Committee on Global Thought Faculty

Yasmine Ergas is Director of the Specialization on Gender and Public Policy and Lecturer in Discipline in International and Public Affairs, and a CGT member.

She also directs the program in Gender and Human Rights of Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, is a member of the Executive Committee of the University’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and is the co-convener of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Council at Columbia University.

A lawyer and sociologist, she has worked on issues regarding gender and women’s rights as a policy analyst and advisor, scholar and advocate. She has served as a consultant to international and domestic policy organizations and NGOs, including the OECD, UNESCO, the Millennium Villages Project, the New York City Commission on Human Rights, Women Strong International and CENSIS, a major applied social research institute in Italy, and been on the staff of the Social Science Research Council. Her recent work has focused on the emergence of an international market in reproductive services, the transformations of ‘motherhood’,  and the integration of gender issues in international affairs. Her previous work centered on feminist movements and their interactions with public policies; the implications of the concept of ‘gender’ for feminist politics; child care policies in international and comparative perspective; educational policies and the social implications of HIV/AIDS.

A graduate of the University of Sussex, the University of Rome and Columbia Law School, Ergas is a former member of the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University; and a Pembroke Fellow of Brown University. Among other honors, she has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the Italian Consiglio Nazionale della Ricerca, and the Compton Foundation.  She co-led a working group of the Committee on International Trade of the New York City Bar Association on child labor and international trade and practiced law at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, and Studio Legale Pedersoli. Ergas has served as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Social Sector of the Millennium Cities Initiative, the editorial board of the Journal of Human Rights Practice, the editorial board of ingenere.it, and the board of New York City Global Partners, among others. Her work has been published widely, including in Italian, French, German, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese.

Wafaa El-Sadr is University Professor at Columbia University. She is a leader in global health with many contributions in HIV/TB, tuberculosis, maternal and child health, and broad health systems strengthening.

ICAP, the Center she founded and currently directs, works in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia in partnership with governmental and non-governmental organizations building in-country capacity for HIV prevention, care and treatment and related issues. More than one million individuals living with HIV have gained access to HIV services and more than 500,000 have received access to life-saving antiretroviral therapy through these programs. ICAP champions a health systems approach to reaching key health goals and a commitment to building meaningful partnerships with governmental and non-governmental organizations. Her work has also advanced the concepts of health systems strengthening globally for the purpose of confronting major health threats faced by communities around the world.

Dr. El-Sadr has been a member of the Columbia community for close to 25 years. For two decades, she led the Division of Infectious Diseases at Harlem Hospital where she successfully established a multi-dimensional research and service program responsive to the needs of the community. Building on this experience, Dr. El-Sadr took the lessons learned from Harlem to the global arena at a time when millions had little or no options for HIV prevention or treatment. Dr. El-Sadr has led the design and implementation of numerous studies that have furthered the understanding of the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases. Dr. El-Sadr’s work demonstrates a deep appreciation of the breadth of issues fundamental to transforming the health of populations at local and global levels–from scientific discovery to implementation science.

Dr. El-Sadr received her medical degree from Cairo University in Egypt, a master’s of public health from Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and a master’s of public administration from Harvard University. She has received numerous awards for her scholarship and is a recipient of a MacArthur ‘genius’ fellowship. Dr. El-Sadr is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, one of the highest honors in medicine.

Suresh Naidu is the Jack Wang and Echo Ren Professor of Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He was a Harvard Academy fellow from 2008-2010, and has been at Columbia since 2010. Naidu works on political economy and historical labor markets. His interests focus on the economic effects of democracy and non-democracy, monopsony in labor markets, the economics of American slavery, guest worker migration, and labor unions and labor organizing. Naidu is also external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a Professor of French, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University.

Professor Diagne received his academic training in France. An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure, he holds an agrégation in Philosophy (1978) and he took his Doctorat d’État in philosophy at the Sorbonne (1988) where he also took his B.A. (1977). Before joining Columbia University in 2008, he taught philosophy for many years at Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar (Senegal) and at Northwestern University.

Professor Diagne’s field of research includes history of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature. His book Bergson postcolonial. L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (Paris, Editions du CNRS, 2011) was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011 and on that same year he received the Edouard Glissant Prize for his work. Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s current teaching interests include history of early modern philosophy, philosophy and Sufism in the Islamic world, African philosophy and literature, twentieth century French philosophy.

Professor Diagne is co-director of Éthiopiques, a Senegalese journal of literature and philosophy and a member of the editorial committees of numerous scholarly journals, including the Revue d’histoire des mathématiques, Présence africaine, and Public Culture. He is a member of the scientific committees of Diogenes (published by UNESCO’s International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies), CODESRIA (Conseil pour le développement de la recherche en sciences sociales en Afrique), and of the African and Malagasy Committee for Higher Education (CAMES), as well as UNESCO’s Council on the Future. He has been named by Le Nouvel observateur one of the 50 thinkers of our time.

