The Committee on Global Thought
Global Thought is driven by the scholarship and activities of our faculty committee, chaired by Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History. Our academic programs are led by teaching staff and fellows, and supported by our staff team. Our Advisory Council provides leadership and guidance for Global Thought's students and programs.
Dr. Vishakha N. Desai is Senior Advisor to Columbia Global and a Senior Fellow of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. She previously served as Senior Advisor for Global Affairs to the President of Columbia (2013-2023) and as Chair of the Committee on Global Thought. From 2004 through 2012, Dr. Desai served as President and CEO of the Asia Society, where she expanded the organization's global footprint with new offices in India and Korea, a center for U.S.-China Relations, and the inauguration of architecturally distinguished
facilities in Hong Kong and Houston.
A scholar of Asian art and a prominent public intellectual, Dr. Desai is internationally recognized for her leadership in presenting contemporary Asian art to Western audiences. She has held tenured and senior academic positions at Columbia University, Boston University, and the University of Massachusetts. Her expertise focuses on the cultural roots of Asia's economic and political transformations, and her commentary has appeared in more than fifty global publications.
Dr. Desai is a Trustee of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Tallberg Foundation. She serves on the boards of Korea University and Teach For All, and recently concluded a twelve-year term on the board of Mahindra & Mahindra (2012-2024). Her extensive leadership history includes serving as Chair of AFS Intercultural Programs, Trustee of the Brookings Institution, and President of the Association of Art Museum Directors.Sarah Miller-Davenport is the Graduate Program Director for the Committee on Global Thought. She advises students in their course work and research, teaches MA Seminar, Global Thought Scholars, and the elective Global New York.
Sarah is a historian whose research and teaching focus on how the global circulation of ideas, people, and capital shaped American society in the decades after World War II, with a particular emphasis on how the local intersects with national and global scales of historical change. She is the author of Gateway State: Hawai‘i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire (Princeton 2019), which shows how Hawai‘i statehood was made necessary by global decolonization and, in turn, reconfigured racial and ethnic differences in postwar US politics and culture. She has also researched and published on the reinvention of New York as a global city after its 1975 fiscal crisis. Prior to joining Columbia, Sarah was a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Sheffield, and she has held fellowships at the New York Historical Society and NYU’s Urban Democracy Lab.
A native New Yorker, she received her PhD in history from the University of Chicago and her BA from Oberlin College.
Sarah's recent publications include:
“‘We want a city of peace, a country of peace and a world of peace’: New Yorkers and the Municipal Foreign Policy Movement during the Reagan Era," chapter in Johanna Fernández, Kim Phillips-Fein, and Mason B. Williams, eds., Gotham on the Verge: The Remaking of a Modern Global American City (University of North Carolina Press 2027).
"Mamdani Lands at LaGuardia," The Ideas Letter, April 2, 2026.
Co-editor, “Curating New York’s ‘Raw Material,’” History Lab feature in The American Historical Review, Vol. 130, No. 4 (December 2025), 1542–1586.
“The Cultural Center of the World: Art, Finance, and Globalization in late-20th Century New York City” (Journal of Urban History, Vol. 50, No. 1 (January 2024), 123–144.
“The New York City Fiscal Crisis and the Domestic Origins of Globalization,” chapter in Daniel Bessner and Michael Brenes, eds., Rethinking U.S. World Power: Domestic Histories of U.S. Foreign Policy (Palgrave Macmillan 2024).
“Where in the World is Hawai‘i? Shifting Geographies of the 50th State,” chapter in Anne Hyde and Alexander Finkelstein, eds., Reconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism (University of Nebraska Press 2023).
“‘The Greatest Opportunity Since the Birth of Christ’: American Evangelical Missionaries at the Dawn of Decolonization,” chapter in John Corrigan, Melani McAlister, and Axel R. Schäfer, eds., Global Faith and Worldly Power: Evangelical Encounters with American Empire (University of North Carolina Press 2022).