic approaches to governance, and the interaction between art, politics, and religion.

Faculty in British Studies at Columbia

Faculty Profiles