Lecture by Roham Alvandi 

Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the Iranian student opposition abroad, developed contending narratives of human rights in Iran. While Iranian students worked with Western human rights organizations to highlight the use of torture against political prisoners in Iran, the Pahlavi state responded by embracing a Third World narrative of human rights that emphasized state sovereignty at the 1968 UN International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran. In this lecture, Dr. Roham Alvandi examines how both the Shah and his opponents sought to instrumentalize human rights in the international struggle that sparked the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79.

For more information, click here. 

Featuring

• Ido de Haan, Professor of Political History, Utrecht University, & Queen Wilhelmina Visiting Professor, Columbia University.
• Beatrice de Graaf, Professor of History of International Relations & Global Governance,Utrecht University.
• Brian Vick, Associate Professor of History, Emory University.

Moderated by

• Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History & Director of the European Institute.

After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the leaders of Europe aimed to establish a new balance of power. The 1815 Congress of Vienna ushered in the emergence of a genuinely European security culture. Securing Europe after Napoleon offers new insights into the military cooperation, ambassadorial conferences, transnational police networks, and international commissions that helped produce stability.

To RSVP, click here. 

“Complaint as Diversity Work” – Sara Ahmed 

What can be learnt about the workings of power from those who challenge power? This lecture draws on interviews conducted with staff and students who have made complaints within universities that relate to unfair, unjust or unequal working conditions and to abuses of power such as harassment and bullying. The lecture approaches complaint as a form of diversity work: the work some have to do in order to be accommodated. Making a complaint requires becoming an institutional mechanic: you have to work out how to get a complaint through a system. It is because of the difficulty of getting through that complaints often end up being about the system. The lecture explores how the experiences that lead to complaint and the experiences of complaint are hard to untangle. It reflects on the role of academic networks and professional intimacies in shaping what happens to complaints and to those who complain. 

Featuring: Pamela Ballinger (University of Michigan) Presenter
Victoria De Grazia (Columbia University) Respondent
Konstantina Zanou (Columbia University) Moderator

Pamela Ballinger reexamines Italy’s decolonization by demonstrating the visible and deeply felt impacts of repatriation by Italian settlers to the metropole and the continued visibility of these experiences in public debates during succeeding decades. She argues that films, novels, and other cultural artefacts can be seen as encoding multidirectional memories: of fascism, of Italian colonialism, of the experience of Italians in other powers’ colonies.

To RSVP, email kz2269@columbia.edu 

Sheri Berman, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jack Snuder, Alexander Stille, Adam Tooze

Panel discussion of new book by Sheri Berman, in discussion with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jack Snyder, and Alexander Stille, moderated by Adam Tooze

Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe (Oxford University Press, 2018) explains how democracy actually develops, and how we should interpret the current wave of illiberalism sweeping Europe and the rest of the world. Sheri Berman is Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of Italian and History at NYU. Jack Snyder is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Columbia. Alexander Stille is the San Paolo Professor of International Journalism at Columbia. Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History & Director of the European Institute at Columbia.

Presented as part of the New Books in the Arts and Sciences series. Event co-sponsored by the European Institute, Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, Office of Divisional Deans 
and Maison Française

To RSVP, click here. 

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What do we know about the landscapes that we inhabit and that serve as places of recreation? How are the historical narratives we’ve been taught a means of erasure?

“Karl Jacoby has devoted his career to understanding the ways in which the making of the United States intertwined with the unmaking of a variety of other societies—from Native American nations to the communities of northern Mexico—and the ecologies upon which they rested.”

We’re excited to announce that History and CSER Professor Karl Jacoby will be leading a teach-in on land use and environmental history. In addition to land rights and environmental history, Jacoby is a scholar of genocide studies Native American history, and borderlands history.

Snacks will be provided!

To register, click here. 

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To see program, see below. 

Transnational Counterrevolutions:

Ideas and Practices of the Right in Latin America’s Cold War

Columbia University, November 9-10, 2018

Sponsored by the Columbia History Department, the Columbia Institute of Latin American Studies, the Columbia Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the Janey Program at the New School for Social Research.

