Libraries and Digital Resources Committee

Sen. Simon Ogundare is an MD-PhD student at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and a graduate of Columbia College (’24), where he studied neuroscience while participating in the John Jay and Laidlaw Scholars’ Programs. Born in New York and raised between Nigeria and the United Kingdom, he brings a transnational perspective to questions of health, identity, and structural inequality. 

Simon's research background explores the neuroscience of comorbidity, examining how chronic pain and depression co-occur, and how their neural representations become entangled in the brain. Elected to the University Senate in 2025, Simon is committed to transparency, structural accountability, and expanding student participation in university governance. His platform emphasizes cross-campus coalition-building and ensuring that the University Senate reflects the needs of students across CUIMC, especially during a time of active review of the University Senate’s structure and scope. 

Simon’s approach to advocacy is shaped by his international background, his work as a science communicator, and his commitment to building a community that welcomes and celebrates – rather than dilutes – diverse voices. He believes healing, education, and institutional change are fundamentally communal processes: each requiring trust, shared power, and sustained dialogue. On the University Senate, Simon aims to strengthen avenues of communication through existing and novel channels, strengthen the links between Morningside and CUIMC, and push Columbia toward a more inclusive, responsive, and transparent future. He sees the University Senate not just as a governance body, but as a platform for collective action: a space to organize across schools, challenge institutional inertia, and push for a Columbia that truly reflects the values, needs, and voices of its community.

Sara Coffield (GS’25) is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of General Studies, where she studied Art History and Sociology. Her senior thesis on the graphic works of the Bibiena family began with research in the Avery Classics Collection, where she later served on a Collections Acquisition Advisory Cohort. At Columbia, Sara also participated in the Justice-in-Education Initiative’s Rikers Education Program, facilitating a book club for incarcerated people.

Sara has experience in art book publishing, worked at the Metropolitan Museum’s Thomas J. Watson Library, and is a member of the Bibliographical Society of America. Most recently, Sara completed a curatorial internship at the Morgan Library & Museum in the Printed Books & Bindings department, where she was tasked with responsibilities relating to collection management, acquisitions, exhibitions, and teaching.

Prior to academia, Sara danced professionally for a decade, performing internationally with Ballet Dortmund, Hamburg Ballet John Neumeier, and the Royal Swedish Ballet.

Maria Luisa Gozzi is a senior lecturer and has taught at Columbia University since 1993. She has twice served in the University Senate and on the Lecturer Advisory Committee.

Dr. Gozzi has taught Italian language courses at all levels, and thematic courses on Italian cinema, opera, linguistic and cultural diversity, literature and war, Dante, stylistics, and the senses. She has published articles on Italian cinema, Italian literature and language pedagogy, and has created several websites for Italian language and culture acquisition. Dr. Gozzi came to the United States after graduating from the University of Florence, Italy. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian from Rutgers University and an M.A. in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution from Columbia University. 

Sen. Lori Qingyuan Yue is Charles E. Exley Professor of Management at Columbia Business School. Her research examines the interplay among business, society, and government, with a focus on how firms respond to contentious social environments, regulatory uncertainty, and international geopolitical dynamics. She has developed a theory of organizational nationalism and used AI and Large Language Models to construct computational measures of nationalism at the firm level. Before joining Columbia, Professor Yue was a tenured professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Sociology Department.

Sen. Katherine Brooks is a Collection Analysis Librarian in the Columbia University Libraries. In this position, she analyzes electronic resource usage data to support strategic collection development and management in the Libraries while also serving as a science librarian. On the University Senate, Katherine co-chairs the Campus Planning and Physical Development Committee and the Libraries and Digital Resources Committee. Before joining the Libraries, Katherine was a Frontiers of Science postdoctoral fellow in the Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Science Department and instructor in the College.

Sen. Jeffrey Wayno is a historian of the European Middle Ages who works as a subject librarian and rare book curator in the Columbia University Libraries. As the Collection Services Librarian at The Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, he is responsible for both Burke's general and rare collections, as well as the ancient, medieval, and religious studies collections at Butler Library. An alumnus of Columbia's doctoral program in medieval history, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the University Libraries before taking up his current position in 2018. He also regularly teaches Literature Humanities in Columbia College's Core Curriculum.
Jeffrey serves as co-chair of the University Senate's Libraries and Digital Resources Committee and as a member of the Education Committee.

