Religion Professor Xiaofei Kang shows how the Communist Party used religion as a model for its own aims and explores propaganda's influence in global politics.
Faculty Books
From the history of race and caste in Latin America to the role of music in religion around the world, Columbian College faculty publish numerous thought-provoking and timely titles every year. Their work has topped bestseller lists, inspired debate and dialogue and received positive reviews from high-profile outlets like the Los Angeles Review of Books and The New York Times.
Jews, Judaism, and Success: How Religion Paved the Way to Modern Jewish Achievement
Religion Professor Robert Eisen attempts to solve a long-standing mystery: How did Jews become such a remarkably successful minority in the modern Western world?
Professorial Lecturer Sayed Hassan Akhlaq from the Religion Department offers both insider and outsider views of how a scholar becomes an Ayatollah in Shia Islam.
English's Thea Brown draws on parallel universes, video games and ghost towns to immerse the reader in grief, utopia, disaster—and, ultimately, love.
Gendering the Renaissance: Text and Context in Early Modern Italy
Italian's Lynn Westwater revisits the Italian Renaissance to rethink established spaces like convents, and literary genres like religious plays and epic poetry.
Sustainability and Sustainable Development
Geography's Lisa Benton-Short introduces students to sustainability structured around the 17 UN SDGs.
The Multiracial Promise: Harold Washington's Chicago and the Democratic Struggle in Reagan's America
Drawing on a rich array of archives and oral history interviews, Gordon K. Mantler offers a bold reexamination of the Harold Washington movement and moment.
History's Joel Blecher co-edited the first English translation of the preeminent meditation on plagues and pandemics from the Islamic medieval world.
(Un)Settled Sojourners in Cities
Geography's Elizabeth Chacko and Marie Price provide an important contribution to the literature on the rights, experiences and trajectories of temporary migrants.
Globalism, Tribalism, and the Quest for Pluralism: Media's Changing Impact
SMPA's Lee W. Huebner explores and explains the inherent tension throughout history between humankind’s global and tribal impulses.