Faculty and Staff

Mindy Aloff

The Rigor and Romance of Dance

Mindy Aloff is an adjunct associate professor of dance and a lecturer in the First-Year Seminar program at Barnard, where she teaches courses in dance criticism and history, dance in film, and the personal essay. She also serves as editor of the newsletter for the Dance Critics Association, as a member of the editorial board for The Washington Independent Review of Books (www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com ), and as a consultant to The George Balanchine Foundation. Her essays, reviews, and features have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many other periodicals in the U.S. and Europe; her most recently published books are Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation (which she authored) and Leaps in the Dark: Art and the World by Agnes de Mille (which she edited). She is a past fellow of The John Simon Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson Foundations and a past recipient of a Whiting Writers Award.

Theodore Barrow

NY in Art and Film

Theodore Barrow is pursuing his Ph.D. in Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He teaches a course on the architectural history of New York at Baruch College, in addition to giving walking tours of different neighborhoods in New York City.  Focusing on the art and development of urban spaces in America, his work engages both ephemeral and more enduring views from the 19th century onwards.

Todd Berzon

A Brief History of Evil

Todd Berzon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. A graduate of Columbia College and the University of Oxford, his primary interest concerns the religious world of Late Antiquity, especially the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. He is currently writing his dissertation about ancient techniques of ethnography and epistemology. 

Julie Bleha

Theater in the City

Our Town: Women in New York City History

Women’s Studies 101

Ms. Bleha holds an M.A. and M.Phil. from the English and Theatre Ph.D. program at Columbia University. She also holds an M.A. in Text and Performance Studies from King's College, London and RADA. She has taught drama, literature, composition, and history at NYU's Gallatin School, Columbia University, Fordham University, and King's College, London, and she works as a dramaturg and producer with various NYC theatre companies and artists.

Jill DiDonato

Writing Our Lives: Women Writing Memoir and Personal Narrative 

Jill holds an M.F.A. in writing from Columbia University, where she has also taught. She teaches various Writing and Literature courses in the Liberal Arts department at the Fashion Institute of Technology (State College of New York), as well as privately in New York. A Barnard alumna, she is teaching Writing Our Lives, for the fourth consecutive year at Barnard's PCP. She writes personal memoirs for a variety of publications, is a contributing writer to the Women section of The Huffington Post, publishes an arts/style blog, and her novel Beautiful Garbage will be released in Spring 2013 from She Writes Press. Currently, she's working on a collection of nonfiction essays.

Sharon Fulton

Discovering Old New York

Sharon has earned a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She holds a postdoctoral appointment as a Literature Humanities Lecturer in Columbia University's Core Curriculum. She has taught literature and writing at Columbia University, NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and Cooper Union in New York City.

Judy Jarvis

The Psychology of Gender Difference

Judy is the Assistant Director for Campus Life/LGBTQ and Gender Resources at Vassar College. She directs Vassar’s Women’s Center and LGBTQ Center, as well as works on a variety of campus-wide diversity and inclusion initiatives. She completed her M.A. in Higher Education  at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and completed her B.A. at Vassar College, where she double majored in Psychology and Media Studies.

Helen Kaplan

Intro to Screenwriting: The Short Form 

Filmmaking: From Script to Screen

Helen holds an M.F.A. in Film from Columbia University and a B.A. from Brown University. She has made numerous short films including the award-winning Return to Sender, was an Associate Producer on the PBS documentary, New York, and authored the chapter on Subplots in Writing Movies (Bloomsbury USA). Helen teaches screenwriting, directing, and film production at Hunter College.

Mary Helen Kolisnyk

Writing Place: Home and the City

Mary Helen Kolisnyk has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, and an M.A. in Cinema Studies.  A Canadian ex-pat, she lives in NYC, where she teaches college writing courses that are informed by global perceptions, voices and descriptions of urban life, and literature courses designed to keep the classics relevant.

Ari Laura Kreith

Acting: Process and Performance

Ari received her B.A. in Theatre from Yale University and her M.F.A. in Acting from UC Davis. A professional theatre director and acting coach, she is the Artistic Director of Theatre 167 (www.theatre167.org,) where she specializes in the development of new plays and musicals. Other credits include world premiere productions in New York, Scotland, and regional theater. 

Jamie Krenn

Psychology of Media

Psych 101

Jamie Krenn holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology: Cognitive Studies from Teachers College, Columbia University.  She also holds three masters degrees in developmental and cognitive psychologies as well as a Bachelor of Science in Art Therapy.  Dr. Krenn has been a Research Assistant for the Little Einstein Series, which appeared on the Disney Playhouse. She is currently a Psychological Research Consultant for Miscellaneous Media, which produce such popular programs as MTV’s True Life.   Dr. Krenn has also been an instructor at Teachers College, SUNY Queens and Westchester Community College teaching various media and psychology courses.  Her research interest includes cognitive media processing, educational television, and the culinary cognition of young children.

Sarah Labarge

Fiction Intensive: Writing Workshop 

Sarah holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University and holds her B.A. in English from Northwestern University. She has taught at Columbia University and Rutgers University, and is currently instructing at LaGuardia Community College. She is working on a novel inspired by her experiences as an adjunct professor in New York. This is her tenth summer teaching in the Barnard Pre-College Program.

Marcelo López-Dinardi

Architectural Culture and NYC Design Studio

Marcelo López-Dinardi began his study of architecture in his native Chile, and in 2004 obtained his B.A. in Architecture from the School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (PUPR), Cum Laude. He is co-founder of the collective CIUDADLAB where he directs research in cities across the globe, including Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brasilia, Santiago, among others. He has been an Associate Professor of design studio, research and representation at the PUPR since 2005, where he also directed the 2009-2010 Lectures Series Sense Recession: What Comes Next?, and also directed the Roundtable Series from 2006-2010 to critically address the implications of contemporary architectural practices. From 2008-2011, Marcelo edited the journal Polimorfo, which he also co-founded. He has written for Entorno, Domusweb, was invited as a juror at UPR, GSAPP and NJIT, lectured at Cooper Union, exhibited his drawings in San Juan and Berlin, and his design and built architectural work has been awarded several times in Puerto Rico. He is now developing his thesis, Destructive Knowledge: Tools for Learning to Un-Dō, while being a 2013 candidate for an M.S. in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University.

Emily Madison

Shakespeare and Performance

Emily Madison is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Theatre at Columbia University, where she also received her M.F.A. in Dramaturgy. She studies early modern English drama and Shakespeare in contemporary performance and works as a dramaturge and producer in and around New York.

Lauren Mancia

Medieval Art in Manhattan 

Lauren Mancia is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Yale University and a lecturer at The Cloisters, the branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to the study of medieval art. A graduate of Columbia College and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, Lauren specializes in the religious world of medieval Europe, especially the devotional and visual culture of eleventh- and twelfth-century monasteries.

Sara Marcus

Documenting the Present: The Art of Attention

Sara Marcus holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her first book, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, was published by Harper Perennial in October 2010. Her prose and poetry have also appeared in publications including Slate, Salon, The Nation, Artforum, Bookforum, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is a founding editor of New Herring Press.

Diana Martinez

New York City Design Intensive

Diana Martinez is a Ph.D. candidate in Architectural History and Theory at Columbia University. She holds a B.A. in Architecture from UC Berkeley and received a M.A. in Architecture from Columbia University. She has practiced as an architect in San Francisco, Manila, and New York. Martinez has taught both design and history courses at Columbia University, Barnard College and the Pratt Institute. While working at the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, she acted as a curator on the exhibition, "Form as Strategy" and as an executive editor on several books including Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture, by Sven-Olov Wallenstein, and Architecture of the Off-Modern, by Svetlana Boym. Martinez’s current research, on the architecture of the Progressive Era in the United States, focuses on the intersections between politics, planning, and design.

Kent Minturn

Masterpieces of Art in New York City

Kent received his Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University, and earned his M.S. in Art History at the University of Chicago. Kent Minturn is a Postdoctoral Lecturer in the Department of Art History at Columbia University, and is currently completing a monograph on the French artist and writer, Jean Dubuffet.

Sydnie Mosley

Dance in the City

Sydnie Mosley earned her M.F.A in Dance with an emphasis on Choreography from the University of Iowa, where she has also taught dance. She is an alumna of Barnard College where she earned her B.A. in Dance and Africana Studies.  During her time at Barnard she traveled to Ghana to study traditional West African dance. Sydnie teaches dance technique, theory and history while performing throughout NYC and choreographing her own work. 