Saskia Sassen’s research and writing focuses on globalization (including social, economic and political dimensions), immigration, global cities (including cities and terrorism), the new technologies, and changes within the liberal state that result from current transnational conditions. Her interests include urban sociology, the sociology of transnational processes and globalization, technology, the dynamics of powerlessness in urban contexts and migration.

In each of the three major projects that comprise her 20 years of research, Sassen starts with a thesis that posits the unexpected and the counterintuitive in order to cut through established “truths”.

Her first multi-year project led to The Mobility of Labor and Capital (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Her thesis is that foreign investment in less developed countries can actually raise the likelihood of emigration if it goes to labor-intensive sectors and/or devastates the traditional economy; this went against established notions that such investment would retain potential emigrants.

Her second multi-year project led, among other publications, to The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press, 1991; 2nd ed, 2001). Her thesis is that the global economy–far from being placeless–needs very specific territorial insertions, and that this need is sharpest in the case of highly globalized and digitized sectors such as finance. This went against established notions at the time that the global economy transcended territory and its associated regulatory umbrellas.

Her third multi-year project led to the award-winning Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006). Her thesis is that today’s partial but foundational globalizations, from economic to cultural and subjective, take place largely inside core and thick national environments and institutions. This makes globalization partly invisible because it is dressed in the clothes of the national even as it denationalizes what was historically constructed as national.

Her current project, When Territory Exits Existing Framings, is under contract with Harvard University Press.

In addition to her appointments at Columbia University, Saskia Sassen serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities. She regularly contributes to The Huffington Post, OpenDemocracy, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek International, and the Financial Times, among others. She serves on the Advisory Committee of Theatrum Mundi.

Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, PhD is Chief of the Division of Ethics and Professor of Medical Humanities & Ethics with tenure at Columbia University. Trained as a medical anthropologist, Dr. Lee has extensive experience leading multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional bioethics research.

Dr. Lee is Co-PI of the Center for ELSI Resources and Analysis (CERA)/ELSIhub(link is external and opens in a new window) funded by the NIH/NHGRI and was Co-Director of the 2020, 2022, and 2024 ELSI Congress. Dr. Lee is a member of the US Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP) and serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Kaiser Permanente National Research Biobank, NIH funded Human Pangenome Research Consortium, and the Genome Canada funded Canada First Research Excellence Fund Program DNA to RNA: An Inclusive Canadian Approach to Genomic-based RNA Therapeutics (D2R).

Dr. Lee has served as President of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors (ABPD) and is on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Bioethics and Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics and on the Editorial Advisory Committee for the American College of Medical Genetics Journals Genetics in Medicine and Genetics in Medicine Open. She is a Hastings Center Fellow and has been a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in the Humanities, a Wenner-Gren Foundation Fellow, a University of Edinburgh Bright Ideas Fellow, and a Fellow at the School for Advanced Research.

Dr. Lee serves as Chair of the Committee on Appointments and Promotions and is Director of the Team Science Program at the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. Dr. Lee received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco (UCB/UCSF) joint program in Medical Anthropology and her undergraduate degree in Human Biology from Stanford University.

Ruth is a labor historian of modern Korea with research interests in literary history, biography and gender. She first went to Korea in 1989 on a student exchange program from Australia. Given the choice of Pyongyang or Seoul, she chose Seoul because the students there two years earlier had brought down the military dictatorship.

Her first book Factory Girl Literature was about the working-class women and girls who generated Korea’s industrialization while cherishing ambitions to be writers, novelists, and poets. In Korea the book spent twenty weeks on the history best-seller list, was nominated for the President’s summer reading list by Korea’s leading book and newspaper editors and named one of the top ten books of 2017.

Her new book Red Glamour, co-authored with Professor Jiseung Roh, is a biographical history of Korea’s early communist women, due for parallel publication in English and Korean. 

Ruth Barraclough has served as Vice-President of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (2023) and as a board member of the Australia Korea Foundation (2018-23) to advise the Australian government on new areas of cooperation between the two countries. In her work for the board, she was instrumental in establishing a Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Seoul National University. At Columbia, Ruth is the new Faculty Director of the Dual Degree Masters in International and World History with LSE and from January 2025 the Director of the Center for Korean Research at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

Before joining Columbia in 2024, Ruth Barraclough served on the faculty at the Australian National University, the University of Minnesota and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sydney.

Rosalind Morris is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her earlier scholarship focused on the history of modernity in Southeast Asia and the place of the mass media in its development, particularly in the encounter between old and new forms of mediation. More recently, she has been writing an ethnography of South Africa’s mining communities. Traversing these fields of inquiry, her work addresses questions of the relationships between value and violence; aesethetics and the political; the sexualization of power and desire; and the history of anthropological thought and social theory. In her formally wide-ranging writings on all of these issues, she attends specifically to the problem of language, and the matter of representation.

