Department of History - Columbia University |

NEWS

David Rosner, Merlin Chowkwanyun and Jerry Markowitz are receiving the Archivists Round Table Award for Innovative Use of Archives for developing Toxicdocs.com, a website of 19 million previously secret corporate documents, which will be presented at the CUNY Graduate Center on October 17th.

Oct 16, 2024

David Rosner, Merlin Chowkwanyun and Jerry Markowitz are receiving the Archivists Round Table Award for Innovative Use of Archives for developing Toxicdocs.com, a website of 19 million previously secret corporate documents, which will be presented at the CUNY Graduate Center on October 17th.

David Rosner and Jerry Markowitz were also awarded the Viseltear Prize for Lifetime Achievement and Outstanding Book (Building the Worlds that Kill Us) in the History of Public Health from the American Public Health Association’s Medical Care Section, which will be presented on October 29th at their Annual Convention in Minneapolis.

Professor Kim Phillips-Fein reviewed Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It for the International Review of Social History.

Oct 14, 2024

Kim Phillips-Fein reviewed Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It for the International Review of Social History. Read the review here.

Marc Van De Mieroop has published the fourth edition of his text, A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 – 323 BC.

Oct 14, 2024

Marc Van De Mieroop has published the fourth edition of his text, A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 – 323 BC. Read more here.

Kim Phillips-Fein contributed to Vital City’s Subway issue, sharing her experiences riding the subway as a young adult. Read the full article here.

Oct 3, 2024

Kim Phillips-Fein contributed to Vital City‘s Subway issue, sharing her experiences riding the subway as a young adult. Read the full article here.

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UPCOMING EVENTS

october 2024

24oct7:00 pm- 9:00 pmBook Launch Event: Manan Ahmed's "Disrupted City"

Event Details

Date: Thursday, October 24th, 2024
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Book Culture (536 West 112th Street, New York, NY 10027)
RSVP here. More event information available here.

Join Book Culture on Thursday, October 24th at 7pm for a reading to celebrate the recent release of Manan Ahmed Asif’s new monograph, Disrupted City. Gaiutra Bahadur will join in conversation.

A stunning history of Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual capital, from one of the preeminent scholars of South Asia.

The city of Lahore was more than one thousand years old when it went through a violent schism. As the South Asian subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 to gain freedom from Britain’s colonial hold, and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was formed, the city’s large Hindu and Sikh populations were pushed toward India, and an even larger Muslim refugee population settled in the city. This was just the latest in a long history of the city’s making and unmaking.

Over the centuries, the city has kept a firm grip on the imagination of travelers, poets, writers, and artists. More recently, it has been journalists who have been drawn to the city as a focal point for a nation that continues to grab international headlines. For this book, acclaimed historian Manan Ahmed Asif brings to life a diverse and vibrant world by walking the city again and again over the course of many years. Along the way he joins Sufi study circles and architects doing restoration in the medieval parts of Lahore and speaks with a broad range of storytellers and historians. To this Asif juxtaposes deep analysis of the city’s centuries-old literary culture, noting how it reverberates among the people of Lahore today.

To understand modern Pakistan requires understanding its cultural capital, and Disrupted City uses Lahore’s cosmopolitan past and its fractured present to provide a critical lens to challenge the grand narratives of the Pakistani nation-state and its national project of writing history.

Manan Ahmed, Associate Professor, in the History Department at Columbia, is a historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE. He also directs the Heyman Center Fellows at SOF/Heyman at Columbia. He is the author of A Book of Conquest: Tne Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Harvard University Press, 2016), Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (Harvard University Press, 2020) and, most recently, Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore (The New Press, 2024).

Gaiutra Bahadur is an associate professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and the Department of English. She is an essayist, critic and journalist who writes often about literature, history, memory, migration, and ethnicity. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Boston Review, Dissent, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Lapham’s Quarterly and many other publications across the globe. Her book Coolie Woman, a personal history of indenture, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the British literary award for artful political writing. It won the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for the best book about the Caribbean in any language from the Caribbean Studies Association in 2014. The Chronicle of Higher Education included the book in its round-up of the best scholarly books of the decade in 2020.

Event address:

Book Culture

536 W 112th St

New York, NY 10025

Time

(Thursday) 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Location

Book Culture, 536 W 112th St, New York, NY 10025, USA

Calendar GoogleCal

30oct6:00 pm- 7:30 pmLegal History Workshop - As if You Were Brothers: The Criminalization of Subjunctive Kinship

november 2024

7nov9:30 am- 4:30 pmBuilding the Worlds That Kill Us Book Talk

Event Details

picture of book

Date: Thursday, November 7th, 2024
Time: 11:30 AM – 4:30 PM
Location: Columbia School of Nursing, 560 W. 168 St., New York, NY 10032
RSVP here.

Join us on November 7 for a panel of distinguished experts who have worked at the intersections of health, history, and politics. This conference celebrates David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz’s new book, Building the World that Kills Us.

