Emily Apter

Professor | Comparative Literature | French | NYU

Emily Apter came to NYU in 2002, having taught in French and Comparative Literature at UCLA, Cornell University, UC-Davis, Penn and Williams College. At NYU she teaches in the departments of French, English and Comparative Literature, specializing in courses on French Critical Theory, the History and Theory of Comparative Literature, the problem of "Francophonie," translation studies, French feminism, and nineteenth-and twentieth-century French literature. Recent essays have focused on paradigms of "oneworldedness," the problem of self-property and self-ownership, literary world-systems and the translatability of genres, and how to think about translation as a form of intellectual labor. At NYU, she has co-organized two Humanities Council lecture series, on "The Humanities in an Era of Global Comparatism," (2005) and "Timing the Political." (2006). She has also initiated a series of panels at NYU's La Maison Française devoted to "Rethinking Nineteenth-Century French Studies." In 2005 she was elected MLA Divisional Representative for "Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century." She is the author of The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton University Press, 2005), Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects. (Chicago University Press, 1999), Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the Century France (Cornell University Press, 1990), co-editor with William Pietz of Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Cornell UP, 1991), and André Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality (Stanford French and Italian Studies, 1987). Ongoing projects include a book titled Kapital, The Novel: (Madame Bovary), as well as essay collection, Decadence: Theory of a Century. Additional publications include articles in: Critical Inquiry, The Columbia Encyclopedia of French Thought, American Literary History, Grey Room, The Boston Review, October, Public Culture, PMLA, Sites, Parallax, Modern Language Notes, Esprit Créateur, and Critique. She edits a book series Translation/Transnation for Princeton University Press. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the Rockefeller Foundation and the NEH.

Roger S. Bagnall

Professor | Roman & Late Antique Egypt | Papyrology

Before joining the NYU faculty in 2007 and becoming the director of NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), Bagnall was Jay Professor of Greek and Latin and Professor of History at Columbia University, where he had taught for 33 years. During that time he served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Chair of the Department of Classics. Educated at Yale University and the University of Toronto, he specializes in the social and economic history of Hellenistic, Roman and Late Antique Egypt. He has held many leadership positions in the fields of classics and papyrology; he is co-founder of a six-university consortium creating the Advanced Papyrological Information System. Among his best-known works are Egypt in Late Antiquity (1993), The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994; with Bruce Frier), and Reading Papyri, Writing Ancient History (1995). He has also edited many volumes of papyri and other ancient texts. He directs NYU-Columbia's joint excavation project at Amheida in the Dakhla Oasis in Egypt. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Académie Royale de Belgique, as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy.

Adam Becker

Associate Professor | Religious Studies & Late Antiquity | NYU

Adam Becker is director of the Religious Studies Program and Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Classics. He got his Ph.D. in 2004 (Religion) from Princeton University and his M.St. in 2001 (Syriac Studies) from Oxford University, after a M.A. in 1997 (Classics) at New York University and a in B.A. 1994 (Classics) at Columbia University. Adam Becker's two major interests are the late antique Christian reception of classical antiquity and Jewish-Christian relations in Late Antiquity. These two interests come together in his ongoing study of the transmission of knowledge among the different religious communities of the Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE) and the early Islamic period. His book, The Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and Christian Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), is a history of the East-Syrian (i.e. Syriac "Nestorian" Christian) school movement and includes material on the reception of the Neoplatonic version of Aristotelian logic in Mesopotamia in the sixth century CE. Adam Becker is also interested in the later Neoplatonic philosophers of the fifth and sixth centuries, "magic" in antiquity, the history of Syriac Christianity in the modern Middle East, and the theoretical problems of studying religion in antiquity as well as critical theories of religion in general. My work is philologically based and he regularly reads Latin, Greek, and Syriac sources with his students. Some of the classes he regularly offers are "Gender in Early Christianity"; "Jews and Christians in the Ancient World"; and "Martyrdom, Ancient and Modern". Among my current projects is an examination of the notion of peoplehood among Christians in Mesopotamia in Late Antiquity (and in the present) and how such a study may help us to think about the relationship between religion and ethnicity. He is also currently developing a series of translations of the Persian Martyr Acts.

