columbia-university-faculty

"For him delicious flavors dwell In books as in old Muscatel."

"And in the evening, everywhere Along the roadside, up and down, I see the golden torches flare Like lighted street-lamps in the town."

"Song like a rose should be; Each rhyme a petal sweet; For fragrance, melody, That when her lips repeat The words, her heart may know What secret makes them so:— Love, only Love!"

"The Corn Belt is a gift of the gods—the rain god, the sun god, the ice god and the gods of geology. In the middle of the North American continent the gods of geology made a wide expanse of land where the rock layers are nearly horizontal. The ice gods leveled the surface with their glaciers, making it ready for the plow, and also making it rich. The rain god gives summer showers. The sun god gives summer heat. All this is nature's conspiracy to make man grow corn. Having corn, man feeds it to cattle and hogs, and thereby becomes a producer of meat."

"...To bring us back to Small Axe, one of the things that we have had to worry about over the course of our existence is the extent to which or the senses in which we are a Caribbean journal with a sense of concern for the regional Caribbean, and not a diaspora journal, as we might have imagined ourselves to be."

"I do think of my work, certainly in Refashioning Futures and Conscripts of Modernity, as work that has grown out of the larger conceptual vision that for me inspired the initiation of the Small Axe project — that is, a sense that the dream of anti-colonialism through which my generation came of age in the Caribbean, and through which the Caribbean was imagined as a space of social transformation and revolutionary change, has now been exhausted. And the end of that dream (and the practices of criticism that accompanied it) has created a demand for us to rethink the project of criticism and social change. This sense of the present infuses both my stewardship of Small Axe and the directions of my own research and writing."

"One of the things that Small Axe has been trying to do over the years is to be self-conscious about criticism as a question."

"I think that by constantly questioning what goes on around them, writers end up with the gift of foresight."

"Creative writing programs are an invention of American universities. In the Francophone world we believe that the power to write is a gift which cannot be taught. My fondness for writing comes from my knowledge of literature from different parts of the world. It is by reading certain authors that I learned how to write and influence my readers. I have never studied otherwise. Reading for me is my master. (2017)"

"This obsessive desire to disassociate the past of the region from its present and to present it instead as a primitive stage in the evolution of mankind facilitated the concept of ‘Mesopotamia’ as the rightful domain of the West […] (Bahrani 1999: 166)"

"Within this disciplinary organisation the term that came to be the acceptable name for Iraq in the Pre-Islamic period was ‘Mesopotamia.’ This revival of a name applied to the region in the European Classical tradition came to underscore the Babylonian/Assyrian position within the Western historical narrative of civilisation as the remoter, malformed, or partially formed, roots of European culture which has its telos in the flowering of Western culture and, ultimately, the autonomous modern Western man. Thus the term Mesopotamia refers to an atemporal rather than a geographical entity, which is, in the words of the renowned Mesopotamian scholar, A. Leo Oppenheim (1964), a ‘Dead Civilisation.’ This civilisation had to be entirely dissociated, by name, from the local inhabitants and contemporary culture in order to facilitate the portrayal of the history of human civilisation as a single evolutionary process with its natural and ideal outcome in the modern West. (Bahrani 1999: 165)"

"The creation of a historical narrative in which space and time became transcendental horizons for the Being—Mesopotamia, was part of the larger discursive project through which Europe attempted its mastery of the colonised. The narrative of the progress of civilisation was an invention of European imperialism, a way of constructing history in its own image and claiming precedence for Western culture. (Bahrani 1999: 171)"

"Since human civilisation was thought to originate in Mesopotamia, and this civilisation was transferred from the East to the West, the two justifications for the archaeological expeditions were repeatedly stated as being the search for the ‘roots’ of Western culture and to locate the places referred to in the Old Testament. (Bahrani 1999: 166)"

"Archaeology, like other human sciences such as anthropology and history, allowed a European mapping of the subjugated terrain of the Other. While ethnography portrayed the colonised native as a savage requiring Western education and whose culture needed modernisation, archaeology and its practices provided a way of charting the past of colonised lands. (Bahrani 1999: 160)"

"The acquisition of monuments and works of art that were shipped to London, Paris and Berlin in the mid-nineteenth century was thus not seen solely, or even primarily, as the appropriation of historical artifacts of Iraq but as the remains of a mythical pre-European past. Mesopotamian cultural remains unearthed in the first days of archaeological exploration then served to illustrate how the modern West had evolved from this stage of the evolution, and that Biblical accounts were true, thus that the Judeo-Christian God was the true God. (Bahrani 1999: 166)"

