Faculty Accolades

Columbia faculty members are recognized within the University and across the world for their outstanding scholarship and cutting-edge research, which they bring into the classroom so students can gain new perspectives and learn from leaders in the field. Following are just some of the awards and honors that our faculty received in 2014–2015.

Awards and Prizes

American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology

This award honors early career scientists for contributions in the first nine years post-Ph.D.

  • Nim Tottenham, Associate Professor of Psychology

Berlin Prize, American Academy in Berlin

The highly competitive Berlin Prize is awarded each year to scholars, writers and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields.

  • Philip Kitcher P: ’03, LAW’06, the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy

Best Paper Award at the Eighth Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems

The conference encourages submission of high quality articles on both theoretical issues and concrete applications.

  • Achille C. Varzi, Professor of Philosophy, for her paper “Adding Convexity to Mereotopology,” written with Marion Haemmerli

Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, Finalist

These annual awards, established by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and administered by the New York Academy of Sciences, recognize and support America’s top young scientific innovators in Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering, and Chemistry. Each finalist receives $10,000.

  • Abhay Pasupathy, Associate Professor of Physics

CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications

The prize recognizes an individual or group who has contributed and applied significant ideas and concepts to quantitative fields.

  • José A. Scheinkman, the Edwin W. Rickert Professor of Economics

Columbia University Faculty Teaching Award

Established in 1996, the presidential awards honor the best of Columbia’s teachers for the influence they have on the development of their students and their part in maintaining the University’s longstanding reputation for educational excellence. They are conferred according to the criteria and procedures developed by separate faculty committees for the awards for faculty and graduate students.

  • Peter S. Bearman, the Jonathan R. Cole Professor of Sociology

Frontiers of Science Award, Society of Cosmetic Chemists

An honorarium given to a speaker who has achieved exceptional national or international stature in the scientific community, for delivering a lecture at the Annual Scientific Meeting.

  • Brian R. Greene, Professor of Mathematics and Physics

Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Faculty Mentoring Award

The Graduate Student Advisory Council instituted this award in 2004 to commemorate excellence in the mentoring of Ph.D. students. It is a student initiative; selections were made by graduate student representatives from GSAS and affiliated schools.

  • Karen Barkey, Professor of Sociology

Columbia University Great Teacher Award

Established in 1949, this award is given annually by the Society of Columbia Graduates to two outstanding teachers, including one from the College, as selected by the society.

  • Brent Stockwell, Professor of Biological Sciences and Chemistry

Elaine Bennett Research Prize

Established in 1998 by the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, the Elaine Bennett Research Prize recognizes and honors outstanding research in any field of economics by a woman not more than seven years beyond her Ph.D.

  • Emi Nakamura, Associate Professor of Business and Economics

Emerging Scholar Award

This award is given by the Society for Music Theory for a book or article published within a specified time span after the author’s receipt of the Ph.D or, in the case of someone who does not hold a Ph.D, before the author turns 40.

  • Benjamin A. Steege, Assistant Professor of Music, for his book Helmholtz and the Modern Listener

Gildersleeve Prize for Best Article in American Journal of Philology

This prize of $1,000 was awarded by a selected committee of the Johns Hopkins University Press for the best article in the journal in 2014.

  • James E.G. Zetzel, the Anthon Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, for his paper “A Contract on Ameria: Law and Legality in Cicero’s Pro Roscio Amerino”

Gruber Prize in Cosmology

The prize was awarded for individual and collective contributions to the study of the universe on the largest scales.

  • Jeremiah Ostriker, Professor of Astronomy

Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies and Archaeology

The Kenyon Medal is awarded biennially by the British Academy in recognition of work in the field of classical studies and archaeology.

  • Alan Cameron, Anthon Professor Emeritus of the Latin Language and Literature

Latin American Studies Association Mexico Humanities Book Award

The Mexico Section Book Award in the Humanities recognizes a single or co-authored monograph or a work of art that reflects outstanding originality in its treatment of any aspect of Mexico.

