COLUMBIA - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Summer Session Department Representative
Amnah Almukhtar is a Ph.D. Candidate whose areas of research interest include modern Middle East, modern Iraq, and intellectual history, particularly political and social theory and philosophy of history. During her time at Columbia, she served as a Teaching Assistant for History of the Modern Middle East with Rashid Khalidi, was awarded the GSAS International Travel Fellowship, held editorial positions with the International Labor & Working Class History Journal (ILWCH) as well as the journal of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME), and is currently teaching as a Core Curriculum Preceptor in Contemporary Civilization. She also co-organized a conference on Iraqi Studies: Past, Present, and Future. She received her MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center, and her BA from Fordham University, where she double-majored in Philosophy and International Studies with a Middle East concentration.
Job Titles:
- Coordinator - PhD Program
Job Titles:
- Director of Graduate Studies
Celine Camps is a Ph.D. student in the history of early modern science at Columbia University. Her research lies at the intersection of the history of science and technology, art, and material culture, and focuses on early modern craft and artisanal practice. She is especially interested in (German) metalworking.
Her dissertation focuses on securing screws, screw makers, and the screw-making industry in early modern Nuremberg and explores why, how, and to what effect goldsmiths began to develop and use screws-instead of or in addition to other fastening technologies and techniques-to assemble their works of art.
Dillon Banis is a PhD candidate in history. His research focuses on the problems of political economy, industrialization, migration, and state- and nation-building in imperial Central Europe, looking in particular at the Prussian sugar beet industry. His research has been supported by the DAAD, the German Studies Association, the Harriman Institute, the Max Kade Foundation, and the Institute of International Education.
Prior to arriving at Columbia, Dillon spent two years at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster as a Fulbright recipient following a year of graduate study in the Maxwell School of Citizenship at Syracuse University. He received his BA summa cum laude in history from Morgan State University and his AA from the College of Southern Maryland.
Between the 2022-2024 academic years, Dillon will be a fellow at Freie Universität Berlin while conducting archival research in Germany, Austria, and Poland.
Ella Coon is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Columbia University. Her research considers 20th-century US history through the lenses of business history, international political economy, and the history of computing. Coon's dissertation, tentatively titled Control Data: American Power and the Global Assembly Line, 1957-1996, looks at the business and politics of global operations at one Minnesota-based supercomputer producer and IBM rival-Control Data Corporation-as company management responded to three decades of changing US industrial policy.
Her research has been supported by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Research Improvement Grant in Science and Technology Studies (NSF DDRIG STS), the Charles Babbage Institute, Hagley Museum and Library, Columbia World Project's Center for Political Economy (CPE), and Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, among other organizations. Before coming to Columbia, Coon received an MA in Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research.
Emily Hawk is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in U.S. History. Her dissertation is "Movements of Modern Dance: Black Choreography and Political Education, 1965-1976." It examines how a cohort of Black modern dance artists intervened in discussions on race, cultural identity, and civic engagement by performing beyond conventional theatrical settings and engaging a diverse national audience with their work.
Hawk's dissertation research has been supported by fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, the New York State Archives, and the Gerald Ford Presidential Library. She has earned awards from the Dance Studies Association, Popular Culture Association, and Western Association of Women Historians.
She welcomes the opportunity to speak with prospective Columbia University doctoral applicants and invites anyone interested in her work to visit www.emilyhawk.org.
Eric Frith is a doctoral candidate in Latin American history. He studies the history of political and economic thought in the Atlantic and the emergence of the economy as a distinct field of knowledge. His dissertation examines the developing language of political economy in Mexico in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly the ways that property, sovereignty, commerce, virtue, and citizenship were reimagined. He also is interested in religion in the modern world, the history of suicide, the philosophy of history, and historical epistemology.
Eric grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He earned his BA from Baylor University, his MA from Old Dominion, and his MPhil from Columbia. He lives and teaches in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Evan DiPrete Brown is a PhD candidate in US history. He researches the history of sport, especially as it concerns labor, political economy, and social movements. His dissertation examines professional baseball across North America and the Caribbean from the 1940s to the 1960s, following the movement of people, information, and capital as the sport industry underwent a social and economic transformation.
His work has been supported by the Lehman Center for American History and the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library.
Evan holds a BA in history from Yale University and an MA in social sciences from the University of Chicago. He has also worked in various capacities for university athletic departments and coached sports while teaching history at an independent secondary school.
Idriss Fofana is a Ph.D. candidate in international and global history at Columbia University and a JD graduate of Yale Law School. He is currently the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School.
