Seminar Faculty
Valerie Paley is senior vice president and the Sue Ann Weinberg Director of the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at the New-York Historical Society. Formerly the chief historian at the institution, she was founding director of its Center for Women’s History, the first such center in the United States within the walls of a major museum. A graduate of Vassar College, Paley holds an MA in American Studies and a PhD in History from Columbia University, where she serves on the adjunct faculty at the Columbia Center for American Studies. Her work at New-York Historical encompasses a critical range of curatorial, scholarly, and administrative responsibilities, including the development of a new joint MA Program in Museum Studies with the CUNY School of Professional Studies, which launched in fall 2019. Paley is the 2020 recipient of the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award, recognizing distinguished contributions to the field of public history.
Education
Ph.D. – Columbia University 2012
M.S. – Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism 2002
B.A. – Vassar College 1999Interests and Research
Thai Jones studies radical social movements, New York City history, and Environmental History in the United States. He is the author of two books. The latest, More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York's Year of Anarchy (Bloomsbury, 2014 [2012]), rediscovers a forgotten political crisis that roiled New York City in the early twentieth century. His first book, A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience (Free Press, 2004), explored his own family’s long history of political dissent against the backdrop of twentieth century social movements. He is currently working on Boomtown, a history of labor and the environment in Progressive Era gold-mining communities. Before becoming Lehman Curator, Jones was an assistant professor of history at the Bard College Master of Arts in Teaching Program. Formerly a reporter for Newsday, his writings have appeared in a variety of national publications, ranging from the New York Times to The Nation, to the Occupied Wall Street Journal.
Ryan Carr (Yale, 2016) teaches Indigenous Studies at the center, as well as classes on other topics in transatlantic cultural history. His current research focuses on the Native Northeast and on the intertwinement of settler colonialism with early ideas about secularism. His recent work appears in Critical Research on Religion, New England Quarterly, English Literary History, and other journals. His first book is on the Mohegan-Brothertown minister Samson Occom.
B.A. Kenyon, Ph.D. Johns Hopkins. Professor Posnock was Andrew Hilen Professor of American Literature at the University of Washington before teaching in the English department at New York University from 2000 to 2004. His books include Henry James and the Problem of Robert Browning (1985, University of Georgia Press); The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James and the Challenge of Modernity (1991, Oxford UP); Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (1998, Harvard UP); The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison (editor, 2005); Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (2006, Princeton UP); Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers and Artists (2016, Harvard University Press). Renunciation was named a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, 2016 and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016, and was on the Shortlist for the 2017 Christian Gauss Award, The Phi Beta Kappa Society. From 1998 to 2017 he was series editor of Cambridge University Press Studies in American Literature and Culture and is a contributing editor of Raritan and American Literary History. In 1994 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2009 he was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently writing a book about American sophistication and the fear of art in the 1920s, 1950s and now.
Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. He holds an A.B. (1995), an M.A. (1996), and a Ph.D. (2004) in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He was Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum at Columbia College from 2008 to 2018. Roosevelt specializes in Antebellum American literature and culture, with a particular interest in American citizenship. His dissertation, Rethinking America: Abolitionism and the Antebellum Transformation of the Discourse of National Identity, won Columbia University’s 2004 Bancroft Award. In 2000, he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student. Roosevelt teaches “Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West,” a year-long course on primary texts in moral and political thought, as well as seminars in American Studies including “Freedom and Citizenship in the United States.” He is Director of the Center for American Studies’ Freedom and Citizenship Program in collaboration with the Double Discovery Center. He speaks and writes on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education and is author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021).
Roger Lehecka retired from a long career at Columbia University at the end of 2004. Among other positions he held at the University, he was Dean of Students for 19 years. He was a founder of Columbia's Upward Bound Program in 1965, an experience that taught him much about the ways access to college is not equally available to all talented youngsters. His three years with Upward Bound led to a career in higher education that always focused on expanding opportunity for those previously excluded from a college education. He remains involved at Columbia in a number of ways and has been teaching the Equity in Higher Education seminar with Prof. Delbanco annually since 2007. In 2015 he received the Heritage Award from Columbia's Black Alumni Council. Outside Columbia for the last two decades, Mr. Lehecka has helped low-income students from New York City, rural Pennsylvania, and both coasts of Florida get admitted to good colleges and find the financial aid to attend. He continues to advise them throughout college, wherever they enroll, and help them through the difficult times most students face. He was Chair of the Double Discovery Center Board of Friends 2019-22 and is currently Chair of the Board of the Lenfest Scholars Foundation. Mr. Lehecka attended New York City public schools before entering Columbia College. He has a Masters degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education as well as an A.B. and M.Phil. from Columbia University.
