Who We Are

Zachary Roberts received his BA in English from Bowdoin College and earned a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University with a dissertation on American literary realism and the visual arts. He has taught Literature Humanities in Columbia's Core Curriculum and courses in American literature, culture, and intellectual history in the English Department at Vassar College. He is the director of the Teagle Humanities Fellowship, a summer mentorship program for alumni of programs in the Knowledge for Freedom consortium, and serves on the KFF leadership council. He also works as an advisor in academic development for the Teagle Foundation's Cornerstone initiative which seeks to revitalize and re-imagine the role of the humanities in general education programs at a large variety of higher educational institutions. His teaching and research interests focus on American literature and history, but his intellectual home is in the classroom teaching courses like Freedom and Citizenship.

Roosevelt Montás is Director of the Freedom and Citizenship Program.  He was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to New York as a teenager.  He attended public schools in Queens and was admitted to Columbia College in 1991 through its Opportunity Programs. He graduated from Columbia in 1995 with a major in Comparative Literature. In 2003, he completed a Ph.D. in English, also at Columbia, where he began teaching in the faculty of the English Department in 2004. From 2008 to 2018, he served as Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Columbia College. Roosevelt specializes in Antebellum American literature and culture, with a particular interest in American national identity. His dissertation, Rethinking America, won Columbia University’s 2004 Bancroft Award.  In 2000, he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student and in 2008, he received the Dominican Republic’s National Youth Prize. He regularly teaches moral and political philosophy in the Columbia Core Curriculum as well seminars in American Studies. Roosevelt speaks widely on the history, place, and future of the humanities in the higher education and is the author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021). 

Jessica Lee is the Executive Director of Freedom and Citizenship. Jessica received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 2016 and her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 2008. Throughout college Jessica worked at a summer camp; developing summer programming for campers and supervising undergraduate cabin counselors. She enjoyed it so much that after graduating college she wasn't sure if she wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in history or become a director of a summer camp. In the end she decided to attend graduate school at Columbia University where she quickly found a way to combine both passions as the graduate coordinator of F&C. There, she could immerse herself in the history and philosophy of citizenship while also growing a tight knit community of motivated high school students each summer, developing meaningful summer and yearlong programming, and teaching and mentoring undergraduate college students. While working for Freedom and Citizenship and teaching in Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum, Jessica finished her dissertation on the formation of an American ethnic voting bloc during the Great Depression.

As Executive Director of Freedom and Citizenship, Jessica continues to think a lot about how new citizens can make an oversized impact on the country's political trajectory. Rather than writing about it, she now gets to act on it. 

Courses Taught:

• UN3030 Migration and Citizenship in American History
• GR6999 Migration and Citizenship in American History
• Immigrant New York

Select Publications:

• "The Italianization of the Italian–American and Fascism’s Entrance into American Ethnic Politics, 1930–1935" in Italianness and Migration from the Risorgimento to the 1960s (2022)
   
• Digital Media Review: Una Storia Segreta: When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens.' in Italian American Review 11 (2021), 2
   
• "What’s in a Race? The Changing Words and Ideas behind America’s Immigrant Classification Systems" in Journal of Urban History 46 (2020), 2
   
• Review: "Searching for Subversives: The Story of Italian Internment in Wartime America" by Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas in Journal of Social History 53, (2019), 1, pp. 322-324

Humberto Ballesteros is a fiction writer and Dante scholar. After obtaining a Ph.D. in Italian from Columbia in 2015 he remained at the University for an additional three years, teaching Literature Humanities as a Core Faculty Fellow. In 2018 he became an Assistant Professor at Hostos, one of the City University of New York’s community colleges, where he teaches Italian and Spanish and coordinates the Modern Languages Unit. The focus of his research is the philosophical underpinnings of Dante’s poetry. He is the commentator and main academic advisor for a new critical edition of the Commedia, translated by Professors Jerónimo Pizarro (Los Andes University) and Norman Valencia (Claremont McKenna College), the first volume of which won a grant for new independent editorial projects and was published in Bogotá in 2019. The second volume, “Purgatorio”, is currently in development, thanks to a grant from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress. Parallel to his scholarly efforts, Ballesteros is an award-winning author in his native Spanish. His fiction has been translated into English, Italian and Portuguese. In 2010 he received the "Ciudad de Bogotá" National Award for "Razones para destruir una ciudad", in 2018 "Juego de memoria" was shortlisted for the Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana prize, and more recently his short story “A tree” was included in the London Magazine’s Special Colombian Edition, curated by Ella Windsor.

Casey Nelson Blake is a historian of modern American thought and culture and founder of the Freedom and Citizenship program at Columbia. Professor Blake’s scholarly work has appeared in numerous books and journals.  He writes regularly for magazines and other publications for a general audience and has also helped design museum exhibitions on American history and art.  Among the courses he teaches at Columbia is a lecture course on U.S. intellectual history since 1865, which includes many of the same texts assigned in the Freedom and Citizenship summer seminar.  

Professor Blake’s work as a scholar and educator explores the ideas and artistic traditions available to Americans seeking to create a more vibrant and inclusive democratic society.   The Freedom and Citizenship program invites high school students the opportunity to join in that exploration.  Students study how major thinkers have struggled with the big questions of civic action:  “What are the responsibilities of citizenship?”  “How does individual freedom contribute to the common good?”  “Do civic equality depend on a particular economic system?”  “In what ways has the definition of American democracy changed since the Revolution?”  “Who has participated in making those changes, and how?” Students not only study a conversation that has gone on for centuries about the meaning of freedom and citizenship.  They join it themselves as informed citizens ready to participate in the decisions that will affect their futures, and the future of their country.