Idriss specializes in the history of international law and other forms of inter-polity order in Asia and Africa since the eighteenth century. His work spans the fields of modern Chinese history, the modern history of Atlantic Africa, as well as the history of twentieth-century anti-colonial and Third World movements.
His dissertation is titled "Civilizing Labor: A Global Legal History of Chinese and West African Labor Migration, 1860-1930." This project examines Chinese and West African efforts to shape regional and international norms governing labor and migration in the wake of the Euro-American movement to abolish slavery. The spread of anti-slavery norms upturned existing labor recruitment networks in the Senegal River Basin and the Pearl River Valley, which relied on coercive practices that Western governments now prohibited. As a result, imperial powers, indigenous political authorities, and labor-source communities competed to set and to enforce new rules for the lawful recruitment of Asian and African laborers for Western enterprises. Drawing on sources in five languages from archives on three continents, this project shows how the resulting legal regimes structured encounters between Chinese and West African laborers on imperial worksites, and how those encounters, in turn, influenced Chinese and West African critiques of Western norms and imperial governance.
Idriss's work has been funded by the Mellon Foundation/Council on Library and Information Resources Fellowship for Research in Original Sources, a Fulbright Student Scholarship, the American Society for Legal History, and various grants from Columbia and Yale universities.
In addition to conducting scholarly research, Idriss has participated in litigation and advocacy on matters of immigration, citizenship, and national security. He has also worked in the public international law and international arbitration practices of major law firms.
Originally from Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, Idriss earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and spent a year as a China Scholarship Council post-baccalaureate fellow at Zhejiang University.
Juliana DeVaan is a PhD candidate in United States history at Columbia, where she studies 20th century cultural and intellectual history, with a focus on dance and performance. She cares about integrating dance into broader narratives of history, showing that movement has meaning which affects how we move through the world. Her dissertation in progress, "Grass-Roots Culture: Experimental Dance and Performance in New York, 1970-2000," explores the relationship between the avant-garde and neoliberalism.
Her work has been supported by the Lehman Center for American History, the Center for American Studies, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and the New York Public Library. She recently completed an oral history with Toni Basil for the Dance Oral History Project at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Currently, she serves as a rapporteur for the Studies in Dance University Seminar and edits the ongoing multi-disciplinary project Dance Lawyer.
Juliana holds an MA in performance studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts (2020), where she won the Performance Studies Emerging Scholar award, and a BA in dance and ethnicity and race studies from Columbia (2019), where she won the award for best thesis in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She is also a dancer who has performed original works by Donald Byrd, Okwui Okpokwasili, Adrienne Truscott, and Kevin Wynn.
Job Titles:
- Coordinator - Undergraduate Program and Curriculum
Michael Gioia is a PhD student in modern European history at Columbia. He is interested generally in the interplay between law and political theory, and more specifically in the legal and intellectual histories of secularism and religious liberty. His current projects cover the role of religion in private law as well as Catholic arguments for the separation of church and state.
Michael earned his BA in history at Stanford, MPhil in political thought and intellectual history at Cambridge and JD at Harvard. He holds bar admission in New York.
Job Titles:
- Director of Undergraduate Studies
Rebecca Glade's work focuses on both Africa and the Middle East, examining the politics and social history of post-independence Sudan. Her dissertation, "Sudanese Political Movements and the Struggle for the State: 1964-1985," analyzes the ways that opposition movements pressured the state to advance their political agendas in Sudan and points to how the state developed in dialogue with them. In the process, Glade engages with and draws upon histories of social and cultural movements, civil society, state-society relations, and labor. Her other recent work focuses on the beginnings of Sudanese Jazz and student activism in Sudan in the 1960s and 70s.
Prior to coming to Columbia, Glade received a B.S. in International Affairs from Georgetown University and a MA in Migration and Intercultural Relations from the Erasmus Mundus European Masters in Migration and Intercultural Relations program. She has lived, worked, and studied in Sudan in various capacities since 2010.
Rebecca Glade is currently teaching English for History Majors as a visiting lecturer at University of Khartoum, where she has also been involved in establishment and continuation of the Sudan Historical Photography Archive. In the past, she has served as a teaching assistant in Columbia's History Department for courses on History of East Africa, Introduction to African History, History of the Modern Middle East, and History of Ancient Egypt. She was co-president of the Graduate History Association at Columbia for the 2017-2018 academic year.
