GTL Sessions are led by Columbia University faculty and guest discussants that introduce diverse and globally inflected local perspectives for topics relevant to students’ wide array of interests.

Course Instructor 

Dr. Kevin Funk 

Kevin Funk is a political economist and Latin Americanist who specializes in globalization, the politics of Brazil and Chile, and urban studies. He is a Fellow in Global Thought with the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, where he is also a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and an affiliated faculty member of the Institute of Latin American Studies. He is the author of Rooted Globalism: Arab-Latin American Business Elites and the Politics of Global Imaginaries (2022, Indiana University Press). 

Global Thought in a Warming World 

Dr. Tom Moerenhout 

Tom Moerenhout is a research scholar at SIPA’s Center on Global Energy Policy and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He is also a Senior Advisor at the World Bank, and a Senior Associate at the International Institute for Sustainable Development. He also teaches at NYU Stern School of Business and is a Scholar in Practice at Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought. Tom’s research expertise and practical engagements focus on geopolitics, political economy, and international economic law. Tom’s main expertise lies in the role of trade, investment, and industrial policies of relevance to the energy transition, the sustainability dimension of economic globalization, and the economic development of resource rich countries. He has published extensively on sustainable development and energy policy reforms in developing and emerging economies, specifically on energy subsidies, critical minerals, and electric mobility. He holds two master’s degrees and a PhD at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Prior to joining Columbia University, he was a visiting fellow at the LSE Department of Government and an Aramco-OIES fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. In 2015-2016 he was a Fulbright fellow at Columbia University. 

Luciane Pereira-Coutinho 

Luciane Coutinho is a visionary entrepreneur and Founder of LivMundi, a network-based NGO that champions sustainability and regeneration through non-formal education programs. With over two decades of experience in leadership roles at prominent companies like Claro and IBM, she is also a former professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. Luciane holds an Executive Master’s in Business from the Berlin School of Creative Leadership with the thesis “Brazilian Socio-Environmental Movements, Youths and their perspective”. She is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Education & Communication at Columbia University’s Teachers’ College. Nominated for the Gender Just Climate Solution Award from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Speaker at TEDx Countdown.

Changing World Order 

Dr. Monique Goldfeld 

Monique Sochaczewski Goldfeld holds a Ph.D. in History, Politics, and Cultural Assets from Getulio Vargas Foundation (Rio de Janeiro) with a research period spent at Bilkent University (Ankara). She is a Permanent Professor at the IDP (Brazilian Institute for Development, Education and Research) Master´s Program in Law, Justice, and Development. She is a co-founder and Senior Researcher at GEPOM (Middle East Research and Study Group). Her interests are mainly connected to Brazil and the Middle East relations in historical and contemporary contexts, as in Gender issues from a global perspective. 

Technology and Communication 

Dr. David Nemer 

David Nemer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies, and an Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Anthropology and in the Latin American Studies program at the University of Virginia. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society (BKC) and a Visiting Scholar at The Institute for Rebooting Social Media (RSM)- both at Harvard University. Nemer is an ethnographer whose fieldworks include the Slums of Vitória, Brazil; Havana, Cuba; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia. Nemer is the author of Technology of the Oppressed (MIT Press, 2022), winner of the Marcel Roche Award, and Favela Digital: The other side of technology (Editora GSA, 2013). 

Kristen Davis 

Former IT & Innovation Director at the New York Times International, Kristen Davis has more than 25-years international business expertise in media and technology and created CinqC to provide the insights, resilience, agility and leadership skills she gained through the deep disruption experienced in the news media industry. Adept at business modeling and growth strategy, she now works with multinationals, startup incubators and accelerators across all sectors, as well as with VCs and open innovation teams. Davis has led teams and organizations across Europe, the US, Asia and the Middle East and now regularly works with companies, accelerators and the government in Estonia – the most digitally advanced society on the planet. She is also an expert external assessor for Google’s News & EU Innovation Fund, is active on multiple boards, and is Chair of the US board of APOPO HeroRATs (we train rats to save lives!) 

Global Cultures and Identities 

Dr. Thiago Amparo 

Thiago Amparo is a professor of human rights and discrimination at FGV Direito São Paulo. He holds a master’s degree (LLM) in human rights and international justice, and a doctorate (SJD) in comparative constitutional law from the Central European University (Budapest). He was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York. He studies diversity policy, discrimination, international human rights law, and comparative constitutional law. He coordinates the diversity area at FGV Direito SP and teaches international law at FGV RI SP. He is the coordinator of the Racial Justice and Law Center (FGV Direito SP), where he develops and coordinates research on democracy and race, public safety and racial violence and police violence. He integrates the Center for Global Law and Development (FGV Direito SP) and the Center for Law and Democracy at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap). He writes weekly for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, current issues such as Brazilian and international politics, human rights, among others. He did a postdoctoral internship at New York University (NYU). He is currently Lemann Public Fellow in Columbia at ILAS – Institute Latin American Studies (Sept 22 – March 23), and is Adjunct Professor at SIPA/Columbia (School of Int Public Affairs), teaching a class about Race In Brazil: Theory, Movements and Policies. He is currently writing a book about the Black Movement in Brazil and perspective of democracy. 

Dr. Yasmine Ergas 

Yasmine Ergas is the Director of the Specialization on Gender and Public Policy and Senior Lecturer in Discipline in International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She also directs the program in Gender and Human Rights of Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, is a member of the Executive Committee of the University’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and is the co-convener of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Council at Columbia University. A lawyer and sociologist, she has worked on issues regarding gender and women’s rights as a policy analyst and advisor, scholar and advocate. She has served as a consultant to international and domestic policy organizations, including the OECD, UNESCO, the Millennium Villages Project, the New York City Commission on Human Rights, and CENSIS, a major applied social research institute in Italy, and been on the staff of the Social Science Research Council. Her recent work has focused on the emergence of an international market in reproductive services, the transformations of ‘motherhood’ and the impacts of human rights programs and policies. Previous relevant work centered on feminist movements and their interactions with public policies; the implications of the concept of ‘gender’ for feminist politics; child care policies in international and comparative perspective; educational policies and the social implications of HIV/AIDS.