The History Department will hold its annual undergraduate Open House & Career Session Thursday, February 25th from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.

The event will be via Zoom and will include Sarah Goldberg of Columbia’s Center for Career Education, a panel of History alumni, and current faculty and fellow History majors.  Each group will be discussing the uses of studying History on a personal, intellectual and professional level, the kind of careers available for History majors and concentrators, and alumni advice and tips for the job market.

To RSVP, please email (undergraduate-history@columbia.edu) with the subject “Career Session RSVP”.  With your RSVP you can also provide any questions or areas that you would like to have covered.

Register here!

Social Conversations Webinar: “Athlete Activism” Set For February 22

NEW YORK — Columbia Athletics is set to hold Social Conversations: Athlete Activism, on Monday, February 22 at 7 p.m. ET. The webinar will be moderated by Dr. Frank Guridy of the Columbia University Department of History along with a panel featuring Alton Byrd ’79CC, Nzingha Prescod ’15CC and Tyler Holmes ’18CC discussing the importance of activism in sports. This is the first webinar in a series of social conversations taking place this winter and spring.

Click here to register for the event. For more information contact lionstickets@columbia.edu.

About the participants

Dr. Frank Guidry
Specializes in sport history, urban history, and the history of the African Diaspora in the Americas. His forthcoming book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (University of Texas Press, 2021) explores how Texas-based sports entrepreneurs and athletes from marginalized backgrounds transformed American sporting culture during the 1960s and 1970s, the highpoint of the Black Freedom and Second-Wave feminist movements. His first book, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), won the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians and the Wesley-Logan Book Prize, conferred by the American Historical Association.
 
Alton Byrd
As Vice President of Growth Properties for the Long Island Nets and Nets GC, Alton Byrd oversees strategic and operational activities for the NBA G League’s Brooklyn Nets and Nets GC of the NBA 2K League. Byrd led the launch of the team’s inaugural season at Barclays Center in Brooklyn and the team’s permanent move to NYCB LIVE, home of the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, on Long Island. He now also works on the strategic business operations of NBA 2K team Nets GC.

Nzingha Prescod
Founder of Fencing in the Park, a community-based, outdoor summer series introducing the less visible sport of fencing to children of color in Brooklyn neighborhoods that are unlikely to access it, otherwise. Olympic, national team, and NCAA athletes joined together to lead the sessions and we enrolled more than 40 kids from underrepresented neighborhoods such as East Flatbush, Flatbush, Brownsville, Bed-Stuy, and Crown Heights. Parents reported noticeable improvement in their child’s discipline, teaming, and focus abilities. Many also believe FITP lifted their kids’ spirits in an unprecedented period of isolation and provided them with a productive outlet to develop confidence, optimism, and sense of purpose.
 
Tyler Holmes
Tyler Holmes graduated from Columbia College in 2018 with a major in Political Science and was a member of the Football Team during his 4 years. He currently is a full-time elementary teacher in the Bronx, a business owner of T. Holmes Photography, a photography and videography company, and an aspiring film director. He is also a member of Strategy For Black Lives, a youth led civil rights group in NYC focused on improving the lives of those impacted by systemic racism through protest and policy reform.  

Register here

Thursday, February 18 

Outsider Art (Art Brut): Symbolism of Body Adornments

Lucienne Peiry in conversation with Camille Robcis

Self-taught Outsider artists (“Art Brut”)  develop personal systems of expression to produce paintings, sculptures, drawings or textile works outside of official artistic circles. Sometimes unaware of social conventions, often resistant to cultural rules, they transgress (sometimes involuntarily) established codes and invent highly personal symbolic universes. In their works, Outsider artists invent subjects, modes of representation, systems of perspective, and technical means, often resorting to used, humble, or discarded materials.

In this conversation with Camille Robcis, Lucienne Peiry explores artists who use their own bodies as medium of expression in the isolation and exclusion of psychiatric hospitals. These artists create real or dreamlike clothes and bodily chimeras: a wedding dress created from threads pulled from used bed sheets, asylum outfits transformed and adorned with embroidered writings, costumes woven with frayed rags; the adornments are part of an extravagant ingenuity. Marguerite Sirvins, Agnes Richter, Anghus McPhee, and Arthur Bispo do Rosario create clothes that they feel are endowed with magical and healing virtues. Seeing their works triggers in the spectator a strong bodily reaction. 

Lucienne Peiry is an art historian, specialist of Art Brut, curator of exhibitions in Europe and Japan, especially “Intextricabilia, enchevêtrements magiques” at la Maison rouge, Paris, 2017, and “Ecrits d’Art Brut”, at the Tinguely Museum, in Basel, in 2021. From 2001 to 2011, she was the Director of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne. Lecturer at the EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) since 2015, she has written extensively on Art Brut, particularly L’Art Brut (translated into English, German and Chinese), and in 2020 Écrits d’Art Brut: Graphomanes extravagants. Lucienne Peiry also hosts a website called Notes d’Art Brut.