Ned Block

Professor | Philosophy | NYU

Ned Block (Ph.D., Harvard), Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science, came to NYU in 1996 from MIT where he was Chair of the Philosophy Program. He works in philosophy of mind and foundations of neuroscience and cognitive science and is currently writing a book on consciousness. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, a Sloan Foundation Fellow, a faculty member at two National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes and two Summer Seminars, the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Science Foundation; and a recipient of the Robert A. Muh Alumni Award in Humanities and Social Science from MIT. He is a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a past Chair of the MIT Press Cognitive Science Board, and past President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.   The Philosophers' Annual selected his papers as one of the "ten best" in 1983, 1990, 1995 and 2002. He is co-editor of The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997). The first of two volumes of his collected papers, Functionalism, Consciousness and Representation, MIT Press came out in May, 2007.  There was a workshop “Themes from Ned Block” at the Australian National University in 2003.  In 2008-2009, he will be Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Hong Kong; Townsend Visitor, University of California at Berkeley; Hilgard Visiting Professor, Stanford; Smart Lecturer at Australian National University; Efron Symposiast, Pomona College; and Distinguished Visitor, University of Warwick.   In 2010, he will give the Josiah Royce Lectures at Brown University, the Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture, and he will give lectures to the Japanese Neuroscience Society and the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki.  Some of his recent papers are available below.

Stefania Capone

Senior Researcher | Anthropology | CNRS

Barbara Cassin

Senior Researcher | Philosophy | CNRS

Barbara Cassin is Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris (Centre Léon Robin de Recherche sur la pensée Antique, Paris IV Sorbonne-CNRS). Her training is in philosophy and philology, as a specialist of ancient Greece. Her initial research focused on the relations between philosophy and  sophistics. Her major publications are L’Effet sophistique (Paris, Gallimard, 1995), Aristote et le logos, Contes de la phénoménologie ordinaire (Paris, PUF, 1997), Parménide, Sur la nature ou sur l’étant, La Langue de l’être (Paris, Seuil, Points-bilingues, 1998), Voir Hélène en toute femme, d’Homère à Lacan (Paris, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond,  2000). She worked on contemporary rhetorical and political issues, as Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (Vérité, Réconciliation, Réparation, Seuil,  2004), and examines critically some new modern tools of "cultural democracy" (Google-moi, la deuxième mission de l'Amérique (Albin-Michel, 2006). She has also initiated and directed a Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies, Dictionnaire des Intraduisibles  (Paris, Seuil-Robert, 2004), which deals with about 15 european languages (ancient and modern), and shows how a tongue is much more than a set of words but is rather a web through which the world is perceived and thought.

Myrian Cottias

Senior Researcher | History of Slavery |CNRS

Myriam Cottias, historian of the colonial fact, is researcher of the Centre national de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) (CRPLC, Université des Antilles et de la Guyane). She steers the International research center on the Slaveries. Actors, systems, representations (GDRI of the NATIONAL CENTER FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH) and European program ( 7th Framework Research & Development Program) on "Slave Trade, Slavery Abolitions, and their Legacies in European histories and identities" (EURESCL). She is co-responsible for the course of specialization " History of the colonial fact " in the master "history" of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Social sciences. She published among others:, Les dépendances serviles : une approche comparée, a collective work with Bernard Vincent et Sandro Stella, Paris : L’Harmattan, 2006; D'une abolition, l'autre. Anthologie raisonnée de textes sur la seconde abolition de l'esclavage dans les colonies françaises, Marseille : Agone Editeur, 1999 ; with Arlette Farge, De la nécessité d’adopter l’esclavage en France : un texte anonyme de 1797, Paris : Bayard, 2007 ; La question noire. Histoire d’une construction coloniale, Paris : Bayard, 2007.