 

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9 (Jerome Greene Hall 101, Columbia Law School)

 

1:45 – 2:00            Welcome and Opening Remarks

 

2:00 – 3:45            Panel 1: The (Transnational) Caribbean Counterrevolution

 

Jennifer Lambe (Brown University). “The Communist Closet: Secrecy, Sexuality, and Ideology in the Cuban Cold War.”

 

Aaron Coy Moulton (Stephen F. Austin State University). “Counterrevolutionary Synergy: A Caribbean Basin Anti-Communist Network, 1947-1952.”

 

Michelle Chase (Pace University). “Cuban Anti-Communism from the Caribbean to the Congo, 1960-65.”

 

Discussant: Eric Zolov (Stony Brook University)

 

3:45 – 4:00            Coffee Break

 

4:00 – 5:45            Panel 2: Infrastructures and Relationships in the Southern Cone

 

1. Patrice McSherry (Long Island University). “Operation Condor: The Organization of Transnational State Violence.”

 

Paul R. Katz (Columbia University). “A Pericentric Approach to the Superior War Colleges of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s.”

 

Mila Burns (Lehman College, City University of New York). “Between Coups: Brazil and Chile Relations Before Allende and After 1964.”

 

Discussant:  Pablo Piccato (Columbia University)

 

6:00 – 7:30            Keynote 1: The European Democracies and the Brazilian Dictatorship: The Case of Great Britain. João Roberto Martins Filho (Federal University of São Carlos)

 

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10 (Jerome Greene Hall 104, Columbia Law School)

 

9:00 – 9:30            Light Breakfast

 

9:30 – 11:15         Panel 3: Transatlantic Networks and Inspirations

 

Luis Herran Avila (University of New Mexico). “La guerra por los caminos del mundo: transnational anticommunist violence and Latin America’s counterrevolution after 1959.”

 

Daniel Gunnar Kressel (Columbia University). “The ‘Spiritual Technocrat’ and the Theory of the “Post-Ideological” Society in Spain, Argentina, and Chile (1957-1977).”

 

Kirsten Weld (Harvard University). “A Guatemalan Reconquest: Falangist Ideology and Arbenz’s Overthrow.”   

 

Discussant: Nara Milanich (Barnard College)

 

11:15 – 11:30      Coffee Break

 

11:30 – 1:15         Panel 4: Neoliberalism and Right-Wing Theories of Progress

 

Benjamin Cowen (University of California, San Diego). “A Hemispheric Moral Majority: Brazil and the Transnational Construction of the New Right.”

 

Cos Tollerson (New York University). “Not One, But Many Brazils: Race-Thinking, Regionalism, and the 1964 coup d’état.”

 

Mary Roldán (Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center). “Foundation(al) Fictions: The Alliance for Progress, Corporate Philanthropy, the Catholic Church, and Neoliberal Development in Colombia.”

 

Discussant: Rachel Nolan (Society of Fellows, Columbia University)

 

1:15 – 2:15            Lunch

 

2:30 – 4:15            Roundtable: The Latin American Right and the Global Counterrevolution

 

Featuring Federico Finchelstein (New School), J. Patrice McSherry (Long Island University), Luca Provenzano (Columbia University), and Colleen Woods (University of Maryland). Moderated by Bernard Harcourt (Columbia University).

 

4:15 – 4:30            Coffee Break

 

4:30 – 6:00            Keynote 2: The Importance, Insights, and Challenges of the Study of Transnational Counterrevolutions. Margaret Power (Illinois Institute of Technology)

 

6:00 – 6:30            Closing Remarks

Registration required, click here. 

Columbia University Seminar Series on 20th Century Politics and Society

“Iran in the Age of Aryamehr: Late Pahlavi Iran and its Global Entanglements”

A talk by Roham Alvandi, LSE

Please write to Peter Slezkine (slezkine@gmail.com) for additional information

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Eric Fassin, introduced by Camille Robcis and George Chauncey

Gender studies have long faced indifference. But today, they are confronted with two symmetrical problems: instrumentalization and rejection. On the one hand, the rhetoric of “sexual democracy” has been mobilized for xenophobic and racist purposes. On the other hand, reactionaries attack the so-called “ideology of gender.” Which is more threatening?

