September 13, 2012
We are delighted to welcome Zev Harvey as a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Columbia.
Professor Harvey studied philosophy at Columbia University (BA, 1965; Ph.D., 1973) and taught in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University (1971-1977), before moving to Jerusalem in 1977. He is the author of many studies on medieval and modern Jewish philosophy, including Physics and Metaphysics in Hasdai Crescas (1998). He is an EMET Prize laureate (2009) and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Professor Harvey will be teaching Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed and the graduate level course Medieval Philosophy in Fall 2012.
September 9, 2012
The History Department is delighted to introduce their Visiting Scholar for the Fall 2012 semester, Michael Stolberg. Michael is chair of the history of medicine at the University of Würzburg, Germany. His research focuses on the history of medicine and the body in 16th- and 17th-century Germany, Italy and France. Recent publications include Experiencing illness and the sick body in early modern Europe (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011; orig. German edn 2003), Die Harnschau. Eine Kultur- und Alltagsgeschichte (Böhlau, 2009, forthcoming Engl. edn; A cultural history of uroscopy, Ashgate, 2013) and “`Abhorreas pinguedinem`. Fat and obesity in early modern medicine (c. 1500-1750)”, in Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. Biomed. Sc. 43 (2012), 370-378. He is currently working on the voluminous personal notebooks of Georg Handsch, a fairly obscure Padua-trained, young physician in mid-16th-century Prague, studying in particular the oral transmission of medical knowledge to the patients and their families, the acquisition of practical skills and the role of empirical observation in ordinary medical practice.
Michael welcomes your contacting him for coffee and discussion while he is here at Columbia, and he can be reached at <michael.stolberg@uni-wuerzburg.de>.
September 6, 2012
We welcome three new additions to the Medieval, Renaissance and early modern faculty:
Manan Ahmed has joined Columbia’s History Department as Assistant Professor. Professor Ahmed is interested in the relationship between text, space and narrative. His work on Islam´s arrival to Sindh in the 8th century traces the longue durée history of contestations among varied communities in South Asia. His areas of specialization include political and cultural history of Islam in South and Southeast Asia, frontier-spaces and the city in medieval South Asia, imperial and colonial historiography, and philology. He is currently working on a manuscript which takes a close look at the production and reception of Chachnama, a text written in Persian in 1226 C.E. in then capital city of Uch. He is the co-Director of Zukunftsphilogie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship – a multi-year research project based at Freie Universität Berlin. He plans to offer courses on memory and history, South Asia from medieval to the early modern period, the city and space in medieval India, and intellectual history of Muslims in early modern Asia. In Fall 2012, he will be teaching a lecture course entitled “History of South Asia I: al-Hind to Hindustan” (History W3810, MW 10:10-11:25).
Rachel Eisendrath has just joined the Barnard English Department. Professor Eisendrath specializes in sixteenth-century poetry. She comes to Barnard from the University of Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. in English literature in 2012. Her work on Renaissance poetry explores problems of aesthetics, the history of poetic forms, and the intersection of literary and visual arts. Her dissertation, “Renaissance Ekphrasis and the Objects of History,” is a study of elaborate literary descriptions, or ekphrases, against the background of the early modern rise of objectivity. The project explores the fraught relation between aesthetic form and an increasingly empiricist understanding of the historical world. She has an article on Spenser’s treatment of art and objectivity forthcoming in Spenser Studies. Professor Eisendrath received a B.A. from Harvard and M.A. degrees from St. John’s College and the University of Chicago; in addition, she studied painting and sculpture at the New York Studio School.
https://english.barnard.edu/profiles/rachel-eisendrath
Seth Kimmel has just joined Columbia’s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. Professor Kimmel studies the literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia. He earned his B.A. in Comparative Literature and Religion here at Columbia and his Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. Before joining Columbia´s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures in 2012, Professor Kimmel spent two years as a member of Stanford University´s Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities, where he taught classes on theories of secularism and religion, the history of reading, and cultural exchange and conflict among Iberian Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Professor Kimmel’s current book project is an intellectual history of New Christian assimilation. The book argues that canon law, Oriental Studies, and history writing were all transformed by hotly contested debates over eradicating Islam and Judaism from the Iberian Peninsula and converting non-Christians elsewhere in the Spanish empire. Other research and teaching interests include the history of cartography and Mediterranean and Transatlantic Studies. Professor Kimmel’s work has appeared in the Journal of Medieval and Early Studies and the Hispanic Issues book series, and he is currently completing two new essays, one on early modern secular discourse and inquisitorial discipline and the other on the relationship between local print economies and peninsular representations of Ottoman Turks.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/spanish/people/faculty/kimmel.html
June 22, 2012
Professor Caroline Bynum (Department of History, emerita) has been elected to the Orden Pour le Mérite. The Pour le Mérite, known informally as the Blue Max, was the Kingdom of Prussia’s highest military order for German soldiers from 1740 until the end of World War I in 1918. The award was a blue-enameled Maltese Cross with eagles between the arms based on the symbol of the Johanniter Order, the Prussian royal cypher, and the French legend Pour le Mérite (“for Merit”) arranged on the arms of the cross. A civilian version of the order for accomplishments in the arts and sciences, the Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste, was founded in 1842 and still exists in the Federal Republic of Germany today. Currently, the Order consists of 37 German and 36 foreign members.
May 16, 2012
Congratulations to our graduates, Jeffery Berry and Charles Yost!