The Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University in New York City has 26 new faculty members for the 2026-27 academic year. Ten of these scholars have been hired to tenured or tenure-track positions. Six are women.
Radhika Govindrajan is an associate professor of anthropology. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who works across the fields of environmental and agrarian studies, political and legal anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, the anthropology of religion, and South Asian studies. Dr. Govondrajan holds a master’s degree in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University in India and a Ph.D. from Yale University. She is the author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Christina Yi is an associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures. She is a scholar of modern and contemporary Japanese literature and culture, with a research focus on issues of postcoloniality, genre and narrative theory, language politics, and cultural studies. Dr. Yi is a graduate of the University of Virginia. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She is the author of Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (Columbia University Press, 2018).
Simone Pinet is a professor of Latin American and Iberian cultures. She studies medieval and early modern Spanish literatures and cultures, from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, especially in relation to spatiality, economics, poetics, translation, and most recently, sound. Dr. Pinet previously taught at Cornell University. She is the author of Archipelagoes: Insularity and Fiction From Romance to the Novel (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and The Task of the Cleric: Cartography, Translation, and Economics in Thirteenth-Century Iberia (University of Toronto Press, 2016). Dr. Pinet is a graduate of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Amaryah Shaye Armstrong is an assistant professor of religion. She is a scholar of race, religion, and sexuality whose work explores the intersections of Black thought, political theology, and continental philosophy of religion. She is completing work on her first book, Sentimental Theologies: Sense, Sex, and the Reproduction of Black Significance. She previously taught at Virginia Tech. Dr. Armstrong is a graduate of Belmont University in Nashville, where she majored in English literature. She holds a master of theological studies degree from Emory University in Atlanta and a Ph.D. in religion from Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Erin Doherty is an assistant professor of biological sciences, who uses biochemistry and structural biology to understand how viruses manipulate host immunity. She has been conducting postdoctoral research in the mechanism and structure of nucleic acid targeting enzymes at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Doherty is a graduate of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where she majored in biochemistry. She earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Davis.
Aya Goldshtein is an assistant professor of ecology, evolution, and environmental biology. Her research sits at the interface of behavioral and neuro-ecology, how animals perceive their environment, make decisions, and adjust their activities under ecological pressure, and how these adjustments shape cognition, behavior, and fitness. Over the past decade, she has revealed key aspects of bat cognition in the wild, providing the first evidence in the animal kingdom that a species can use a cognitive map for navigation. Dr. Goldshtein is a graduate of the Open University of Israel and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University.