Roz Myers

Crime and Society

Roz Myers, J.D., is a writer and editor in the field of criminal justice, focusing on subjects related to crime victims, offender accountability, justice and ethics, and law and society. She teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and has served for over fifteen years as the managing editor and legal columnist for Civic Research Institute. Her work has appeared in publications by West, Matthew Bender, and other major legal publishers. Ms. Myers is a doctoral candidate at John Jay, and a graduate of the University of California-Berkeley and Fordham University School of Law.

Marti Newland

Music and Cultural Identity in NYC

Marti Newland is a Ph.D. Candidate in Music (Ethnomusicology) at Columbia University specializing in voice studies, performance, and African American music. Her dissertation ethnographically examines radicalized vocality in the United States, with a focus on blackness.  She has taught courses in ear-training, Western music history and private voice at Columbia University and Seton Hall University and is a choral adjudicator and clinician for Wordstrides Heritage Music Festivals. Through her studies at Columbia University (M.A., African American Studies), Oberlin College (B.A., African American Studies), and Oberlin Conservatory of Music (B.M., Voice Performance), she remains an active classical singer. <www.martinewland.com>

Ruth Palmer

Media and Society Today: From Print to Facebook

Ruthie Palmer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Communications Program at Columbia’s Pulitzer School of Journalism. Her dissertation research is interview-based and explores citizens’ experiences being featured, quoted, or mentioned in news stories. She has worked as a teaching assistant or instructor for courses in Critical Issues in Journalism at the Journalism School, and History and Theories of Communication at Columbia’s Teachers College. After receiving a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Bryn Mawr College, she worked in the Artistic Department at the Metropolitan Opera before pursuing her doctorate.

Elizabeth Pillsbury

Understanding the City: Analyzing NY Neighborhoods and Infrastructure 

Elizabeth Pillsbury received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2009.  She has taught high school and college students at Columbia, Barnard, Horace Mann School, and Riverdale Country School.  She brings to her classes her love of U.S. urban and environmental history. Her work explores the history of New York City, marine environments, and food production. In addition to teaching in the Pre-College Program, she teaches History and American Studies at Riverdale Country School and leads walking tours of historic neighborhoods in New York City.

Laurie Postlewate

Playing Bohemian Greenwich Village 1913: A Reacting to the Past Experience

Laurie Postlewate began teaching at Barnard College in 1997 and she is currently a Senior Lecturer in the French Department. At Barnard she teaches a wide range of French literature, culture and language courses. Since 2005, she has also been active in the First Year Seminar program, “Reacting to the Past,” an innovative pedagogy that combines role playing in historical contexts with training in public-speaking. 

Kristy Riggs

On Broadway: American Musical Theater in New York City

Kristy Riggs teaches in the Music Program at Barnard College.  Her current research interests include nineteenth-century French music, music in Algeria and its diaspora, and the relationship between colonialism and music.  Her dissertation, entitled "On Colonial Textuality and Difference: Musical Encounters with French Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century Algeria," explores the historical and political parallels between music and French colonialism in Algeria during the nineteenth century.  She received her Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Columbia University in 2012.

Joanna Scutts

Modernist New York

Joanna is associate editor for PEN America, the biannual literary journal of the PEN American Center, and a part-time faculty member at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where her research focused on the literature and culture of the early twentieth century in Britain and the US, and she is particularly interested in writing by women, visual and literary representations of the city, and memoir and autobiography. She is also a freelance critic and editor, and has written for publications including the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Originally from London, she is happiest surrounded by crowds, city noise, and tall buildings.

Soomin Seo

Global News Media in Digital Age

Soomin Seo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Communications Program at Columbia’s Pulitzer School of Journalism and a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Her research focuses on the evolution of foreign news in light of changes to technology, global politics and the business of news media. From 2000 to 2008, she worked as a journalist in South Korea. Most of her reporting related to North Korea and the nuclear crisis, and she also wrote from conflict zones like Darfur and northern Sri Lanka. Soomin has a B.A. from Seoul National University and also holds an M.A. in Public Policy  from John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where she was a Shorenstein Scholar and received the Jane Mansbridge Research Award in 2010.