  • Claudio W. Lomnitz, the Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology for The Return of the Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon

Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award

Established in 2005, these awards are given annually and recognize and reward faculty members for attributes beyond their scholarship and research. Recipients are recognized for their teaching and mentoring skills.

  • Brian A. Cole, Professor of Physics
  • Patricia A. Dailey, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature; Director, Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality
  • Souleymane Bachir Diagne P: ’12, Professor of French and Romance Philology
  • Bradford G. Garton P: ’16, Professor of Music
  • Stathis Gourgouris P: ’18, Professor of Classics and English and Comparative Literature
  • Liza Knapp Timberlake GSAS’80, GSAS’80, GSAS’85, P: ’10, ’12, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages
  • Rebecca A. Kobrin, the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History
  • Feng Li P: ’18, Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
  • Molly Murray ’94, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature
  • Gerard F.R. Parkin, Professor of Chemistry
  • Carol A. Rovane, Professor of Philosophy
  • Dorothea E. von Mücke, Professor of Germanic Languages and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages

Grand Prix des Rendez-vous de l’histoire de Blois

This prize rewards historical work, in the French language, having contributed in a remarkable fashion to the progress of historical research and/or to its distribution, all periods.

  • Karl H. Jacoby, Professor of History, for his book Des ombres à l’aube: Un massacre d’Apaches et la violence de l’histoire

Lionel Trilling Book Award

This award is given annually by Columbia College students to a faculty author whose work upholds a level of excellence commensurate with that of Lionel Trilling ’25, GSAS’26, GSAS’38.

  • Zainab Bahrani, the Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art History and Archaeology, for her book The Infinite Image: Art, Time, and the Aesthetic Dimension in Antiquity

Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching

Named after Mark Van Doren GSAS’21, this award is given annually by Columbia College students and recognizes outstanding teaching on the part of a faculty member who teaches College students.

  • Austin E. Quigley, the Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature and Dean Emeritus of Columbia College

Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies Prize

This award is selected by the Council of NAISA for the best first book published by one or two authors on any topic related to Native American and Indigenous Studies.

  • Audra Simpson, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Acting Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, for her book Mohawk Interrupts: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States

New York State Writers Hall of Fame

This project was established in 2010 by the Empire State Center for the Book and the Empire State Book Festival and was established to highlight the rich literary heritage of the New York State and to recognize the legacy of individual New York State writers.

  • Colm Tóibín, the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities

Outstanding Book Award from The Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility of the American Sociological Association

Awarded annually for a book published in the three calendar years preceding the American Sociological Association annual meeting at which the award is bestowed.

  • Thomas A. DiPrete, the Giddings Professor of Sociology, for his book) The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools, written with Claudia Buchmann

Paradigm Award

The Breakthrough Institute’s Paradigm Award is bestowed annually upon individuals whose work has made major contributions to realizing a future where all the world’s inhabitants can enjoy secure, free and prosperous lives on an ecologically vibrant planet.

  • Ruth DeFries P: ’06, PH’09, the Denning Family Professor of Sustainable Development

Statistician of the Year

This honor, given by the Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association and selected by previous recipients, is given annually to the statistician who demonstrates a significant and ongoing commitment to the statistical sciences.

  • Andrew Gelman, Professor of Statistics and Political Science

Woodress Visiting Scholar Award

This award is given by the Cather Project, which supports research and teaching that focuses on the life and work of Willa Cather.

  • Austin Graham, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature

The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds

Selection is based on the number of highly cited papers contributed during the period from 2001 to 2012, and citations to them as per ISI Thomson Reuters.

  • Ruth DeFries P: ’06, PH’09, the Denning Family Professor of Sustainable Development
  • Shahid Naeem, Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology

Fellowships and Grants

American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellows Grant for Public Books

This initiative, made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to expand the role of doctoral education in the United States by demonstrating that the capacities developed in the advanced study of the humanities have wide application, both within and beyond the academy.

  • Sharon Marcus, the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Dean for Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
  • Christia Mercer, the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy

Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship

The Sloan Research Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. These two-year fellowships are awarded yearly to 126 researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field.

