Date: Thursday, April 10th
Time: 12:10 – 1:30 PM
Location: 411 Fayerweather Hall

Historical writing for general audiences comes in a variety of forms and subgenres. In this talk, commercial nonfiction author and historian of science Dr. Surekha Davies will discuss the research, writing, and business of creative and narrative nonfiction history books. Topics will include: how a trade-list book differs from an academic book; getting an agent; getting a book deal; researching the market; devising a saleable topic; and making a living.

Dr. Surekha Davies is a British author, speaker, and historian, with a BA and an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the University of London. She is the author of Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025). Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016), won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. Her writing has been supported by such institutions as the American Historical Association, the Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the John Carter Brown Library. She has written about biology, anthropology, and monsters in the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, and Aeon.

Date: Friday, April 11th, 2025
Time: 12:00 – 1:00 PM ET
Location: Via Zoom.

Part of the Science Studies Working Group, Spring 2025, presented by Stephanie Reitzig (History).
To receive the papers and Zoom invitations for each meeting, make sure you are subscribed to our mailing list. You can subscribe by emailing Julia Tomasson (jct2182@columbia.edu) or Stephanie Reitzig (scr2165@columbia.edu).

Date: Monday, April 14th, 2025
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 PM
Location: Room 607B, Pulitzer Hall, 2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

Join Dr. Marc-William Palen (University of Exeter) for a discussion of his new book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World. This fascinating study explores the intersections of global capitalism, anti-imperialism, and peace activism. The book was recently listed in the Financial Times “Best Books of the Year,” as well as the 2024 “Best Books” review by the New Yorker.

Comment will be provided by Prof. Kim Phillips- Fein (Columbia University), renowned historian of American politics and political economy.

RSVP is required for attendance and for free lunch. Please RSVP to Stuart Anderson-Davis (sra2168@columbia.edu).

Columbia University makes every effort to accommodate individuals with disabilities. If you require disability accommodations to attend this event, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212-854-2388 or disability@columbia.edu at least 10 days in advance of the event.

Date: Thursday, April 24th, 2025
Time: 1:00 – 3:00 PM ET
Location: LaGuardia Community College, 31-10 Thomson Avenue Room E-242 Queens, NY 11101
RSVP here.

The LaGuardia Book Prize, in its second year, recognizes an exceptional work of scholarship that utilizes collections from the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, a repository of New York City history. The inaugural award, in 2024, went to historian and journalist Terry Golway for I Never Did Like Politics: How Fiorello La Guardia Became America’s Mayor, and Why He Still Matters.

“LaGuardia Community College is delighted to honor the historian Kim Phillips-Fein for her groundbreaking work on New York’s fiscal crisis. Meticulously researched, drawing from resources at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, Fear City illuminates the origins of the fiscal crisis in 1975 and the response of politicians and bankers. The crisis changed the way the city is governed. It also permanently transformed CUNY,” said President Kenneth Adams. “On the 50th anniversary of the crisis, as we grapple with other economic challenges in New York, Fear City couldn’t be timelier.”

LaGuardia and Wagner Archives established the Fiorello LaGuardia Book Prize in 2024. Soraya Ciego-Lemur, Deputy Director of LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, said since the 1980s the Archives has been a major research center for scholars doing work on New York City history.

“Many books have been written based on our rich collections. We decided that it was time to recognize stellar works that have come out of the Archives,” Ciego-Lemur said. “Fear City by Kim Phillips-Fein was an obvious choice. She used the Papers of Mayors Abraham Beame,” said Soraya Ciego-Lemur, Deputy Director of LaGuardia and Wagner Archives.

“Fear City became an instant classic when it was published in 2017, recognized by scholars as a seminal work on the urban political economy,” said Stephen Petrus, Ph.D., Director of Public History Programs at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives. “Phillips-Fein sheds light on the rise of austerity politics in the city in the late 1970s. It was a pivotal moment in New York history and had ramifications on the global economy. The policies implemented became a blueprint for neoliberals around the world.”

Each year the recipient of the Fiorello LaGuardia Book Prize will deliver a talk at LaGuardia. On April 24 in the E-Building, room 242, at 1 p.m., Phillips-Fein will be in conversation with Petrus. The event will incorporate LaGuardia students studying the fiscal crisis as well as showcase resources from the Archives. The talk is free and open to the public.

Date: Friday, May 2nd, 2025
Time: 12:00 – 1:00 PM ET
Location: Via Zoom.

Part of the Science Studies Working Group, Spring 2025, presented by Farideh Laffan (Cornell, STS).
To receive the papers and Zoom invitations for each meeting, make sure you are subscribed to our mailing list. You can subscribe by emailing Julia Tomasson (jct2182@columbia.edu) or Stephanie Reitzig (scr2165@columbia.edu).

