Columbia University
The Graduate Program
Annual Newsletter
July, 2020
We welcome our incoming Ph.D. candidates for Fall 2020!
East Asia
Sally Greenland
IGH
Ifadha Sifar
Latin America History
Rosa Mantilla
Medieval Europe
Claire Dwyer
Charles Steinman
Middle East History
Janna Aladdin
Janina Santer
Modern European History
Julia Burke
Rochelle Malcom
Zinaida Osipova
Marie Robin
South Asia History
Kamini Massod
Anusha Sundar
United States History
Josias Agustin Mendez
Juliana DeVaan
Samuel Niu
Seokju Oh
Kayla Smith
Jordan Villegas
Ph.D.s Conferred in 2019-20
Allen, David Every Citizen a Statesman: Building a Democracy for Foreign Policy in the American Century Sponsor: Matthew Connelly Bhattacharyya, Tania Ocean Bombay, 1839-1937: Space, itinerancy and community in an imperial port city Sponsor: Manan Ahmed Cho, Eunsung The Thread of Juche: Vinalon and Materially-Embodied Interdependencies in North Korea, 1930-2018 Sponsor: Eugenia Lean & Jungwon Kim Elmer, Hannah Alive Enough? A Conflict over Divine Presence and Natural Power in the Reanimation of Dead Infants, 1400-1545 Sponsor: Kayle Gerien-Chen, James Jin Between Empire and Nation: Taiwan Sekimin and the Making of Japanese Empire in South China, 1895–1937 Sponsor: Carol Gluck Igra, Alma Farm to Pharmacy: Nutrition, Animals, and Governance in Britain 1870-1945 Sponsor: Susan Pederson Koeth Stephen The Suburban Church: Catholic Parishes and Politics in Metropolitan New York, 1945-1985 Sponsor: Ira Katznelson Murphy, Anna Junn Corporatizing Defense: Management Expertise and the Transformation of the Cold War U.S. Military Sponsor: Elizabeth Blackmar Neubauer, Jack Adopted by the World: China and the Rise of Global Intimacy Sponsor: Lean Lillevik Nofil, Briana Detention Power: Jails, Camps, and the Origins of Immigrant Incarceration, 1900-2002 Sponsor: Hsueh-Hwa Ngai Okan, Orcun Coping with Transitions: The Connected Construction of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, 1918-1928 Sponsor: Rashid Khalidi
O'Neil, Sean The Art of Signs: Symbolic Notation and Visual Thinking in Early Modern Europe, 1600-1800 Sponsor: Pamela Smith Provezano, Luca Under the Paving Stones: Militant Protest and Practices of the State in France and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1968-1977 Sponsor: Moyn Resnikoff, Jason The Misanthropic Sublime: Automation and the Meaning of Work in the Postwar United States Sponsor: Casey Blake Rutherford, Emily The Politics and Culture of Gender in British Universities, 1860–1935 Sponsor: Susan Pedersen Sarwate, Rahul Reimagining the Modern Hindu Self: Caste, Untouchability and Hindu Theology in Colonial South Asia, 1899-1948 Sponsor: Manan Ahmed Serby, Benjamin Gay Liberation and the Politics of the Self in Postwar America Sponsor: Casey Blake Shinnar, Shulamit The Best of Doctors Go to Hell”: Rabbinic Medical Culture in Late Antiquity (200-600 CE) Sponsor: Beth Ann Berkowitz Vuljevic, Suzana The Crisis of Spirit: Pan-Balkan Idealism, Transnational Cultural-Diplomatic Networks and Intellectual Cooperation in Interwar Southeast Europe, 1930-1941 Sponsor: Mark Mazower
Congratulations to all those who successfully defended their dissertations in 2018-19!
Alcenat, Westenley. “Children of Africa, Shall be Haytians”: Prince Saunders, revolutionary transnationalism, and the foundations of Black emigration
Sponsor: Eric Foner
Aumoithe, George. Strange bedfellows: Public health and welfare politics in the United States, 1965-2000
Sponsor: Alice Kessler-Harris
Bhattacharyya, Tania. Ocean Bombay: Space, itinerancy and community in an imperial port city, 1839-1937
Sponsor: Manan Ahmed
Buljina, Harun. Empire, nation, and the Islamic world: Bosnian Muslim reformists between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, 1901-1914
Sponsor: Mark Mazower
Ferguson, Susanna. Tracing tarbiya: Women, education, and childrearing in Lebanon and Egypt, 1860-1939
Sponsor: Rashid Khalidi
Freeman, Mary. The politics of correspondence: Letter writing in the campaign against slavery in the United States
Sponsor: Barbara Fields
Gerien-Chen, James. Between empire and nation: Taiwan Sekimin and the making of Japanese empire in South China, 1895-1937
Sponsor: Carol Gluck
Gonzalez Le Saux, Marianne. The Rule of Lawyers: Legal Profession, Politics and the Social in Chile, 1925-1989
Sponsor: Nara Milanich
Ispahani, Merve. Building sovereignty in the late Ottoman world: Imperial subjects, consular networks, and documentation of individual identities
Sponsor: Rashid Khalidi
Kaplan, Abram. The myth of Greek algebra: Progress and community in early-modern mathematics
Sponsor: Matthew Jones
Kressel, Daniel. Technicians of the spirit: Post-fascist technocratic authoritarianism in Spain, Argentina, and Chile, 1945-1988
Sponsor: Pablo Piccato
Kung, Chien Wen. Nationalist China in the postcolonial Philippines: Diasporic anticommunism, shared sovereignty, and ideological Chineseness, 1945-1970s
Sponsor: Marwa Elshakry
Kuzuoglu, Ulug. Codes of modernity: Infrastructures of language and Chinese scripts in an age of global information and revolution
Sponsor: Madeleine Zelin
Luo, Weiwei. The common good: Property and state-making in late imperial China
Sponsor: Madeleine Zelin
Marcus, David. In socialism’s twilight: Michael Walzer and the politics of the long New Left
Sponsor: Casey Blake
Mulder, Nicholas. The economic weapon: Interwar internationalism and the rise of sanctions, 1914-1945
Sponsor: Mark Mazower
Murphy, Anna. Corporatizing defense: Management expertise and the transformation of the Cold War U.S. military
Sponsor: Betsy Blackmar
Newman, Rachel. Transnational ambitions: Student migrants and the making of a national future in twentieth century Mexico
Sponsor: Pablo Piccato
Resnikoff, Jason. The misanthropic sublime: Automation and the meaning of work in the postwar United States
Sponsor: Casey Blake
Shinnar, Shulamit. “The Best of Doctors Go to Hell”: Rabbinic medical culture in late antiquity (200-600 C.E.)
Sponsor: Beth Berkowitz
Vendell, Dominic. Scribes and the vocation of politics in the Maratha empire, 1708-1818
Sponsor: Nicholas Dirks
Yee, Ethan. The burden of forgiveness: Franciscans’ impact on penitential practices in the thirteenth century
Sponsor: Neslihan Senocak
Zakar, Adrien. The disembodied eye: Technologies of surveillance and the logistics of perception in the Ottoman Empire and Syria, 1900-1930
Sponsor: Christopher L. Brown
Zárate, Arthur. The making of a Muslim reformer: Muḥammad al-Ghazálī (1917-1996) and Islam in postcolonial Egypt, 1947-1967
Sponsor: Marwa Elshakry
Dissertation Write-up Fellowships Awarded for the 2018-19 Academic Year (Update in progress)
Doris G. Quinn Fellowship
Owain Lawson
Christopher W. Jones
Micah McElroy
Robin Reich
Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship
Harriet Zuckerman Dissertation Completion Fellowship
Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship
CES/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship
Lowenheim History Fellowship
Fellowships, Awards, Grants, & Babies (Update in progress)
Halimat Somotan has started a pre-doctoral fellowship at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, at the University of Virginia.
Heath Rojas, a first-year doctoral student, won the Raymond J. Cunningham Prize for the best article published in a history department journal by an undergraduate. His winning article, titled “A Model of Revolutionary Regicide: The Role of Seventeenth-Century English History in the Trial of King Louis XVI,” appeared in Herodotus in Spring 2018.
Madeline Woker was named a Spring 2019 fellow of the Camargo Foundation Core Program, and her article “Edwin Seligman, initiator of global progressive public finance” will be published in the Journal of Global History in November 2018.
Amanda Martin-Hardin published an article (titled “Nature in Black and White: Summer Camps and Racialized Landscapes in the Photography of Gordon Parks”) in the journal Environmental History.
The Heyman Center for the Humanities named doctoral candidates Liz Dolfi (Religion), Alma Igra (History), Paul Katz (History), Warren Kluber (Theatre), and Emily Rutherford (History) as its 2018-2019 graduate student fellows.
The National Science Foundation awarded grants supporting the dissertation research of four GSAS doctoral students: David Alfaro Serrano (Economics), Eduardo Romero Dianderas (Anthropology), Aaron Plasek (History), and Anna Schirrer (Anthropology).
Conor Wilkinson won the Graduate Student Best Paper Prize at the South East Regional Seminar in African Studies & Southeast Africanist Network Annual Joint Meeting, for his paper “Ancestors and Family Life in Eastern and Southern Tanzania at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.”
Robin Reich won the prize for Best Student Paper (for “Nearly Gold and Nearly Perfect? Meaning and Materiality of Copper-Alloy in Twelfth-Century Sicily”) from the Medieval Academy of America at its 2018 Annual Meeting.
Benjamin Serby published an article (“The Dialectical Liberalism of Richard Hofstadter”) in the journal Society.
A group of Columbia faculty, librarians, and students—including doctoral candidates Zeinab Azarbadegan (History), Mahmood Gharavi (Religion), and Sadegh Ansar (Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies)—received a $500,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources to digitize the university’s collection of Islamic manuscripts and paintings.
An award from the National Science Foundation will support the dissertation research of History Ph.D. candidate Sean O’Neil, who is studying the history of science in early modern Europe.
Baby Historians