Mitali Banerjee
Mitali s a doctoral student in the Management Division at Columbia Business School. Her research interests span networks, innovation and sociology of culture and labor markets. She is interested in several aspects of cultural markets—artists creative success across different audience, the development of art auction markets and the similarity and differences between artistic and other entrepreneurial careers . As part of her dissertation, she is looking at the relationship between network positions of early 20th century European and American abstract artists and their creativity and fame across different geographical markets. She aims to extend this research to other creative fields such as Jazz and technology start-ups.
Her undergraduate training is in Mathematics(BS) and Economics (BA) from the University of Rochester (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa).
Sonia Coman
Sonia received her B.A. in 2011 in Art History with a Secondary Field in Studio Art from Harvard University (Magna cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa). Her senior thesis explored the notion of authorial ambition in relation to the Recueil Jullienne, an eighteenth-century compendium of prints. Sonia worked as a student docent for the Harvard Art Museums and as a curatorial intern in the Department of Paintings at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Since starting her Ph. D. program in Art History at Columbia, Sonia received her M.A. (2012) and M. Phil. (2014), conducted research in Paris on an Alliance Program Doctoral Mobility Grant, and wrote reviews of contemporary art for New York-based magazines. Her doctoral research focuses on the influence of Japanese ceramics on nineteenth-century French art. Sonia is working with Damon Phillips, Professor of Business Strategy at Columbia Business School, on a paper, currently in progress, on the rise and fall of swing in the US in the 1930s. She is also an active member of the core team of C.A.E.S.A.R., a think-tank of young experts in a variety of fields whose aim is the sustainable development of Romania. Whenever possible, Sonia is an avid reader and writer of poetry and particularly of Japanese verse.
Ryan Hagen
Ryan Hagen is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. His primary interest is how organizations encounter non-market risk. He is also conducting an historical project on the influence of political dynamics on collective violence in the post-Redemption American South. He holds a BA in English and American Literature from New York University, and an MA in Sociology from Columbia University.
Kari Hensley
Kari holds a PhD from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and a BA in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, Making Brooklyn Local: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Postindustrial City, is a discourse analysis and ethnographic study of “The Brooklyn Food Movement” with particular attention to localism, craft, nostalgic aesthetics, gentrification, entrepreneurialism, and the urban branding of Brooklyn. Her research and teaching interests include media and urban studies, visual culture, critical and social theory, the cultural industries, and consumer culture. At Data & Society Research Institute Kari investigated the social implications and political economy of data mining in the areas of consumer finance, criminal justice, housing, education, and employment. Kari has served as the administrative director for a performance art non-profit in San Francisco, a union organizer of NYU graduate student workers, and a creative recruiter for the design industry.
M. Pilar Opazo
Pilar Opazo is a Post-Doctoral Research Scholar in the Business School at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D in Sociology from Columbia and a B.A from the Catholic University of Chile. Her research interests include organizational theory, innovation studies, science and technology studies, network analysis and qualitative methods. Pilar’s doctoral dissertation, “Appetite for Innovation,” uses ethnographic methods to examine how new ideas are mobilized in order to become radical innovations. She looks at the case of “elBulli,” the avant-garde restaurant directed by Chef Ferran Adria that has revolutionized the field of haute cuisine. Pilar’s doctoral research was supported by a Fulbright scholarship and by a grant from Telefonica R&D, Spain’s major telecommunications company.
Iva Petkova
Iva Petkova is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University and with the Management Division at Columbia Business School. Her research focuses on new digital branding platforms andtools in online fashion retail and the potential of these innovations to change the cultural practice of branding in traditional fashion brands when those expand their operations to e-commerce and digital marketing. Starting in September, Iva will take a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Davidson College, North Carolina.
Damon J. Phillips
Damon J. Phillips is the James P. Gorman Professor of Business Strategy at Columbia University. Damon has published articles in the top journals in sociology and management along several topics: the social structural approach to labor and product markets, entrepreneurship, innovation, organizational strategy and structure, as well as social network theory and analysis. His industry specialties are the markets for professional services (financial services, legal services, etc.) and culture (music industry). He has also written a book on the market for recorded jazz titled Shaping Jazz (Princeton University Press).
Before joining Columbia in 2011, Damon was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (from 1998-2011). He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Morehouse College, has master’s degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Business.
Alessandro Piazza
Alessandro Piazza is a Ph.D. candidate in Management at Columbia Business School. His interests lie at the intersection of organizational theory and economic sociology; his current projects concern career patterns in the creative industries, the role of language in organizations and markets, the impact of activism on organizational fields, the emergence of network patterns in organizations, the dynamics of field-level stigma and other social judgments of organizations (such as reputation and status). His work tends to be empirical and quantitative, focusing on the analysis of large datasets by means of econometric techniques, content analysis and network analysis. Before joining Columbia in 2013, he was a graduate student in Business Administration at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. He is a graduate of the Collège des Ingénieurs in Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris, France; the Scuola di Alta Formazione al Management in Turin, Italy; and the University of Bologna (Italy).
Sarah Sachs
Sarah Sachs is a PhD student in sociology, researching organizations, technology, and the process by which developers and users alter the structure of social relations in the material world via online applications and devices and the production and distribution of data between them.
Before beginning her doctoral studies, Sarah enjoyed a tech career, most recently at Google, where she worked with a team of developers and became deeply engaged in user experience research and feature development. Sarah completed her undergraduate studies at the University of California-Davis.
Barbara Slavich
Barbara Slavich is Associate Professor in the Department of Management at IESEG School of Management (Paris) and Affiliate Professor of Organization and Human Resources Management at SDA Bocconi School of Management (Milan). She holds a double PhD degree in Management from ESADE Business School (Barcelona, Spain) and Università Ca’ Foscari (Venice, Italy). She was visiting scholar at Duke University, North Carolina (USA). She is the Academic Director of the Master in Fashion Management at IESEG School of Management. She teaches courses on organization theory and design, organizational behavior, creativity and innovation management. She has published her research in academic peer reviewed journals, like Organization Studies, Journal of Business Research, European Management Journal, International Journal of Arts Management, and in edited books, like the Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries. Her research focuses on creativity management, identity, status and social evaluations in creative industries.
Jenna Song
Jenna is a Ph.D student in Management at Columbia Business School. She received her A.B. in Sociology from Princeton University (Highest Honors, Phi Beta Kappa) and her M.A. in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences from Columbia University. Her current research interests focus on the dynamic construction of authenticity, identity, and valuation schemes, as they pertain to individual, organizational, and industrial outcomes. She has applied these interests by examining the globalization of Korean pop music (K-pop) and grandmothers paid to take care of their grandchildren. More broadly, she is interested in organizational, economic, and cultural sociology, organizational strategy, and entrepreneurship.
Hannah Wohl
Hannah Wohl is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude from Brown University, where she received her B.A. in Sociology. Her work explores judgment and valuation in social interaction, ranging from practices in everyday life to selection processes in creative industries. Her dissertation, “The Structure of Creativity: Consistency and Innovation in the Production of Contemporary Art,” examines processes of creative production in the field of contemporary visual art. Using ethnographic and interview methods, she analyzes how artists make decisions about their work during the creative process, and how these choices are influenced by social and economic forces. Hannah has published her research in peer-reviewed journals, including Sociological Theory and Poetics.