Speakers and Panelists:
Dean Linda Fried, Introductory Remarks

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Introductory Remarks

David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, Author Q&A

Participants:
Samuel Roberts, Columbia University

Betsy Blackmar, Columbia University

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Columbia University

Merlin Chowkwanyun, Columbia University

David Michaels, George Washington University

Simon Szreter, Cambridge University

Susan Reverby, Wellesley College

Through the lens of death and disease, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz provide a new way of understanding the history of the United States from the colonial era to the present. Building the World that Kills Us demonstrate that the changing rates and kinds of illnesses reflect social, political, and economic structures and inequalities of race, class, and gender. These deep inequities determine the disparate health experiences of rich and poor, Black and white, men and women, immigrant and native-born, boss and worker, Indigenous and settler. This book underscores that powerful people and institutions have always seen some lives as more valuable than others, and it emphasizes how those who have been most affected by the disparities in rates of disease and death have challenged and changed these systems.

Time

(Thursday) 9:30 am - 4:30 pm

Location

Columbia School of Nursing

560 W. 168 St., New York, NY 10032

Calendar GoogleCal

20nov6:00 pm- 7:30 pmLegal History Workshop - International Law as History: John Bassett Moore and the Remaking of South American Borders

20nov6:30 pm- 8:30 pmBrianna Nofil on The Migrant's Jail: Book Talk

View Past Events >>

FACULTY PUBLICATIONS

Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 – 323 BC, 4th Edition. 2024: Wiley-Blackwell.

David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, Building the Worlds that Kill Us: Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History. 2024: Columbia University Press

Manan Ahmed, Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore. 2024: The New Press

Frank Guridy, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play. 2024: Basic Books

Mae Ngai, Chee Wang Ng, and Corky Lee (eds.), Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally. 2024: Clarkson Potter

Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, and David Moon (eds.), Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally. 2023: Berghahn Books

George Chauncey, Nueva York Gay: Género, Cultura Urbana y Conformación del Mundo Gay Masculino (1890-1940). 2023: Promoteo.

Neslihan Senocak and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani . A People’s Church: Medieval Italy and Christianity, 1050 – 1300. 2023: Cornell University Press.

Neslihan Senocak. Lateran IV: Theology and Care of Souls. 2023: Brepols Publishers.

Carl Wennerlind. Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis. 2023: Harvard University Press.

Matthew L. Jones and Christopher Wiggins. How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms. 2023: W. W. Norton & Company.

Matthew Connelly. The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets. 2023: Pantheon.

Richard A. Billows. The Spear, the Scroll, and the Pebble: How the Greek City-State Developed as a Male Warrior-Citizen Collective. 2023: Bloomsbury Academic.

Marc Van De Mieroop. Before and After Babel: Writing as Resistance in Ancient Near Eastern Empires. 2022: Oxford University Press.

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FEATURED RESOURCES

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: How History is Used in Senate Politics Concerning Climate Change Denialism

U.S. Senator Senator Sheldon Whitehouse spoke to the Community University community on Monday, February 6, 2023 regarding Climate Change, U.S policy and his new book : "The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court, and the Damage the Court is Doing to the Fight Against Climate Change." View a recorded video of this event by clicking here.

Columbia University and Slavery: A Research and Justice Initiative

The Columbia University and Slavery project is a research and justice initiative examining Columbia’s connections to the history and legacies of enslavement. The ongoing work aims to provide a fuller and more nuanced picture of Columbia’s past, while also helping to inform conversations about the university’s role in the present.

Confluence: A History of North American Rivers

Rivers have always been the lifeblood of the continent, yet their human histories have remained largely hidden from public view. Our goal is to create a publicly accessible digital platform for mapping and narrating lived history along North American rivers.

Columbia Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities

The Columbia Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities fosters collaborative transnational research on the global history of sexualities and supports such research at Columbia.

History in Action

History in Action is one of four pilot programs comprising the Career Diversity for Historians Initiative, funded by the American Historical Association and the Mellon Foundation.

Mapping Historical New York City

Mapping Historical New York City is a collaboration to map immigration and neighborhood change in New York City during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Columbia University Historical Justice Initiative

The Columbia University Historical Justice Initiative offers a self-guided, interactive walking tour of CU's Morningside campus through an iOS app and eventually an Android one as well.

Featured Podcasts

FACULTY HOSTED PODCASTS: Global Thought Podcast (co-hosted by Carol Gluck) People Doing Interesting Stuff (hosted by Samuel Roberts) STUDENT HOSTED PODCASTS: New Books in Middle Eastern Studies (co-hosted by Joshua Donovan) The Sounds of Caliban (hosted by Mariana Katz) New Books in Latin American Studies (co-hosted by Rachel Newman) FACULTY FEATURED PODCASTS: Manan Ahmed discussed his path to historian academia in The Dean’s Table podcast. Frank Guridy discussed how he came to study history and his research on popular sports in The Dean's Table podcast.