Éric Fassin is Professor of Sociology in the Departments of Political Science and Gender Studies, Paris-8 University Vincennes – Saint-Denis, Laboratoire d’études de genre et de sexualité (CNRS)

This event is co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Francaise, the Columbia Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities, and the Insitute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

To register, please click here. 

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3/13: Indivisible: Political Revolution

This book explores the radical innovations of African Catholic and Protestant evangelists who received and innovated Christianity to challenge local and foreign governments operating in the League of Nations Mandate of Cameroon. Demonstrating the power of non-clerical networks rather than institutional hierarchies, African Christians transformed foreign missionary societies into profoundly local religious institutions by establishing novel family and community models and reimagining African male authority. Relevant for those interested in African religion, global Christianity, colonialism, and masculinity studies.

Lecture by Michel Feher, in conversation with Bernard Harcourt and Adam Tooze, moderated by Camille Robcis

The hegemony of finance compels a new orientation for everyone and everything: companies care more about the moods of their shareholders than about longstanding commercial success; governments subordinate citizen welfare to appeasing creditors; and individuals are concerned less with immediate income from labor than with appreciation of their capital goods, skills, connections, and reputations. In this book (from MIT Press), in clear and compelling prose, Michel Feher explains the extraordinary shift in conduct and orientation generated by financialization. That firms, states, and people depend more on their ratings than on the product of their activities also changes how capitalism is resisted. For activists, the focus of grievances shifts from the extraction of profit to the conditions under which financial institutions allocate credit. While the exploitation of employees by their employers has hardly been curbed, the power of investors to select investees—to decide who and what is deemed creditworthy—has become a new site of social struggle. Above all, Feher articulates the new political resistances and aspirations that investees draw from their rated agency.

Michel Feher’s new book from MIT press describes the extraordinary shift in conduct and orientation—among companies, governments, and individuals—generated by financialization. Feher, a Belgian philosopher, is the author of Powerless by Design: The Age of the International Community and the editor of Nongovernmental Politics and Europe at a Crossroads, among other titles. Founder of Cette France-là, a monitoring group on French immigration policy, Feher is also a founding editor of Zone Books.

Event co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, and European Institute.

To RSVP, click here. 

Making Art, Making Meaning in 15th-Century Flanders: 

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Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge

Registration required: to register, click here.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11, 6-7:30 P.M.

Claude Levi-Strauss, our contemporary 

Emmanuelle Loyer, in conversation with Emmanuelle Saada and Camille Robcis

*In French with English translation

Emmanuelle Loyer recently published a widely acclaimed biography on French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, which has just been translated into English as Lévi-Strauss: A Biography. In this talk, she discusses how Lévi-Strauss took a critical perspective on the present, expressed not only in his structural anthropology but also in his acerbic critiques of many things we take as certainties in the modern world, including our belief in progress and even our modern conception of human rights, whereas he advocated for a more inclusive “rights of the living.” Lévi-Strauss’s “regard éloigné” or “view from afar” still yields today one of the sharpest critiques of present times and of the ills of modernity.

Emmanuelle Loyer is Professor of Contemporary History at Sciences Po Paris. Her books include Paris à New York, Intellectuels et artistes français en exil, 1940-1947 ; Mai 68 dans le texte; and Lévi-Strauss, for which she won the Prix Femina in 2015. It is being released in English translation as Lévi-Strauss: A Biography by Wiley in October 2018. Emmanuelle Saada is Professor of French and History at Columbia. Camille Robcis is Associate Professor of French and History at Columbia.

Event co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française and Alliance Program. Event made possible with support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

Les Historiennes

Registration required: to register, click here. 

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 6-7:30 P.M.

Marriage and Slavery in the Early Portuguese Atlantic World

Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile, in conversation with Amy Chazkel and Roquinaldo Ferreira 

Marriage played a crucial role in the making of a Catholic slavery-based society such as that of Brazil from the 16th century to the 19th century. Historical sources such as legal documents and petitions from slaves can shed light on the topic. In this Catholic world, marriage was accessible to slaves, in theory at least, without their master’s permission. The point is to understand how the ecclesiastical institution made possible some marital freedom within the slavery system and how slaves used this real but limited right to claim some area of autonomy. Attentive to slaves’ voices, this lecture is an invitation to think about the functioning of the long-standing slavery-based Brazilian society, developed between Africa, America and Europe.

