Our esteemed Columbia faculty co-leads are:
James Eli Adams, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University where he specializes in the literature and culture of Victorian England. He holds degrees from M.I.T., the University of Oxford (where he was a Rhodes Scholar) and Cornell University, where he earned his Ph.D. under the direction of M.H. Abrams. He is the author of Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (1995) and A History of Victorian Literature (2009) as well as more than 30 articles and chapters in scholarly journals and collections.
Michele Moody-Adams, Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University. Moody-Adams holds degrees from Wellesley College, the University of Oxford (where she was a Marshall Scholar) and Harvard University, where she earned her Ph.D. under the direction of John Rawls. She has published articles on democracy and disagreement; equality and social justice; moral psychology and the virtues; academic freedom; and the idea of moral progress. She is the author of Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy (1997), exploring debates about moral objectivity and moral relativism. She is currently at work on a book entitled Renewing Democracy.
Guest faculty for the week include:
Derek Miller, John J. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
Derek Miller has taught at Harvard since 2013. His research considers the material relationship between the performing arts and industry, particularly the effects of law and economics on artistic production. He draws on both traditional archival and digital methods in his work. Other research interests include musical theater and music-as-performance. He holds a Ph.D. in theater and performance studies from Stanford University (2013) and a B.A. cum laude in English from Yale (2004).
Lauren Robertson, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Lauren Robertson holds a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis and a B.A. from St. John’s College. She is currently at work on her first monograph, Spectacular Skepticism: Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern English Theater, which examines how the theater embraced and exploited performance conventions in order to induce doubt in its audiences. Her article, “‘Ne’er was dream so like a waking': The Temporality of Dreaming and the Depiction of Doubt in The Winter’s Tale,” was recently published in Shakespeare Studies, and her book and performance reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming from Theatre Journal, Shakespeare Bulletin and The Shakespeare Newsletter.
Laura Slatkin, Gallatin Distinguished Professor in Interdisciplinary Scholarship, New York University
Laura Slatkin's research and teaching interests include ancient Greek and Roman poetry; wisdom traditions in classical and Near Eastern antiquity; gender studies; anthropological approaches to the literature of the ancient Mediterranean world; and cultural poetics. Professor Slatkin has published articles on Greek epic and drama and her book The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays was published by Harvard University Press in 2011. She is currently collaborating on a study of the reception of Homer in British romantic poetry.
Gareth Williams, Anthon Professor of Latin Language and Literature, Columbia University
Gareth Williams has taught at Columbia since 1992. He received a Ph.D. in 1990 from Cambridge University for a dissertation on Ovid’s exilic writings that subsequently resulted in two books, the first, Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid’s Exile Poetry (Cambridge, 1994), and the second, The Curse of Exile: A Study of Ovid’s Ibis, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society Supplementary Volume 19 (Cambridge, 1996). Two distinct research phases followed, the first of which focused on the Latin ethical writings of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Two monographs resulted, the first an edition with commentary of L. Annaeus Seneca: Selected Moral Dialogues. De Otio, De Brevitate Vitae (Cambridge, 2003); the second, The Cosmic Viewpoint: A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions (Oxford, 2012), was awarded the Goodwin Award of Merit by the Society for Classical Studies in 2014. Most recently, among various other projects and edited volumes in the area of Roman philosophy, his research has focused on the socio-literary culture of Renaissance Venice, an interest that recently resulted in the publication of Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist (Oxford, 2017).
Bill Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts Dramatic Literature, Performance Theory, Barnard College
B.A., University of Massachusetts (1977); Ph.D., Princeton University (1981). W. B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre (Barnard), is the author of several books. He is currently completing a book on Shakespeare Performance Studies. He has held grants from a number of foundations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation; most recently, he is a Fellow of the "Interweaving Performance Cultures" International Research Center, Institute for Theater Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He teaches a wide range of courses in dramatic literature and performance theory, and is currently co-director of the Ph.D. in Theatre Program.