Date: Friday, February 28th
Time: 4:10 PM
Location: 208 Knox Hall, 606 W 122nd St, New York, NY 10027
RSPV here.

Join Teren Sevea for a discussion of his essay, Singapore’s Islamic Pasts: Alexanders in an Island Below the Wind. The essay explores the fascinating history of Singapore’s first Islamic king, Iskandar Sahib, tracing his legacy as a descendant of the pre-Qur’anic prophet and king Iskandar Dhu al-Qarnayn. Through Malay court chronicles, oral histories, and Sufi traditions, Sevea uncovers how Islamic communities have preserved and reclaimed their histories amidst marginalization. This engaging work connects the rich cultural and spiritual heritage of Singapore’s Islamic past with the voices of chroniclers, storytellers, and everyday community members.

Date: Friday, February 28th
Time: 10:00 AM – 6:30 PM
Location: Room 406, Lehman Centre for American History, Columbia University, 420 W 118th St., New York, NY 10027

Join us for a conference marking the 40th anniversary of Brazil’s return to democracy after 21 years of military-civilian dictatorship. We will explore the convergence of political, social, and economic transitions that defined this period, situating it within the broader regional history of authoritarianism in Latin America. The conference will examine how pro-democracy movements advocating for racial justice, human rights, and government accountability emerged at the municipal level, often preceding their influence on national politics. We aim to reevaluate how law functioned both as an instrument of state violence and as a tool leveraged by marginalized groups to advocate for their basic needs, thereby expanding the meaning of citizenship. The event will also reflect on key historiographical debates that illuminate the complex relationship between law, democracy, and violence in Latin America. Marking 40 years since Brazil’s return to democracy offers a critical opportunity to examine the very ideas of “transition” and “democratization.” Using Brazil as a focal point, we will also explore the intertwined, recent histories of nations emerging from dictatorships across the Americas in the context of current global political challenges.

Speakers

• Amy Chazkel, Columbia University
• Barbara Weinstein, New York University
• Claudio Lomnitz, Columbia University
• Daniela Traldi, Columbia University
• Gianpaolo Baiocchi, New York University
• Jacob Blanc, McGill University
• James N. Green, Brown University (Emeritus)
• Juan Ignacio Arboleda, University of Pennsylvania
• Keisha-Kahn Perry, University of Pennsylvania
• Kendall Thomas, Columbia University
• Larissa Rosa Correa, PUC-Rio and Harvard University
• Mariana Cavalcanti, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and Columbia University
• Martha S. Jones, Johns Hopkins University
• Melissa Teixeira, University of Pennsylvania
• Oscar Vilhena Vieira, Fundação Getulio Vargas
  

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.

Please click here to see the full program and to register for this event. Registration is required.

Date: Thursday, February 13th
Time: 6:00 PM
Location: 208 Knox Hall, 606 W 122nd St, New York, NY 10027
RSPV here.

Join Mohammad Sadegh Ansari to discuss his book, The Science of Music: Knowledge Production in Medieval Baghdad and Beyond. In this innovative work, Ansari explores how the medieval Islamic intellectual tradition conceptualized and produced scientific knowledge, offering a unique perspective that bridges musicology and intellectual history. He examines how music, categorized as a branch of the mathematical sciences alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, was intricately linked to medicine and astrology as part of a cosmological system of knowledge. Through this lens, the book raises thought-provoking questions about the impact of defining music as a ‘science’ rather than an ‘art’ and what it reveals about medieval Islamic civilizations’ understanding of truth and the universe.

Date: Wednesday, February12th
Time: 6:00 – 7:30 PM
Location: Fayerweather Hall (Room 513), Columbia University, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York

Disability has been a central—if unacknowledged—force in the history of science and the scientific disciplines. Across historical epistemology and laboratory research, disability has been “good to think with”: an object of investigation made to yield generalizable truths. Yet disability is rarely imagined to be the source of expertise, especially the kind of expertise that produces (rational, neutral, universal) scientific knowledge.

Jaipreet Virdi, Mara Mills, and Sarah F. Rose introduce a disability history of science in the current volume of Osiris, which they co-edited. Across the volume, contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; others excavate racial and settler ableism in the history of scientific facts, protocols, and collections; still others query the boundaries between scientific, lay, and disability expertise. Contending that disability alters method, the volume’s authors bring new sources and interpretation techniques to the history of science, overturn familiar narratives, apply disability analyses to established terms and archives, and discuss accessibility issues for disabled historians.

In this talk, the three editors emphasize how disability history and the history of science need to be placed in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond the paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the editors further propose a “scientific management model of disability” to account for the shaping of disabled lives and relations by the applied sciences, from the ancient world to the present.

Event Speakers

• Mara Mills, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University
• Sarah F. Rose, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington
• Jaipreet Virdi, Associate Professor of History at the University of Deleware

Event Information

Free and open to the public; registration required. Contact scienceandsociety@columbia.edu or historyofscience@nyu.edu for questions. 

This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.

Sponsoring Organizations:

• Columbia University in the City of New York
• NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
• The Graduate Center, City University of New York
• The New York Academy of Medicine
• The New York Academy of Sciences

Co-sponsored by the Center for Disability Studies at New York University. 

