Arts and Sciences Faculty Tenured in 2024
Nine Arts and Sciences professors joined Columbia's tenured faculty in 2024, including Provost Angela V. Olinto. Tenure is a distinction that recognizes scholarly excellence, demonstrated capacity for imaginative, original work, and great promise for continued contributions at the forefront of one's field.
Angela V. Olinto
Provost, Columbia University; Professor of Astronomy and of Physics
Angela V. Olinto is best known for her contributions to the study of the structure of neutron stars, primordial inflationary theory, cosmic magnetic fields, the nature of the dark matter, and the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays, gamma-rays, and neutrinos. Dr. Olinto is the Principal Investigator of the POEMMA (Probe Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics) space mission and the EUSO (Extreme Universe Space Observatory) on a super pressure balloon (SPB) missions, and was a member of the Pierre Auger Observatory, all designed to discover the origin of the highest energy cosmic particles, their sources, and their interactions. Dr. Olinto is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
As Provost, Dr. Olinto is Columbia’s chief academic officer, and works to advance the academic distinction, intellectual richness, creativity, and integrity of the many facets of Columbia University. She supports the President in the development and implementation of the University’s strategic academic priorities, and leads the deans and faculty in their pursuit of research and teaching excellence.
Dr. Olinto received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She served on the faculty of the University of Chicago, where she served as Dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences and Chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She joined the Columbia faculty in 2024.
Angela V. Olinto's Faculty Profile
Genevera Allen
Professor of Statistics
Genevera Allen is a Professor of Statistics and a member of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience; the Zuckerman Institute for Mind, Brain, and Behavior; and the Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics. She is a leader in the field of statistics and machine learning, focusing on graphical models and high-dimensional data analysis with applications in neuroscience and bioinformatics.
Her major research contributions include innovating graphical models and other unsupervised learning methods to reflect uncertainty within data. Dr. Allen has garnered significant recognition for her work, including being elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and having her research generously funded by the NSF and NIH.
Dr. Allen earned her PhD from Stanford University. She served on the faculty of the Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University, before joining the Columbia faculty in 2024.
Genevera Allen's Faculty Profile
Ruth Barraclough
Korea Foundation Associate Professor of the Social Sciences
Ruth Barraclough is an historian of modern Korea with a focus on labor, gender, and literature.
Her first book Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence and Representation in Industrializing Korea was about the working-class women and girls who generated Korea’s industrialization while cherishing ambitions to be writers, novelists, and poets. In Korea the book spent twenty weeks on the history best-seller list, was nominated for the President’s summer reading list by Korea’s leading book and newspaper editors, and named one of the top ten books of 2017.
In addition to academic work, Dr. Barraclough has served as Vice-President of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (2023) and as a board member of the Australia Korea Foundation (2018-23) to advise the Australian government on new areas of cooperation between the two countries. In her work for the board, she was instrumental in establishing a Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Seoul National University. At Columbia, Dr. Barraclough is the new Faculty Director of the Dual Degree Masters in International and World History with LSE and is affiliated with the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
Before joining Columbia in 2024, Dr. Barraclough served on the faculty at the Australian National University.
Ruth Barraclough's Faculty Profile
David Kipping
Associate Professor of Astronomy
David Kipping is a leader in the field of exoplanetary science, astrostatistics and astrobiology, most well-known for his work on the search for exomoons. He leads the Cool Worlds Lab—a team studying worlds far enough away from their star that they could potentially host life.
Methodologically, Dr. Kipping relies on inference techniques from Bayesian statistics to reveal patterns within the data to better characterize distant worlds as well as our own uniqueness. He has received competitive grants from NASA and has also won recognition in the field with awards including the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. He has published in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and Nature Astronomy, and has been identified by Science News as one of “10 Scientists to Watch.” He is also a passionate communicator of science with over 900,000 subscribers to his YouTube series “Cool Worlds.”
Dr. Kipping earned his PhD from University College London. He joined the Columbia faculty in 2015.
David Kipping’s Faculty Profile
Debashree Mukherjee
Associate Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies
Debashree Mukherjee is a leading scholar in the field of South Asian media studies.
Her first book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City, adopts both historical and theoretical approaches to examine the 1930s Bombay film industry. She analyzes the industry not just from the perspective of aesthetics, but also from what she calls the “cine-ecology,” which takes into consideration labor, financial speculation, as well as the technological, social, and political contexts behind the making of films. Challenging conventional assumptions that the film industry was chaotic and disorganized, the study shows how technologies of organization and rationalization shaped local film production even as it identifies the structural inequities behind the making of films. The book received an Honorable Mention from the Modernist Studies Association for its First Book Prize. Drawing on the visual archives for this monograph, Dr. Mukherjee edited a photo-anthology that was accompanied by a major exhibition in Mumbai titled A Cinematic Imagination: Josef Wirsching and the Bombay Talkies (2024). She is currently working on her second monograph, tentatively titled Tropical Machines: A Decolonial History of Modern Media, which expands her focus to the Indian Ocean region of the nineteenth century, and argues that the media technologies and machinic imaginaries we consider to be emblematic of modernity, were in fact forged in the “dark” tropics.