Sahar Bostock is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the impact of development projects on the people and environment of Southern Palestine during the late Ottoman period and under the British Mandate. She is particularly interested in the ways in which urban planning, transportation networks, and communication technologies shaped daily life in the desert and the interactions between Palestinian Bedouins, fellahin, urbanites, and Zionist settlers. Her previous work examined Palestinian practices of radio listening during the British Mandate and listeners' discourse on the Palestine Broadcasting Service (1936-1948).
Her article "Radio Listenership in Palestinian Society: Reshaping Cultural Practices and Political Debate under the British Mandate, 1930-1948" was published in Contemporary Levant in 2022.
Before coming to Columbia, Sahar was an Arabic teacher, developed digital materials for teaching Arabic and Hebrew, and promoted the study of spoken Arabic in schools, universities, and private organizations in Israel.
Shakti Castro is a Bronx-born Boricua, historian, and mother. She holds a BA in English Literature and Media Studies from Hunter College and a Master's in History with a certificate in Public History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As an oral historian at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at CUNY, Shakti conducted over 30 oral history interviews to document the history of New York's Puerto Rican community. She is an alumna of the Smithsonian's Latino Museum Studies Program, where she spent 6 weeks as a fellow in the Medical & Science division at the National Museum of American History. There, she created a collections plan to document the history of the long opioid epidemic, harm reduction, and drug policy reform in New York's Puerto Rican and Latinx communities. This collections plan forms the basis of her anticipated dissertation project at Columbia. Shakti's work examines public health and racialized surveillance, the history of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States, and the postwar urban "crisis" period in New York City.
Shakti has presented at conferences for the National Council on Public History, the Puerto Rican Studies Association, and the Oral History Association. She has given talks at the CUNY Graduate Center, Binghamton University, and the Drug Policy Alliance. You can learn more about her work by visiting her website, wiselatinahustle.com.
Sohini Chattopadhyay is a Ph.D. Candidate with a focus on South Asian studies, urban studies, history of science, and British imperial history. Her doctoral dissertation looks at science and technological uses and innovations in moments of mass deaths such as famines, epidemics, and riots; and how these reorganized the knowledge systems around mortality and transformed social relations in colonial South Asian cities. She has previously studied at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi), and Presidency College (Kolkata).
Her dissertation research is funded by Columbia University Hofstadter Fellowship. She has also been awarded the International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC-IDRF) and The Junior Research Fellowship from the American Institute for Indian Studies (AIIS) for research in India and the UK. Previously, she has held summer fellowships including the History in Action Award, the Ischia School of Life Sciences Summer Fellowship (Ischia, Naples), and AIIS Summer Language Fellowship.
Sohini has held teaching fellowships in four courses: South Asia I with Manan Ahmed, South Asia II with Anupama Rao, Modern Middle East with Rashid Khalidi, and the History of American Public Health with James Colgrove. She has also held a year-long Editorial Assistant position for Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
She has coordinated monthly meetings and talks for the Comparative Histories of Medicine and Health in the Global South, and for Geographies of Injustice. In June 2020, she co-organized a hybrid conference on Indian Ocean Urbanism with her colleague Laura Yan. She has also contributed to the Making and Knowing Minimal Digital Edition.
Sohini is also interested in public history. Some of her recent engagements are available on scroll.in, The Telegraph, The Print, Quartz, SSRC Items, Radio Sofia (IIM Calcutta). She edits a web journal called Borderlines that seeks to rethink theory through research situated in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Currently, she is located in Mumbai for archival research.
Susannah Glickman is a PhD candidate in the American History track. She has a background in mathematics and anthropology and works between the fields of science and technology studies and history, mixing archival and ethnographic methods. Specifically, she is interested in how institutions deal with the category of the future and the origins of the category "tech". Most of her research focuses on the history of quantum computation and information through the transformations in global American science that occurred at the end of the Cold War. Through this line of research she writes more broadly about the political economy of computing. She also sometimes writes about risk and uncertainty in other fields (for example, in history of economics) where those topics intersect theoretically with her interests.
Before Columbia, she got her BA from Reed College (2015) in mathematics and anthropology. She worked as a research assistant at Harvard researching the history of biomarkers (2013-2016) and continued her thesis research (2015-2016) on quantum algorithms (specifically, on optimal queries for algorithms like the dihedral hidden subgroup problem) with her undergraduate advisor Jamie Pommersheim. Her work has been supported by IEEE, the Heyman Center for Humanities, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and IBM. She is currently a Cain Fellow at the Science History Institute and the Zuckerman Dissertation Fellow.
Job Titles:
- Coordinator - Faculty Affairs