Announcing our 2025-26 Faculty Visitors
The 2025 – 2026 Reid Hall Faculty Visitors will conduct research at Parisian institutions and contribute to podcasts, videos, and programs at the Columbia Global Paris Center and Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
The 2025 – 2026 Faculty Visitors at Reid Hall will engage in a wide range of research and collaborations, spanning colonial and environmental history, art and LGBTQ+ studies, racial justice, and pediatric healthcare.
Over the course of one- to three-week stays in Paris, they will work with archives and museums such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Musée du Quai Branly. They will contribute to public lectures, the Columbia Global Paris Center’s Atelier podcast, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination’s Library Chats video series.
Their projects deepen understanding of topics including wartime racial dynamics, neurogenetic inheritance, and fashion in a decolonial perspective, all within the rich intellectual and historical context provided by Reid Hall.
Leah Aronowsky
Leah Aronowsky is a historian of science at the Columbia Climate School, focusing on U.S. climate and energy policy in the late 1970s. Her research examines why early scientific warnings about global warming were sidelined during the energy crisis and how this shaped long-term energy strategies.
In Paris, Aronowsky will work on advancing her book project, The Pragmatic Pessimists: Fossil Fuel Dependence and the Politics of Climate Adaptation, which reexamines climate politics by centering oil and energy in the story since the 1970s. She will collaborate with CNRS researchers on a joint article exploring the historical conditions shaping climate denialism beyond overt obstructionism, emphasizing how 1970s oil shocks led scientists to favor adaptation over prevention.
Julia Bryan-Wilson
Julia Bryan-Wilson researches feminist and queer theory, artistic labor, and craft histories. Her current work includes studies of materiality and the politics of art-making. She has curated exhibitions on art and social histories and is active in exploring collaborative and durational art practices.
In Paris, Bryan-Wilson will research her book AIDS is Contemporary, which argues that the 1980s AIDS crisis—not the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall—marks the true beginning of contemporary art by highlighting the urgency and inclusion of activist and non-traditional art forms like posters, zines, and performance. She will engage with the archives and ideas from the recent Exposé-es exhibition at Palais de Tokyo and interview Paris-based activist Élisabeth Lebovici.
Alexis Clark
Alexis Clark is a journalist and author focused on race, culture, and politics during World War II and the Civil Rights era. Her current projects explore historical and contemporary issues of racial justice, poverty, and food insecurity, including a forthcoming book on Black sororities and equality.
In Paris, Clark will expand her research on the experiences of Black American World War II soldiers, focusing especially on mixed-race children known as “Brown Babies” fathered by Black G.I.s and white European women in France. Building on her reporting about Germany’s Brown Babies and Black veterans’ struggles with segregation and denied benefits, she will explore French archives and connect with WWII scholars to deepen understanding of these overlooked histories.
Ralph Ghoche
Ralph Ghoche is a historian of 19th-century architecture and urbanism. His current research explores how the Catholic Church reshaped colonial Algiers to revive Augustinian Christendom. He has also written on French architecture, ornament, and aesthetics.
In Paris, Ghoche will research and write a chapter for his book Christians in the Casbah: Reassessing the Catholic Church’s Role in Algeria, focusing on the 1853 discovery and forensic study of Geronimo, a 16th-century Muslim convert martyred in French Algeria. His project explores how this case bolstered Catholic missionary efforts under colonial rule and reveals little-known conversion practices through rarely accessed archival documents.
Mirna Giordano
Mirna Giordano is a pediatric hospitalist with a particular interest in surgical co-management. She has co-managed pediatric neurosurgical patients for over 10 years. Her clinical research focuses on outcomes related to opioid-sparing multimodal analgesia.
In Paris, Dr. Mirna Giordano will study multidisciplinary pediatric surgical co-management protocols by observing preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative care at leading children’s hospitals like Hôpital Necker-Enfants Malades and Pitié-Salpêtrière, as well as the American Hospital in Paris. She aims to learn how shared decision-making and collaborative care are practiced in France to inform international consensus and curricular improvements in pediatric surgical care.