Professor Morris has served as a Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, an Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and is the former co-editor of CONNECT: art, politics, theory, culture. She is also the founding editor of “The Africa List,” for Seagull Books.

Reinhold Martin is Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where he directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. He is a member of Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society as well as the Committee on Global Thought.

Martin is a founding co-editor of the journal Grey Room and has published widely on the history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture. He is the author of The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (MIT Press, 2003), and Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minnesota, 2010), as well as the co-author, with Kadambari Baxi, of Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries (Actar, 2007). In 2012, Martin co-curated with Barry Bergdoll “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for which he and Bergdoll also co-edited the exhibition catalog.

His work centers on histories of space, power, and the aesthetic imagination, particularly as mediated by technical infrastructures. Related areas of research include architecture and epistemology, globalization and cities, and media history. Currently, Martin is working on two books: a history of the nineteenth century American university as a media complex, and a study of the contemporary city at the intersection of aesthetics and politics.

Orhan Pamuk is the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He is one of Turkey’s most prominent novelists with English titles including The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, My Name Is Red, Snow, Istanbul: Memories of a City, Other Colors: Essays and a Story, and most recently The Museum of Innocence and A Strangeness in My Mind. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages and he has received numerous prestigious international prizes, including IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Le Prix Mediterranee etranger, the Prix Medicis, the Ricarda Huch Prize, and honorary membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2006, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Nikhar Gaikwad’s research interests span international and comparative political economy, with a focus on the politics of economic policymaking, trade and migration, business-state relations, and identity. He has a regional specialization in India, which he studies in comparative perspective with Brazil and other democracies.

Nikhar Gaikwad’s research interests span international and comparative political economy, with a focus on the politics of economic policymaking, trade and migration, business-state relations, and identity. He has a regional specialization in India, which he studies in comparative perspective with Brazil and other democracies.

Prior to joining Columbia University, he was a Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. He has worked at Cornerstone Research, an economics and finance research firm.

Neil Krishan Aggarwal is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and a research psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. His areas of research interest are cultural psychiatry, cultural-competence training, and psychiatric anthropology. He is especially interested in conceptions of mental health and illness among South Asian and Middle Eastern populations.

Michael Morris holds the Chavkin-Chang Professor of Leadership at Columbia Business School. He is also associated with the Psychology Department of Columbia University. He teaches M.B.A. and executive-level classes on leadership, teamwork, communication, negotiation, and decision-making. He designed and runs Columbia’s Leadership Lab, which translates emerging research insights into new forms of leadership training. He chairs the school’s Organizational Culture Committee and serves on the university’s Committee on Global Thought. Outside of academia, his consulting and training work brings him into contact with may private and public sector leaders from around the world.

In his research career, Professor Morris has published over 200 articles in the leading psychology and management journals on topics such as individual decision-making, interpersonal influence, and social networks. His early research on culture and cognition played a key role in the blossoming of the field of cultural psychology. His scientific papers have received international awards from scholarly societies in the fields of social psychology, judgment and decision-making, psychology in the public interest, Asian psychology, management, human resources, marketing, and others. He is a founding editor of the journal Management and Organization Review and an associate editor at several other journals. He has served on National Academy of Science and National Science Foundation panels advising the Armed Services about managing cultural differences.

Prior to joining the Columbia in 2001, Professor Morris was a tenured Professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Psychology Department. He served as a visiting professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1995 and at the University of Hong Kong in 2000 and at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2008. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1993 and B.A. from Brown in 1986.

Mark Mazower is a historian and writer, specializing in modern Greece, 20th century Europe and international history. His current interests include the history of international norms and institutions, the history of Greek independence, and the historical evolution of the Greek islands in the very long run. He read classics and philosophy at Oxford, studied international affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s Bologna Center, and has a doctorate in modern history from Oxford (1988).

His books include Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44 (Yale UP, 1993); Dark Continent: Europe’s 20th Century (Knopf, 1998); The Balkans (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000); and After the War was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943-1960 (Princeton UP, 2000). His Salonica City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 (HarperCollins, 2004) was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize. In 2008 he published Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (Allen Lane) which won that year’s LA Times Book Prize for History. His most recent book is Governing the World: the History of an Idea (Penguin: London and New York, 2012). He is currently the director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities and the Center for International History, as well as Chair of the History Department at Columbia University. He is also Founding Director of the university’s new Institute for Ideas and Imagination. His articles and reviews on history and current affairs appear regularly in the Financial Times, the Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation and The New Republic.

Manan Ahmed, Associate Professor, is a historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE. His areas of specialization include intellectual history in South and Southeast Asia; critical philosophy of history, colonial and anti-colonial thought. He is interested in how modern and pre-modern historical narratives create understandings of places, communities, and intellectual genealogies for their readers.