  • Jennifer C. Hom SEAS’04, the Joseph Fels Ritt Assistant Professor of Mathematics
  • Suresh Naidu, Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs and Economics

American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellowship

Founded in 1780, the American Academy is among the world’s most prestigious honorary societies; its members are those who advance “scholarship, civil dialogue, and useful knowledge.”

  • David Z. Albert, the Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy
  • George E. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of Music
  • Edward Mendelson, the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities

Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography

The aim of this fellowship program is to reinvigorate bibliographical studies within the humanities by introducing doctoral candidates, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty to specialized skills, methods and professional networks for conducting advanced research with material texts.

  • Joseph A. Howley, Assistant Professor of Classics

Center for the Study of Social Difference Grant

The Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University promotes innovative interdisciplinary scholarship on the role of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race in global dynamics of power and inequality.

  • Kevin A. Fellezs, Assistant Professor of Music and African American Studies, for his project Pacific Climate Circuits

Chang-Chavkin Grant for Global Core Course Development

Courses in the Global Core typically explore the cultures of Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Middle East in an historical context. These courses are organized around a set of primary materials produced in these traditions and may draw from texts or other forms of media, as well as from oral sources or performance, broadly defined.

  • Marcus Folch, Associate Professor of Classics
  • Karen R. Van Dyck, the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Hellenic Studies

Columbia Provost’s Hybrid Learning Course Redesign and Delivery Grant

This funding supports redesign and delivery of courses using innovative, technology-rich pedagogy and learning strategies.

  • Susan L. Boynton, Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music, for her project Increasing the use of Digital Humanities Tools for Active Learning
  • Susan Boynton, Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music, and Bradford G. Garton P: ’16, Professor of Music, for their project Using Music Visualization to Enrich Student Learning in Music Humanities
  • Donald R. Davis GSAS’89, GSAS’91, GSAS’92, the Ragnar Nurkse Professor of Economics, for his course The Economics of New York City
  • Robert G. O’Meally, the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature, for his course The Harlem Renaissances

Curriculum Development Grant from Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality

The Institute aims to develop courses that can be offered within current disciplinary structures, as part of already-existing majors and concentrations, but that bring significant interdisciplinary content into these offerings.

  • Ellie M. Hisama, Professor of Music, for her course Feminist Listening: Critical and Intersectional Approaches to Popular Music

Folger Library Fellowship

Fellowships are awarded based on the proposed topic’s importance, the originality and sophistication of the approach, the feasibility of the research objectives and the use of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collections.

  • Christia Mercer, the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy

Guggenheim Fellowship

U.S. Sen. Simon Guggenheim and his wife established the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1925 as a memorial to a son who died April 26, 1922. The Foundation offers fellowships to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions and irrespective of race, color or creed.

  • Sarah Cole, Professor of English and Comparative Literature
  • Brent H. Edwards GSAS’92, GSAS’95, GSAS’98, Professor of English and Comparative Literature
  • Carmela V. Franklin P: LAW’14, Professor of Classics
  • George E. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of Music

Hettleman Summer Faculty Development Fellowship, Columbia University

  • John B. Gamber, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Innovative Co-teaching Grant from the Alliance Program

The Alliance Program supports joint transatlantic research teams that are thriving in the humanities, social sciences and hard sciences. Each year, dozens of faculty members and doctoral students from Columbia University, École Polytechnique, Sciences Po and Panthéon-Sorbonne University benefit from Alliance grants, which encourage innovative research and teaching approaches and lead to long-term collaboration among the four institutions.

  • Karen Barkey, Professor of Sociology, for her course Ethno-religious Identity and Politics in the Middle East and South Asia, taught with Christophe Jaffrelot

Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship

This fellowship is awarded by the Institute for Advanced Study, one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry, making it possible for approximately 200 scholars to study at the Institute.