The Center for Science and Society makes every reasonable effort to accommodate individuals with disabilities. If you require disability accommodations to attend a Center for Science and Society event, please contact us at scienceandsociety@columbia.edu or (212) 854-0666 at least 10 days in advance of the event. For more information, please visit the campus accessibility webpage. 

Date: Wednesday, Feburary 5th, 2025
Time: 6:15 – 8:00 PM EST
Location: Heyman Center for the Humanities, 74 Morningside Drive, New York, NY 10027
RSVP here.

The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play

by FRANK GURIDY

The “deep and impactful” story of the American stadium (Howard Bryant, author of Full Dissidence)—from the first wooden ballparks to today’s glass and steel mega-arenas—revealing how it has made, and remade, American life.

Stadiums are monuments to recreation, sports, and pleasure. Yet from the earliest ballparks to the present, stadiums have also functioned as public squares. Politicians have used them to cultivate loyalty to the status quo, while activists and athletes have used them for anti-fascist rallies, Black Power demonstrations, feminist protests, and much more.

In this book, historian Frank Guridy recounts the contested history of play, protest, and politics in American stadiums. From the beginning, stadiums were political, as elites turned games into celebrations of war, banned women from the press box, and enforced racial segregation. By the 1920s, they also became important sites of protest as activists increasingly occupied the stadium floor to challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, fascism, and more. Following the rise of the corporatized stadium in the 1990s, this complex history was largely forgotten. But today’s athlete-activists, like Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe, belong to a powerful tradition in which the stadium is as much an arena of protest as a palace of pleasure.

Moving between the field, the press box, and the locker room, this book recovers the hidden history of the stadium and its important role in the struggle for justice in America.

About the Author

Frank Guridy is a Professor of History and the Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies. He is also the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia. An award-winning historian, his recent research has focused on sport history, urban history, and the history of American social movements. Other books of his include The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics and Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow, and he co-edited Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America. His scholarly articles have appeared in Kalfou, Radical History Review, Caribbean Studies, Social Text, and Cuban Studies. His writing and commentary on sport, society, and politics have been published in Public Books, Columbia News, NBC News.com and the Washington Post.

About the Speakers

Aram Goudsouzian is the Bizot Family Professor in the Department of History at the University of Memphis. His research is in 20th century American history, with a particular focus on race, politics, and culture. Most of his books and articles have examined the era of the civil rights movement from a variety of angles, though his most recent book is on the presidential election of 1968, and he is pursuing some projects in U.S. sports history. His most recent books include The Men and the Moment: The Election of 1968 and the Rise of Partisan Politics in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014), and King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution (University of California Press, 2010). Recent publications have appeared in Modern American History, Journalism History, Journal of American Studies, and Study the South.

Kim Phillips-Fein is the Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia University. She is a historian of 20th-century American politics and political economy, and her interests include the history of political institutions and ideas, as well as the history of labor and capitalism and the history of New York City. She got her B.A. from the University of Chicago (1997) and her Ph.D. from Columbia (2005). She is the author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (Norton, 2009) and Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. Her articles have appeared in many scholarly and popular publications, including the Journal of American History, Labor: The Working-Class History of the Americas, The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Nation.

Pablo Piccato is a Professor in and Chair of the Department of History at Columbia University. He specializes in American history. He has worked on the political and cultural history of Mexico, and on the history of crime. He is currently working on an overview of crime in Mexico during the twentieth century. Books include A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). He has been published in The Oxford Handbook of The History of Crime and Criminal Justice; The Americas, Dictablanda: Politics, Work and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968, and Antropología, among many others.

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, a Professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. She is trained in Architecture and American Studies, two fields that inform her scholarship, curatorial projects, art works and design projects. Through her transdisciplinary practice Studio &, Wilson makes visible and legible the ways that anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal and desire. Her research investigates space, politics and cultural memory in black America; race and modern architecture; new technologies and the social production of space; and visual culture in contemporary art, media and film.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to ISERP and the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.

Date: Friday, Feburary 31st, 2025
Time: 1:00 – 5:00 PM
Location: Low Library Rotunda, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027

Date: Thursday, January 23rd
Time: 5:00 PM
Location: 707 International Affairs Building (Lindsay Rogers Room), 420 W. 118th St., New York, NY 10027

Please join us on Thursday, January 23d, at 5pm for the first in a series of evening talks co-sponsored by Columbia American Politics Speaker Series (CAPSS) and the Columbia World Projects (CWP) initiative on “Renewing Democratic Participation.”

Daniel Schlozman (Johns Hopkins), the recent co-author with Sam Rosenfeld of The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, will present on “Political Parties and the Democracy Conversation,” followed by comment by two discussants, Kate Krimmel (Barnard) and Ira Katznelson (Columbia). 

The event will take place from 5-6.30p.m. in the Lindsay Rogers Room (International Affairs Building 707).  Refreshments will be available. 

During the course of the term, there will be three additional evening sessions:

February 20, Daniel Carpenter (Harvard)
March 13, Didi Kuo (Stanford)
April 17, Susan Stokes (Chicago)  

This series is part of an initiative considering how political institutions and patterns of democratic representation can contribute to an open and inclusive civic culture.  Professor Schlozman will address a paradox: The decline of rooted, organized political parties is often identified as a contributor to the current crisis of democracy, yet when it comes to solutions, parties are little in evidence, and reformers tend to recast old anti-party arguments in new garb.

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.