Sen. David Lurie is Associate Professor of Japanese History and Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and also teaches in History and in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Sen. Lurie's first book, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing, won the Lionel Trilling Award in 2012, and he received the Marc Van Doren Teaching Award in 2022. He has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies, as director of the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture and of the University Committee on Asia and the Middle East, and has been on many departmental and Arts and Sciences committees, including ARC (Academic Review Committee) and PPC (Policy and Planning Committee). Sen. Lurie was the founding president of the Columbia chapter of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors—please join!!), serving until summer 2024.

Sen. Charly Coleman, professor of history, specializes in the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution, with an emphasis on the intersections of religion, philosophy, and political economy. His latest monograph, The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment, uncovers a distinctly Catholic ethic of commodity culture that in contrast to Weber’s famous “Protestant ethic” privileged the marvelous over the mundane, consumption over production, and the pleasures of enjoyment over the rigors of delayed gratification. He is also the author of The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment, which examines the relationship between personhood and property through the study of a culture of dispossession that drew together heretical mystics and radical materialists during the long eighteenth century. His research on selfhood, political economy, and economic theology has appeared in The Journal of Modern History, Modern Intellectual History, French Historical Studies, French History, Aeon, and various edited volumes. He is currently at work on The Enlightenment and the Politics of Resacralization, a volume in The Oxford History of Political Thought.

Sen. Ann Thornton is Vice Provost and University Librarian for Columbia University in the City of New York, where she is responsible for one of the top five academic research library systems in North America with world-class physical and digital collections and expert staff in support of research, teaching, and learning. On the University Senate, Vice Provost Thornton serves on the Libraries and Digital Resources Committee, and the Elections Commission.

She came to Columbia in June 2015 after serving for nearly two decades at the New York Public Library, where she was most recently the Andrew W. Mellon Director, a position she held since 2012, with responsibility for research and reference services, collection development, preservation, fellowships, and exhibitions. Vice Provost Thornton’s previous roles at the New York Public Library included Director of Reference and Research Services, Associate Director for the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, and Assistant Director of Electronic Resources for the Science, Industry and Business Library.

Early in her career, Vice Provost Thornton served as a systems librarian at the University of Houston Libraries. She was a Leadership Fellow in a program sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and subsequently served on the board of that organization. Additionally, Vice Provost Thornton has chaired the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation and has served on the New York State Education Department’s Board of Regents Advisory Council on Libraries and on the Council of Experts for the National Academic Library and Information Systems Foundation of Bulgaria. She currently serves as chair of the board of governors for the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium.

Alan Stewart works on early modern British literature, history, and culture. He joined Columbia in 2003, after teaching for ten years at Queen Mary, and Birkbeck, both University of London.

His book publications include Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (1997); Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon 1561-1626 (with Lisa Jardine, 1998); Philip Sidney: A Double Life (2000); The Cradle King: A Life of James VI and I (2003); Letterwriting in Renaissance England (with Heather Wolfe, 2004); Shakespeare's Letters (2008); and The Oxford History of Life-Writing, volume 2, Early Modern (2018). He has published over thirty articles in collections and journals including Representations, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare Studies, Spenser Studies, and Textual Practice. With Garrett Sullivan, he is co-general editor of the three-volume Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature (2012), and he recently edited the Broadview Anthology of Tudor Drama (2021). 

He is Director of the Oxford Francis Bacon, a new 20 volume edition of Bacon's writings for Oxford University Press. He edited volume I, Early Writings 1584-1596, with Harriet Knight (2012), and is now working on volume 2, Late Elizabethan Writings 1596-1602.

Alan Stewart has won awards from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, and in 2011-12 he was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Since 2002, he has been the International Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters in London. He is co-chair with Cynthia Pyle of Columbia's University Seminar in the Renaissance, and chair of the University Seminars Executive Committee. He has previously served as his Department's Director of Graduate Studies (2012-2015) and Chair (2018-2021), and is currently Associate Chair.   

Cambridge, B.A. (1988), M.A. (1992); London, Ph.D. (1993).