Staff Directory

Stephanie Insley Hershinow is associate professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. She is co-editor of Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries and chair of the Columbia Seminar in Eighteenth-Century European Culture. Stephanie is the author of Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel (Johns Hopkins, 2019) and the editor of Jane Austen’s Emma (Norton, 2022). Currently, she is at work on two books: one on legal and literary personhood in the long eighteenth century, and another on Jane Austen’s storytelling.

Srividhya Swaminathan is the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies in St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. John’s University. Her field of scholarship is eighteenth-century social movements with a focus on the rhetoric around the British transatlantic slave trade. She is the author of Debating the Slave Trade (2009) and has co-edited two collections on topics relevant to the period. Her current focus has shifted to contemporary issues that are the legacy of slavery, specifically antiblackness and critical race and ethnic studies.

Shruti Jain is a PhD candidate at Binghamton University (SUNY). Her research is interested in networks between caste and race in the global eighteenth century. She is also the co-host and co-producer of the podcast “Immigrants Wake America,” which helps her explore the role that podcasts play in digital archiving in the Eighteenth century and beyond.

Scott M. Sanders is an Associate Professor of French and affiliated faculty of Music at Dartmouth College. His research investigates British and Caribbean influences on French performance culture. His first book, Voices from Beyond: Physiology, Sentience and the Uncanny in Eighteenth-Century French Literature, won the 2021 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for outstanding scholarship in eighteenth-century studies. In it, he investigates eighteenth-century French conceptions of the voice across scientific, philosophical, and literary texts. His second book project, entitled An Uneasy Marriage: Reflections of the Black Atlantic on French Stages, examines the influence of the Black Atlantic on eighteenth-century French theater, especially in theatrical works produced across the naval admiralties in Metropolitan France, including the slave trading ports Bordeaux and Nantes.

Patricia A. Matthew is associate professor of English at Montclair State University. She is the editor of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and special issues of Romantic Pedagogy Commons, European Romantic Review, and Studies in Romanticism. Her work has been published in refereed journals including The Keats-Shelley Journal, PMLA, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. She has written about race and regency-era culture for The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement. She is co-editor of the series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Oxford University Press). The 2022-2023 Anthony E. Kaye Fellow at the National Humanities Center, she is writing a book about sugar, gender, and British abolitionist culture for Princeton University Press.

Photo Credit: Joel Elliott

Magdalena Baczewska [pronounced ba-CHEV-ska] is a pianist, harpsichordist, recording artist, speaker, and an educator. She is a Senior Lecturer and the Director of the Music Performance Program at ​Columbia University. Baczewska has ​appeared internationally​ with the world’s leading orchestras, among them the San Francisco Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony, and China National Symphony. She has toured extensively with the Grammy and Oscar-winning composer Tan Dun. Her critically acclaimed discography spans many genres, from pre-Baroque keyboard music to collaborations with techno and hip-hop artists. Embracing the dual role of an educator and administrator at Columbia, Baczewska directs a program that gathers over 400 student musicians, including members of the elite Columbia-Juilliard Exchange.

Kaushik Tekur is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of English, Binghamton University (SUNY). His research interest lies in studying the intersections of the long 18th century, its literary forms, and the British Empire’s evolving policing and surveillance practices. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Keats-Shelley Review, and The LA Review of Books. He tweets at @kaushik_tekur

Kathleen Tamayo Alves is Associate Professor and Deputy Chair of English at Queensborough Community College of The City University of New York where she teaches literature and composition. Her research centers on eighteenth-century literature and culture, medicine, and literary history, and she has recently published for Journal for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Aphra Behn Online, and The Rambling. Her book-in-progress, Body Language: Medicine and the Eighteenth-Century Comic Novel, currently under review at Bucknell University Press, explores how medicine shaped and is shaped by comic language through fictional dramatizations of female-specific medical phenomena, such as menstruation, hysteria, and pregnancy. 