Muriel Debie

Researcher | Philology & Late Antiquity |CNRS

Muriel Debié studied classics at the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris. She fell into Syriac by chance, thanks to her interest in a Syriac text, the so-called Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodios, that was translated almost immediately into Greek and Latin, and then into all the old European languages, and circulated in Russia until the 18th century. Since then she has kept her hand in with Syriac by teaching it (first at the Ecole normale supérieure and then at the Catholic University of Paris), whilst simultaneously maintaining an active interest in Greek and other Eastern Christian literature. For her PhD (Paris IV-Sorbonne) she specialized in the history of historical writing. Since 2000 she has held a permanent research position in the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, in the Institute for Textual Research and History (IRHT). She is currently finishing a monograph on Syriac Historiography entitled (in French): Writing History in Syriac: Intercultural Transmissions and Identity Formation between Hellenism and Islam. She is a founding member of the Société d'études syriaques (Society for Syriac Studies) that organizes an international meeting every year on a specific topic of Syriac Studies, which is then published as a guide to the subject. The 6th volume, edited by Muriel, is dedicated to Syriac Historiography. Muriel is currently working collaboratively on a monograph on multilingualism and diglossia in the Late Antique Near East.

Frédérique de Vignemont

Researcher |Philosophy | CNRS

Valérie Doyère

Senior Researcher | Neuroscience | CNRS

Valérie Doyère got her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Paris VI in 1990. She got post-doctoral training with Professor B. Srebro in the University of Bergen, Norway, before being appointed as a full-time researcher, with a tenure position at the CNRS in 1993. She got additional training as a visiting scholar in the lab of J.E. LeDoux (2000-2003) at NYU. She is an expert in synaptic plasticity in the awake freely-moving rat, in relation with learning and memory. She has published several scientific articles in prestigious journals and she is one of the few capable of recording synaptic and cellular plasticity in various brain structures over several days, and during learning tasks in the awake behaving rat. As a PI, she has been recipient of several national and international grants. She is currently recipient of a European grant as a PI and the head of the French team (EU FP6, 2005-2008).

Carol Gluck

History | Professor | Columbia University

Carol Gluck is the George Sansom Professor of History at Columbia University. Her field of inquiry covers modern Japanese history, from the Nineteenth century to the present, international relations, history-writing and public memory in Asia and the West.

She received her B.A. from Wellesley in 1962 and her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1977. She joined the Columbia faculty in 1975.From 2002-2008 she directed the Expanding East Asian Studies (ExEAS) program (see below), a project funded by a $2 million grant from the Freeman Foundation. She chairs the WEAI publications program, working with Madge Huntington, Daniel Rivero, and others, to produce three series ( Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Weatherhead Books on Asia, and Asia Perspectives). She is a member of the university's Committee on Global Thought established by President Bollinger in 2005, and she headed the Undergraduate Initiative of the Committee, which produced its first report and proposals in April 2007.

In 2006 she received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, from the government of Japan and in 2002 was honored with the Japan-United States Fulbright Program 50th Anniversary Distinguished Scholar Award. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Current activities include the National Coalition on Asian and International Studies in the Schools, the board of trustees of Asia Society, the board of directors of the Japan Society, elected member of the Council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and others. She will be the Distinguished Visitor in the Program in U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard in March, 2009.

Her publications include Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, 1985), Showa: the Japan of Hirohito (Norton, 1992), Asia in Western and World History: A Guide for Teaching, co-edited with Ainslie Embree (Sharpe, 1997), Words in Motion, co-edited with Anna Tsing (Duke, 2009), Thinking with the Past: Japan and Modern History (University of California, 2009), Past Obsessions: World War Two in History and Memory (Columbia University Press, forthcoming), and a number of books in Japanese, most recently Rekishi de kangaeru [Thinking with History] (Iwanami, 2007). Her most recent articles are "Meiji and Modernity: From History to Theory,” in Intrecci Culturali, ed. Rosa Caroli ( Venice, 2009), and “Ten Top Things to Know About Japan in the Early Twentieth Century,” Education About Asia(Winter 2008).

Her media publications include a column in Japanese for Newsweek Japan from 2000 to 2006 and occasional pieces in the US and Japanese press.

Nicolas Guilhot

Researcher | Political science | CNRS

Nicolas Guilhot is senior researcher at the CNRS and visiting scholar at NYU. His research interests include the history of the social sciences, philanthropic foundations, human rights and international politics. His current work focuses on the intellectual and social history of international relations theory in the 20th century. Prior to joining Transitions, he worked as a research fellow and program officer at the Social Science Research Council in New York. He has also taught at the London School of Economics and at Columbia University. He earned his doctorate from the European University Institute in Florence in 2001. His publications include The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and the Politics of Global Order (New York: Columbia University Press: 2005); Financiers, Philanthropes: Sociologie de Wall Street (Paris: Raisons d'Agir 2006), and more recently "The Realist Gambit: Postwar American Political Science and the Birth of IR Theory," International Political Sociology, 2:4, 2008, 281-304.

