Martha Howell, Miriam Champion Professor of History (co-chair)
Martha Howell, Miriam Champion Professor of History, specializes in social, economic, legal, and women’s history in northern Europe during the late medieval and early modern centuries, concentrating on the Burgundian Netherlands, northern France, and Germany.
Pamela Smith, Professor of History (co-chair)
Professor Smith specializes in early modern European history and the history of science. Her current research focuses on attitudes to nature in early modern Europe and the Scientific Revolution, with particular attention to craft knowledge and historical techniques.
Patricia Dailey, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Professor Dailey specializes in medieval literature and culture (English, Dutch, French, and Italian) and critical theory, focusing on women’s mystical texts, visions, Anglo-Saxon poetry and prose, medieval rhetoric, hermeneutics, and theology.
David Freedberg, Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art
Professor Freedberg is best known for his work on psychological responses to art, and particularly for his studies on iconoclasm and censorship. His more traditional art historical writing originally centered on the fields of Dutch and Flemish art. Within these fields he specialized in the history of Dutch printmaking, and in the paintings and drawings of Bruegel and Rubens. He then turned his attention to seventeenth century Roman art and to the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, before moving on to his recent work in the history of science and on the importance of the new cognitive neurosciences for the study of art and its history.
Wijnie de Groot, Instructor of Dutch Language and Literature
Wijnie E. de Groot has been teaching Dutch at Columbia since 1999. She holds two master’s degrees (Slavic Languages and Literature, and General Linguistics from the University of Amsterdam, 1983 and 1985).
Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature
Professor Huyssen focuses his research and teaching on 18th- to 20th-century German literature and culture, international modernism, Frankfurt School critical theory, postmodernism, cultural memory of historical trauma in transnational contexts, and, most recently, urban culture and globalization.
Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages (ex officio)