Camille Robcis is Associate Professor of History and French at Columbia University.

Fanny N. Guex, Ph.D.
Program Coordinator
Maison Française | Columbia University
fng2108@columbia.edu | 212-854-4482

www.maisonfrancaise.org

Friday 12 March, 2-4pm GMT via Zoom
RSVP: History.OnLine2021@gmail.com

• Franciszek Dąbrowski PhD, archivist in the Institute of National Remembrance Archives (digital resources branch),
deputy editor-in-chief of the “Institute of National Remembrance Review”, lecturer with the Institute of Military
History, War Studies University in Warsaw.
• Marek Dąbrowski, archivist in the Institute of National Remembrance Archives (digital resources branch), coordinates
the archival on-line publication projects.
• Jan Annusewicz, archivist in Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw (social and family archives
support branch).
Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej
Institute of National Remembrance Archives (AIPN)

The records of the former security police of the Communist dictatorship in Poland, among others. Minutes of the
Warsaw Pact Political Advisory Committee, as well as its Defense Ministers’ Committee meetings, and collections
of the security police intelligence branch and military intelligence.

Archiwum Akt Nowych, Central Archives of Modern Records (AAN):
Records of government and central institutions, including the vast collection of the Central Committee of
Communist party, and many other decision-making bodies in Communist-ruled Poland.
The first seminars took us to the Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown, NY, the Open Society Archives in Budapest, Hungary, the FRUS
Collection with the US State Department Office of the Historian and the CIA Reading Room, the Cold War collections at the British

National Library, and to Latin American Resources. For recordings of these sessions, visit https://www.victoria-phillips.global/history-
online. Please address questions to Dr. Victoria Phillips, V.Phillips2@lse.ac.uk or History.OnLine2021@gmail.com.

Chronic complication poster
Register here

Soviet Judgment At Nuremberg: A New History Of The International Military Tribunal After WWII By Francine Hirsch

Friday, January 29

A panel discussion with  Manan Ahmed (History)

On his new book, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India

Panelists:

Vishakha Desai (Chair, Committee on Global Thought)

Purnima Dhavan (History, University of Washington)

Ayesha Ramachandran (Comparative Literature, Yale University)

Time:  10:10am – 12:00pm

Registration details to be announced

Co-sponsored by the Committee on Global Thought, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy

Manan Ahmed is Associate Professor in the History Department at Columbia University. He is an historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE. His areas of specialization include intellectual history in South and Southeast Asia; critical philosophy of history, colonial and anti-colonial thought. He is interested in how modern and pre-modern historical narratives create understandings of places, communities, and intellectual genealogies for their readers. Prof. Ahmed’s second book, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (Harvard University Press, 2020), tells a history of the historians of the subcontinent from the tenth to the early twentieth century. The core of the book is the history Tarikh-i Firishta which was written by Muhammad Qasim Firishta (b. ca. 1570) in the Deccan in the early seventeenth century. Broadly, the book presents a concept-history of “Hindustan,” a political and historiographic category that was subsumed by the colonial project of creating British India and the subsequent polities of “Republic of India” and “Islamic Republic of Pakistan.”

Dr. Vishakha N. Desai is Chair, Committee on Global Thought; Senior Advisor for Global Affairs to the President of Columbia University; and a Senior Research Scholar for the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She also serves as Senior Advisor for Global Programs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. From 2004 through 2012, Dr. Desai served as President and CEO of the Asia Society, a global organization dedicated to strengthening partnerships between Asia and the U.S.  In 2012, in recognition of Dr. Desai’s leadership in the museum field, President Barack Obama appointed her to serve on the National Museum and Library Services Board. An internationally renowned scholar of Asian art, she has published and lectured extensively on the intersection of traditional and contemporary arts and policy in diverse countries of Asia.  Dr. Desai holds a B.A. in Political Science from Bombay University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Asian Art History from the University of Michigan, in addition to honorary degrees from Williams College, Centre College, Pace University, The College of Staten Island, and Susquehanna University.

Purnima Dhavan is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Washington.  Her Fields of Interest include Comparative Gender; Environmental History; Islamic Studies; Literature; Science and Technology; and South Asia.  Her research interests encompass the social and cultural history of early modern South Asia, 1500-1800. The ways in which religious, linguistic, and status identities shaped the political and cultural institutions of the Mughal period are central to her work.  Prof. Dhavan’s  first book, When Sparrows Became Hawks: the Making of Khalsa Martial Tradition (2011) examined the transformation of North Indian peasants into high-status warriors as they became members of the Sikh warrior order, the Khalsa.  Her second book project, The Lords of the Pen: Literary Associations in Early Modern South Asia, examines the literary activities of poets in emerging urban centers of the Mughal Empire to understand how participation in literary associations shaped understandings of caste, gender, and religious identity, to engage with larger questions of how notions of the “public” and “common good” emerged in different parts of the world.