Alexander Jones

Professor | History of Exact Sciences in Antiquity | NYU

Alexander Jones studied Classics at the University of British Columbia and the history of the ancient mathematical sciences in the Department of the History of Mathematics at Brown University. Before coming to NYU, he was for sixteen years on the faculty of the Department of Classics and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. His work centers on the history and transmission of the mathematical sciences, especially astronomy. He is the author of several editions of Greek scientific texts, among them Pappus of Alexandria's commentary on the corpus of Hellenistic geometrical treatises known as the "Treasury of Analysis"; an anonymous Byzantine astronomical handbook based on Islamic sources; and a collection of about two hundred fragmentary astronomical texts, tables, and horoscopes from the papyri excavated a century ago by Grenfell and Hunt at Oxyrhynchus. His current research interests include the contacts between Babylonian and Greco-Roman astronomy and astrology, the Antikythera Mechanism and other artifacts of Hellenistic astronomy, and the scientific work of Claudius Ptolemy. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and recipient of several awards and honors including a Guggenheim fellowship and the Francis Bacon Award in the History of Science.

Aisha Khan has earned a Ph.D from the City University of New York in 1995, after having done her M.A. (1982) and her B.A. (1977) in San Francisco State University. Thanks to a sabbatical this year (2009-2010), she has recently published or is about to publish a number of my papers, including her edited volume, Empirical Futures for the (University of North Caroline Press (November 2009. She is preparing two articles : one is on the 19th and 20th century Canadian Presbyterian Mission in Trinidad, and the other on Hosay/Muharram in the Caribbean and South Africa. She has already published Callaloo Nation, at the University of Toronto’s “Conference on South-South Encounters Across South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.”  She has been appointed as the Program Co-Chair for the Society for the Anthropology of Religion's annual conference, this year held jointly with the Society for Psychological Anthropology. As a doctoral committee member, she has had the pleasure and satisfaction of seeing several graduate students in anthropology and other disciplines finish their degrees and go off to jobs and post-docs.

Jacques Lezra

Professor | Comparative Literature |Spanish & Portuguese | NYU

Jacques Lezra, a specialist in literary theory and in the literary, visual and philosophical culture of the early modern period, received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 1990. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, at Yale, Harvard, and at the Bread Loaf School of English. Lezra has published Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe (1997) and edited Spanish Republic (2005) and Depositions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey and the Labor of Reading (1988). With Georgina Dopico (NYU), he co-edited Covarrubias's 1613 Suplemento al 'Tesoro de la lengua'. His 1992 translation into Spanish of Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight won the PEN Critical Editions Award. Lezra has just completed Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror in Radical Democracy (Fordham 2009); his Economía política del alma: El suceso cervantino will appear in Fall 2008.

Marie-Claire Lavabre

Senior Researcher | Sociology | CNRS

Marie-Claire Lavabre is a CNRS (CEVIPOF=Centre for Political Research, Sciences Po-CNRS). Her main fields of research are Memory as a dimension of Communism (how to deal with the past in post-Communist texts), particularly the French Communist Party as a case study for the analysis of collective memory, to illustrate or verify theories of collective memory; Theories of social memory; other issues connected to the question of memory and political uses of the past : qualitative methods in the social sciences / micro-sociology / history from below; sociology and psychoanalysis; social functions of historians. She also teaches at Sciences Po and at the EHESS. She has been a visiting academic at the Department of Politics of the University of Oxford via the Maison Française d’Oxford since 2005. Dr Lavabre holds a PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po which she was conferred with in 1992. She also holds a DEA in Political Philosophy.