His first monograph, A Book of Conquest: Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Harvard University Press, 2016), is on the intellectual life of an early thirteenth-century Persian history Chachnama also known as Fathnama-i Sind (Book of the Conquest of Sindh). The book delves into how Muslim polities in Sindh addressed sacral differences, created new ethics of rule, and articulated a political theory of power in the thirteenth century Indian Ocean World.

His second monograph, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (Harvard University Press, 2020), tells a history of the historians of the subcontinent from the tenth to the early twentieth century. The book is a concept-history of “Hindustan,” focusing specifically on the work of the seventeenth century Deccan historian Firishta (fl. 1570-1620). In it, he argues for a decolonized philosophy of history for the subcontinent. The Loss of Hindustan was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize 2021.

He is currently working on two book projects. One, under contract with The New Press, is on memory, history and historiography in Pakistan. The second is on decolonization as method and praxis for history writing.

He has extensive background in digital history, in the history of archives in the global south and the problems of access and control to digitized materials (see, e.g., the project Torn Apart/Separados, which focused on the humanitarian crisis on the southwestern border in Summer 2018).  More recently, he co-published a data-analysis study–“Targeted Harassment of Academics by Hindutva: A Twitter Analysis of the India-US Connection.”

Mamadou Diouf is the Leitner Family Professor of African Studies. He joined Columbia University in 2007. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. Before joining the faculty at Columbia University, he was the Charles D. Moody Jr. Collegiate Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Michigan, from 2000 to 2007. Before that, he was Head of the Research, Information, and Documentation Department of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and faculty member of the History Department of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal.

His research interests include urban, political, social and intellectual history in colonial and postcolonial Africa. His publications include: Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal (ed. 2013), New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration, Wealth, and Power (with Mara A. Leichtman, 2009), La Construction de l’Etat au Sénégal (with M. C. Diop & D. Cruise O’Brien, 2002), Histoire du Sénégal: Le Modèle Islamo-Wolof et ses Périphéries (2001), Histoires et Identités dans la Caraïbe. Trajectoires Plurielles (with Ulbe Bosma, 2004); Les Jeunes, Hantise de l’espace public dans les sociétés du sud? (with R. Collignon, 2001); Les figures du politique: Des pouvoirs hérités aux pouvoirs élus (with M. C. Diop, 1999);  Academic Freedom and Social Responsibility of the Intellectuals in Africa (with Mahmood Mamdani, 1994); Le Sénégal sous Abdou Diouf with M.C. Diop, 1990); La Kajoor au XIXe siècle: Pouvoir Ceddo et Conquête Coloniale (1990).

Professor Diouf is a member of the editorial board of several professional journals including: the Journal of African History (Cambridge), Psychopathologie Africaine (Dakar), la vie des idées.fr (Paris), and Public Culture.  He is co-editor (with Peter Geschiere) of the book series Histoires du Sud/Histories of the South published by Karthala, Paris and New National Histories in Africa published by Palgrave MacMillan.

Madhav Khosla is the B. R. Ambedkar Professor of Indian Constitutional Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He also serves as the Faculty Director of the B.R. Ambedkar Program in Global Constitutionalism. Khosla is interested in the nature and form of constitutions, especially from a comparative and theoretical perspective. Much of his research and writing in comparative constitutional law has focused on South Asia and India. Khosla studied political theory at Harvard University, where his dissertation was awarded the Edward M. Chase Prize for “the best dissertation on a subject relating to the promotion of world peace”, and law at Yale Law School and the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Before joining Columbia Law School, he was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Khosla’s book India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (Harvard University Press 2020) was an Economist Best Book of 2020 and co-winner of the Order of the Coif Book Award 2021. His other books include Redefining Comparative Constitutional Law (ed. with Vicki Jackson, Oxford University Press, 2025), The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution (ed. with Sujit Choudhry and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Oxford University Press 2016), and Unstable Constitutionalism: Law and Politics in South Asia (ed. with Mark Tushnet, Cambridge University Press 2015). In addition, Khosla’s writings have appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Comparative Law, Harvard Law Review, and the International Journal of Constitutional Law, as well as popular forums like the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, New York Times, and Time. Khosla’s work has been cited by courts in India and Pakistan.

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan is a public health historian of South Asia with a focus on the politics of health, medicine and science in the global South. Her early research focused on the politics of ‘indigenous’ Ayurvedic medicine and its reconfiguring in a late colonial context in North India through claims and representations based on language and religion. She has also worked on social histories of epidemics and the role played by experts and scientific evidence, including the plague and its national and regional politics in South Asia.