B.A., Columbia College, Physics (1961); Ph.D. Brandeis University, Biology (1966). Robert Pollack, Professor of Biological Sciences, joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1978. His laboratory research focused on the potential utility of stable reversion from the oncogenic phenotype. His teaching focuses on the application of knowledge of the natural world to problems that require decisions that cannot be based solely on such data-driven knowledge. He was a Postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Howard Green at NYU Medical Center from 1966-1969; a research scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1969-70; a senior scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 1970 to 1975; and an associate professor of microbiology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1975 until he joined the faculty as a Professor in 1978. Until 1991 his NIH-supported laboratory research focused on elaboration of his discovery in 1968 that the clonal descendants of tumor cells include genetically stable revertant cells, capable of growing into normal populations in turn. Beginning in the late 1990s, after he had set aside lab work in order to write a series of books, he has been pleased to note that other laboratories have begun to apply his discovery to the development of novel forms of cancer chemotherapy. As a result, his early research continues to be referenced in current research articles. He received the Alexander Hamilton Medal from Columbia University, the Gershom Mendes Seixas Award from the Columbia/Barnard Hillel, and held a Guggenheim Fellowship. He presented the Schoff Lectures at Columbia in 1998, which led to his third book, The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith. He is the Director of the University Seminars and heads the Research Cluster on Science and Subjectivity in the Center for Science and Society.
Paul Levitz is a comic fan (The Comic Reader), editor (Batman), writer (Legion of Super-Heroes), executive (30 years at DC, ending as President & Publisher), historian (Will Eisner: Champion of the Graphic Novel, Abrams ComicArts, 2015) and educator (including the American Graphic Novel at Columbia). Paul Levitz was extensively involved in transmedia in his four decades with DC Comics ending as President & Publisher from 2002-2009. He won two consecutive annual Comic Art Fan Awards for Best Fanzine, received Comic-con International’s Inkpot Award, the prestigious Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award, the Comics Industry Appreciation Award from ComicsPro and the Dick Giordano Humanitarian Award from the Hero Initiative.
His 75 Years of DC Comics won the Eisner Award, the Eagle Award and Munich’s Peng Pris, and has been released as three separate volumes in 2013-5. His over 400 comics have been collected in over 20 graphic novels, and he is the first writer to have appeared on the New York Times Graphic Books Bestseller List for both fiction and non-fiction. Levitz also serves on the board of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and Boom! Studios. He teaches at Princeton, Columbia, Manhattanville and in Pace’s graduate program.
Michael Stephen Hindus received his AB from Columbia, his MA and PhD in History from the University of California at Berkeley, and his JD (cum laude) from Harvard Law School. At Columbia College, he studied with legendary professors James P. Shenton, Walter Metzger, and David Rothman, and participated in the Double Discovery Center. The author of two books and numerous articles in American legal history, he taught at the University of Minnesota and Stanford Law School. As a lawyer, he specialized in renewable energy development as a partner in the international law firm, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman before retiring in 2018. Since 2017, he has taught a seminar on American Legal History for the Center for American Studies. A passionate classical music devotee, he is on the board of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.
Maura Spiegel specializes in contemporary fiction, film, and narrative theory. She is a founder and co-director of the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where she teaches a film course to first-year medical students. She has lectured on Narrative Medicine in Venice, London, Dublin, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Calgary, Tampere, Finland, Baroda, India, and in many cities around the U.S. She co-authored The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press), which has been translated into French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Greek and Polish; The Grim Reader: Writings on Death, Dying and Living on (Anchor/Doubleday), The Breast Book: An Intimate and Curious History (Workman), which was a Book-of-the-Month Club-Quality Paperbacks selection. She edited and introduced new editions of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes for the Barnes & Noble Classics Series. With Rita Charon, MD, PhD, she edited the journal Literature and Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press) for seven years. She has written for The New York Times, Newsday, The British Film Institute, and has published articles on the history of the emotions, Charles Dickens, Victorian fashion, diamonds in the movies, among many other topics. She is writing a monograph on the films of Sidney Lumet (Columbia University Press), and her book, Sidney Lumet: A Life (St. Martin’s Press) was published in 2019.
Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities, specializes in intellectual history, with a particular focus on Western political and religious thought. Before moving to Columbia in 2007 he taught in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and at New York University. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, he is the author of The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (2017), The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (2016), The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (2007),The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (2001),and G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (1993). He has also edited The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin(2001) with Ronald Dworkin and Robert Silvers, and The Public Face of Architecture(1987) with Nathan Glazer. He is currently writing a book titled Ignorance and Bliss, and another on the history of the idea of conversion.
Lynne Breslin is a founding member of the architecture firm LBA. Her firm’s award winning work in the US, China and Africa has been widely published. She has taught architectural history and theory as well as design studio at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia since 1986. She has also taught at Princeton University School of Architecture, the Cooper Union and Pratt University. A graduate of Harvard College, she holds a M.Arch and M.A. from Princeton University. She was a Luce Scholar and served on the Advisory Board of the Princeton School of Architecture.
In addition to housing, single family residences, and schools, Breslin has designed a wide range of exhibitions for major museums including the opening temporary exhibition for the U S Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University, Slavery in NY and the Civil War for the N-Y Historical Society, and the permanent exhibition at the Empire State building. Space, construction, video, graphics and artifacts are used to immerse visitors and compel them to examine the conventions of museum narratives. She has also written essays for books and design magazines on contemporary Japanese architecture and urbanism, museums and photography.
John H McWhorter is an associate professor in the Slavic Department at Columbia University. He earned his B.A. from Rutgers, his M.A. from New York University, and his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford. Professor McWhorter has taught the seminar "Language in America," a study of American linguistic history that considers Native American languages, immigrant languages, creole languages, American Sign Language, Black English and other speech varieties-- their development, interactions, and preservation. He has also taught the seminar "Language Contact," which focuses specifically on the mixture of language in North America, and studies the development of creoles, pidgins, koines, "vehicular" languages, and nonstandard dialects. Both seminars consider perceived legitimacy of languages, and the standing of language mixtures in media and education. Professor McWhorter also teaches various other courses for the Linguistics Program and Music Humanities for the Core Curriculum program.
Professor McWhorter is an author of more than twenty books including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Losing the Race: Self Sabotage in Black America and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. In 2016 he published Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally), while in 2021 he published Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism. He also writes a weekly column for The New York Times and hosts the language podcast Lexicon Valley. Students might be particularly interested in his article on how immigrants change languages in The Atlantic and an essay on policing the "N-word" in Time.
Jeremy Dauber is the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture and, for a decade, directed the Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of six books: Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Stanford University Press, 2004); In the Demon's Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern (Yale University Press; 2010); The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem (Schocken Books, 2013); Jewish Comedy: A Serious History ( W.W. Norton, 2017); American Comics: A History (W.W. Norton: 2021), and, now, Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew (Yale University Press: 2023). He frequently lectures on topics related to Jewish literature, history, humor, and popular culture at the 92nd St Y and other venues throughout the United States.
B.A., Columbia (1977); Ph.D., University of Chicago (1982). Professor Shapiro is author of Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991); Shakespeare and the Jews (1995), which was awarded the Bainton Prize; Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play (2000); 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), winner of the Theatre Book Prize as well as the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize; and Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010), winner of the Lionel Trilling Award in 2011. He has co-edited the Columbia Anthology of British Poetry and served as the associate editor of the Columbia History of British Poetry. He has also co-authored and presented a 3-hour BBC documentary, The King and the Playwright (2012). He has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the Huntington Library. His other books include The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, a Library of America volume on Shakespeare in America, and Shakespeare in a Divided America, selected by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year. He is currently at work on two books, one on rise and fall of the Federal Theatre Project in the late 1930s, the other, Othello: An American Life. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.
Interests and Research
Hilary Hallett is a historian of modern American cultural and social history. Her areas of specialization include women and gender history; histories of popular and mass culture in transatlantic perspective; and histories of American culture industries, particularly theater, music, film, and Hollywood's history. She is interested in mass media’s relationship to social change, and to the big stories they tell about America and Americans over time. She has worked as an historical consultant for both documentaries and narrative features and television, including most recently a forthcoming mini-series about actress, Hedy Lamarr.
Go West, Young Women: The Rise of Early Hollywood (2013) https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520274099/go-west-young-women explores how early Hollywood became a symbol of the new professional opportunities and sexual freedoms seized by some young women in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Her second book, Inventing the It Girl: Life & Times of Elinor Glyn is due out with Liveright-Norton (June 2022). This unconventional biography explores the influence of the British socialite, founder of the modern 'sex novel' (and author of more than 30 books), and early Hollywood's resident philosopher of love on mass culture.