Joseph E. Ledoux

Professor | Neural Science | NYU

My lab's research (The Emotional Brain) is aimed at understanding the biological mechanisms of emotional memory. We are particularly interested in how the brain learns and stores information about danger. Using classical fear conditioning as way of inducing emotional memories in rats, we have mapped the neural pathways by which sensory stimuli enter and flow through the brain in the process of fear learning. This work implicated specific circuits in within the amygdala as essential for the formation of memories of the fear conditioning experience. It is now clear that the same brain system underlies fear learning in and humans. The detailed mechanisms of fear, which can only be uncovered through animal studies, are thus applicable to understanding fear processing in the human brain. With the neural system mediating fear learning now understood in considerable detail, we are pursuing the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved. This is being done by performing studies in which we compare the effects of pharmacological manipulations of the brain on fear learning in behaving animals and on long-term potentiation in vitro. Through such studies the neural plasticity underlying fear conditioning has been shown to involve elevation of calcium in amygdala cells through NMDA receptors and L-type voltage gated calcium channels. The elevated calcium activates protein kinases, which initiate gene expression and protein synthesis, leading to the consolidation of the memory, and its reconsolidation after retrieval. Some of the techniques we use to explore emotional memory in the brain include brain lesions, neuroanatomical tract tracing at the light and electron microscopic level, pharmacological and viral manipulation of brain chemistry, single unit and field recordings of neural activity in awake and anesthetized animals, whole cell recordings in in vitro brain slices, and fMRI in healthy human volunteers and in patients with fear/anxiety disorders. Conceptual issues being explored include the following. Is the same basic system that has been uncovered for the conditioning of reflexive responses also apply to voluntary behavioral responses in dangerous situations or do other networks become involved? How does the brain regulate fear, as in extinction or other processes? Are other emotions mediated by similar or different circuits? What are the mechanisms through which conscious emotional feelings, as opposed to behavioral or autonomic responses, come about?

Lorie Novak

Professor |Photography | NYU

Lorie Novak’s photographs, installations, and internet projects have been in numerous exhibitions including solo exhibitions at ArtSway, Hampshire, England; The International Center for Photography, NY; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Houston Center for Photography; Breda Fotografica, the Netherlands; Addison Gallery, Andover, MA; and Stanford University Art Museum. Her work has been in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.; Art Institute of Chicago; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation, Italy; the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center (Italy), ArtSway (England), Mac Dowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Djerassi Foundation. Her photographs are in numerous permanent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, NY; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Novak's Collected Visions project, 1996-present, exploring how family photographs shape our memory, was one of the earliest interactive storytelling sites.  She was Chair of Photography and Imaging from 1999 to 2006. In 1996, she initiated and now co-directs with Erika deVries the Department’s community collaboration program, where NYU students teach photography and digital imaging to NYC high school students. Novak is also Chair of the Visual Arts Steering Committee at NYU, and the Chair of the Arts Committee and a Board Member of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics in the Americas.

Denis Peschanski

Senior Researcher | Contemporary History | CNRS

Denis Peschanski is a CNRS senior researcher (directeur de recherche), Center for Twentieth-Century Social History (Paris, Sorbonne). Specialist in history of France during WWII (Vichy, Resistance, Holocaust studies), in historical methodology (archives, historians and experts in society etc.), in police and in french communism, he has published nearly twenty books and eighty articles throughout his career. He is the author of Les Tsiganes en France 1939-1946 (Paris, CNRS-Editions, 1994), Vichy 1940-1944 : Contrôle et exclusions (Bruxelles, Complexe, 1997), co-editor of Polices et pouvoirs au XXe siècle. Europe, Etats-Unis, Japon (Bruxelles, Complexe, 2000), author of La France des camps. L’internement 1938-1946 (Paris, Gallimard, 2002), and Des étrangers dans la Résistance (Paris, éditions de l’Atelier, 2002). He is the president of the scientific council of the Memorial Museum of Caen (Memorial for the Peace), and of the scientific council of the Memorial Museum of Rivesaltes (internment Camps). He is the author of three films: “La Traque de l’Affiche rouge”; Maréchal, nous voilà? La propagande sous Vichy”; “La France des camps”, which were diffused by France 2 (France Télévisions) in 2007, 2008 and 2010. Member of the CNRS scientific council (2001-2005) and then, from 2006 february to september 2008, scientific deputy manager at the CNRS, department of social sciences and humanities. In April 2009, the research project he leads, with Ed Berenson (NYU), was elected by FACE (Foundation) and the French Embassy. The project associates NYU, the CNRS, the Mémorial de Caen and the US Foundation for the Museum and Memorial 9/11

Christine Proust

Researcher | Ancient Mathematics | Institute for Advanced Study (Princ.)

