Graduate Program Director

Sarah Miller-Davenport is the Graduate Program Director for the Committee on Global Thought. She advises students in their course work and research, co-instructs the Core M.A. Seminar, and teaches electives on the history of the United States in the world.

Miller-Davenport is a historian whose research and teaching focus on how the global circulation of ideas, people, and capital shaped American society in the decades after World War II, with a particular emphasis on how the local intersects with national and global scales of historical change. She is the author of Gateway State: Hawai‘i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire (Princeton 2019), which shows how Hawai‘i statehood was made necessary by global decolonization and, in turn, reconfigured racial and ethnic differences in postwar US politics and culture. She has also researched and published on the reinvention of New York as a global city after its 1975 fiscal crisis. Prior to joining Columbia, Miller-Davenport was a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Sheffield, and she has held fellowships at the New York Historical Society and NYU’s Urban Democracy Lab.

A native New Yorker, she received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago and her B.A. from Oberlin College.

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