Her most recent research is on the global politics of aging, and her new book is titled, As the World Ages: Rethinking a Demographic Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2018). She is currently engaged in a new book project on the history of consumption and disease risks in South Asia. Kavita’s research traces the transformation of bodies, metabolisms and minds in South Asia over the past century that have redrawn the map of South Asia’s epidemiological and social history. She is also collaborating with David Jones (Harvard University) and writing a monograph on heart disease in India and the making of new networks of medical expertise that has been supported by an NEH grant; and works with Jennifer Manly on a research project on cultures of aging and cognitive decline in India and South Africa (based on a PSSN grant from the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University).

Prior to joining the Mailman School faculty as assistant professor of Sociomedical Sciences, Kavita was a David Bell Research Fellow at the Center for Population Studies and Development Studies at Harvard University and also was awarded the Balzan Fellowship for her work on social inequalities and health by University College London. Her training in history at Trinity College, Cambridge University and the Jawaharlal Nehru University and experience in archival work, policy debates and public health practice in the global South brings together a rich interdisciplinary perspective anchored in rigorous historical method.

Katharina Pistor is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School and Director of the Law School’s Center on Global Legal Transformation. Her research and teaching spans corporate law, corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions. She has published widely in legal and social science journals. Her most recent book is “The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality” (Princeton University Press, 2019).

A founding member of the Committee on Global Thought, Pistor remains an active contributor to CGT’s research projects and “Global Think-ins” (a signature term she conceived). Most recently, Pistor deadlined a CGT Global Think-In on her recent book The Code of Capital. Pistor is now leading a new CGT Signature Research project titled A World Indebted, which takes a close look at debt dependencies and interdependencies and how they shape economic inequality and political tensions within, and between, countries.

Joseph Slaughter specializes in literature, law, and socio-cultural history of the Global South (particularly Latin America and Africa). He teaches and publishes in the fields of postcolonial literature and theory, African, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures, postcolonialism, narrative theory, human rights, and Third-World approaches to International Law. He is especially interested in the social work of literature—the myriad ways in which literature intersects (formally, historically, ideologically, materially) with problems of social justice, human rights, intellectual property, and international law.

His first book, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, was awarded the prestigious René Wellek prize for comparative literature and cultural theory from the American Comparative Literature Association and helped to establish the interdisciplinary field of literature and human rights. He co-edited a volume of essays, The Global South Atlantic (2017), that explores some of the social, cultural, political, and material interactions across the oceanic space between Africa and Latin America that have made it historically (im)possible to imagine the South Atlantic as a region. He is currently finishing two books: New Word Orders, on intellectual property and world literature, and The Conscience of Humankind, a collection of essays on human rights and the humanities.

He was a founding coeditor of the transdisciplinary journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, which he co-edited for nearly a decade. In addition to numerous book chapters, he has published interdisciplinary articles in a wide range of journals, including Alif, Human Rights Quarterly, Research in African Literatures, The Journal of Human Rights, Politics and Culture, Comparative Literature Studies, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Critical Quarterly, PMLA, and The London Review of International Law.

He recently completed his term as President of the American Comparative Literature Association and has undertaken a number of international research projects with colleagues across the globe, including IL-Lit: Literature and International Law at the Edge.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University in New York. He is also the co-founder and Co-President of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia. His interests are wide-ranging and include emerging markets, development, industrial policy, labor economics, public economics, and the economics of inequality.

A graduate of Amherst College, he received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, given biennially by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2011, TIME named Stiglitz one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95, during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman from 1995-97. He then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997-2000. In 2008 he was asked by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy to chair the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, which released its final report in September 2009. In 2009 he was appointed by the President of the United Nations General Assembly as chair of the Commission of Experts on Reform of the International Financial and Monetary System, which also released its report in September 2009.

Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, “The Economics of Information,” exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but of policy analysts. He has made major contributions to macro-economics and monetary theory, to development economics and trade theory, to public and corporate finance, to the theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and to the theories of welfare economics and of income and wealth distribution. In the 1980s, he helped revive interest in the economics of R&D. His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance. Recognized around the world as a leading economic educator, he has written textbooks that have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

José Antonio Ocampo is Director of the Economic and Political Development Concentration in the School of International and Public Affairs, Member of the Committee on Global Thought and Co-President of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. He is also the Chair of the Committee for Development Policy, an expert committee of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). In 2012 – 2013 he chaired the panel created by the IMF Board to review the activities of the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office; in 2008-2010, he served as co-director of the UNDP/OAS Project on “Agenda for a Citizens’ Democracy in Latin America”; and in 2009 served as a Member of the Commission of Experts of the UN General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System.

Prior to his appointment, Ocampo served in a number of positions in the United Nations and the Government of Colombia, most notably as United Nations Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs; Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC); Minister of Finance and Public Credit, Chairman of the Board of Banco del República (Central Bank of Colombia); Director of the National Planning Department (Minister of Planning); Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, and Executive Director of FEDESARROLLO.

Ocampo has published extensively on macroeconomic theory and policy, international financial issues, economic and social development, international trade, and Colombian and Latin American economic history.

