Executive Committee
Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government. He was also professor and executive director of Makerere Institute of Social Research (2010-2022) in Kampala, where he established an inter-disciplinary doctoral program in Social Studies. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1974 and specializes in the study of colonialism, anti-colonialism and decolonisation. His works explore the intersection between politics and culture, a comparative study of colonialism since 1452, the history of civil war and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, the history and theory of human rights, and the politics of knowledge production. Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, Mamdani was a professor at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania (1973–1979), Makerere University in Uganda (1980–1993), and the University of Cape Town (1996–1999).
Rhiannon Stephens specializes in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the first millennium CE through the twentieth century. She is the author of Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History (Duke University Press, 2022), an interdisciplinary history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. Her first monograph, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), traced the history of motherhood as a social institution and an ideology across over a millennium of Ugandan political, economic and social change. She is the co-editor of Doing Conceptual History in Africa (Berghahn Books, 2018), which critically examines what it means to write conceptual history on the continent. Her current research is a collaborative project that focuses on questions of gender, power, and climate over fifteen-hundred years on the east coast of Africa. Her work has been published in the American Historical Review, the Journal of African History, Past and Present, and African Studies Review.
Jennifer Wenzel is jointly appointed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. She is an affiliate of the Columbia Climate School. Her first book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, published by Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal in 2009, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. With Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger, she co-edited Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham 2017). Her recent monograph, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (Fordham 2020), was a Finalist for the 2020 Book Prize by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) and was shortlisted for the 2022 Ecocriticism Book Prize awarded by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. As part of the After Oil Collective, she co-authored Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice (Minnesota Forerunners Series, 2022).
Madeleine Dobie is a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Comparative Literature & Society and Co-director of Columbia’s Amman-Tunis Middle-East/North Africa summer program, an intensive Arabic language course combined with a cultural and historical seminar. Her teaching and research areas include francophone/postcolonial literatures and cinemas of France, the Maghreb, the Middle East and the Caribbean as well as the cultural dimensions of migration and diaspora. She also teaches and writes about eighteenth-century French culture, particularly with regard to orientalism, colonialism and the history of slavery.