Luca Arens (laa2185@columbia.edu)
Graduate Student Mentor, Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program
Facilitator, CUSP Columbia Journey Seminar

​​Luca Arens is a PhD candidate in Germanic Languages and Comparative Media. Before Columbia, he studied media and art history in Amsterdam and at NYU and worked for the German Center for Art History in Paris. He is writing a dissertation on the poetics of unethical life from Enlightenment melodrama to the modernist novel of (bad) manners.

Beyond the dissertation, Luca’s published and forthcoming work ranges from the misogynist reinvention of medieval chivalry on the 18th-century stage to the film theory of Alexander Kluge, the chief thinker of New German Cinema. Current projects focus on the African novel of manners (Camara Laye, Ama Ata Aidoo), the Austrian portraiture tradition, so-called German media theory, and Enlightenment time anxiety (Goethe, Kant). 

2025-2026 will be Luca’s second year as a GSM. Before joining CUSP, he taught a self-designed course on bad habits, several German language courses, and TA’d for “Marx, Nietzsche, Freud.” Since 2021, he has been a research assistant for Columbia Professor Gayatri Spivak.

 In his free time, Luca likes to read fiction and criticism unrelated to his research (lately: Meiji novels; social art history), go to museums, and agonize over a provincial German football club.

Margaret Banks (mkb2177@columbia.edu)
Graduate Student Mentor, Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program
Facilitator, CUSP Columbia Journey Seminar

Margaret Banks is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  Her dissertation explores black girlhood’s burdened relationship to the future, posing that black women authors in the late 20th century trouble developmental discourses that mobilize black girlhood to represent future freedom. The authors she engages, such as Jamaica Kincaid and Ntozake Shange, restage traditional processes of becoming through their work, gesturing towards models of development that extend beyond capitalist and antiblack logics. These literary restagings reflect Margaret’s broader interest in education and commitment to facilitating spaces that aid students in thinking critically about their development and worlds.  Prior to doctoral study she taught middle school humanities. She seeks to carry the flexibility, curiosity, and humor she learned from her middle school classroom to her college one. 

While at Columbia, Margaret has taught University Writing: Data and Society, co-faciliated the Black Studies Colloquium and Pedagogies of Race and Oppression Learning Community, and served as a Lead Teaching Fellow and Writing Studio Consultant. She holds a B.A. in English from Amherst College and a M.A. in Education from Stanford University.

In her free time, Margaret enjoys trying bakeries throughout the city, attending concerts, and spending time with friends. 

Ruilin Fan (rf2720@columbia.edu)
Graduate Student Mentor, Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program
Facilitator, CUSP Columbia Journey Seminar

Ruilin is a PhD candidate in the department of English and comparative literature. Prior to Columbia, she received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and MPhil from Cambridge University, where she was supported by a Cambridge Trust scholarship. 

Ruilin’s research focuses on early modern English literature, particularly that of the 1600s. The seventeenth century saw an increase in the scale of production in industries such as sugar-making, mining, and the military. Her dissertation examines how literary works of the period made sense of this shift, arguing that that literature helped readers to imagine the unprecedented scale of England’s global production and trade network. Her work is informed by the field of early modern race, environmental humanities, and her commitment to the rights and dignity of workers. 

At Columbia, Ruilin has taught multiple semesters of the “Data and Society” and “Climate Humanities” themes of University Writing. She was also a seminar leader of the introductory course to the English major, “Literary Texts, Critical Methods.” She believes that meaningful learning is relevant to students’ daily lives, and can empower them to make changes in their communities. For this reason, she encourages her students to not only look for academic sources for their research papers, but also to seek out alternative sources of knowledge, such as interviews with community members, zines, the work of local activists, and the like. 

In her free time, Ruilin likes to read and go for walks. She loves working with her hands: she sews, binds books, and her next goal is to learn basic woodworking. She can often be found nagging her friends about composting. 

Constantine Lignos (cjl2212@columbia.edu)
Graduate Student Mentor, Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program
Facilitator, CUSP Columbia Journey Seminar

Constantine is a PhD candidate on the East Asian Religions track in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.  His dissertation focuses on the centrality of transformation in Tibetan Buddhist awakening and the role of performance as a primary means of effectuating that transformation in tantric ritual.  In particular, he is interested in tantric ritual dances and the bodies that perform them as vehicles for doctrinal transmission and experiential realization.  By learning these dances from ritual masters and translating their accompanying manuals from Tibetan, he explores the performative ontologies they create, spaces where Buddhist cosmology, ethics, and epistemology are enacted rather than merely represented.  Drawing on his transdisciplinary background in religious studies, performance studies, and history, he considers how dances function as living texts, archives of flesh and movement that resist reduction to written form.  Constantine has trained in monastic tantric dance at Pema Ösel Ling Retreat Center in Watsonville, CA, and was the first layperson granted permission to learn the ritual dances of Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in Bylakuppe, India. 

Constantine’s teaching emphasizes experiential learning as a vital complement to intellectual engagement.  In the spring of 2025, through the Teaching Scholars Fellowship at Columbia, Constantine taught an undergraduate course called “The Body and/in Performance: Dance & Drama in Tibet & China.” Combining seminar-style classes with workshops led by guest artists, the course gave students opportunities to gain embodied experiences of various Tibetan and Chinese performance traditions.

Beyond research and teaching, Constantine enjoys practicing meditation, honing his cooking and baking skills, and seeing as much of the world as possible.  Most often, though, you can probably find him walking his dog, Garbo, in Riverside Park.