Charlotte de Castelnau is Professor of Early Modern History at the Université de Paris 7 – Diderot.  Her research interests include the history of slavery and the history of Catholicism in the modern era.

Amy Chazkel is Associate Professor of History at CUNY Graduate Center. 

Event co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.  Made possible with support from the Institut Français.

France’s Fifth Republic: Origins and Legacies

Amidst the gala commemorations of “68,” 2018 also marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Fifth Republic, a constitutional regime issued from a coup d’etat and forged in colonial war. This conference is an occasion to reflect on the turbulent origins of the present-day French Republic as well as the legacies of its foundation, from the crisis of May 1958 to the institutions that continue to govern France more than half a century later.

Featuring Grey Anderson, Adam Tooze, Nadia Urbinati, Delphine Dulong, Herrick Chapman, Emmanuelle Saada, Megan Brown, Todd Shepard, Kalinka Courtois, & Luca Provenzano.

Sponsored by the European Institute, the Alliance Program, the Department of History, and the Maison Francaise

See flyerFrench Fifth Republic-2.

Iuventa 
Everyone in Maritime Emergency Deserves Rescue

To register, click here. 

The Thinking Europe Now Seminar presents

IUVENTA – Film Screening and Discussion

A film screening and discussion with Michele Cinque (Director of documentary Iuventa) and Kathrin Schmidt (Head of Mission, Jugend Rettet / Iuventa), in conversation with Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, Rajan Menon, Adam Tooze, and Nadia Urbinati.

This event marks the launch of “Thinking Europe Now,” a new interdisciplinary seminar series on European affairs convened by faculty from Columbia University and the City College of New York.

The documentary film Iuventa relates the events of a crucial year in the lives of a group of young Europeans involved in the Jugend Rettet humanitarian project, starting from the first voyage of the Iuventa ship to rescue over 2,000 migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, to the heavy accusations that led to the seizure of the vessel more than a year later. The backbone of the narration is the ship’s first trip out to sea: setting sail from Malta, she comes back to La Valletta after 15 days offshore, having saved the lives of over 2,000 people. After the first mission the film takes us to Berlin and in Italy in the months following the first voyage, through the winter time when the future of the Jugend Rettet is discussed. The film, precisely because of the particularly young age of its protagonists, becomes the tale of a sort of training period: finding themselves at the forefront of this horror and death, and conscious of the vastness and complexities of the correlated socio-political problems, these youngsters start having doubts about the sense of the whole project which, it appears, determines in some way the loss of their innocence.

We are thrilled to be joined by the director of Iuventa, Michele Cinque, as well as one of documentary’s protagonists, Kathrin Schmidt (Head of Mission, Jugend Rettet / Iuventa).

This event is sponsored by the Thinking Europe Now Seminar, the European Institute, the Columbia Maison Française, and the Columbia European Union Student Association.

Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel & the Arab World
Maha Nassar (The University of Arizona)
Introduced by Rashid Khalidi (Department of History)

Maha Nassar is an Associate Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. She specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of the modern Arab world. 

Her book, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World, examines how Palestinian intellectuals in Israel have connected to global decolonization movements through literary and journalistic writings. This book has been shortlisted for the 2018 Palestine book Awards. 

Prof. Nassar is a 2018 Public vocies Fellow with the OpEd Project and a Policy Member of Al-Shabaka – The Palestinian Policy Network. 

 

Ten Years On: Reflections on the Economic and Political Legacy of the Financial Crisis for Europe

Join us for a conversation between Pierre Moscovici and Adam Tooze, followed by a Q&A.

Pierre Moscovici is the European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation, and Customs, and the former French Minister for Economy and Finance.

Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullon Davis Professor of History and the Director of the European Institute.

To register, click here. 

