Feburary 8th from 4:20pm – 6:00pm  Workshop with Jungwon Kim (Columbia, Legal History). “Who Triggered My Death: Suicide and Punishment in Early Modern Korea” Comment by Pablo Piccato (Columbia, History).

Workshop location will be circulated closer to event date

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See full calendar of Legal History Workshop schedule here

Date: Wednesday, February 8th, 2023

Location: Low Memorial Library Rotunda, 535 West 116th Street, New York, NY 10027

Time: 4:30 PM – 7:00 PM EST (Event runs from 4:30 – 6:00 PM, followed by a reception from 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM)

Register here.

SPEAKER: Chinh Chu, Founder & President of CC Capital

HOST: Professor Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Founder, Vietnamese Studies, Director, Weatherhead East Asian Institute

INTRODUCTIONS: Naja Pham Lockwood, Founder and CEO, RYSE Media Ventures

MODERATOR: Anh Do, Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times

Chinh Chu has had an illustrious 30-plus-year career as a private-equity investor and executive. He is the former Co-Chair of Blackstone Private Equity. He joined Blackstone in the early 1990s and spent 25 years at the firm, becoming head of the Software and Technology, Financial Services, Chemicals and Healthcare groups. He served on Blackstone’s Executive Committee, co-chaired its Private Equity group, and was a member of its Investment Committee. Mr. Chu led some of the most prominent and successful private equity deals at Blackstone. Mr. Chu founded CC Capital in 2016 and has since spearheaded both traditional private-equity investments as well as a series of SPACs (special purpose acquisition companies). He led the $7.2 billion going-private transaction of Dun & Bradstreet in February 2019  — and less than 18 months later, Dun & Bradstreet was taken public at a 3.5x return for CC Capital’s equity investors. CC Capital has created 5 SPACs since 2016, 3 in partnership with Neuberger Berman. Its SPACs have invested in high-quality businesses including Getty Images ($4.8 billion), the global leader in photo imaging and distribution; UTZ ($1.6 billion), the 100 year-old leading manufacturer of salty snacks; E2 Open ($2.6 billion), the leading supply chain software company; and FG Insurance ($2.1 billion), the life and annuities insurer. Mr. Chu has served on over 20 public and private corporate boards including: City Harvest, Getty Images, E2 Open, Dun & Bradstreet, NCR Corporation, Catalent, Kronos, SunGard Data Systems, Biomet, Celanese Corporation, Nalco, Nycomed, Alliant Insurance Services, London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE), Graham Packaging, AlliedBarton, and BankUnited. Before joining Blackstone, Mr. Chu worked at Salomon Brothers in the Mergers & Acquisitions department. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Buffalo’s School of Management.  

Mr. Chu was born in Vietnam and emigrated to America at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. He is the eldest of 6 children born to Dennis and Linda Chu.  Mr. Chu currently lives in New York City and is passionate about philanthropy, music, mountaineering, and, most importantly, his two daughters.

Lien-Hang Nguyen is the Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia, Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and co-founder of Vietnamese Studies at Columbia University. She is author of Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (2012), which won the Society for Military History Edward M. Coffman Prize and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Stuart L. Bernath Prize. Professor Nguyen serves as the general editor of the Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, 3 vols., as well as co-editor of the Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations. She is currently working on a comprehensive history of the 1968 Tet Offensive with Random House. She has appeared on numerous documentaries including PBS History with David Rubenstein, CNN Documentary, and MSNBC’s A Rachel Maddow Special Report. Professor Nguyen received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University.

Naja Pham Lockwood has produced multiple documentary and narrative films focusing on social justice issues including 76 Days, Try Harder!, Coming Home Again, Gook and Cries From Syria. She is the co-founder of RYSE Media Ventures, which supports stories of diverse voices, and an investor in Impact Partners Films, where she has financed the Academy Award winning documentary, Icarus as well as Won’t You Be My Neighbor and Audrie and Daisy. She served on the Sundance Utah Advisory Board and partnered with Sundance Institute to build and fund the Sundance Screenwriters Fellowships for Asian American filmmakers. She currently serves on the Board of the Utah Film Commission and Center for Asian American Media (CAAM). Naja is an associate instructor at the University of Utah teaching the Power of Storytelling: Asia and the Global Cinema. She is the Founder and CEO of www.najalockwooddesigns.com to support female artisans of Southeast Asia. Born in Vietnam, Naja immigrated to Massachusetts during the Fall of Saigon. She was the first Vietnamese-American to be appointed by Mayor Willie Brown and Mayor Gavin Newsom to be Arts Commissioner of San Francisco with a focus on community and diversity and the expansion and capital campaign development of the Asian Art Museum. Throughout Naja’s life, there has always been a commitment to social justice and making sure the voices of the under-represented, the minority and the oppressed are heard.

