Date: Wednesday, December 4th, 2024
Time: 6:00 – 7:30 PM
Location: Fayerweather 411, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027

The Legal History Workshop brings together students and faculty to discuss works-in-progress by scholars from within and outside Columbia University. For more information on the workshop or to be put on the mailing list, please contact Susanne Ridley at sridley@law.columbia.edu.

This workshop is presented by Gautham Rao (American University, History), with comments by Stephanie McCurry (Columbia, History).

Date: Wednesday, November 20th, 2024
Time: 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Location: IAB Room 406, International Affairs Building, 420 W. 118 St., New York, NY 10027
RSVP here.

Join the Lehman Center for American History and the Columbia University Carceral Studies Workshop for a book talk and discussion with Brianna Nofil, Assistant Professor at the College of William & Mary. 

The Migrant’s Jail demonstrates how a century of political, economic, and ideological exchange between the immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to the U.S.’ vast immigration detention system, and how an evolving network of individuals, municipalities, and private corporations profited from jailing.

This talk is part of the Lehman Center’s Recent Graduates series. Brianna Nofil earned her Ph.D. from the Columbia University Department of History in 2020.

Date: Wednesday, November 20th, 2024
Time: 6:00 – 7:30 PM
Location: Fayerweather 411, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027

The Legal History Workshop brings together students and faculty to discuss works-in-progress by scholars from within and outside Columbia University. For more information on the workshop or to be put on the mailing list, please contact Susanne Ridley at sridley@law.columbia.edu.

This workshop is presented by Mariana Silveira (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais & Columbia, History), with comments by Christina Ponsa-Kraus (Columbia, Law).

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.

Date: Wednesday, October 30th, 2024
Time: 6:00 – 7:30 PM
Location: Fayerweather 411, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027

The Legal History Workshop brings together students and faculty to discuss works-in-progress by scholars from within and outside Columbia University. For more information on the workshop or to be put on the mailing list, please contact Susanne Ridley at sridley@law.columbia.edu.

This workshop is presented by Naor Ben-Yehoyada (Columbia, Anthropology), with comments by Katharina Pistor (Columbia, Law).

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. 

Date: Thursday, October 17th, 2024

Time: 5:00 PM

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

 

At an LGBT rights protest in Mexico City in June 1980, the communist Mario Rivas declared that his party “strove to be an ally to the movement for sexual liberation.” Despite a new platform that recognized sexual liberty, Rivas was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party for his speech. This moment has often been characterized as another manifestation of the Left’s enduring homophobia. However, this talk demonstrates that the expulsion of Rivas may have had more to do with the limits of a tolerance-based sexual rights platform than with the outbreak of homophobia.

Robert Franco is an Assistant Professor of History at Kenyon College. His current manuscript, Revolution in the Sheets: Sexuality and Tolerance in the Mexican Left, explores the history of homophobia, heterosexism, and hostility towards sexual politics in Mexico’s leftist parties and organizations. His work has appeared in the  Journal of the History of Sexuality, Radical History Review, and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

Sponsored by the Columbia Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities.

The Center for International History and Qalam Pakistan Initiative Present:
Deferred Extermination: Jonathan Swift and Drone Warfare by Peter DeGabriele

Date: Thursday, October 10th, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: 411 Fayerweather Hall (1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027)

Peter DeGabriele is Associate Professor of English at Mississippi State University and the author of “Drone Englightenment: The Colonial Roots of Remote Warfare” (Virginia University Press, 2023). DeGabriele specialises in the study of eighteenth century literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on the relation between literary texts and the political philosophy and epistemology of the period.

Madiha Tahir is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Yale. Tahir’s current book project explores U.S. drone warfare and transnational militarism in the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands. A former journalist, she is the director of Wounds of Waziristan, a short documentary essay film that tracks 2 drone survivors as they reflect on the afterlife of bombardment.

