Lisa Clark (ljc2181@columbia.edu)
Graduate Student Mentor, Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program
Facilitator, CUSP Columbia Journey Seminar

Lisa Clark is a PhD candidate in Philosophy. Her work concerns the way extreme forms of doubt disrupt the ways we communicate and make decisions. She proposes that sometimes ordinary people reason like philosophical skeptics, but that this is hard to detect because skeptical doubts are difficult to express to other people. This project overlaps with topics in psychiatry and psychology, and Lisa engages with research in those fields in order to understand the cognitive processes by which people come to question the commonsense worldviews of their communities. A further aim of this work is to help explain how people can be aware of the apparently irrational nature of their doubts while continuing to entertain them. More recently, Lisa has been interested in scientific hypotheses that lead to extreme doubt, specifically in cases where theories seem to call into question the evidence on which they depend. 

Lisa received a BA in Philosophy and a BS in Cognitive Science from UC Santa Cruz. Before returning to academia to pursue her graduate studies, she spent time working in education and contributing to cognitive science and psychiatry labs. Her hobbies include exploring music, drinking tea, and assembling tessellations. 
 

Claire Dwyer (ccd2147@columbia.edu)
Graduate Student Mentor, Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program
Facilitator, CUSP Columbia Journey Seminar

Claire Dwyer is a seventh year PhD candidate in history at Columbia University. Prior to Columbia, she received her BA from Pomona College in Late-Antique Medieval Studies.
 
Her in-progress dissertation, on noblewomen’s networks in twelfth and thirteenth century Iberia, is about how queens, countesses, abbesses and untitled women worked together, often across regional and linguistic boundaries, in order to construct gender-specific economic and political connections between them. Unlike their peers in the male monarchical or monastic worlds, women leaders faced unique challenges on the basis of their gender that made economic and political connections directly with other women particularly advantageous. These connections created a kind of social security net which made moving property or completing political goals easier. Claire’s thesis demonstrates how the governance of abbesses and queens in Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and al Andalus consisted of the use of single gender land sales, diplomatic agreements, object sales and other forms of political communication to form these networks. Specifically, it focuses on how abbesses were able to use their complex persona as simultaneously economic, political, and religious leaders to form women’s property-based communities immediately adjacent to convents.
 
At Columbia, Claire has served as a TA in the history department for a wide range of courses, from ancient Greek history to Ottoman history. She also served as the lead teaching fellow in the history department with the CTL (Center for Teaching and Learning) in 2024-5..
 
In her free time, Claire likes reading horror novels and going for runs. A fun fact is that she almost went to conservatory to train as an opera singer before deciding to go to Pomona.

Joe Hamilton (jdh2209@columbia.edu)
Graduate Student Mentor, Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program
Facilitator, CUSP Columbia Journey Seminar

Joe is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy department. Before coming to Columbia he received a BA in Philosophy from Kings College London and an MPhil in Intellectual History from Cambridge University. For 2025-2026 academic year he was a DAAD research fellow at the University of Potsdam. 
 
Joe's research is at the intersection of history of philosophy and ethics. His dissertation reconstructs Kant's and Hegel's accounts of evil. The hope is to figure out what (if anything) is wrong with evil. Vices he is currently thinking about include hypocrisy, irony, conceitedness, and miserliness. 

Joe has taught classes on the limits and challenges of liberalism in political philosophy, as well as existentialist ethics. He has TAed for a wide range of courses in value theory and the history of philosophy. In 2023 he was a Lead Teaching Fellow and from 2022-2025 he ran Columbia's chapter of MAP (minorities and philosophy).

Outside of academic work, Joe enjoys running and fermentation. 
 

Connor Spencer (ces2272@columbia.edu)
Graduate Student Mentor, Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program
Facilitator, CUSP Columbia Journey Seminar

Connor Spencer is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature. Broadly, he researches gender, sexuality, and American literature and culture in the long twentieth century. He is interested in how stereotypes, clichés, and notions of “typicality” mediate identity production and aesthetic experience, particularly for minoritarian subjects. His dissertation theorizes the elaborate subcultural typologies that queer and trans people have fashioned to describe themselves and the social worlds they inhabit. This project traces the emergence and afterlives of vernacular “types” such as butches, clones, bears, and queens that have proliferated beneath categories such as “homosexual” or “transgender.” Along with analyzing novels, the dissertation examines a variety of eccentric print and visual objects––material that includes bar flyers, magazines, internet mailing lists, smut, shopping catalogues, newsletters, and photography.
 
At Columbia, Connor has previously taught University Writing, Literary Texts & Critical Methods, and most recently, “Queer Politics and Literature in the Time of AIDS,” a seminar he created through the Teaching Scholars Fellowship. He holds a Graduate Certificate from the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender and is a Graduate Affiliate at the Columbia Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities. His B.A. is from our downtown neighbor, New York University. Before graduate school, he taught middle and high school English at an independent school in Brooklyn.
 
Connor is an avid home chef, amateur camper, and occasional book collector. He is the first person in his family to attend graduate school.
 

Melody Wauke (maw2277@columbia.edu)
Graduate Student Mentor, Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program
Facilitator, CUSP Columbia Journey Seminar

Melody Wauke is a PhD candidate in the department of Classics. Before coming to Columbia, She received a B.A. in Classics from the College of the Holy Cross and an M.A. in Classics from the University of Notre Dame. In between her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, she served as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Psychiko, Greece.

Melody’s dissertation investigates “fictive kinships” in the Greco-Roman world, primarily focusing on the first two centuries CE. More specifically, she is examining relationships between children and adults who were not related by blood or law, but who interacted with one another in ways that resemble the relationship between parent and child. Such relationships include those between foster parents and foster children, teachers and students, and wet nurses and nurslings. Through an examination of both literary and documentary evidence, she explores how factors such as gender, status, and ethnicity impact how these various kinships are represented in ancient sources.

During her time at Columbia, Melody has been an instructor of record for courses in both Latin and Greek and a teaching assistant for ancient history and mythology courses. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, exploring the city by foot, watching baseball (no team allegiance, just rooting for a good game!), and playing tetris.