Kristy Barbacane is an Advising Dean in the Berick Center for Student Advising at Columbia College and Columbia Engineering. In addition, she has been teaching at Barnard College since 2012. Kristy works on nineteenth-century French music and the relationship between colonialism and music. Her dissertation, entitled "On Colonial Textuality and Difference: Musical Encounters with French Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century Algeria," explored the historical and political parallels between music and French colonialism in Algeria during the nineteenth century. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Institute of Maghrib Studies, the Centre d’études maghrébines en Algérie, Reid Hall in Paris and the Columbia University Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.