Christine Proust is a historian of mathematics and ancient sciences, specialised in cuneiform sources. She is currently a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (Sept. - Dec. 2009), the “Transition” UMI (CNRS and NYU) since 2008 and CNRS and University Paris-Diderot's research unit, SPHERE. She has been involved in the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (http://cdli.ucla.edu/) and the Mission Epigraphique de Mari (http://www.unige.ch/lettres/antic/mesopotamie/mari/projet.html). She obtained a doctoral thesis under Christian Houzel's supervision in 2004. She has started her research by studying mathematical cuneiform texts from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Nippur, now kept in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul and in the University of Jena. She has also studied the organisation of mathematical curriculum in Nippur’s scribal schools during the Old-Babylonian period (early second millennium BC). Using pedagogical sources, she has managed to rebuild the methods used by ancient scribes to calculate surfaces and volumes. She has published two books on the Nippur’s sources: Tablettes mathématiques de Nippur (2007) and Tablettes mathématiques de la collection Hilprecht (2008). She is pursuing her investigations on the calculation practices in ancient cultures, as a member of Dominique Tournès 's project, “History of Numerical Tables”. She is involved in research programs dealing with history of education in Antiquity, with Alain Bernard (EHESS, Université Paris 12, (http://mathshistoire.ehess.fr/sommaire.php?id=258). Her current research is focused on the enumerative structures of mathematical texts and, more widely, the specificities of technical writing in mathematical cuneiform texts. She is also developing a historiographical approach by working on Neugebauer’s papers.

Janet Roitman

Researcher | Anthropology |CNRS

Janet Roitman is a graduate of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.  She has conducted extensive research in Central Africa, focusing specifically on the borders of Cameroon, Nigeria, the Central African Republic and Chad.  This research is the basis of Fiscal Disobedience (Princeton University Press, 2005), an analysis of the unregulated commerce that transpires on those borders.  This work inquires into emergent forms of economic regulation in the region of the Chad Basin and considers consequential transformations in the nature of fiscal relations and citizenship.  More generally, her research covers topics of political economy, the anthropology of value, and emergent forms of the political.  Roitman has served as an instructor at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques de Paris and is a research fellow with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). She is a member of the editorial board of Public Culture and is co-editor (with Stephen Collier and Aihwa Ong) of the series “Assembling the Global in Anthropology,” Palgrave Press.  Roitman is recipient of fellowships and grants from the Social Science Research Council, the MacArthur Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, l’Agence française du développement, the Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellowship at Berkeley, and Fulbright-Hayes.  She is a member of the “Cultures of Finance” research group at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University and has been teaching in both the Graduate Program in International Affairs and the Anthropology Department at the New School University.  Her ongoing research project, entitled “The Stakes of Crisis,”which examines the status of “crisis” in social science theory and writing.  Specifically, she traces the conceptual history of the term as well as its displacements through various domains (philosophy, sociology, Marxist political economy, historiography, anthropology) so as to demonstrate how “crisis” is constituted as an object of knowledge.