"The image of Mesopotamia, upon which we still depend, was necessary for a march of progress from East to West, a concept of world cultural development that is explicitly Eurocentric and imperialist. (Bahrani 1999: 172)"

"I was really interested in the basic workings of nature: Why ? What is the unified theory of everything? But I realized how many easier questions we have in astrophysics: that you could actually take a lifetime and go answer them. Graduate school at MIT showed me the way to astrophysics — how it can be an amazing route to many questions, including how the universe looks, how it functions, and even particle physics questions. I didn’t plan to study s; but every step it was, “OK, it looks promising.”"

"Scientists are very curious ... We might be curious about something that looks completely irrelevant, and it turns out to be a really amazing thing. Or it could be irrelevant. We don't know. If we knew, we wouldn't be looking at it."

"The Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (POEMMA) was designed as a Astrophysics probe-class mission to identify the sources of ) and observe s from extremely energetic transient sources. POEMMA consists of two identical spacecraft flying in a loose formation at 525 km altitude oriented to view a common atmospheric volume and to provide full-sky coverage for both types of messengers. Each spacecraft hosts a wide with a hybrid focal plane optimized to observe both the UV fluorescence signal from extensive air showers (EASs) and the optical signals from EASs."

"Being a woman is hard ... The expectations are that we’ll be gorgeous, completely organized, great mothers, great wives, and great professionals ... The pressures are huge. I was always expected to bring the cookies to meetings because I’m a woman. Like, men can’t find cookies? That’s why I say: Let’s be nicer to ourselves. Diversity is very important ... When you bring in new folks who ask new questions, you change the field and the basic sciences. Women want to do great research. But we’re asking, ‘Why do we have this rule? That artificial hierarchy?’ We can be more collaborative. And I’ll tell you this ... When men suggest we speak with deeper voices if we want to get our message across, here is what I say: Gravity does not care how deep your voice is."

"is that is assumed to be absolutely stable. A seed of strange matter in a will convert the star into a . The speed at which this conversion occurs is calculated. The calculation takes into account the rate at which the and s equilibrate via s and the diffusion of strange quarks towards the conversion front. The speed is found as a function of the temperature of the star and the minimum strangeness necessary for strange matter stability. The conversion can be detected as an energy release of ∼58 MeV with different luminosities for different stages of a neutron star's evolution and as a “super-glitch” on s' frequencies."

"I am dead, my king," I wrote to you, meaning that defeat had overtaken me, even before the battle at Actium. "I am dead, my king. The word will not scorch your mouth because I have been dead to you for some time now. Follow the steps of Dionysus. Your god has abandoned Alexandria. Attended by an ostentatious procession, he left by the eastern gate late at night, awash with music, bearing our laughter with him."

"Women are not entirely excluded from public life and positions of power, but there is still a lot of work to be done to achieve equality between the two genders, in the literary world and elsewhere."

"I read the poems quickly, drinking them up, gulping them down, as if to get drunk. Poetry recharges my batteries. When I am rushing to finish a novel, I read poets like Lope de Vega, Jorge Guillén, Quevedo, Sor Juana, almost without reading them. They nourish my ear."

"If we don’t fight for spaces of tolerance and civility, Mexico could become a doomed country, marked by intolerance and fanaticism."

"if the novel has a power, it’s to touch that consciousness behind words, or before words. There is a kind of poet that always lives there, that lives in a preverbal world, and they work with their words to touch where the words cannot touch. They are always struggling…these two novels, they are nonverbal. They want to touch where words can’t touch. There are many things that cannot be touched by words. In this case, it was the world of the child. (2016)"

"They [novels] are a vice. It’s a vice so big that I cannot keep it hidden. I love to tell stories. I love to tell stories the way I tell them, not the way anybody else tells them. I am all the time writing a novel. I think it has to do with joy: there’s an immense pleasure in threading or organizing in a personal way those novels, and I also think it has to do with my Catholic training. Because in Catholicism, you learn to worship a superior god that creates, who organizes and creates. And when you do novels, you have this illusion that you are following the model of the creator, that you are playing the creator who has to organize that. It is a vice and a sin, and I like to sin. (2016)"

"Everything was bound to change, I realized, when I started to imagine and couldn't stop imagining that the virulent outbreak of flu was spreading far and wide."