  • Deborah T. Steiner, the John Jay Professor of Greek and Latin Languages

Isabel Dalhousie Fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh

This fellowship is offered by invitation on an occasional basis to Honorary Graduates of the University and distinguished figures in business or public life who wish to spend a period of reflection and research, aside from their normal responsibilities, in any area of the humanities and social sciences.

  • Edward Mendelson, the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities

Junior Faculty Diversity Grant Award

Designed to contribute to the career success of junior faculty who contribute to Columbia’s diversity goals, the program has supported 53 projects throughout Columbia since 2013. Applications are reviewed by a committee of faculty from the Morningside and Medical Center campuses.

  • Rebecca A. Kobrin, the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History
  • Tamar Lando, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
  • Valerie J. Purdie-Vaughns ’93, Associate Professor of Psychology
  • Tanya Zelevinsky, Associate Professor of Physics

Kolleg Friedrich Nietzsche Distinguished Fellowship

As the Distinguished Fellow of Kolleg Friedrich Nietzsche, the recipient will deliver four lectures pertaining to the work of the social philosopher.

  • Axel Honneth, the Jack B. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities

Michael I. Sovern Affiliated Fellow

This fellowship, awarded by the Provost of Columbia University, was established by the Trustees of the American Academy in Rome and Friends of Columbia University in honor of Michael I. Sovern ’53, LAW’55, P: ’77, LS’79, LAW’80’s chairmanship of the Academy board from 1993 to 2005. It enables a member of the Columbia community to spend six weeks in residence at the Academy.

  • Karen R. Van Dyck, the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Hellenic Studies

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, American School of Classical Studies at Athens

Founded in 1881, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens is the most significant resource in Greece for American scholars in the fields of Greek language, literature, history, archaeology, philosophy, and art, from pre-Hellenic times to the present. Since it’s inception in 1994, the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship program at the ASCSA has demonstrated its effectiveness by supporting projects for 47 scholars with distinguished research and teaching careers in the humanities.

  • Elizabeth K. Irwin ’91, Associate Professor of Classics

Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering

In 1988, the Packard Foundation established the Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering to allow the nation’s most promising professors to pursue science and engineering research early in their careers with few funding restrictions and limited reporting requirements.

  • Ivan Z. Corwin, Associate Professor of Mathematics

President’s Global Innovation Fund Grant, Columbia University

This fund supports faculty who are developing projects that increase opportunities for research, teaching and service around the world. The 16 projects receiving awards were selected by a review committee of senior faculty drawn from both the Morningside and medical campuses.

  • Zoë Crossland SCE’16, Associate Professor of Anthropology
  • Ruth DeFries P: ’06, PH’09, the Denning Family Professor of Sustainable Development in the Department of Evolution and Environmental Biology
  • Mae M. Ngai GSAS’93, GSAS’95, GSAS’98, the Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History
  • Dennis Tenen, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Public Voices Fellowship of the OpEd Project

The goal of this fellowship is to dramatically increase the public impact of our nation’s top underrepresented thinkers and to ensure our ideas help shape the important conversations of our age. Each Public Voices Fellowship is customized for approximately 20 women and underrepresented thought leaders at each institution. Fellowships last one year and in most cases lead to ongoing partnerships.

  • Susan L. Boynton, Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music
  • Patricia Grieve, the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Professor of the Humanities
  • Hilary Hallett, Assistant Professor of History
  • Christia Mercer, the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy
  • Michele M. Moody-Adams, the Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory
  • Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco, Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures
  • Joseph R. Slaughter, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Residential Fellowship at Princeton Humanities Council

The Council fosters interdisciplinary work, offering grants for conferences, faculty seminars and innovative, team-taught courses, as well as for scholarship that brings the humanities into dialogue with the arts, social sciences, sciences and technology.

  • Katja Vogt, Professor of Philosophy

Simons Fellow in Mathematics

The Simons Fellows program is intended to make leaves more productive by enabling the extension of sabbatical leaves from one academic term to a full academic year. Awards are based on the applicant’s scientific accomplishments in the five-year period preceding the application and on the potential scientific impact of the work to be done during the leave period.

