Jonathon S. Kahn GSAS'03, senior associate dean of community and culture for Columbia College.
Karl Rabe/Vassar College
Earlier this summer, Columbia College welcomed Jonathon S. Kahn GSAS’03 back to the Columbia community as senior associate dean of community and culture.
“I am thrilled that Jonathon is returning to Columbia in this new capacity, fostering reflection, connection and purpose across our community,” said Josef Sorett, dean of Columbia College and vice president for undergraduate education. “In this role, he will build and lead initiatives that cultivate curiosity, civic purpose and meaningful dialogue — facilitating student engagement with faculty outside the classroom, and helping reimagine what a liberal arts and sciences education can be in the next century.”
Kahn’s relationship with Columbia began in 1989 as a residential teaching assistant for the Double Discovery Center’s Summer Academy. It continued while completing his Ph.D. in the philosophy of religion at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and during a postdoctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, when Kahn taught Contemporary Civilization for several years.
Prior to his return, Kahn served as Professor of Religion, Africana, and American Studies at Vassar College for 20 years, where he also held leadership roles as director of engaged pluralism and special adviser on inclusion and engaged pluralism. In these positions, he developed campus-wide initiatives to build practices and projects of belonging throughout the Vassar community.
In the 2024–25 academic year, Kahn co-led the Practices in Community Building Fellowship with Larry Jackson, associate dean of academic affairs and director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. Offered through the Undergraduate Community Initiative Deans’ Fellowship, the course brought together a diverse cohort of students across Columbia College, Columbia Engineering and Columbia General Studies to build community through collaborative projects, reflective dialogue and public humanities practices.
“Teaching Contemporary Civilization was a formative experience that continues to influence how I think about undergraduate education,” Kahn said, “and working with the students in Practices in Community Building shaped how I think about community — not as something inherited, but as something built through care, disagreement and persistence. I carry these experiences with me into this new role, committed to creating spaces where dialogue can take root and trust can grow — even when agreement feels out of reach.”
Kahn plans to teach Contemporary Civilization in the Spring 2026 term and will continue to play an active role in leading the Undergraduate Community Initiative. A scholar of religion, secularism and political theology, his work examines the intersections of race, religious ethics and politics. His essays on secularity, democracy and education have appeared in Inside Higher Education, Political Theology, Soundings and The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Education, among other venues. He is the author of Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (Oxford University Press, 2009) and editor, with Vincent Lloyd, of Race and Secularism in America (Columbia University Press, 2016).