Advisory Committee

Robert L. Belknap

Professor Emeritus of Russian, Director Emeritus of The University Seminars, Columbia University

MA ’54, PhD ’60. He is the author of The Structure of The Brothers Karamazov; The Genesis of The Brothers Karamazov; and other studies of Russian literature.  He was briefly Acting Dean of Columbia College in 1975, and he directed the University Seminars from 2001 to 2011. He was President of the Whiting Foundation from 2001-2011, and on the Whiting Board from 1985-2012. He chaired the Trustees of the Brearley School for seven years. He was a member of the University Seminar on Hermeneutics, and has chaired the University Seminars on Literary Theory and on Slavic History and Culture. He has taught Literature Humanities since 1957, and his commitment to the Core Curriculum extends far beyond the classroom: he has chaired the Literature Humanities program on several occasions, chaired the Committee on Educational Policy (the Belknap Committee) in 1970 and co-authored (with Richard Kuhns) Tradition and Innovation: General Education and the Reintegration of the University. Professor Belknap received the Award for Distinguished Service to the Core Curriculum in 2000-2001. He received the Great Teacher Award in 2010.

Susan Boynton

Professor of Music, Columbia University

She joined the Columbia faculty in 2000. Her current research interests include liturgy and music in medieval Western monasticism, particularly the abbey of Cluny; manuscript studies; monastic education; music in the Iberian peninsula; and music and childhood. Professor Boynton has received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy in Rome, and the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). Her book, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000-1125 (2006), won the Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society. Her second monograph is Silent Music: Medieval Song and the Construction of History in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Oxford University Press, 2011). Recently, she coedited (with Diane Reilly) The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2011).

With Isabelle Cochelin, she is general editor of the interdisciplinary series Disciplina Monastica: Studies on Medieval Monastic Life/Etudes sur la vie monastique au moyen age (Brepols Publishers). She is currently the Chair of the University Seminar on Medieval Studies at Columbia. Professor Boynton serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, and Studies in Iconography, and is one of the book review editors for Speculum.

Ester R. Fuchs

Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

She received her BA from Queens College, CUNY. She then went on to receive her MA from Brown University, followed by a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago. She served as Special Advisor to the Mayor for Governance and Strategic Planning under New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg from 2001–2005. She was the first woman to chair the New York City Charter Revision Commission in 2005. Professor Fuchs has been the recipient of numerous grants including the Ford Foundation, the Wallace Foundation, United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, and New York City Economic Development Corporation.  In 2007, she received the Columbia University, SIPA Award for Outstanding Teaching. She is the author of Mayor’s and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York and Chicago and has written numerous articles on urban politics and policy. She also appears as a political analyst on radio and television.

Kenneth T. Jackson

Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences, Columbia University

He is a former president of the Urban History Association, the Society of American Historians, the Organization of American Historians, and the New York Historical Society. His many books include Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States; The Encyclopedia of New York City; Empire City: New York Through the Centuries; and The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930. In addition to the Francis Parkman and Bancroft Prizes, and five honorary doctorates, he is a former chair of Columbia’s Department of History, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2001 he served as New York State Scholar of the Year. His famous all-night bicycle ride through the city has been an annual event at Columbia since 1975.

David Johnston

Professor of Political Philosophy, Columbia University

PhD, Princeton University, ‘81. He taught at Yale before coming to Columbia. He has served as Chair of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought and as President of the New York State Political Science Association and is currently Chair and Director of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia. His publications include The Idea of a Liberal Theory (Princeton University Press, 1994), The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton University Press, 1986), and, as editor, Equality (Hackett, 2000) and (with Richard Flathman) Leviathan: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton, 1997). He has recently completed A Brief History of Justice (forthcoming in 2011). His research interests include theories of justice, the liberal tradition of political theory, and the history of political thought. He is currently studying the relationship between justice and reciprocity.

Lisa Keller

Associate Professor of History, Purchase College, Adjunct Research Scholar of History, Columbia University

She specializes in trans-Atlantic (England and the U.S.), women’s, and urban history. She has published on New York, London, and Westchester County. She is executive editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City (2nd Edition). She founded the journalism program at Purchase College in 1998, and directed it for ten years.  Her book Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York & London (Columbia University Press, 2008) was awarded the Best Book prize by the Urban History Association in 2009.  She is the recipient of the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service (2005), a Gilder-Lehrman Fellowship in American Civilization (2000), and an National Endowment for the Humanities grant for local history (1996).  She also is an adjunct Research Scholar in the history department at Columbia University, where she serves as Chair of the Seminar on the City, The University Seminars.  

David Magier

Associate University Librarian for Collection Development, Princeton University

PhD, UC Berkeley, ’83. He was appointed Associate University Librarian for Collection Development at Princeton University Library in April 2008. A specialist in South Asian linguistics, he previously served for 21 years as South/Southeast Asia Librarian and Director of Area Studies at Columbia University Libraries. He also served as Director of the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research at Columbia. Since 1999, Dr. Magier has been the Chair of the University Seminar on South Asia.  He holds a BA from Cornell, and an MA and PhD in Linguistics (focusing on Indian and Pakistani languages) from UC Berkeley, and was a professor of linguistics at Berkeley and Michigan State University before embarking on his library career. He is well known internationally for his librarian training efforts and his leadership in developing digital library/global resource projects, including especially the Digital South Asia Library (DSAL), the South Asia Resource Access on the Internet (SARAI), and the Digital Library for International Research (DLIR).

Robert Remez

Professor of Psychology, Barnard College

He joined the faculty of Barnard in 1980. His teaching focuses on the relationships among perception, cognition and language.  Since 1985, Professor Remez’s research has been supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders under the project “Sensory and Perceptual Factors in Spoken Communication.”

Professor Remez is a member of the Board of Directors of Haskins Laboratories. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the American Psychological Association; and the Association for Psychological Science. During the 2006-7 academic year, Professor Remez was a Visiting Scholar at the Parmly Hearing Institute in Chicago.

Herbert Terrace

Professor of Psychology, Columbia University

He received his PhD at Harvard in 1961 as a student of B. F. Skinner. Since then he has been a faculty member at Columbia University’s Department of Psychology.  His recent research is on ape language and primate cognition. In 2004 he was awarded the Warren Medal by the Society for Experimental Psychology and in 2009 a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Comparative Cognition Society.