Henry Rousso

Senior Researcher | Contemporary History | CNRS

Born in Cairo in 1954, graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure de Saint-Cloud (1974-1979), ”agrégé” in history (1977), Henry Rousso holds a ”Habilitation à diriger des recherches” (Institut d’Etudes Politiques Paris, 2000). He joined the CNRS in 1981, he participated in the creation of the IHTP inaugurated a year before, which he headed from 1994 to 2005. He was a member of the National Committee of the CNRS (1987-1994) and Secretary General of the International Committee for the History of the Second World War, which is based in Paris (1990-2000). He headed in 2001 the ”Entretiens du Patrimoine”, and from 2002 to 2004, the Commission on Racism and Holocaust deniers at the University Jean Moulin-Lyon III, established by the Ministry of Education. He has been research associate or visiting professor in many places: Center for European Studies (Harvard University, 1986-1987), Munich (Bosch Stiftung, 1990), New York University (1992), Dartmouth College (1994), Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (2005), Texas A & M University (2007), Jena Center Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (2009). He is a member of several editorial boards: Vingtième Siècle, History and Memory, South Central Review, SegleXX. Revista di Storia catalana, Les Cahiers du Judaïsme, Cahiers d’histoire du temps présent (Brussels), and several scientific councils: Centre français de recherche en sciences sociales in Prag, Centre de recherche de l’Historial de Péronne, Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, Mémorial de la Paix in Caen, the Centre d’histoire de la Resistance et la Deportation in Lyon, the Jena Center Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Germany), the Buchenwald Memorial (Germany), Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk (Poland, in project), etc.. He teaches at the University Paris-Ouest-Nanterre La Défense (ex-Paris X), where he directs doctoral students, most of which are involved in joint Ph. D. with European or North American universities. He belongs to the doctoral program: ”Milieux, cultures et societies du présent et du passé”. He coordinates, with Annette Becker and Nicole Edelman, a master seminar on "The Invention of the Victim in XXth century". Since 2007, he is also a professor at the IEP in Paris, where he provides a master course on contemporary history. He runs two series: "Contemporary European History, Berghahn Books (Oxford / New York), with Konrad Jarausch & "Histoire du temps présent", Éditions Complexe (Paris). Since 2006, he coordinates the European Research Group (GDRE) EURHISTXX.

Brigitte Sion

Assistant Professor | Religious Studies | NYU

Clifford Siskin

Professor | English & American Literature | NYU

Clifford Siskin is the Henry W. and Alfred A. Berg Professor of English and American Literature at New York University and the Director of The Re:Enlightenment Project at New York University and the New York Public Library. His subject is the interrelations of literary, social, and technological change, with a particular emphasis on print culture: both its historical formation and its current remediation in the face of the electronic and the digital. Links between past and present inform all of his work, from his sequencing of the genres of subjectivity (The Historicity of Romantic Discourse, Oxford) to his recovery of literature's role in the formation of the modern disciplines (The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700-1830, Hopkins). His latest book asks when and how the central genre of Enlightenment became the thing that we now love to blame: the SYSTEM (forthcoming from Chicago). Professor Siskin is also co-editor, with Anne Mellor, of the Palgrave-Macmillan monograph series in "Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print." He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1978 and has been the George Delacorte Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, the A. C. Bradley Chair at the University of Glasgow, the Waynflete Lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford, a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, and Chair of English at SUNY Stony Brook.

Robert Young

Professor | English Literature & Postcolonial Studies | NYU

A member of the faculty of the Department of English since 2005, Professor Young came to NYU from Oxford University, where he was a professor of English and critical theory and a fellow of Wadham College. He has also held appointments at Southampton University and Rutgers University.  He earned his B.A., M.A., and D.Phil. degrees in English from Exeter College, Oxford University. Robert Young is one of the early pioneers and most influential scholars in the rapidly growing fields of Anglophone and postcolonial literatures; this interdisciplinary literary field involves research that also crosses over into areas of history, theory, philosophy, anthropology and translation studies. His books include White Mythologies: Writing History and the West; Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race; Torn Halves: Political Conflict in Literacy and Cultural Theory; Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction; The Idea of English Ethnicity. He is also General Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and was founding editor of The Oxford Literary Review.  Robert Young has lectured in over 20 countries, and his work has been translated into 14 languages.

Randall White

Professor | Anthropology | Archaeology | NYU

Randall White is Professor of Anthropology at New York University and one of the world’s leading specialists in the study of Paleolithic art and personal adornment. Randall White was one of the first to recognize the evolutionary importance of personal adornment and its critical role in the organization and demographic expansion of modern humans. His work on the origins of art and personal adornment in Europe has taken him to various museums from France to Russia. He recently published the lavishly illustrated book Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind (New York: Harry Abrams, 2003). White has worked on the Upper Paleolithic cultures of France for more than 30 years and is currently director of excavations at the 35,000 year old ornament-rich site of Abri Castanet in SW France. He is also a member of several other research teams and is responsible for the analysis and publication of hundreds of early Upper Paleolithic personal ornaments from modern excavations at sites such as Isturitz, Brassempouy and Arcy-sur-Cure.

and on Alan Alda's tv show on PBS: