Dr. Morton will be a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Romance Philology.  This Fall he’s teaching a course on “Le Roman de la rose and Medieval Discourses of Nature.”

Jonathan Morton is a Junior Research Fellow at New College, University of Oxford. He works on medieval French and Latin literature and intellectual history, with a particular focus on the relationship between poetry and philosophy. In 2014 he completed his D. Phil. at Oxford on the Roman de la rose and Aristotelian philosophy in the thirteenth century, on the basis of which he is writing a book, entitled Nature, Art, and Ethics: The Roman de la rose in its philosophical context, which reinterprets the Rose by examining its dialogue with and reworking of some of the key philosophical texts and traditions of the thirteenth century when it was composed. As well as writing articles on different aspects of the Roman de la rose, he works on French and Latin bestiaries, particularly studying their relationship with Neoplatonic theology. He has recently started work on a new project about creativity and its meaning in the High Middle Ages, with a focus on the philosophical poetry of the Chartrian school and the representation of technology in vernacular and Latin sources

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/french/department/fac_bios/morton.html

We are delighted to welcome Zev Harvey as a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Columbia.

Professor Harvey studied philosophy at Columbia University (BA, 1965; Ph.D., 1973) and taught in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University (1971-1977), before moving to Jerusalem in 1977.  He is the author of many studies on medieval and modern Jewish philosophy, including Physics and Metaphysics in Hasdai Crescas (1998).  He is an EMETPrize laureate (2009) and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Professor Harvey will be teaching Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed  and the graduate level course Medieval Philosophy in Fall 2012.

The History Department is delighted to introduce their Visiting Scholar for the Fall 2012 semester,  Michael Stolberg.  Michaelis chair of the history of medicine at the University of Würzburg, Germany.  His research focuses on the history of medicine and the body in 16th- and 17th-century Germany, Italy and France.  Recent publications include Experiencing illness and the sick body in early modern Europe (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011; orig. German edn 2003), Die Harnschau. Eine Kultur- und Alltagsgeschichte (Böhlau, 2009, forthcoming Engl. edn; A cultural history of uroscopy, Ashgate, 2013) and “`Abhorreas pinguedinem`. Fat and obesity in early modern medicine (c. 1500-1750)”, in Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. Biomed. Sc. 43 (2012), 370-378.  He is currently working on the voluminous personal notebooks of Georg Handsch, a fairly obscure Padua-trained, young physician in mid-16th-century Prague, studying in particular the oral transmission of medical knowledge to the patients and their families, the acquisition of practical skills and the role of empirical observation in ordinary medical practice.

Michael welcomes your contacting him for coffee and discussion while he is here at Columbia, and he can be reached at  <[email protected]>.

We welcome three new additions to the Medieval, Renaissance and early modern faculty:

Manan Ahmed has joined Columbia’s History Department as Assistant Professor.  Professor Ahmed is interested in the relationship between text, space and narrative. His work on Islam´s arrival to Sindh in the 8th century traces the longue durée history of contestations among varied communities in South Asia. His areas of specialization include political and cultural history of Islam in South and Southeast Asia, frontier-spaces and the city in medieval South Asia, imperial and colonial historiography, and philology. He is currently working on a manuscript which takes a close look at the production and reception of Chachnama, a text written in Persian in 1226 C.E. in then capital city of Uch. He is the co-Director of Zukunftsphilogie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship – a multi-year research project based at Freie Universität Berlin. He plans to offer courses on memory and history, South Asia from medieval to the early modern period, the city and space in medieval India, and intellectual history of Muslims in early modern Asia.   In Fall 2012, he will be teaching a lecture course entitled “History of South Asia I: al-Hind to Hindustan” (History W3810, MW 10:10-11:25).

Rachel Eisendrath has just joined the Barnard English Department.  Professor Eisendrath specializes in sixteenth-century poetry. She comes to Barnard from the University of Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. in English literature in 2012. Her work on Renaissance poetry explores problems of aesthetics, the history of poetic forms, and the intersection of literary and visual arts. Her dissertation, “Renaissance Ekphrasis and the Objects of History,” is a study of elaborate literary descriptions, or ekphrases, against the background of the early modern rise of objectivity. The project explores the fraught relation between aesthetic form and an increasingly empiricist understanding of the historical world. She has an article on Spenser’s treatment of art and objectivity forthcoming in Spenser Studies. Professor Eisendrath received a B.A. from Harvard and M.A. degrees from St. John’s College and the University of Chicago; in addition, she studied painting and sculpture at the New York Studio School.

https://english.barnard.edu/profiles/rachel-eisendrath

Seth Kimmel has just joined Columbia’s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. Professor Kimmel studies the literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia. He earned his B.A. in Comparative Literature and Religion here at Columbia and his Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. Before joining Columbia´s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures in 2012, Professor Kimmel spent two years as a member of Stanford University´s Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities, where he taught classes on theories of secularism and religion, the history of reading, and cultural exchange and conflict among Iberian Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Professor Kimmel’s current book project is an intellectual history of New Christian assimilation. The book argues that canon law, Oriental Studies, and history writing were all transformed by hotly contested debates over eradicating Islam and Judaism from the Iberian Peninsula and converting non-Christians elsewhere in the Spanish empire. Other research and teaching interests include the history of cartography and Mediterranean and Transatlantic Studies. Professor Kimmel’s work has appeared in the Journal of Medieval and Early Studies and the Hispanic Issues book series, and he is currently completing two new essays, one on early modern secular discourse and inquisitorial discipline and the other on the relationship between local print economies and peninsular representations of Ottoman Turks.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/spanish/people/faculty/kimmel.html