Ocampo received his B.A. in economics and sociology from the University of Notre Dame in 1972 and his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1976. He served as Professor of Economics at Universidad de los Andes and of Economic History at the National University of Colombia, and Visiting Fellow at Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Yale. He has received a number of personal honors and distinctions, including the 2012 Jaume Vicens Vives Prize of the Spanish Association of Economic History for the best book on Spanish or Latin American economic history, the 2008 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought and the 1988 “Alejandro Angel Escobar” National Science Award of Colombia.

A member of UN High-level Advisory board on mediation (UN) and advisory board on disarmament matters, and a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution, Jean-Marie Guéhenno sits on the boards of the Carnegie Corporation, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He also chairs the scientific council of the French Institute for Higher Defense Studies. A French diplomat and member of the Cour des Comptes, he was appointed by Kofi Annan in 2000 Under-Secretary-General for peacekeeping (2000-2008), and led the biggest expansion of peacekeeping in the history of the United Nations. After leaving the UN, he taught at Columbia University, but worked again with Kofi Annan as deputy special envoy for Syria (2012).  He was later president of the French commission of the White Paper for defense and national security (2012-2013), and president of the International Crisis Group (2014-2017). He is the author of several books. His new book, Le Premier XXIème Siècle, de la globalisation à l’émiettement, published in France in the fall of 2021, received the annual prize of the Revue des Deux Mondes in 2022.

Hiba Bou Akar is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Her research focuses on planning in conflict and post-conflict cities, the question of urban violence, and the role of religious political organizations in the making of cities. She is also the founder and director of the Post-Conflict Cities Lab at Columbia University. The lab focuses on the studies of post-conflict urban planning and aims to develop methodological, empirical, and theoretical approaches to planning in contested spaces. Bou Akar’s award-winning book, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (Stanford University Press, 2018), examines how Beirut’s post-civil war peripheries have been transformed through multiple planning exercises into contested frontiers that are mired in new forms of conflict. Her first co-edited book, Narrating Beirut from its Borderlines (2011), explored Beirut’s segregated geographies. Bou Akar received her Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut, and a Master in Urban Studies and Planning from MIT. She has also worked as an architect and planner and as a research consultant with local NGOs and international UN organizations in the Middle East.

Garud Iyengar is the Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute (DSI) and a Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia Engineering. As the Avanessians Director of DSI, he leads education and research initiatives for Columbia’s central hub of data science scholarship with more than 400 affiliated faculty. He also co-leads the University’s Artificial Intelligence Initiative in partnership with Jeannette Wing, the Executive Vice President for Research, and Shih-Fu Chang, Dean of The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.

His research interests are broadly in the areas of control, machine learning, and optimization. His current projects focus on the areas of large-scale power systems and supply chains, causal inference, large scale game solving, and modeling of cellular processes. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, and the Department of Energy, among others. He is the author of over 90 publications and chapters, holds two patents, was an Amazon Scholar from 2019-2024, and was elected an INFORMS Fellow in 2018.

Iyengar, who has been on the faculty since 1998, has held a range of academic leadership roles. He was Columbia Engineering’s Senior Vice for Dean of Research and Academic Programs from 2021-2024, and Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research department from 2013-2019. At DSI, where he has been deeply involved since the institute’s 2012 founding, he was Associate Director for Research from 2017-19 and also played a critical role in shaping important programs like the DSI Seed Funds Initiative and the Postdoctoral Scholars Program.

David K. Park is Member of the Committee on Global Thought and Faculty Director for the Master’s in Global Thought. Dr. Park is also The Honorary Distinguished Professor of Solbridge International School of Business and Honorary Dean of the Future College at Woosong University and supports Woosong Education Foundation as a Global Advisor. Dr. Park co-chairs the Council of Advisors for the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy. Dr. Park is a member of the Data Science Institute, Fellow at the Center for the Management of Systemic Risk and founding member of the Digital Storytelling Lab at Columbia University. Dr. Park was formerly Dean of Strategic Initiatives for the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University and co-founded several New York-based technology companies in the areas of natural language processing and machine learning.

Dr. Park is currently exploring the historical arc of universities, limitations and possibilities of “big data”, how failure and vulnerability are the foundations of innovation and creativity across organizations, as well as the electoral origins of congressional polarization. Dr. Park is also working on several manuscripts including, The Twentieth Century Sectional Reversal: How did the Republican States Switch to the Democrats and Vice Versa? and Is History Repeating Itself? Comparing 1875 to 1928 and 1971 to 2008.

Dr. Park received his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland and his Ph.D. in political science at Columbia where he focused on historical comparative institutional analyses of societal change. He was an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Applied Statistics at Washington University, Assistant Professor at George Washington University, Visiting Professor at Columbia University and Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He has written numerous articles and co-authored Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State: Why American Vote the Way They Do (Princeton University Press, 2008).