"The experience of love led me to poetry—I fell in love and I discovered what had been missing from my poems—; friendship and collaboration led me to theater; and motherhood led me to the novel."

"Carmen Boullosa is, in my opinion, a true master."

"After reading documents and historical treatises, I began to write the novel, and this, for me, is a craft not unlike bricklaying. I’m not thinking of American construction workers, who arrive with ready-made walls and simply put them in place, but about Mexican bricklayers who painstakingly erect a building stone by stone, brick by brick. If you place a rock in the wrong place, it all comes tumbling down. And in a novel, if you put a sentence in the wrong place, the fictional building comes tumbling down."

"I never feel that I have to be true to history: I have to be true to my story, so that it holds up. My novels use historical scenarios, but they are not at the service of history: they are neither memoirs nor testimonies. Like all novelists, I like reality, and I also like to betray reality by correcting its flaws and ultimately reinventing it."

"A visit to the Mexican literary world recalls Dante’s procession through the inferno. I don’t want to point the finger at anyone in particular; it’s a collective evil. Octavio Paz was lucky to have lived in happier times. Though writers were already “yoked to the chariot of power”—the phrase was coined by Margo Glantz—as they have been since independence, their conscience and good names were still intact. I am especially disturbed by the corruption of the craft of the writer—contractors pass themselves off as intellectuals, thugs pretend to be poets—which has been so damaging to our critical conscience. This corruption reached grotesque levels during the term of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. We suffer at the hands of pseudohistorians and corrupt political analysts whose work legitimizes truly sinister public officials."

"Carmen Boullosa is as playful as a mischievous Puck, making a mockery of every stuffy convention with a powerful imagination that romps through page after page with felicity, fun, and creativity."

"I am quite proud to have started a line of work now pursued by many – including investors: machine learning applied to security problems."

"There is no beating around the bush in this Brooklyn-kid-gone-Ivy."

"Fraud detection research with Citibank led to my interest in developing automated machine learning infrastructures and applying this infrastructure to security problems. The JAM project (Java Agents for Meta-learning) was way ahead of its time."

"I hope to empower my students to make progress in science and in their own lives. To date, the 34 or so PhD students who I have worked with are as important in my professional life as are my four real children in my life."

"After working with large datasets of credit card transactions, I learned that humans are remarkably predictable - at least where money is concerned."

"believe my duty as a professor is to mentor students and other young scientists to get excited to learn and to contribute to the very long conversation exploring hard questions in computer science."

"In those days, it was common for a woman to be addressed as ‘Miss’ even though she had earned a Ph.D. degree."

"Courage is like — it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging."

"Rockefeller, where she worked for seven years, was an “awesome and inspiring” place to be."

"Migrancy, a central theme for many of us in this shifting world, forces a recasting of how the body is grasped, how language works. Then, too, at the heart of what happens in these sometimes jagged reflections of mine, is the question of postcolonial memory. ("Overture: Another Voice")"

"At once violent, erotic, and somber, Manhattan Music is infused with the power of myth and poetry and the inner life, the electric intersection of characters who illuminate for the reader both the Old World and the New."

"How can I make a durable past in art, a past that is not merely nostalgic, but stands in vibrant relation to the present? This is the question that haunts me. (beginning of "A Durable Past")"

"Meena Alexander sings of countries, foreign and familiar places where the heart and spirit live, and places for which one needs a passport and visas. Her voice guides us far away and back home. The reader sees her visions and remembers and is uplifted."

"Meena Alexander has written a fierce new complexity into questions of identity, diaspora, tradition, language, and community. This is a powerful fusion of poetic vision and critical thinking."

"When I was a child I saw the sea burn. How often I have thought that sentence but with no page to set it on, no place to make it mine. As I sit and write, my words fly off the page. I think of geese lumbering into the wind. Or paper kites men have held in their hands, stretched taut over wind, over water, lit by the half darkness. But the darkness turns into barbed wire. In reaching for the past I am forced to crawl through it."

"It seems to me that in its rhythms the poem, the artwork, can incorporate scansion of the actual, the broken steps, the pauses, the blunt silences, the brutal explosions. So that what is pieced together is a work that exists as an object in the world but also, in its fearful consonance, its shimmering stretch, allows the world entry. I think of it as a recasting that permits our lives to be given back to us, fragile, precarious."