Julia Hamilton-Louey is a Lecturer in Music at Columbia University, where she received her PhD in 2021. Her dissertation explored connections between popular abolitionism and British musical culture in the late eighteenth century, with a particular focus on the ways female amateur musicians used their everyday musical activities to enact political change. She has published an article on British women’s abolitionism and domestic music-making in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, and is currently working on a book project that traces the shifting musical approaches to British antislavery activism from the 1760s to the 1840s.

Frank Felsenstein is the Reed D. Voran Distinguished Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Ball State University. He is author of Anti-Semitic Stereotypes,1660-1830 (1995), English Trader Indian Maid: An Inkle and Yarico Reader (1999), and co-author of What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City (2015). He has prepared editions of works by Tobias Smollett (Travels through France and Italy), John Thelwall (Incle and Yarico), and Peter Aram. He is completing No Life Without You: Refugee Love Letters from the 1930s, which recaptures his parents’ flight from Nazi Germany. Felsenstein previously taught at the University of Leeds. 

Christopher Brown is a historian of Britain and the British empire, principally in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with special emphasis on the comparative history of slavery and abolition, and with secondary interests in the Atlantic Slave Trade and the Age of Revolutions.  His current research centers on the history of European experience on the African coast at the height of the Atlantic slave trade, and continues early commitments to the rise and fall of slavery in the British Empire.  Published work has received prizes in four distinct fields of study – American History, British History, Atlantic History, and the history of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance.  Completed projects include Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press) and, with Philip D. Morgan, Arming Slaves: Classical Times to the Modern Age (Yale University Press).  He has written as well for The Nation, The New York Times, and the London Review of Books, among other outlets.  

Callum Blackmore is a graduate student in historical musicology at Columbia University in the City of New York studying French opera in the long eighteenth century. His dissertation, “Opera at the Dawn of Capitalism: Staging Economic Change in France and Its Colonies from Rameau to Cherubini,” explores representations of economic life on the operatic stage in the lead-up to the French and Haitian Revolutions. His research has been supported by the Barker Fellowship and the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life.

A Reader in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, Berta’s specialisms include 18th-century musical celebrity culture, the role of the performer in creating musical works, and computational music editorship. Her monograph Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster (2019) is a bold re-reading of Clive's music as a medium of the star singer-actor's onstage artistry. Berta's 2020 edition for Bärenreiter of the 1762 pastiche opera Love in a Village is the first-ever critical hybrid score – that is, a bound publication with notes and digitized primary sources online – of an English work. Since 2019, Berta has been researching transatlantic Black music of the long 18th century.

Joy is the hallmark of Awet Andemicael’s artistry. A critically-acclaimed concert and recording soprano, she has sung across North America, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, with ensembles including the Boston Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Handel and Haydn Society, and Bach Collegium Japan. She holds degrees from Yale University, Yale Divinity School (YDS)/Institute of Sacred Music (ISM), the University of Notre Dame, UC Irvine, and Harvard University. Dr. Andemicael has published articles and chapters on Christian theology, music and faith, and other topics, and is currently Associate Dean for Marquand Chapel and Assistant Professor (adj) in Theology at Yale. 

Dr. Atesede Makonnen investigates the impact of racialized visuality on British culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, exploring how the approaching end of slavery sparked new consideration and wariness of black subjects and gave birth to persistent forms of anti-blackness centered on the concept and act of seeing. This work has received support from organizations including The American Trust for the British Library, The New York Public Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library and her work has been published in Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Symbiosis, The Keats-Shelley Journal, and Victorian Studies.

Adrienne L. Childs is an independent art historian and curator and adjunct curator at The Phillips Collection. Childs is co-curator of The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sex and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture for the Henry Moore Institute. She was awarded the 2022 Driskell Prize by the High Museum for scholarly work in African American art. She curated the exhibition Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition at the Phillips Collection. She has held fellowships at The Hutchins Center at Harvard University, The Clark Art Institute and CASVA among others. Her current book project is Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts.