Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the founding Director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society through the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. He holds an M.Sc. in Culture and Society from the London School of Economics, an M.A. and M.Phil in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Near Eastern Studies, Religious Studies, and Government from Cornell University. He taught for several years in Columbia’s Core Curriculum and his research focuses on comparative philosophy, cultural theory, Iranian and Islamic intellectual history, the Frankfurt School, modern Jewish thought, religion, social and critical theory, visual studies and post-colonial studies. He has written for Dialectical Anthropology, The Jewish Daily Forward, Filmmaker Magazine, and The Huffington Post. At any given time he is probably pacing, reading, playing video games or thinking about the relationship between norms, morals, and metaphysics and almost certainly not sleeping.
Abby Kluchin holds a Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. in philosophy of religion from Columbia University and a B.A. with High Honors from Swarthmore College. She is a Lecturer at Columbia University, where she teaches in the Core Curriculum, and an adjunct member of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union. Abby specializes in Continental philosophy, with emphases in poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory. Her current research focuses on the category of affect and the often neglected affective dimension of reading and writing, particularly in the realm of philosophical discourse. Abby’s course offerings at the Institute include Writing on the Body, Dreams and Hysteria: an Introduction to Freud, and Spinoza and Mendelssohn: Politics of the Sacred and Profane. She is also a compulsive reader of Victorian novels and science fiction.
Christine Smallwood is a doctoral candidate in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she is writing a dissertation on narrative non-development in the English novel. She holds an M.Phil and an M.A. in English from Columbia and a B.A. in English and Art History from Swarthmore College. Her research interests include 19th and 20th century British and American literature, theory of the novel, and the history of American cultural criticism. Her essays and reviews have been published in The Baffler, Bookforum, Criterion Collection, Harper’s, the London Review of Books, n+1, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, and other publications.
Maeve Adams teaches literature, philosophy and writing at New York University in the Morse Academic Plan (NYU’s core curriculum) and the Tisch School of the Arts. She completed her PhD at NYU in May 2010 in the English Department, where she studied eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, philosophy and history of science. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to literary studies, Maeve’s work retrieves networks of writers–lyric poets and novelists along with scientists and journalists–that developed concepts in common (and competition). Her current book project explores concepts of persuasion and force in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literatures of war, reform and empire–from lyric poetry and the novel to war journalism and statistical writing. Her recent publications have appeared in the Journal of British Studies, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and a collection of essays on Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain. Maeve enjoys reading about the history of technological invention, watching BBC miniseries and concocting elaborate dinner parties.
Michael Brent holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University and is currently a Bradley Postdoctoral Fellow at Carthage College. He has taught as an Adjunct Instructor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Cooper Union, and was a co-founder at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University in New York. Prior to his arrival at Columbia, he studied at the University of Toronto.
Anjuli Raza Kolb is a lecturer at New York University and a doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she is writing a dissertation on epidemiology, horror, and terror as literary forms. Her orbital research projects explore bird flu, zombies, apocalypse literature, krumping, and international law. She has taught literature and theory at Bard College and Columbia University, where she received the Presidential and Meyerson awards for outstanding teaching in 2012. Her work has appeared onstage in the undergroundzero theater festival and in Black Balloon, 3 Quarks Daily, Discourse, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She hails from upstate New York by way of Boston. Twitter can give you access to her shorter musings, queries, complaints, and shoutouts.
Heather C. Ohaneson (M. Phil.) is a Ph.D. candidate in the philosophy of religion at Columbia and a preceptor in the university’s Core Curriculum. Her academic projects span the areas of ancient philosophy, nineteenth century thought, and virtue ethics. In particular, she seeks to address topics—such as the philosophy of friendship and the moral significance of playfulness—that bear upon everyday life. Before entering graduate school, Heather worked for the civic engagement organization Project Pericles and studied philosophy and religion at Barnard College. A Kierkegaardian at heart, she loves to walk.
K. Soraya Batmanghelichi is a women’s activist and feminist scholar. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. Advised by Professor Hamid Dabashi, she conducts research on embodied politics, especially concerning how women’s bodies become ”taboo” constructs in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Soraya has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. At Columbia, she achieved a Master of Arts in Human Rights, as well as a Master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies and a M.Phil in the same area. She is a Whiting Foundation Fellow for 2011-2012. Soraya is currently writing her PhD thesis, entitled “Revolutions and Rough Cuts: Conceptualizing Women’s Bodies in Modern Iran.” Outside of academia, she rages against the machine, jumps from continent to continent, reflects on Morrissey lyrics, and expands her cooking and baking skills to the delight of her friends.
Lindsay Caplan is a doctoral candidate in the department of Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she is writing her dissertation about the notion of “the open work” in 1960s Italian art and design. Her interests include the relationship between 20th-century art and technology as well as aesthetic and social theory. She holds an M.Phil. in Art History from The Graduate Center, an MA in Sociology from Queens College, and a BA in American Studies from Wesleyan University. She is currently a Humanities Fellow at the Center of the Humanities at The Graduate Center and has taught courses at Parsons, SVA, and various campuses across the CUNY system.
Michael Robert Stevenson received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University. A proud native ofPhiladelphia, he currently teaches classes in the history of philosophy at HunterCollege, CUNY, in his adopted city. He specializes in the German philosophical tradition and has special fondness for Kant, Fichte, and Heidegger, because each of them thinks that there is something profoundly special and metaphysically unique about being a human being or a person—as opposed to being any other kind of existing thing—an idea, he thinks, which has become lamentably, and dangerously, unpopular. When he’s not trying to keep alive the dream of the 1790s, he returns to the present to watch and think about TV shows and movies, both good and bad, and play and think about videogames, but only good ones, mostly.
Nathan Shields is completing his doctorate in Composition at Juilliard, where he also serves as Adjunct Professor in the department of Music History. He recently completed his dissertation on nature and transcendence in the music of Arnold Schoenberg, and spent several months conducting research at the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna on a grant from the Theodore Presser Foundation. He holds an M.M. from Juilliard and a B.M. from the New England Conservatory of Music. His research specialties include Wagner, Viennese expressionism, and philosophy of music. His writing has been published in Perspectives of New Music, and his music has been performed by the JACK and Jupiter Quartets, the Horszowski Trio, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
Suman Ganguli earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University, where his studies focused on mathematical logic and theoretical computer science. Prior to that, he studied mathematics and the philosophy of science at the University of Chicago. For the past decade, he has dabbled in various area of applied mathematics: mathematical/computational biology, quantitative finance, and most recently, data mining. He is also an adjunct instructor in mathematics at the New York City College of Technology in downtown Brooklyn.