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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.

Confronting Silences: Columbia University and the Afterlife of Slavery

Join Professor Karl Jacoby and the students in the History Department’s seminar on Columbia and Slavery as they discuss their research into the connections between Columbia and the legacies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

Question and Answer session to follow. 

Dr. Karl Jacoby: Professor (Department of History and Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University) 

A student conference for Prof. Victoria Phillips’ course Cold War Power. 

Featuring Alexander Cooley, Victoria de Grazia, Bradley Gorski, Victori aPhillips, and Anderes Stephanson. 

Keynote: Alexander Cooley
Ordering Eurasia: The Rise and Decline of the Liberal Internationalism in the Post-Communist Space

Panels
– American Jazzmen and Boxers Fight the Cold War
– Words are a Weapon: Literature and Soft Power
– Location, Location, Location: Nixon in Disneyland, Nevada’s Nuclear Ballerina, and Bridges in Space

A light lunch and afternoon refreshments will be served

See the full program and RSVP at: europe.columbia.edu/events

See conference details 05.02.2018 Cold War Power Conference – Program (1). 

LSE-CU Research Seminar: Territory and Resources in International History

The Rennert Forum of Barnard College will be hosting a visit by medieval historian Elisheva Baumgarten on Thursday, April 19th. 

Her most recent project, which she is working on this year as a fellow at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, is called “Beyond the Elite,” and her public lecture will draw upon that work. 

Prof. Baumgarten’s work is on the social and religious history of the Jews of medieval northern Europe (1000-1400), and she teaches medieval history in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry and in the Department of History at Hebrew University (Jerusalem). Her research focuses on the social history of the Jewish communities living in the urban centers of medieval Europe and especially on daily contacts between Jews and Christians. Her work seeks to include those who did not write the sources that have reached us, with a special interest in women and gender hierarchies.

Co-Sponsored by: Barnard’s Medieval and Renaissance Studies program and Columbia’s History Department

“Songs for the ‘Great Leaders’: Ideology and Political Agitation in the Music of North Korea” 

Keith Howard, (Fellow of the National Humanities Center, North Carolina and Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London)
Moderated by Charles K. Armstrong, (Korea Foundation Professor of the Korean Studies in the Social Sciences in the Department of History)
No registration required. 

Abstract:

Songs have, for more than 70 years, taken a central role in North Korean cultural production. They form the dominant soundscape, reflecting ideology, whether in Soviet-inspired revolutionary songs of the first decade of North Korea’s existence, in the Chinese-inspired incorporation of folksongs into nationalist discourse in the second decade, or in more recent state-sanctioned pop. Songs mark political transitions: they function as newpaper editorials, promoting new policies and underpinning the monolithic unity of the leaders, the party and the people. Under North Korea’s juche ideology, ‘seeds’ are implanted in the lyrics and in the leitmotifs of songs. Songs are then recast in multiple forms to increase the penetration of the ‘seed’. They become background music, festival music, and the music of mass games: the message remains even when lyrics are replaced by instrumental or orchestral arrangements. This seminar provides an overview, then zooms in on two periods of leadership transition – from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il in 1994-1997, and from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un in 2009-2011 – to explore the politicization of song culture. I offer brief comparisons to Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Karimov’s Uzbekistan and Assad’s Syria, but argues that North Korea has gone further than anywhere else in embedding songs into the fabric of the theatre of daily life.

Bio:

Professor Keith Howard is a Fellow of the National Humanities Center, North Carolina. He is Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London, and was formerly Professor and Associate Dean at the University of Sydney. He has written or edited 20 books and 150 academic articles. He has been a regular broadcaster on Korean affairs for BBC, ITV, Sky, NBC and others. He was editorial chair for the SOAS Musicology Series (Ashgate/Routledge) for nine years (2008–2017), and founded and managed the SOASIS CD and DVD series as well as OpenAir Radio. He serves on the boards of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, International Council for Traditional Music, and sits on editorial boards for Music Theory Spectrum, Asian Ethnology, Papers of the British Association for Korean Studies andOMNES.

Co-sponsored by Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Presentation of the book The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War by Peter Guardino (Indiana U).
“Between Savage Tribes: Frontier Warfare, Vigilantism, and Atrocities against Mexican Civilians during the Mexican-American War.”
With comments from Karl Jacoby and Stephanie McCurry (Columbia).

See flyer: dead march2

Matthew Bogdanos: “ISIS & Antiquities Trafficking”

For more information, click here.
To register, click here. 

Matthew Bogdanos will speak about the Islamic State’s trafficking in looted antiquities and the global black market that emerged after the looting of the Iraq Museum in April 2003. He will also discuss the aims and efforts of the New York District Attorney’s newly formed Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which under his leadership has already taken several highly visible actions against prominent antiquities collectors, dealers, and cultural institutions.

Matthew Bogdanos is a New York Assistant District Attorney and a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps. He has served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is the co-author of Thieves of Baghdad (2005), his account of tracking down looted antiquities in the wake of the plundering of the Baghdad Museum (his royalties go to the Baghdad Museum). Bogdanos holds a JD and an MA in Classical Studies from Columbia University, and an MA in Strategic Studies from the United States Army War College. He was awarded a Bronze Star for counterterrorist operations in Afghanistan and a National Humanities Medal from President George Bush in 2005 for his work recovering Iraqi antiquities.

Co-sponsors: Columbia University’s Department of History; Department of Classics; Classical Studies (CLST) Graduate Program; Center for the Ancient Mediterranean.

Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity

Editors Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna will be in conversation with
Volker Berghahn
Yasmine Ergas
Linda Gordon
Frances Fox Piven

Books will be available for sale.
Reception to follow.

JPG: 

Presentation of the book From Fascism to Populism in History  by Federico Finchelstein (New School). With comments from Carol Gluck, Mark Mazower, Nadia Urbinati, Pablo Piccato (Columbia) and Hugo Drochon (Cambridge). 

See flyer: from-fascism.pdf

Protestants Abroad: How missionaries tried to change the world but changed America 
David Hollinger (University of California, Berkeley)
and
Susan Pedersen
Wayne Proudfoot
Casey N. Blake

Please see attached flier: 

Korematsu V. United States: The History and Legacy of the WWII Japanese American Incarceration Cases

In 1943 and 1944 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the military orders that forced over 120,000 Japanese Americans into American prison camps. It took almost 40 years to overturn the convictions of Fred Korematsu and others who violated the orders with the “smoking fun” evidence of governmental misconduct. 

A panel discussion with:

-Prof. Peter Irons of the University of California at San Diego, author of Justice at War and a leader of the 1983 legal team representing Fred Korematsu

– Karen Korematsu, daughter of Fred Korematsu and Founder & Executive Director, Fred T. Korematsu Institute

Moderated by Michael Hindus
Lecturer in History and American Studies

Presented by the Center for American Studies
with support from the Jack Miller Center 

Carol Anderson (Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies)

“One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy”

Reception to follow in 411 Fayerweather Hall 

International History Workshop presents: Rockefeller Archives Center information session and archives workshop, featuring 

Bob Clark, Director of Archives

Renee Pappous, Assistant Archivist, Reference

Barb Shubinksi, Assistant Director, Research and Education

for more information and to submit a question in advance please contact Sam Coggeshall at sfc2117@columbia.edu