Drawing from Drone Enlightenment: The Colonial Roots of Remote Warfare (UVA Press, 2023), this talk will draw on the Jonathan Swift’s 1726 Gulliver’s Travels to discuss the phenomenon of drone warfare. Taking up Swift’s description of a political situation in which the decision to exterminate a racialized colonial population is indefinitely suspended while the serial killing of those same people is permitted, the talk will look at the way this structure works in the drone warfare practiced by the United States and by Israel. It will argue that this form of sovereignty is essential to the “political technology” of the drone, which links the technical capacities of remote bombing to forms of colonial and liberal sovereignty which have their roots in the Enlightenment. The talk will conclude by thinking about the use of AI by the Israel Defense Forces in the current war in Gaza and how this produces a radical asymmetry between two legacies of the Enlightenment: mediation and publicity. In particular, it will argue that the velocity of technical mediation produced both by AI and by drones overwhelms the use of public reason and claims for accountability.

Date: Wednesday, October 9th, 2024
Time: 6:00 – 7:30 PM
Location: Fayerweather 411, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027

The Legal History Workshop brings together students and faculty to discuss works-in-progress by scholars from within and outside Columbia University. For more information on the workshop or to be put on the mailing list, please contact Susanne Ridley at sridley@law.columbia.edu.

This workshop is presented by Jeremy Kessler (Columbia, Law), with comments by Hannah Farber (Columbia, History).

Qalam Pakistan Initiative and Sacred Music Columbia Present:

“Come, This Is the Way”: An Evening of Hindustani Poetry & Music with Apporva Mudgal, Ria Modak and Yacouba Sissoko.

Date: Thursday, September 19, 2024

Time: 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Location: St. Paul’s Chapel, 1160 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027

Drawing from poetry in North Indian languages — including Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Poorvi, Brijbhasha, Kashmiri, Rajasthani, Sindhi and Persian — as well as the rich tradition of raag-based Hindustani music, the musicians seek to create an evening that centers expression for shared human experiences across borders and advocates for change in a world increasingly rife with sectarian, authoritarian, and extremist violence. By imbuing these traditions with modern political and aesthetic sensibilities — they hope to defamiliarize them while remaining legible to diasporic audiences of all generations.

Apoorva Mudgal is an Agra (North India) born Hindustani singer and composer currently based in Brooklyn (NY). Her serene vocals steeped in longing, and often minimally arranged to stringed instruments like the classical guitar and Kora (African Harp), make for transcendental performances of the Urdu Ghazal, Hindavi folk and Punjabi Sufi Kalaam.
Ria Modak is an Indian-American guitarist and composer whoe compositional voice and approach to the instrument is grounded in Hindustani music, flamenco and classical guitar. Currently a PhD student in History at Brown University, her research focuses on the role of film, folk, classical and other musics in creating and subverting national identity in South Asia.
Taught kora by his grandfather, Yacouba Sissoko comes from a family line of Malian musicians dating back centuries. He has modernized the kora sound collaborating with contemporary music greats such as Harry Belafonte, Lauryn Hill and Paul Simon.

More information and registration available here. Please contact Julian Bennett Holmes (jbh2170@columbia.edu) with any questions.

 

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.

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 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. All participants will come together in seminar-style discussions on the novel challenges posed by doing 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-teachers Ray Hicks and Ben Lis, who have extensive experience processing and analyzing textual data. It will also feature presentations from archivists, historians, and data scientists (see list below). The Text as Data workshop will run for two weeks, while the Archiving Digital Records workshop will be in-person for classes only the first week. In the second week, participants in the Archiving workshop will participate in the lunchtime talks and discussions remotely. Attendance is free, and funding is available for those who need to travel to participate.

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.

When: June 10-21, 2024. Sessions will be from 9am – 3pm each weekday. Workshop participants will be invited to submit proposals to a conference that will take place at Columbia at the same time the American Historical Association holds its annual meeting in NYC in January 2025.

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.

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.

Benjamin Lis (Instructor – Archives Workshop) has been the History Lab’s data engineer since 2019, where he has developed some of the tools used in the workshop. He has also taught as an adjunct in the Applied Analytics department of Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies and co-taught “Hacking the Archive” with Connelly in spring 2020. He has a B.S. from Montclair State University and an M.S. from Stevens Institute of Technology.

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

Lara Putnam, University of Pittsburgh

Barbara Rockenbach, Yale University

Heidi Tworek, University of British Columbia