Professor Camille Robcis, incumbent Chair of the History department, was featured in The Columbia News. In the piece, Professor Robcis discusses her vision for the department, emphasizing history’s dual role in documenting the past while actively engaging with the present. She reflects on the importance of public-facing scholarship, the responsibilities of historians in moments of political and social uncertainty, and the direction she hopes to guide the department during her term as chair. Read the full interview here. 

Professor Casey Nelson Blake delivered a lecture on “Experience as Art” as the keynote address of the annual meeting of the Society for US Intellectual History on November 7th.  See the full conference program here. 

Professor Mae Ngai was named an honorary fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the highest honor the Society confers, which recognizes distinguished historians whose scholarship has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of others, at its annual meeting in Detroit in November 15. Read the full article here.

Professor Pablo Piccato was interviewed by El País about Mexico’s justice and security system, which he argues was shaped under the PRI to fail by design—favoring corruption, discretion, and political control over real justice. He explains that violence became part of the system itself, allowing criminal and state interests to merge and sustain each other. Read the full interview here. 

Professor Hannah Farber is 1 of 17 U.S Historians appointed to the Organization of American Historians’ distinguished lectureship program. Read the full announcement here. 

Professor Kim Phillips-Fein‘s latest article in The Nation, “How the Capitalism of the 1980s Created Donald Trump’s Theory of the State,” examines the historical precedent behind Trump’s political rise, as well as the economic conditions of the 1990s that lacked the constraints of corporate capitalism from an earlier era. Read the full article here.