School of the Arts Faculty Tenured in 2024
Rivka Galchen and Deborah Paredez joined Columbia's tenured faculty in 2024. Tenure is a distinction that recognizes scholarly excellence, demonstrated capacity for imaginative, original work, and great promise for continued contributions at the forefront of a field.
Rivka Galchen
Associate Professor of Writing in the Faculty of the Arts
Rivka Galchen is an award-winning novelist, fiction, and long-form non-fiction writer, known especially for her interest in the relationship between fiction and science.
Holding an MD, she has drawn on her understanding of scientific and clinical approaches to pursue questions about the relationship between fact and value, science and fiction, truth and deception in her writings. Her award-winning novels, Atmospheric Disturbances and Everyone Knows your Mother is a Witch, explore these questions in different contexts. The first focuses on an unreliable first-person narrator who may be a clinical psychologist who believes his wife has been replaced by a replica, and the second features the historical seventeenth-century witch trial of the mother of astronomer Johannes Kepler. She has also written a shorter book titled Little Labors about motherhood. Dr. Galchen has an enormous number of essays, reviews, and non-fiction reporting, often featured in The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer. She is currently completing a book titled The Lives of Scientists, which brings together science and history through biography to examine how lived experience informs the scientific imagination.
Dr. Galchen earned her MD from Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and her MFA from Columbia University. She joined the Columbia faculty in 2017.
Rivka Galchen's Faculty Profile
Deborah Paredez
Associate Professor of Writing in the Faculty of the Arts, Chair of the Writing Division
Deborah Paredez is a celebrated poet and non-fiction author, as well as a performance studies scholar whose work is anchored in feminist scholarship and Latina/x theorization of the borderlands.
She has two collections of poetry, including the award-winning Year of the Dog, which was cited as a New York Times “New and Notable” poetry book. A scholarly monograph, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos and the Performance of Memory, explores the afterlife and memorialization of the pop star Selena Quintanilla and calls attention to the complicated cultural politics surrounding high profile Latina women. Her most recent book is the critical memoir, American Diva, which chronicles the impact of divas on her life and on American culture over the last 50 years. She has won multiple awards, including the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award in 2020. Professor Paredez co-founded and co-directed CantoMundo, a poetry organization designed to support and nurture Latinx poets. She is the current chair of the School of the Arts Writing Program.
Dr. Paredez earned her PhD from Northwestern University. She served on the faculty of Vassar College and the University of Texas, Austin, before joining the Columbia faculty in 2015.