Archives as Data – Summer Institute 2025 

An Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities for Archivists and Historians

Digital history and archiving are thriving, but the increasing volume of digitized and “born digital” materials for historical research also presents new challenges for archivists and historians. Typically, the only way to explore these resources has been through keyword searching. More direct access to the data creates tremendous new research opportunities, but the barriers to entry can seem daunting.

The third edition of this NEH-funded program will offer practical training for historians and archivists in processing and analyzing textual data. Participants in the Archiving Digital Records workshop, designed for archivists, will learn how to use new technology to improve the description and arrangement of digital or digitized records, especially PDFs, and provide users with new ways to access them. Participants will receive training in using metadata tools such as PDF Processing, OCR Processing, and Named Entity Recognition (NER) analysis. Participants in the Text-as-Data workshop, designed for historians, will learn how to organize and analyze large document collections and use new methods to formulate original arguments. Participants will receive training in using data science technologies like R and SQL and will be expected to attend afternoon lab sessions where they will put these tools into practice. All participants will come together during lunch for invited speakers and seminar-style discussions on the novel challenges posed by archival research in the age of “big data,” including issues related to community representation, protecting private information in online archives, and the professional and scholarly pitfalls in navigating this new terrain. 

The Institute will be led by Matthew Connelly and Courtney Chartier, with co-teacher Ray Hicks, who has extensive experience processing and analyzing textual data. Lunch-time talks will feature presentations from archivists, historians, and data scientists (see list of previous invitees below). The Text as Data workshop will run for two weeks, while the Archiving Digital Records workshop classes will only run for one week. In the second week, participants in the Archiving workshop will be expected to participate in the lunchtime talks and discussions remotely. Attendance is free, and funding is available, although limited, for those who need to travel to participate. Note that we expect all participants to attend daily, and group activities will require everyone to be present and actively contributing. 

The Institute is a joint project of Columbia’s History Lab and Columbia Libraries, and is funded by the NEH Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. Hands-on training will use textual data from the Freedom of Information Archive, a project that has aggregated the largest database of declassified government documents in the world. Here are the draft syllabi for the workshops as well as the slides from a typical Text-as-Data course. Please peruse through these documents prior to applying.

When: June 2 to June 13 2025. Sessions will be from 9am – 3pm each weekday.  

Where: Columbia University Campus in New York City.

Eligibility: This workshop is open rank. Masters students through established scholars are encouraged to apply. Priority in the Text-as-Data workshop will be given to historians, while priority in the Archiving Digital Records workshop will be given to archivists. Others will be eligible to participate on a space-available basis.

Financial Support: We are happy to offer financial support for those workshop participants who need it for travel and accommodations. In your application, we will ask you to describe your budget and prospects for obtaining other funding. We will use the limited funds we have to ensure broad participation, including from under-resourced institutions.

How to Apply: Please use this form to apply. In addition to providing a CV, we will ask you to describe any previous experience or training in either processing digital collections (for archivists) or analyzing textual data (for historians). We will also ask you what motivates you to apply to the workshop and what you hope to gain from attending it. Feel free to contact us with questions.

 

Confirmed Participants:

Instructors

Courtney Chartier is the director of Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. She has long-standing interest and experience in the archiving of electronic records, and was previously the Head of Research Services at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library at Emory University and taught at Georgia State University. Chartier is also the immediate past President of the Society of American Archivists.

Matthew Connelly is a professor of history at Columbia University. He received his B.A. from Columbia in 1990 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1997. His publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era, which won five prizes, Fatal Misconception, The Struggle to Control World Population, an Economist and Financial Times book of the year, and The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets, which was published in February 2023 by Random House. In 2011 he also co-directed (with Stephen Morse) a summer research program on “The History of the Next Pandemic.”

Raymond Hicks (Data Scientist) has been working with History Lab since 2017. Before starting at Columbia, he worked as the Statistical Programmer for the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. His research has appeared in the Journal of Politics, International Organization, and the British Journal of Political Science, among other journals. He received his B.A. from The College of William and Mary and his Ph.D. in political science from Emory University. He has taught a 2-week workshop on the introduction to text analysis for several different audiences, including economists, political scientists, and historians.

Invited Speakers at the 2023 and 2024 workshops:

Cameron Blevins, University of Colorado Denver

Merlin Chowkwanyun, Columbia University

Greg Eow, Center for Research Libraries

Jo Guldi, Southern Methodist University

Tim Hitchcock, University of Sussex

Barbara Rockenbach, Yale University

Heidi Tworek, University of British Columbia