Daniel Friedrich is Professor of Curriculum at Teachers College. He is interested in epistemological and philosophical questions, as they relate to the politics of schooling and of teacher education. He engages in interdisciplinary, comparative and international perspectives, particularly with a focus in Latin America.

He has a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction, minor in Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies, 2010, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI, and a B.A. [Licenciatura] in Educational Sciences, minor in Philosophy,  from Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Carol Gluck is the George Sansom Professor of History in the departments of History, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

A founding member of the Committee on Global Thought, Professor Gluck served as the Committee Chair from 2015 to 2020. She specializes in the history of modern Japan from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, with writings in modern social and cultural history, international relations, World War II, history-writing and public memory in Japan and the West.  She has a B.A. from Wellesley and a Ph.D. from Columbia, including study in Munich and Tokyo. She has taught at the Universities of Tokyo, Venice, and Leiden, Harvard, and the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales.

Her many publications include Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period; Showa: The Japan of Hirohito, Asia in Western and World History, Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon, as well as works in Japanese.  Forthcoming are Thinking with the Past: Japan and Modern History and Past Obsessions: World War Two in History and Memory. 

Former president of the Association for Asian Studies, appointed member of the Japan-US Friendship Commission, leader of programs to expand K-12 and undergraduate education in international and Asia studies, she has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and has received numerous teaching awards, book prizes, as well as a decoration from the Japanese government.

Carol Becker is Professor of Arts and Dean Emerita at Columbia University School of the Arts. She is also a member of the Committee on Global Thought.

Carol earned her B.A. in English literature from State University of New York at Buffalo and her Ph.D. in English and American literature from the University of California, San Diego. With research interests that range from feminist theory, American cultural history, the education of artists, art and social responsibility, to South African art and politics, she has published numerous articles and books on cultural criticism including: The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change (translated into seven languages); The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility; Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety; Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art and Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production.

Carol was Dean of Faculty and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before coming to Columbia University. She lectures extensively in the U.S. and abroad and is the recipient of numerous awards. She also is a member of the Global Agenda Council on the Role of Art in Society for the World Economic Forum. Her book The Invisible Drama, was reissued in paperback in 2014.

Brian Larkin is the Director of Graduate Studies and a Professor of anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research focuses on the ethnography and history of media in Nigeria. Most broadly he examines the introduction of media technologies into Nigeria—cinema, radio, digital media—and the religious, political, and cultural changes they bring about. He explores how media technologies comprise broader networked infrastructures that shape a whole range of actions from forms of political rule, to new urban spaces, to religious and cultural life. He has also published widely on issues of technology and breakdown, piracy and intellectual property, the global circulation of cultural forms, infrastructure and urban space, sound studies, and Nigerian film (Nollywood). He is currently completing the manuscript for Secular Machines: Media and the Materiality of Islamic Revival, which analyzes the role media play in the rise of new Islamic movements in Nigeria and explores theoretical questions about technology and religion.

With Stefan Andriopoulos, Larkin is Co-Director of the Comparative Media Initiative at Columbia University and co-founder of the University Seminar on Media Theory and History. He is a board member of the Institute for African Studies and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, and a member of the Committee on Global Thought. Larkin is the author of Signal and Noise: Media Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2008) and, with Lila Abu-Lughod and Faye Ginsburg, co-editor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (University of California Press, 2000).

Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science, Founding Director of the Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University, and the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights. He also serves as Directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en sciences sociales in Paris, and served as visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies during the 2016-2017 academic year.

Bernard E. Harcourt’s scholarship focuses on social and critical theory, with a particular interest in punishment and surveillance.  He has taught at several universities, including, most recently, as the University of Chicago’s Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Political Science and chairman of the political science department. Harcourt represented death row inmates in Montgomery, AL, at what is now the Equal Justice Initiative. He continues to represent inmates sentenced to death or life imprisonment without parole pro bono, and has also served on human rights missions in South Africa and Guatemala.

Benjamin Orlove, an anthropologist, has conducted field work in the Peruvian Andes since the 1970s and also carried out research in East Africa, the Italian Alps, and Aboriginal Australia. His early work focused on agriculture, fisheries and rangelands. More recently he has studied climate change and glacier retreat, with an emphasis on water, natural hazards and the loss of iconic landscapes. In addition to his numerous academic articles and books, his publications include a memoir and a book of travel writing.

Orlove taught for many years at the University of California, Davis. At Columbia University, he also teaches in the Master’s Program in Climate and Society, for which he serves as Associate Director. He is a Senior Research Scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, and is one of the four co-directors of the Center for Research in Environmental Decisions.

Azmat Khan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose work grapples with the human costs of aerial war.

