The
Policy and Planning Committee
of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
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.Policy and Planning Committee, 2011-12
Members in the SOCIAL SCIENCES: |
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Peter Bearman has been at Columbia since 1999. He was the founding director of ISERP and served in that capacity until 2008. He was chair of the Sociology department and for one year served as chair of the Statistics department. He served on ARC for 4 years and was ARC chair for one year. Bearman serves on the executive committee of the Global Health Research Center of Central Asia (which he cofounded), the European Institute, and is an external adviser to the Department of Epidemiology. He co-directs the Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate training Program, The Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Program, and the Oral History MA program. He is currently the director of the Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences. He has supervised 16 PhD students in sociology and is the recipient of the Graduate Student Teaching Award in the department of Sociology. He works on the autism epidemic, large scale collective violence, and in problems in analytical sociology. |
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Michael H. Riordan is the Laurans A. and Arlene Mendelson Professor of Economics and Chair of the Economics Department at Columbia. Professor Riordan specializes in industrial organization economics. His recent research interests include topics on telecommunications, antitrust and oligopoly. He has written numerous journal articles on these and other industrial organization topics including regulation, contract theory, defense procurement, health services, vertical integration, internal organization of firms and product quality. Professor Riordan's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and other organizations. He is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society and was a National Fellow of the Hoover Institution. He is served as co-editor of the RAND Journal of Economics, a member of the editorial board of the American Economic Review and associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. His government experience includes assignments as Chief Economist of the Federal Communications Commission and Economic Advisor at the Federal Trade Commission. He held previous academic appointments at the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Boston University. Professor Riordan received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Cathy Popkin (PhD, Stanford; BA, 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. |
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Philip C. Watts, is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of French and Romance Philology. He received his BA at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982 and his PhD from Columbia University in 1991. Before joining the faculty at Columbia he taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1992 to 2006. His research and teaching focus on 20th-century French literature and film and the relation between politics and aesthetics. His first book, Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France (Stanford, 1999) was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize. Since then he has continued to study how literature and film participate in democratic formations, and he has published articles on Jean Genet, Jacques Rancière, Roland Barthes and film, Jacques Rivette and the cold war, and the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. His current research focuses on the persistence of archaic forms in postwar French literature and film. He is the co-editor with Gabriel Rockhill of "Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics" (Duke, 2009). |
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Members in the NATURAL SCIENCES: |
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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 2007/8). 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. |
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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. |
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William Allen Zajc (Ph.D. 1982, University of California, Berkeley) is Professor and Chair of the Physics Department at Columbia. His research interests center on the experimental study of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Far and away the most exciting topic in nonperturbative QCD is the role of QCD in determining the properties of bulk hadronic matter. The excitement results from theoretical predictions that highly compressed nuclear matter will undergo a phase transition, where the quarks and gluons are no longer confined to individual nucleons. The formation and experimental detection of such a state (called the quark-gluon plasma or QGP) is the outstanding question in high-energy nuclear physics. Previously, his group investigated these issues in fixed-target heavy-ion collisions at Brookhaven. In particular, these concentrated on the implementation of a fast Level II trigger for a magnetic spectrometer, which allowed us to select events of maximum physics interest, such as those events containing strange particles (kaons) and/or those with two-like bosons (pions or kaons). Such data were used to study f meson production and to determine the size and lifetime of the production region using two-boson interferometry. Currently he is spokesperson for the PHENIX experiment at BNL's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC). This machine provides colliding beams of Au nuclei at 100 A GeV, thereby extending the study of nuclear collisions into a truly fundamental regime. RHIC began operations in 2000, and the first results both verify expectations and also challenge understanding of dense hadronic matter. |
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PPC Historical Membership
Policy and Planning Committee, 2010-11 In its inaugural year, 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 PPC roster is given below. | |
| SOCIAL SCIENCES:
Peter Bearman |
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| HUMANITIES:
Teodolinda Barolini, PPC Chair 2010-11 |
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NATURAL SCIENCES:
Ruth S. DeFries |
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