  • Mu-Tao Wang, Professor of Mathematics

Stuart Fellow

Each year distinguished writers, artists and scholars spend a semester at Princeton, teaching one course. The fellowships were endowed by the Old Dominion Foundation, the Princeton Class of 1932, the Belknap Fund for the Humanities, and the Virginia and Richard Stewart Memorial Fund.

  • Akeel Bilgrami, the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair of Philosophy

Tsunoda Fellowship

Waseda University offers a broad menu of undergraduate, graduate and graduate professional programs and has established the Tsunoda Fellowship to promote academic exchanges between the faculties of Columbia and Waseda.

  • Kevin A. Fellezs, Assistant Professor of Music

Invited Speakers and Dedications

50th Anniversary of Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain at New College, Oxford and at the Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung in Berlin: Keynote Speaker

The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain was founded in 1964. The publication of the first Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain in 1966 would later become the Journal of Philosophy of Education.

  • Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor, English and Comparative Literature

Automorphic Forms, Shimura Varieties, Galois Representations and L-functions: Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley

This workshop focused on recent developments related to Langlands correspondence and arithmetic of special values of L-functions.

  • Dedicated to Michael Harris, Professor of Mathematics

Bishop Hurst Honorary Lecturer at American University

The Bishop John Fletcher Hurst Philosophy Lecture brings some of the most distinguished thinkers from this country and abroad to the American University campus.

  • Michele M. Moody-Adams, the Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory

Festschrift, Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater

This collection of original essays, presented at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in April 2014, honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater.

  • Jean Howard, the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities

Hydra Residency, Athens School of the Arts

  • Karen R. Van Dyck, the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Hellenic Studies

International Congress of Mathematicians, Seoul, Korea

The International Congress of Mathematicians is the largest congress in the mathematics community. It is held once every four years under the auspices of the International Mathematical Union. Each congress is memorialized by printed Proceedings recording academic papers based on invited talks intended to reflect the current state of the science.

  • Mohammed Abouzaid, Associate Professor of Mathematics
  • Ivan Z. Corwin, Associate Professor of Mathematics
  • Panagiota Daskalopoulos, Professor of Mathematics
  • Michael Harris, Professor of Mathematics

John Bahcall Lecturer

The John Bahcall Lectureship is awarded each year to a leading astronomer based on the research excellence and accomplishments of the lecturer, who spends one week at the Space Telescope Science Institute and delivers three lectures.

  • Brian R. Greene, Professor of Mathematics and Physics

Master-Seminar Series at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland

  • Christopher A.B. Peacocke P: ’09, the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy

Patrick Romanell Lecture at the American Philosophical Association

This lecture is presented annually at a divisional meeting of the American Philosophical Association on the topic of philosophical naturalism.

  • Patricia Kitcher P: ’03, LAW’06, the Roberta and William Campbell Professor of the Humanities

Plenary Lecture, 37th Conference on Stochastic Processes and Their Applications

The Conference on Stochastic Processes and Their Applications is organized under the auspices of the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability, co-sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and in partnership with the Clay Mathematics Institute.

  • Ivan Z. Corwin, Associate Professor of Mathematics

RTcmix Festival 2014, Center for Computer Music, University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Keynote Speaker

RTcmix, a real-time software “language” for digital sound synthesis and signal-processing, was developed in the late ‘90s by Bradford G. Garton P: ’16, Professor of Music, and David J. Topper GSAS’96, Department of Music at Columbia University in New York.

  • Bradford G. Garton P: ’16, Professor of Music

Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature honoring Toni Morrison at Cornell

The Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature brings distinguished scholars of modern literature, at the invitation of the English Department, to speak at Cornell about their field of specialty.

  • Farah J. Griffin, the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies

Featured Performers & Composers

2015 Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States Conference

Founded in 1984, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States is a non-profit national organization of composers, performers and teachers of electro-acoustic music representing every part of the country and virtually every musical style.

  • Bradford G. Garton P: ’16, Professor of Music

2014 NYU/ITP Interactive Music Concert

This annual concert features the works of the Interactive Telecommunications Program of New York University.