Raymond A. Smith

America in the World: Understanding the Politics and History of a Unique Nation

Raymond Smith, Ph.D.,  is an adjunct assistant professor of Political Science at Columbia University and New York University, and has also taught in the Department of Political Science at Barnard.  His courses have included “Race and Ethnicity in American Politics,” “Majority Rule and Minority Rights,” and “American Parties and Elections,” as well as special courses on the presidential elections in 2000, 2004, and 2008. Professor Smith is the author of several books involving American politics, including  most recently The American Anomaly: US Government Politics in Comparative Perspective (Routledge, 2nd edition 2010) and Importing Democracy: Ideas from Around the World to Reform and Revitalize American Politics and Government (Praeger, 2010).  He holds an M.A. in International Relations from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia, with an emphasis on American Politics.

Frederic Stark

Science and the Law

Ric holds an M.A. in Science Education from Stony Brook University, and a B.S. in Chemistry, with minors in Physics and History, from the University at Albany.  For the last 23 years, he has taught chemistry, physics, and other science courses, including one called “Science and Society,” at G.W. Hewlett High School in Nassau County.  Ric’s Master’s degree paper was an examination of the history and legal cases related to the teaching of creationism in public school biology classrooms, from the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial” to the landmark 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard Supreme Court decision.  Ric  has also written for a blog called Defender of the Brain, dedicated to the advocacy of scientific and rational thought.

Maxine Weisgrau

Women, Men, Families, and States

Maxine has been affiliated with Barnard College since she received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 1993. She has conducted fieldwork research in Rajasthan, India since the late 1980s, studying nongovernmental organizations and rural development programs in rural underserved communities. Her teaching areas focus on cultural anthropology, gender, development, tourism, and the sociopolitics of reproduction and reproductive technologies. She is the co-author and editor of Raj Rhapsodies: Tourism, Heritage and the Seduction of History (Ashgate 2007), the first interdisciplinary analysis of historic and contemporary impacts of tourism in Rajasthan. She is the author of Interpreting Development: Local Histories, Local Strategies (University Press of America 1997), an ethnography of rural development in Rajasthan. She is the co-editor of Beyond the Boundaries of Belief: Readings in the Anthropology of Religion (Westview 1999) and is also the co-author, with colleagues Abraham Rosman and Paula Rubel of the 9th edition of The Tapestry of Culture: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Altamira Press 2009). Maxine teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in cultural anthropology, gender, development, South Asia, cultures of reproduction, and anthropology of tourism at Barnard, Columbia, NYU and The New School.

Julia Westerbeke

Making Contemporary Art NYC

Julia Westerbeke is an artist based in Brooklyn whose recent exhibitions include "Staccato" at den contemporary and "The Deluge" at the de Young Museum. She is a member of A.I.R. Gallery, the first artist-run gallery for women in the United States, founded in 1972. Julia is currently the Visual Arts Curator and Adjunct Faculty at Barnard College. In 2009, she received her M.F.A. in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. A Barnard alumna, she founded The Diana Center Alumnae Arts Forum, which covers alumnae working in the field of visual arts. She has also recently curated the exhibitions "Re-turn" and "Barbara Novak: Full Bloom" at the McCagg Gallery.

Şevin Yıldız

Urban Ecology and Sustainability

Şevin Yıldız is an adjunct assistant professor in the Urban Studies program at Barnard. She has a B.Arch. from Istanbul Technical University and a Master of Human Settlements from KULeuven in Belgium. She is currently finishing her Ph.D. on the ecological planning and the governance of New Jersey Meadowlands in the Urban Systems joint program at Rutgers University and New Jersey Institute of Technology where she also taught. For the past two years, she has been working as a researcher on brownfields, transit-oriented development and planning. In 2011, she was a summer fellow at Harvard University’s institute, Dumbarton Oaks. Parallel to her architectural practice at Westfourth and Alatas offices in Istanbul, she was the editor of Betonart Magazine and guest edited the Istanbul issue of Arch+ Magazine in 2009. She recently edited the Ecology issue of New City Reader in Istanbul Design Biennale curated by Joseph Grima. Her article “Designing the Ecological Future of the Metropolis” appeared in the book Five Proactive Scenarios on Urbanization in Istanbul, published by the London School of Economics and Arkitera. Her research interests are urban and ecological planning and design in post-industrial regions, infrastructure, architecture and architectural history.