Education
Ph.D. — CUNY Graduate Center, 2005
B.F.A. — Tisch School of the Arts, NYUAwards
- Fellow, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library, 2016-17
- Jensen-Miller Prize, for “Based on a True Story,” Western History Association, 2012
- Historical Society of Southern California/ Haynes Foundation Fellowship, 2007
- Fellow, Center for the Analysis of Culture, Rutgers University, 2004-2005
- E. P. Thompson Dissertation Fellowship, CUNY Graduate Center, 2002-2003
Affiliations
- Organization of American Historians
- Society of Cinema and Media Studies
- Women & the Silent Screen
Publications
Books
Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood (University of California Press, 2013).
Inventing the It Girl: Life & Times of Elinor Glyn (Liveright-Norton, June 2022).
Articles
“A Mother to the Modern Girl: Elinor Glyn and Three Weeks,” Journal of Women’s History (Aug. 2018).
“Based on a True Story: New Western Women and the Birth of Hollywood,” Pacific Historical Review (May 2012): 177 – 210.
“Women’s Migration, Early Hollywood, and the Making of Los Angeles,” in Actes de l’histoire de l’immigration, Image et representations du genre en migration, Numero special, vol. 7 (2007): 91 – 104.
Cathleen Price is a 1992 graduate of Columbia College who presently practices law. She works to confront the disaster of mass incarceration that has resulted from the over-reliance on the prison system as a solution to our society's problems. Since 1997, she has worked on behalf of death-sentenced prisoners, offenders subject to excessively harsh punishments, and communities marginalized by poverty and chronic discrimination. She litigates on behalf of individuals and also advocates before legislators and other policymakers. In addition to practicing law, Ms. Price provides training and consultation assistance to a range of activists and organizations whose work challenges the despair of the prevailing system of criminal justice. She is a 1996 graduate of Harvard Law School, which in 2004 awarded her its Gary Bellow Public Service Award.
Casey Nelson Blake works on modern U.S. intellectual and cultural history, with an emphasis on the relationship between artistic modernism, cultural criticism and democratic citizenship. His publications include Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford, The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State, The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution and At the Center: American Thought and Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century (co-authored with Daniel Borus and Howard Brick). He is currently at work on a cultural biography of the writer and critic Paul Goodman.
Professor Blake came to Columbia in 1999 as founding Director of the Center for American Studies after directing American Studies programs at Indiana University and Washington University, and teaching at Reed College. As Director, Professor Blake oversaw the development of a civic engagement curriculum within the Center, as well as the “Freedom and Citizenship” program that provides humanities education and college mentoring to under-served high school students.
Caroline Miller is a veteran journalist who was editor-in-chief of New York magazine from 1997 to 2004, along with many other magazine and newspaper editing posts. Currently she teaches journalism seminars at Columbia and New York University, and she is the editorial director of the Child Mind Institute and its website, childmind.org. On childmind.org Miller has supervised the development of hundreds of articles and other resources on children’s mental health and learning disorders, including guides and interactive tools, that are accessed by 2 million users a month.
Lecturer in Law Benjamin E. Rosenberg is a partner in the white collar and securities litigation groups at Derchert. From 1990 to 1994, he was an assistant United States attorney in the criminal division in the Southern District of New York, where he tried and investigated cases involving narcotics trafficking, identification theft, perjury, obstruction of justice, and gang violence. From March 2007 to July 2008, Rosenberg took a leave of absence from Dechert to serve as chief trial counsel for the New York State Attorney General, where he was lead counsel responsible for some of the largest investigations and litigations in the attorney general's office. For his work there, he was awarded the New York State Attorney General's award.
He clerked for the Honorable Judge Edward R. Becker of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Rosenberg earned his B.A. and J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was editor and treasurer of the Harvard Law Review.
Andrew Delbanco is Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies, president of the Teagle Foundation, and past president (2021-22) of the Society of American Historians.
His recent book The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (Penguin Press, 2018), named a New York Times notable book, was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf prize for “books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity,” the Lionel Trilling Award, and the Mark Lynton History Prize, sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, for a work “of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression.”
Professor Delbanco’s other books include College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton University Press, 2012; second edition 2023), and Melville: His World and Work (Knopf, 2005), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography. His essays appear in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Nation, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and other periodicals, on topics ranging from American literature and history to contemporary issues in higher education.
In 2006, Professor Delbanco was honored with the Great Teacher Award by the Society of Columbia Graduates. In 2012, he was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. In 2022 he delivered the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, “the highest honor conferred by the federal government for intellectual achievement in the humanities,” on “The Question of Reparations: Our Past, Our Present, Our Future.”