Oral history interview with Alondra Nelson, 2015

Biographical Note

Alondra Nelson was a professor of sociology and gender studies at and dean at Columbia University. She was Director of Institute for Research on Women and Gender from 2013-2014, after which she became Dean of Social Science at Columbia University. Nelson is an interdisciplinary social scientist, whose research explores the production of knowledge about human difference in biomedicine and technoscience and the circulation of these ideas in the public sphere. Her research focuses on how science and its applications may shape the social world, including aspects of personal identification, racial formation, and collective action. In turn, she also explores the ways in which social groups reject, challenge, engage and, in some instances, adopt and mobilize conceptualizations of race, ethnicity, and gender derived from scientific and technical domains

Scope and Contents

Alondra Nelson begins this three-session interview with a description of her arrival at Columbia University from Yale University. She offers a comparison of the academic and administrative environments at the two institutions. Throughout the interview, she returns to the subject of teaching, especially for undergrads. Some specific topics include teaching about gender, genealogy, and the family; science themes for social science and humanities students; and general strategies for keeping students engaged. She speaks at length about her activities at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWGS). Specific topics addressed include her goals as Director of IRWGS, curriculum reforms, administration of IRWGS, considerations around graduate-level major and certificate, event programming, and IRWGS director succession. She describes the 2015 Title IX complaint against Columbia, student activism, faculty activism, and student perceptions of faculty. She compares IRWGS with similar departments at other universities, including Barnard College. She also discusses philosophical questions of disciplines, such as the implication of combining women, gender, and sexuality studies; interdisciplinary approaches; the roles of history and sociology; feminist approaches; and disciplines as "political" projects. She describes her own research approaches and her work on subjects such as genetic testing and the Black Panthers. She also speaks about her role as Dean and her experiences as an administrator

Subjects

• College teachers--Interviews.
• College teaching.
• Columbia University. Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
• Dziedzic, Sarah, interviewer.
• Feminist theory.
• Interdisciplinary approach in education.
• Interviews.
• Nelson, Alondra--Interviews.
• Oral histories (literary works)
• Rape in universities and colleges.
• Universities and colleges--United States--Administration.
• Yale University.

Access Conditions

Copyright by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, 2015