Event co-sponsored by The European Institute and The Columbia University Maison Française.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World 
Adam Tooze, Katharina Pistor, Charles F. Sabel, Tano Santos
Moderated by Mark Mazower

Registration
Free and open to the public
No registration necessary
First come, first seated

New Books in the Arts & Sciences:
Celebrating Recent Work by Adam Tooze

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
By: Adam Tooze

From a prizewinning economic historian, an eye-opening reinterpretation of the 2008 economic crisis (and its ten-year aftermath) as a global event that directly led to the shockwaves being felt around the world today.

In September 2008 President George Bush could still describe the financial crisis as an incident local to Wall Street. In fact it was a dramatic caesura of global significance that spiraled around the world, from the financial markets of the UK and Europe to the factories and dockyards of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, forcing a rearrangement of global governance. In the United States and Europe, it caused a fundamental reconsideration of capitalist democracy, eventually leading to the war in the Ukraine, the chaos of Greece, Brexit, and Trump. 

It was the greatest crisis to have struck Western societies since the end of the Cold War, but was it inevitable? And is it over? Crashed is a dramatic new narrative resting on original themes: the haphazard nature of economic development and the erratic path of debt around the world; the unseen way individual countries and regions are linked together in deeply unequal relationships through financial interdependence, investment, politics, and force; the ways the financial crisis interacted with the spectacular rise of social media, the crisis of middle-class America, the rise of China, and global struggles over fossil fuels. 

Finally, Tooze asks, given this history, what now are the prospects for a liberal, stable, and coherent world order?

For more information, click here. 

World Leaders Forum: Can the EU be True to its Values? First Vice-President of the European Commission H.E. Frans Timmermans

Wanted! Crime, Punishment, And The State in Habsburg Central Europe, C. 1750-1820

Please join the East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a talk with Dr. Stephan Sander-Faes, István Deák Visiting Professor at the Harriman Institute.

This talk features the more or less criminal deeds of individuals in the Austrian monarchy around the turn of the nineteenth century. Continuity and change, widely understood, as well as an increasingly activist central government were the hallmarks of the Josephi(ni)st state during an era characterised by the French Revolution (1789), the ensuing Napoleonic wars, the end of the Holy Roman Empire (1806), and the incipient industrialization.

Dr. Sander-Faes will investigate a largely overlooked source type: wanted notes from Lower Austria during these momentuous decades. In looking at the communication, circulation, and modification of the relevant media, he will also touch upon the construction of ‘the criminal’, what he or she looked like, and how state officials described these offenders. Analysis of these (written) wanted notes further enables us to consider three additional aspects: the diffusion of body knowledge among a mostly illiterate peasantry, which highlights how judicial-bureaucratic sources may be used to analyze shifts in media use, and, finally, allows for insights into the material culture of the rural underclasses.

For more information, click here. 

Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin
Seyla Benhabib, Nadia Urbinati, Jeremy Waldron, Bernard Harcourt, Adam Tooze

Preventing Palestine: A Political History From Camp David to Oslo
A book launch and conversation with Dr. Seth Anziska and Professor Rashid Khalidi
For more information, click

The Field of Blood: Joanne Freeman and Eric Foner

To register, click here. 

Joanne Freeman and Eric Foner discuss her new book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, in which she brings to light the history of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress in the decades preceding the Civil War and the consequences of that violence for the state of the Union.

Joanne Freeman, a professor of history and American studies at Yale University, is the author of Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic and the editor of The Essential Hamilton and Alexander Hamilton: Writings. She is a co-host of the history podcast BackStory. Freeman worked on The Field of Blood during her Cullman Center Fellowship in 2007-2008.

Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. He is one of just two persons to serve as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians. He is the author of multiple award-winning books including The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, for which he won the Bancroft Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for History, and the Lincoln Prize.

PLEASE ARRIVE EARLY
For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. There is no charge for attendance, however, seating is not guaranteed without reservations. All unclaimed seats are released 10 minutes before start time, so we recommend arriving early. Doors open at 6:30.

PRESS 
Please send all press inquiries (photo, video, interviews, audio-recording, etc.) at least 24-hours before the day of the program to Amy Geduldig at amygeduldig@nypl.org.