Kellie Jones
Kellie Jones’s work focuses on Black American, African Diaspora, and Latinx artists. Her research explores contemporary art and museum theory, emphasizing underrepresented histories and cultural politics. As a curator for over 30 years, she has organized acclaimed exhibitions including Now Dig This! at the Hammer Museum and Witness at the Brooklyn Museum.
In Paris, Jones will focus on researching and writing the Parisian chapter of her book Augusta Savage: Inhabiting Black Modernism, exploring how Savage’s sculptural work engaged Black internationalism, pan-Africanism, and queer visual culture within the vibrant diasporic and artistic networks of interwar Paris. She will utilize archives at the American Library and Parisian institutions to deepen understanding of Savage’s connections to Negritude, the 1931 Colonial Exposition, and Black modernist communities, while contextualizing her work alongside the broader cultural movements captured in exhibitions like Paris Noir.
Bianca Jones Marlin
Bianca Jones Marlin is a neuroscientist at Columbia studying how learned behaviors in parents become innate in offspring through epigenetic inheritance. Her work combines neural imaging and genetics to understand brain changes linked to trauma and inherited behaviors, with implications for mental health and parenting.
In Paris, Jones Marlin will advance her collaborative project TRANSMIND, investigating how imagined sensory experiences—“fictive memories” generated via optogenetics—might be biologically encoded and inherited across generations. Working closely with French collaborators at ESPCI Paris and utilizing resources at Reid Hall, she will deepen the understanding of how brain plasticity links imagination, trauma, and inheritance, with implications for mental health and generational healing.
Emmanuelle Saada
Emmanuelle Saada’s main field of research and teaching is the history of the French empire in the 19th and 20th century, with a specific interest in law. She is currently writing a historiographical book reflecting on French and European colonization as a history of the present, and a project on law and violence in Algeria and France in the 19th century.
In Paris, Saada plans to promote her forthcoming book Écrire l’histoire de la Colonisation by engaging with French media, delivering talks at prominent universities, and sharing her research with the Reid Hall community, all while providing a comprehensive analysis of global colonial histories and their impact on historical scholarship.
A. Tunç Şen
A. Tunç Şen studies Ottoman social and cultural intellectual practices, focusing on how knowledge was perceived and organized within political and emotional frameworks. His forthcoming book, Forgotten Experts (Stanford, 2025), explores the contested authority of occult scientific practitioners in the early modern Ottoman Empire.
In Paris, Şen will conduct in-depth archival research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France on 16th- and 17th-century Islamic manuscripts acquired during Mediterranean maritime conflicts, focusing on their material features to uncover the social history of Ottoman military readers. He will also advance research on key figures in early French Orientalism linked to imperial and diplomatic networks.
Aziza Shanazarova
Aziza Shanazarova specializes in the religious history of Islamic Central Asia and the Persianate world from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Her current book project, Female Religiosity and Gender History in Early Modern Central Asia, examines female religious authority through the 16th-century Sufi master Aghā-yi Buzurg (The Great Lady).
In Paris, Aziza Shanazarova will conduct archival research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France on previously unstudied waqf deeds established by women in Islamic Central Asia from the 16th to 20th centuries, aiming to illuminate women’s roles in charity, religious, and educational institutions. Her work seeks to recover women’s legal and financial agency in shaping public life and offer a counter-narrative to restrictive contemporary gender ideologies.
Paige West
Paige West’s research focuses on Indigenous ecological knowledge, environmental conservation, and socio-political change in Oceania, especially Papua New Guinea, where she has conducted extensive fieldwork. Her current work examines sea level rise, managed retreat, and community adaptation to climate change. She is completing a new book, Aunty: A Prayer for the World.
In Paris, West will conduct archival and museum research on Melanesian textiles and motifs at institutions like the Musée du Quai Branly and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, situating Indigenous Pacific fashion within historical and colonial contexts. She will also engage with Paris’s fashion industry networks to explore sustainable, decolonial design collaborations and build international partnerships that amplify Pacific designers. Her work aims to trace the transformation of traditional cultural expressions into contemporary fashion as a form of biocultural resilience, sovereignty, and environmental stewardship.