Students in British Studies at Columbia
A directory of students in British Studies at Columbia, and their interests.
Anna Danziger Halperin
Anna Danziger Halperin studies twentieth century American and British social policy and its effects on women and children, with a particular interest in child care. She graduated from Barnard College in 2006 with a degree in History and Human Rights. Before returning to Columbia in 2010, Anna conducted research and coauthored several reports on U.S. child care policies and other related issues affecting low-wage working families during her employment with the Urban Institute and the Institute for Women's Policy Research.
Asheesh Kapur Siddique
Asheesh Kapur Siddique entered the Columbia graduate program in History in 2009 after receiving his AB from Princeton University (2007) and M.Phil from the University of Oxford (2009). His interests lie in the history of the book and the social history of political thought in the modern Atlantic World.
Ben Parker
Ben Parker is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative literature since 2006, having received his BA from Columbia in 2005. His dissertation lacks a finalized title, but the subtitle will certainly be "Plot and the Cognitive Modalities of Victorian Fiction." Research interests include: Victorian financial crises, bourgeois political economy, and theories of historicism (particularly Marxist debates).
Daniel Wright
Daniel Wright is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature who specializes in British literature and intellectual history of the Victorian and modernist periods. His dissertation analyzes the novelistic uses of forms of ?bad logic? (such as contradiction, tautology, vagueness, and unreflective drifting) for making erotic desire ethically meaningful. A portion of this project, on Anthony Trollope and tautology, is forthcoming in ELH. Research interests include the theory of the novel; gender and sexuality; literature and philosophy, especially ethics, ordinary language philosophy, and political philosophy; and psychoanalysis.
Deborah Aschkenes
A PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Deborah Aschkenes specializes in the nineteenth-century British novel. Her dissertation project asks: how did British thinking about the formation of mental images shape description in the novel? Other research interests include classical rhetoric, natural history, and Victorian psychology and aesthetics.
Katie Gemmill
Katie Gemmill is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She holds an MA in English from McGill and a BAH in English and Italian from Queen's University. She focuses on British prose of the long 18th century, which she values for its simultaneous elegance and eccentricity. She is particularly curious about the period's Anglo-French literary relations and intellectual exchange. She has published two articles on Jane Austen's novelistic practice, and her most recent work focuses on Frances Burney's archive of French journals.
Lucas Kwong
Lucas Kwong (B.A., Yale) is a PhD candidate in English specializing in religion and Victorian literature. He is currently writing his dissertation on the representation of religious practices in late Victorian gothic and fantasy fiction, focusing on the ways that such representations index shifting attitudes towards the emergent pluralism of the period. Portions of his chapter on Dracula were selected for presentation at both the 2012 MACBS and NAVSA conferences. His other interests include postcolonial theory and rethinking secularization.
Nicole Longpre
Nicole Longpre is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History. She received her MA and BAH from Queen's University, Canada in 2009 and 2008 respectively. Her current interests include twentieth century British political history, immigration, social policy, and Atlantic conceptions of conservatism.
Olivia Moy
Olivia Moy is a PhD candidate in English specializing in nineteenth century poetry. Her dissertation work explores confinement and claustrophobia in poems of the Romantic and Victorian eras. She completed her undergraduate degree at Princeton in 2006, where her work on W.H. Auden was awarded the Thomas H. Maren thesis prize.
Peter Walker
Peter Walker (B.A., University of Oxford, 2008; M.Phil., University of Oxford, 2010) studies modern British history, with interests in national identity, citizenship and religious toleration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His M.Phil. dissertation was entitled '"A Free and Protestant People"? The Campaign for the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, 1786-1828'.
Rashmi Sahni
Rashmi Sahni is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She taught English Literature to undergraduates at the University of Delhi before joining Columbia University. Her dissertation work examines the significance of prayers, premonitions, curses and providential design in novels dealing with detection and punishment of crimes in eighteenth-century Britain. Other research interests include British cultural and intellectual history, eighteenth-century women's writing, Restoration drama, oriental tales, and genre and narrative theories.
Ryder Kessler
Ryder Kessler is a PhD candidate in the department of English and Comparative Literature, focusing on British and American novels from the mid-nineteenth through early twentieth centuries. He is particularly interested in how these novels thematically and formally explore the conflict between chance and choice in shaping individuals' life outcomes.
Sarah Minsloff
Sarah Minsloff came to Columbia from the University of Wisconsin to study British literature and theories of sexuality and gender. She is currently writing her dissertation on poetry quotation and the concept of the poetic in nineteenth-century English novels. Other interests include the Victorian marriage plot, detective fiction, and French and British Medieval romance.
Simon Stevens
Simon Stevens came to Columbia from Cambridge University, and is now a third-year PhD student in International and Global History. His research interests focus on the policies toward South Africa in the apartheid period of governments, activist groups, corporations, and sporting bodies, primarily in Britain and the United States. He is the author of "'From the Viewpoint of a Southern Governor': The Carter Administration and Apartheid, 1977-1981," forthcoming in Diplomatic History.
Stephen Wertheim
Stephen Wertheim is a doctoral candidate in History. He specializes in international ideas and institutions and U.S. foreign relations since the nineteenth century. With the support of a Javits Fellowship, he is researching the transformation of "liberal internationalism" in Britain and America from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Stephen received his BA from Harvard University (2007). Some of his writings may be found on his website.
Stephanie O'Rourke
Stephanie O'Rourke is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History and Archeology specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art. Her research interests include the sublime, Romanticism, theories of spectatorship, and scientific discourses of the body.
Toby Harper
Toby Harper has been a student in the history department at Columbia since 2007, specializing in modern British history. In 2010-2011 he is in the UK doing research for his dissertation, which looks at the political, cultural and social history of the British honours system (including its imperial dimensions) since 1917. Before coming to Columbia, he completed a MA at the University of Auckland on religious belief in 1920s New Zealand.