Anh Do is a Metro reporter covering Asian American issues and general assignments at the Los Angeles Times. A second-generation journalist, she has worked at the Seattle Times, the Orange County Register and Nguoi Viet Daily News, the largest Vietnamese-language newspaper in the US, based in California and founded by her late father. Born in Saigon, Do is a graduate of the University of Southern California with degrees in journalism and English and she has reported from Cuba, India, Mexico, Peru and Vietnam, elevating on-the-ground storytelling with cultural research and techniques honed from five years of living in Mexico City. Her writing on diaspora, race and trauma has won awards from Columbia University, Freedom Newspapers Sweepstakes and the Asian American Journalists Association. She is a recipient of Yale’s Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, and in 2016, she was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its breaking news coverage of the San Bernardino terrorist attacks. Apart from words, she’s passionate about all things canine, spending 27 years volunteering in dog rescue campaigns around the globe.

This event is sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

Talk in French by Patrick Boucheron with English text available.

Date: Wednesday, February 8th

Location: Maison Française, 515 West 116th Street New York, NY 10027

Time: 6:00 – 7:00 PM EST

Held by Patrick Boucheron (History of Powers in Western Europe from 7th to 16th century, Collège de France)

Register here.

How do we tell the history of the Black Death today? A global history of humanity’s largest demographic catastrophe over the longue durée, from our present pandemic times? Drawing from his teachings at the Collège de France and his Theatre of the Plague production with the Théâtre National de Bretagne, acclaimed medievalist Patrick Boucheron reflects back on his long standing engagement with the plague and its contagious, overflowing metaphors.

Patrick Boucheron is a Professor and Chair of the History of Powers in Western Europe from the 7th to the 16th century at Collège de France. He specializes in the Middle Ages, particularly in Italy. His work also concerns the writing of history and changes in the discipline. It was in this spirit that he wrote Histoire mondiale de la France (Seuil, 2017). Since 2017, he has partnered with the Théatre National de Bretagne (TNB) headed by actor and stage director Arthur Nauzyciel. For each program, he invites associates, academics, and artists to imagine and create with him a monthly gathering, “Rencontrer l’Histoire” (“A Rendez-vous with History”), based on the program’s themes or current affairs.

This performance is co-sponsored by Columbia Maison Française, ICLS Medical Humanities, Department of French, and Department of History.

Date: Tuesday, February 14th, 2023

Location: Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street New York, NY 10018

Time: 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM EST

Register here for in-person attendance and here for remote livestream attendance.

This Valentine’s Day, discover the story behind the modern romance novel and its connection to the life of celebrity author Elinor Glyn. From rose petals and silken lingerie to smoldering looks and lingering caresses, Elinor Glyn’s work in fiction and film laid the foundations for much of modern romance on the page and the screen. Her scandalous, sexually charged 1907 novel, Three Weeks, was simultaneously a bestseller and one of the most denounced books of its time. Working in early Hollywood films, she coined the term “It Girl” and turned actor Clara Bow into a symbol of America’s first sexual revolution.

Hilary A. Hallett’s biography, Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood, traces Glyn’s sensational life. She wrote it during her 2016–2017 Fellowship at the Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She will be discussing the book with historian Alice Kessler-Harris.

Hilary A. Hallett is the Mendelson Family Professor and director of American Studies and Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. She is also the author of Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood, and has written for the Los Angeles Times.

Alice Kessler-Harris is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor Emerita of American History at Columbia University and Professor Emerita at Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She is the author of many books, most recently A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman.

Date: Thursday, February 16th, 2023

Location: The Skylight Room, 9100 Graduate Center, CUNY 365 5th Avenue New York, NY 10016

Time: 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM EST

Register here for in-person attendance and here for Zoom attendance.