Dr. Mukherjee earned her PhD from New York University. She joined the Columbia faculty in 2015.
Debashree Mukherjee's Faculty Profile
Lorenzo Sironi
Associate Professor of Astronomy
Lorenzo Sironi is a leader in high-energy astrophysics. His research aims to model the behavior of astrophysical plasma and non-thermal radiation emitted from astrophysical high-energy sources.
Dr. Sironi’s accomplishments include making substantial contributions to "particle-in-cell" computational methods that allow for the simulation of the physics of plasmas at the particle level. He has used these computational methods to produce important insight into a range of astrophysical phenomena, including Fast Radio Bursts, the Crab Nebula high energy emission, and radiation emitted by black holes, among others. Dr. Sironi has a long publication record and funding from sources such as the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the United States Department of Energy (DOE). He has received several prestigious awards, including the DOE’s Early Career Award, the Cottrell Scholar Award, and the Alfred P. Sloan Research fellowship in Physics.
Dr. Sironi earned his PhD from Princeton University. He joined the Columbia faculty in 2016.
Lorenzo Sironi's Faculty Profile
Dominique Townsend
Jey Tsong Khapa Associate Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies
Dominique Townsend is a leader in early modern Tibetan cultural history and Tibetan Buddhism, with a particular interest in aesthetics, the relationship between the religious and the secular, poetics and translation theory. Her current book project concerns the place of dreams and dreaming in Tibetan Buddhist experience.
Her first academic book, A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet’s Mindröling Monastery, examines the curriculum of the late seventeenth-century Mindröling monastery, which combined a religious education with worldly topics and aesthetic concerns. With this curriculum, the monastery transformed into an important cultural and political institution that educated not just the religious elite, but also the political and social elite of Tibet, and provided support for the Fifth Dalai Lama’s government. Her most recent book, Longing to Awaken: Exploring Buddhist Devotion in Tibetan Poetry and Song, is an anthology of translated Tibetan verse focused on the complex and sometimes vexed theme of devotion. Her forthcoming book uncovers accounts of dreams as a unique and original source material from which to examine early modern Tibetan Buddhism and cultural history. She is also an accomplished translator and poet and has administered impressive grant funding to support the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network, which is focused on supporting the development of innovative pedagogy and interdisciplinary research at the intersection of technology, the humanities, and justice.
Dr. Townsend earned her PhD from Columbia University. She served on the faculty at Bard College before joining the Columbia faculty in 2024.
Dominique Townsend's Faculty Profile
Lisa Trever
Lisa and Bernard Selz Associate Professor of Pre-Columbian Art History and Archaeology
Lisa Trever is a leader in ancient Latin American art history and archaeology. Focusing on the artwork of north-coastal Peru from the Moche period (circa 250-850 CE), her scholarship addresses archeological discoveries including murals and clay vessels that have added significantly to the empirical base from which to understand the period at the same time that it develops original theoretical approaches toward those materials.
Her first book, The Archaeology of Mural Painting at Pañamarca, Peru, provides a critical assessment of earlier archaeological projects at Pañamarca and serves as a definitive reference work and primary source for early Peruvian studies based on her findings of murals at the site. Her second book, Image Encounters: Moche Murals and Archaeo Art History, presents an archaeo-art history approach toward the study of murals, bridging the methodological and interpretative gaps between art history and archaeology. Image Encounters was a recipient of the 2023 Horowitz Book Prize. Dr. Trever’s third book project, Seeing with Clay: Imagination and Replication in Ancient South America, investigates ancient sculptural vessels, to understand them both on their own terms and through modern and contemporary lenses. Her first publication based on this project, “A Moche Riddle in Clay,” won the best article award from the Association for Latin American Art, and was the first paper on the ancient period to be awarded this prize.
Dr. Trever earned her PhD from Harvard University and served on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the Columbia faculty in 2018.
Eliza Zingesser
Associate Professor of French
Eliza Zingesser is a pioneering scholar in medieval French and Occitan poetry and literature.
Her first book, Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French, demonstrates how troubadour songs written in Occitan were assimilated to francophone poetry in their earliest phase of transmission. By shedding light on the key role of Occitan lyrics in the very foundation of French literature and the origins of France’s literary canon, this book has proven to be field-altering. Drawing on sound studies and animal studies, Dr. Zingesser’s second book, Lovebirds: Avian Erotic Entanglements in Medieval French and Occitan Literature, explores how humans and birds were entangled in medieval texts in instances of sonic mimicry, dialogue, and even bodily eros. In 2017, she received the Malcolm Bowie Prize from the Society for French Studies for her article, “Pidgin Poetics: Bird Talk in Medieval France and Occitania.” This prize is awarded for the best article published by an early-career researcher in the discipline of French Studies.
Dr. Zingesser earned her PhD from Princeton University and her AB from Smith College. She served on the faculty of the University of Ottawa before joining the Columbia faculty in 2014.