  • Bradford G. Garton P: ’16, Professor of Music

Composer-in-Residence, 2015 Musica nova Helsinki Festival

This festival is Finland’s largest contemporary music festival. Held every other year, it was launched in 1981 as the Helsinki Biennale and presents the very latest music, composers now making their mark internationally and contemporary classics.

  • Alfred W. Lerdahl P: ’08, the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition

Composer-in-Residence, 2015 Winnipeg New Music Festival

This festival is one of the premier new music events in North America.

  • George Friedrich Haas, Professor of Music

Hauptkomponist, 2014 Wien Modern

Wien Modern is one of the most important festivals of contemporary music held in Vienna for the past 28 years. In 2014, Professor George Friedrich Haas held the honor of being the main composer, or Hauptkomponist, for the festival.

  • George Friedrich Haas, Professor of Music

Featured Soloist with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall

The Orchestra of St. Luke’s grew out of a chamber ensemble that began giving concerts at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields in Greenwich Village in 1974. Today, the 21 virtuoso artists of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble make up the orchestra’s artistic core.

  • Christopher J. Washburne GSAS’92, GSAS’94, GSAS’99, Associate Professor of Music

Featured soloist for the Django Reinhardt NY Festival at Birdland Jazz Club

The festival was launched in 2000 and celebrates the music of legendary gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt who teamed with famed jazz violinist Stehane Grappelli in the ’30s and ​’40s to create the Quintet of the Hot club de France, which went on to become one of the most important jazz partnerships in history.

  • Christopher J. Washburne GSAS’92, GSAS’94, GSAS’99, Associate Professor of Music

Featured soloist with Bobby Sanabria at the Apollo Theater

Organized by the Apollo Theater, Harlem Stage and Jazzmobile in collaboration with Columbia University, the Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival honors the rich legacy of jazz in the uptown community and the neighborhood’s continued role as a laboratory for new jazz talent. Featured performances included Bobby Sanabria at the Apollo Theater, with trombonist and Columbia professor Christopher J. Washburne.

  • Christopher J. Washburne GSAS’92, GSAS’94, GSAS’99, Associate Professor of Music

Honorary Degrees and Fellowships

Doctor of Letters (honoris causa), University of Ghana-Legon

  • Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor, English and Comparative Literature 

Honorary Degree of Doctor of Music, University of Edinburgh

  • George E. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of Music

Honorary Doctorate, Yale University

  • Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor, English and Comparative Literature 

Honorary Research Fellow, University of Birmingham, UK

  • Justin Clarke Doane, Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Appointments and Committees

Board Member of the Society for Novel Studies

The Society for Novel Studies exists to further the study of the novel as a genre and to examine the role of fiction in engaging, formulating and shaping the world.

  • Bruce W. Robbins P:’04, GSAS’07, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities

Chairman, PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature

This festival was founded by Salman Rushdie in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and is the only international literary festival in the world with a human rights focus.

  • Colm Tóibín, the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities

Comité d’Honneur des Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco

  • Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor, English and Comparative Literature 

Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee

This committee advises the directors of the Economics and Statistics Administration’s two statistical agencies, The Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Commissioner of the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, on statistical methodology and other technical matters related to the collection, tabulation and analysis of federal economic statistics.

  • David E. Weinstein, the Carl S. Shoup Professor of the Japanese Economy

First-Vice President, Medieval Academy of America

The Medieval Academy of America was formed to conduct, encourage, promote and support research, publication and instruction in Medieval records, literature, languages, arts, archaeology, history, philosophy, science, life and all other aspects of Medieval civilization.

  • Carmela V. Franklin, Professor of Classics

President, Columbia College Phi Beta Kappa

The Phi Beta Kappa honor society was founded in 1776 at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

  • Marcellus Blount, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Vice President, American Comparative Literature Association

Founded in 1960, this association is the principal learned society in the United States for scholars whose work involves several literatures and cultures as well as the premises of cross-cultural literary study itself.

  • Joseph R. Slaughter, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature