of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Introduction In 2008-09 and 2009-10 the Faculty of Arts and Sciences undertook a review of faculty governance, spearheaded by the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (ECFAS) and carried out by the Academic Review Committee (ARC). In Spring 2010 the recommendations of the ARC review were shared with the entire Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Fruitful consultations between ECFAS, ARC, Department Chairs, Administration, and Faculty informed the entire process. A subsequent vote of the entire Faculty was held to amend the Stated Rules of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and thereby implement one of the recommendations of the review: to replace the form of faculty governance exercised by ECFAS with a new proposed system, to be structured by the formation of a new faculty committee to be called the Policy and Planning Committee. The proposed amendment to the Stated Rules passed in April 2010. (The Stated Rules can be found at the link on the left.) Past years' PPC rosters are found at the bottom of this page. Educational Policy and Planning Committee In August 2011, the PPC proposed the establishment of the Educational Policy and Planning Committee in a memo to Executive Vice President Nicholas Dirks. That memo and the announcement of the formation of that new committee and its members can be found here (and also on the navigation link to the left). Policy and Planning Committee, 2012-13
Members in the SOCIAL SCIENCES: |
|
 |
Yinon Cohen is the Yosef H. Yerushalmi Professor of Israeli and Jewish Studies, and Chair of the Department of Sociology. His areas of research include social stratification, labor markets, labor market discrimination, socioeconomic ethnic and gender gaps, industrial relations, international migration, selectivity and economic assimilation of immigrants, and Israeli society. Recent and current research projects include the migration of highly skilled workers, causes for rising income inequality in the U.S. and Israel, and the changing demography of Israeli settlers in the Occupied West Bank. Before joining Columbia in 2007, Cohen taught at Tel Aviv University where he served as chair of the senior faculty union. |
 |
E. Valentine Daniel is a professor of Anthropology whose consuming interest is in the relevance of the writings of Charles S. Peirce and Martin Heidegger for anthropological theory and practice. European modernity begins and is sustained, he holds, by the--unwarranted? --questions raised by Descartes and the --inadequate?--answers provided by him and most major thinkers in the western intellectual tradition who followed him. And anthropology is a capricious child of such a modernity because of its encounter with systems of thought and action that interrogate this modernity on the one hand and its filial loyalty to its own disciplinary heritage on the other. Peirce and Heidegger, as two of the most powerful critics of Cartesianism, show us ways of connecting non-western (ethnographic) critiques to western modernism’s (philosophical) critiques deriving from these two thinkers. Against this broad problematique, he does research and writes on semeiotic, violence, refugees and plantation labor. His geographic areas of research are South India and Sri Lanka. |
 |
Jack Snyder, the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations in the political science department, has taught at Columbia since 1981. He has served as chair of the political science department, chair of the Academic Review Committee, director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies, and acting director of the Harriman Institute. His books include Religion and International Relations Theory (Columbia University Press, 2011), Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (MIT Press, 2005), co-authored with Edward D. Mansfield; From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (Norton Books, 2000); Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Cornell University Press, 1991); and The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Cornell 1984). A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Snyder received a B.A. in government from Harvard University in 1973, the Certificate of Columbia's Russian Institute in 1978, and a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia in 1981. |
| Members in the HUMANITIES: | |
 |
Teodolinda Barolini, PPC Chair 2010-11, is Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Medieval Academy of America. She was fifteenth President of the Dante Society of America (1997-2003). After receiving her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1978, Barolini taught at the University of California at Berkeley and New York University before returning to Columbia University in 1992 as Chair of the Department of Italian, serving in that capacity until 2004. She has served on numerous Committees, including ECFAS, which she chaired in 1995-1996, TRAC, and ARC, which she chaired in 2000-2001 and 2009-2010. She is the author of Dante?s Poets (Princeton, 1984; Italian trans., Bollati Boringhieri, 1993; winner of the Marraro Prize of the Modern Language Association and the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy), The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton, 1992; Italian trans., Feltrinelli, 2003), and Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (Fordham, 2006; Italian trans. Bompiani, forthcoming; winner of the Premio Flaiano, 2007). The first volume of her commentary to Dante?s lyrics, Rime giovanili e della "Vita Nuova", was published by Rizzoli in 2009. |
 |
Nicholas Dames is the Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities and Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He is a specialist in the novel, with particular attention to the novel of the nineteenth century in Britain and on the European continent; his interests also include novel theory, the history of reading, and the aesthetics of prose fiction from the seventeenth century to the present. He is the author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (Oxford, 2001), which was awarded the Sonya Rudikoff Prize by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association; and The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford, 2007). He was awarded Columbia’s Presidential Teaching Award in 2005, and in 2008 he was named a recipient of the Gerry Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. In 2005-2006 he was a Charles Ryskamp Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2009 he served as Chair of the MLA’s Executive Division on Prose Fiction. He is a founding member and on the Executive Board of the Society for Novel Studies (SNS). Along with Prof. Susan Pedersen of the History Department, he co-runs British Studies at Columbia. His current project is a history of the chapter, from the textual cultures of late antiquity, particularly the editorial and scribal practices of early Christianity, to the modern novel. |
 |
Cathy Popkin (Ph.D., Stanford; B.A., Wesleyan) is the Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Russian. She is the author of The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol and a number of articles on nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture. Her new Norton Critical Edition of Anton Chekhov's Selected Stories is the first in that series to focus explicitly on the question of translation. Work in progress includes a book manuscript, "Bodies of Knowledge: Chekhov's Corpus," a co-edited volume ("Teaching Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature"), and two essays ("Trees Are People Too: Turgenev and Metaphoricity"; "Chekhov and the Medical Humanities"). Her recent work is motivated by a concern with bodies, knowledge, and the meaning of space, place, and resemblance, as well as a particular interest in nineteenth-century psychiatric and documentary practices. Popkin moved to Columbia from Dartmouth in 1986 and has been active in faculty governance at all levels: department (Chair, Slavic Langs.); College/GS (Chair, Literature Humanities and Committee on the Core; member , COI; President, Phi Beta Kappa; DUS,); GSAS (DGS); Arts and Sciences (ECFAS, Faculty Budget Group, Internal ARC Review of Faculty Governance Structures; Convener and Chair, Administrative Advisory Group); University (TRAC). Popkin was one of the authors of the report that recommended the creation of the PPC. |
|
Members in the NATURAL SCIENCES: |
|
 |
Stuart Firestein is a professor and chair of the biological sciences department. He is an advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program for the Public Understanding of Science. In 2010, he received the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for excellence in scholarship and teaching. He was also recently elected to become a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). His most recent book, Ignorance, was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press. |
 |
Robert Friedman (Ph.D., Harvard 1981) has been in the Mathematics Department of Columbia University for 30 years. He has been chair of the Mathematics Department (2001-2004) and a member of ECFAS (chair in 2007-08). His research is centered on algebraic geometry and its connections with topology, mathematical physics, and the theory of Lie groups. His books include Smooth Four-Manifolds and Complex Surfaces (with John Morgan) and Algebraic Surfaces and Holomorphic Vector Bundles. His current research is concerned with understanding the period domains associated to Calabi-Yau manifolds. |
 |
Ann McDermott, is the Esther Breslow Professor of Biological Chemistry and Chair of the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University. She has a B.S. in Chemistry from Harvey Mudd College, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from U.C. Berkeley, where she was involved in studies of the photosynthetic reaction centers of green plants. She carried out postgraduate work at MIT with Dr. Robert Griffin studying Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, and at the Tropical Medicine Institute of the ULB in Brussels, Belgium, studying drug development, and she has been on the faculty of Columbia University since 1991. Her research at Columbia University concerns understanding the remarkable ability of naturally occurring proteins to catalyze chemical reactions; she studies the structure and inherent flexibility of these proteins using magnetic resonance methods. On the basis of her research, she is the recipient of the Pure Award in Chemistry (1996) and the Eastern Analytic Symposium Award for Achievement in Magnetic Resonance (2005), and she is an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. She recently served as Associate Vice President for Academic Advising and Science Initiatives in the Arts and Sciences. She teaches in both the graduate biophysics program and the undergraduate chemistry program. |
|
PPC Historical Membership
Policy and Planning Committee, 2010-11, 2011-12 In its inaugural year, in 2010, the Policy and Planning Committee (PPC) membership was established in September and the election from the nominated slate yielded three members (rather than six), one from each division. For continuity and in recognition of the important work by ECFAS, three inaugural members of the PPC (one from each division) were chosen by and from the 2009-10 ECFAS membership. As per the Stated Rules three PPC members were chosen by and from the Chairs. The complete 2010-11 and 2011-12 PPC rosters are given below. | |
| SOCIAL SCIENCES:
Peter Bearman, 2010-11 Jack Snyder, 2011-12 |
|
| HUMANITIES:
Teodolinda Barolini, PPC Chair 2010-11, 2011-12 Cathy Popkin, 2011-12 Phil Watts, 2011-12 |
|
|
NATURAL SCIENCES:
Ruth S. DeFries, 2010-11 Robert Friedman, 2011-12 |
|