Professors

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). 

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.