In this groundbreaking portrait of a courageous icon of independence, Hilary A. Hallett traces Elinor Glyn’s meteoric rise from a depressed society darling to a world-renowned celebrity author who consorted with world leaders from St. Petersburg to Cairo to New York. After reporting from the trenches during World War I, Glyn was lured by American movie producers from Paris to Los Angeles for her remarkable third act. Weaving together years of deep archival research, Hallett movingly conveys how Glyn, more than any other individual during the Roaring Twenties, crafted early Hollywood’s glamorous romantic aesthetic. She taught the screen’s greatest leading men to make love in ways that set audiences aflame, and coined the term “It Girl,” which turned actress Clara Bow into the symbol of the first sexual revolution.

Hilary A. Hallett is the Mendelson Family Professor and director of American studies and associate professor of history at
Columbia University. The author of Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood, she has written for the Los Angeles Times.

David Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History Emeritus at the CUNY Graduate Center and a past president of the Society of American Historians. His most recent book is The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War. He is also the author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, a New York Times “Ten Best Books of the Year” and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography. His bestseller Andrew Carnegie was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and the winner of the New-York Historical Society’s American History Book Prize. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst was honored with several awards, include the Bancroft Prize for History.

Date: Friday, February 17th, 2023

Location: Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, 74 Morningside Drive, New York, NY 10027 and online via Zoom.

Time: 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM EST

Register here (for both in-person and virtual attendance)

In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa, Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.

Rhiannon Stephens is an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University and specializes in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the late first millennium CE through the twentieth century. She is the author of Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History (Duke University Press, 2022), an interdisciplinary history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. Her first monograph, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), traced the history of motherhood as a social institution and an ideology across over a millennium of Ugandan political, economic and social change.

About the Speakers

Laura Fair is a historian of twentieth-century urban East Africa and the author of several award-winning books. She teaches in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. Her scholarship focuses on gendered social and economic change, and urban popular culture in Swahili-speaking communities. Her first book, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Ohio University Press, 2001), illustrates how former slaves used the social and cultural tools at their command to demonstrate their freedom from slavery and articulate alternative visions of justice under colonialism.

Raevin Jimenez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. Her work examines the gender history of Nguni-speakers in southern Africa between the 9th-20th century. Over a millennium, Nguni-speakers innovated and reconfigured masculine propriety and male relationships. Changing ideas of gender allowed Nguni-speakers to congregate young men into vast networks, define male identity, establish obligations of men as sons and husbands, and orient junior men towards political and economic opportunities.

Pablo Piccato is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931, published by Duke University Press, and a co-editor of True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico. His research and teaching focus on modern Mexico, particularly on crime, politics, and culture. He has taught as visiting faculty in universities in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and France.

Caterina Pizzigoni is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. She specializes in the colonial history of Latin America. Her interests include indigenous populations and the study of sources in Nahuatl (indigenous language of central Mexico), social history, household and material culture, religion and gender. Her current research focuses on household saints in colonial Mexico.

Friday, March 3rd, 2023
• New York City Latin American History Workshop (Co-Sponsored by Dept., Hosted by Baruch College) – Andrei Guardarrama (Columbia), “Automobiles, Urban Business, and Industrialization in Mexico City, 1920-1940”
11AM-1PM
Baruch College, Newman Vertical Campus, 55 Lexington Ave, Room 8-210
To register and obtain workshop paper please email: Mark Rice, mark.rice@baruch.cuny.edu

Date: Thursday, March 9th, 2023

Location: 411 Fayerweather Hall, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027

Time: 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM EST

As part of the current upsurge of authoritarian politics and blood-and-soil ethnonationalism, U.S. Christians have rediscovered in Holy Russia an unlikely polestar. But this surge in the international “family values” movement is only the most recent iteration of a century-long relationship. From the Bolshevik Revolution through the present bromance with Putin, U.S. theocrats have used Russia as a resource for promoting sexual conformity, racial purity, and gender rigidity. Far from serving as mere “culture wars” distractions from law and economics, these theocratic ambitions are meant to secure a free market under God. This history suggests that when Christian nationalists tell us what they want, we should take them at their word.

Bethany Moreton is Professor of History at Dartmouth College and a series editor for Columbia University Press’s Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism.  Her first book, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 2009), won the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in U.S. history and the John Hope Franklin Award for the best book in American Studies.  Her most recent book is Entre Dios y el capital (Txalaparta, 2022). 

March 22nd from 4:20pm -6:00pm  Workshop with Kunal Parker. (U Miami, History). “The Turn to Process: Legal, Political, and Economic Thought in America, 1870-1970” Commenter Alma Steingart (Columbia)

Workshop location will be circulated closer to event date

*

See full calendar of Legal History Workshop schedule here