Anya Schiffrin is a senior lecturer in the discipline of international and public affairs and faculty co-director of the Technology Policy and Innovation (TPI) concentration at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She previously directed the Technology, Media, and Communications (TMaC) specialization and teaches courses on global media, innovation, and human rights. Dr. Schiffrin writes on journalism and development, investigative reporting in the global south and has published extensively over the last decade on the media in Africa. More recently she has become focused on solutions to the problem of online disinformation, earning her PhD (with honors) on the topic from the University of Navarra.  

She is the editor of Women in the Digital World, (Routledge, April 2023) Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Reporting from Around the World (New Press, 2014) and African Muckraking: 75 years of Investigative journalism from Africa (Jakana 2017) She is the editor of Media Capture: How Money, Digital Platforms and Governments Control the News (Columbia University Press 2021.) Her research with economist Haaris Mateen on the valuation of news has been cited in the Atlantic, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post and many other publications. She is a leading thinker and commentator on AI and publishing, media sustainability as well as mis/disinformation and media impact.

Alexander Cooley is a scholar of international relations who studies how global authoritarianism and transnational kleptocracy are reshaping the international order. His regional expertise centers on Eurasia, particularly Central Asia and the Caucasus, where he studies how external powers shape governance, sovereignty, and political development across the post-Soviet states.

He is the Claire Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. At Columbia, he served as Director of the Harriman Institute for the Study of Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe from 2015 to 2021, and as Barnard's Vice Provost for Research and Academic Centers from 2022 to 2025. He is now Vice Chair of the Committee on Global Thought and chairs the Faculty Advisory Board of the Columbia Global Center in Athens. 

Beyond Columbia, he is  Chair of the American University in Central Asia Foundation, a Nonresident Senior Fellow for Eurasian Affairs at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a Nonresident Fellow at the Kennan Institute, and an Academy Adjunct Fellow at the Queen Elizabeth II Academy for Leadership at Chatham House.

Cooley is the author or co-author of eight books, including Dictators without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia (Yale 2017, with John Heathershaw), Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford 2020, with Daniel Nexon), and Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics (Oxford 2025, with Alexander Dukalskis).

His commentary regularly appears in Foreign Affairs and other current affairs publications and he has testified before the United States Congress and the Helsinki Commission. He also moderates public conversations and panels, including interviews with heads of state and government at Columbia's World Leaders Forum and expert discussions at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. His research has been supported by the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He holds an MA and PhD from Columbia University.

Akeel Bilgrami is Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy. He is a founding member of the Committee on Global Thought. Akeel Bilgrami got a first degree in English Literature from Bombay University but defected to philosophy because he found the former too hard. He went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and there got another Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (1974). He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1983), after writing a dissertation, “Meaning as Invariance,” on the subject of the indeterminacy of translation and issues concerning realism and linguistic meaning. He joined the Philosophy Department in 1985 after spending two years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

His book of selected essays on the moral psychology of politics entitled Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment was published by Harvard University Press in March 2014.  He is also contracted to publish two small books in the very near future, one called What is a Muslim? (Princeton University Press) and another on Gandhi’s philosophy, situating Gandhi’s thought in seventeenth century dissent in England and Europe and more broadly within the Radical Enlightenment and the radical strand in the Romantic tradition (Columbia University Press).

He teaches courses and seminars regularly in the department on Philosophy of Mind and Language and also in the Committee on Global Thought and Political Science on issues in Politics and Rationality as well as Religion and Politics in a Global Context.

Professor Bilgrami was the Chairman of the Philosophy Department from 1994-98 and the Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University from 2004-2011.

Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History, Chair of the Committee on Global Thought and the Director of the European Institute at Columbia University. Born in London, Professor Tooze grew up in Heidelberg, Germany, before taking a first degree in economics from King’s College Cambridge. After postgraduate study at the Free University Berlin, he took his Ph.D. in economic history from the London School of Economics in 1996. For 13 years he taught in the History Faculty of the University of Cambridge before joining Yale University, where he was the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and the Co-Director of International Security Studies from 2009 to 2015.

He has authored five prize-winning books: Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2001), The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (UK edition, Penguin Allen Lane, 2006), The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (Viking, 2014), Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018), and Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy (2021). Tooze’s books have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Mandarin, Polish and Bulgarian.

Statistics and the German State 1900-1945 explores the connection between the emergence of modern national economic statistics and the crisis of the German state in the first half of the twentieth century. Wages of Destruction provides a novel account of the Third Reich viewed from the perspective of the regime’s efforts to harness the German economy for its bid for continental hegemony. The Deluge is an analysis of the First World War that challenges the existing narrative of the war, its peace, and its aftereffects. Most recently, it won the 2015 Los Angeles Times History Book Prize.

Professor Tooze has served on the academic panels charged with writing the histories of both the German Finance Ministry and Ministry of Economics Affairs. He has served as the Thomas Hawkins Johnson Visiting Professor in Military History at West Point and contributed to the academic advisory panel of the National Intelligence Council. He has written and reviewed for Foreign Affairs, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph, the Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Tageszeitung and Spiegel Magazine, and New Left Review.