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Professor Mahmood Mamdani Recognized with Lenfest Award
SIPA Professor Mahmood Mamdani is one of eight Columbia faculty members to receive this year’s Distinguished Columbia Faculty Awards.
The awards, established by University Trustee Gerry Lenfest in 2005, are given annually to faculty of unusual merit, across a range of activities—including scholarship, University citizenship, and professional involvement—with a primary emphasis on the instruction and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students.
“I aim to introduce students to key debates that are driving the production of knowledge in any field,” said Professor Mamdani. “The goal is to get them to understand that knowledge is less a search for answers than a quest to formulate the most relevant questions in the circumstances in which we live.”
The winners of the Distinguished Columbia Faculty Awards teach across a range of disciplines at Columbia University. Each receives a stipend of $25,000 per year for three consecutive years.
Currently, Professor Mamdani’s research focuses on understanding violence in public life—as criminal or political.
“The Nuremberg paradigm, which is the inspiration behind the formation of the International Criminal Court, is based on the assumption that we must see all public violence as criminal, driven by individual perpetrators,” he said. “I seek to explore more political ways of framing mass violence; ways which foregrounds the issues rather than perpetrators as drivers of the violence.”