Ayesha Ramachandran is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University.  Her research interests include Early modern European literature and cultural history; Renaissance poetry; history of science and technology (sixteenth and seventeenth century); cartography and literature; early modern empires and international law; history of philosophy; Europe and the Indo-Islamic world.  Her recent work focuses on Europe’s relations with an expanding world.  Her first book, The Worldmakers (University of Chicago Press, 2015) charts transnational encounters and the early mechanisms of globalization from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. It was awarded the MLA’s Scaglione prize in Comparative Literary Studies (2017), the Milton Society of America’s Shawcross Prize for the best book chapter on Milton (2016), and the Sixteenth Century Studies Association’s Founder’s Prize for the best first book manuscript (2015). In addition to literary and intellectual historical questions, Prof. Ramachandran is interested in early modern maps (particularly world mapping), the history of science and technology, early modern empires, and the rich visual archive of illustrated books in the period). Her current book project, Lyric Thinking: Humanism, Selfhood, Modernity, argues for the central importance of lyric form and language in shaping new intellectual possibilities for the self in the early modern period and beyond.

Registration link: 
https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUuceGgrD0jGN2zb8yrZzh-TfqtQMR5_cmz

Columbia University affiliates: Register here!

Public audience: Livestream on our YouTube and Facebook!

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Join us for an organic discussion about teaching against the institutional and canonical grain, cultivating inclusive classroom environments, gender dynamics in academia, the importance of tying lived experiences and scholarly work, and related topics. 

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Anupama Rao is a TOW Associate Professor of History, Barnard and MESAAS (Columbia) in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, History, Human Rights departments. She has research and teaching interests in gender and sexuality studies; caste and race; historical anthropology; social theory; comparative urbanism; and colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism.

Frank Guridy is an associate professor in the Columbia history department. He specializes in sport history, urban history, and the history of the African Diaspora in the Americas. 

Luz Colpa is a doctoral student in African history in the Columbia History department. Her interests include the history of household, family and gender in twentieth century West Africa and late-imperial France. Colpa’s research is centered on interracial, transnational and intercultural marriage in the Francophone world (1945-1974).

Rhiannon Stephens is an Associate Professor in the Columbia history department. She specializes in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the late first millennium CE through the twentieth century.

Johanna Fernández is a native New Yorker. She received a PhD in History from Columbia University and an AB in Literature and American Civilization from Brown University. Fernández is an Associate Professor of history at Baruch College of the City University of New York where she teaches 20th Century U.S. History, the history of social movements, the political economy of American cities, and African-American history. Fernández published her most recent manuscript, The Young Lords: A Radical History.

The American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS) will host a virtual conversation “Can Democracy Survive Growing Inequality?” on Thursday, January 14, 2021 at 1:00 pm EST.  New York Times columnist David Leonhardt will moderate a conversation with the 2020 AAPSS Fellows: Katherine Cramer, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Eric Foner, Columbia University; Helen Milner, Princeton University; Mario Luis Small, Harvard University and Bruce Western, Columbia University. The discussion will take stock of the current state of racial and socioeconomic inequality in the United States and around the world, and suggest public policy opportunities for the Biden administration. Please register here.

January 8 @ 12:30 PM via Zoom

Register Here: https://bit.ly/3bCK3u2

A virtual conference exploring issues of globalization and its opponents from various disciplinary perspectives. The conference will take place online on the second Friday of the month, from November 2020 to February 2021. The second session “Deglobalizing Capitalism” will take place January 8, 2021. 

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2020
7:00 PM

Click here for AAWW Event Info

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ8u9gX4TsQ&feature=youtu.be

Free Speech Norms in the 21st Century: Regardless of Frontiers or Guarded by Borders?

 

Live virtual event | December 16, 2020 | 10am (New York) | 4pm (Paris)

To mark the launch of their forthcoming edited volume Regardless of Frontiers: Global Freedom of Expression in a Troubled World, join Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger and Dr. Agnes Callamard, Director of Columbia University Global Freedom of Expression, in a conversation moderated by Professor Mark Mazower, Director of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

Have global norms on freedom of expression and information truly been established? President Bollinger and Dr. Callamard will critically address this question and evaluate which actors and institutions have contributed to developing these norms and which ones are undermining and constraining them. As they reflect on events and developments of the last 70 years, the speakers will discuss the future of free speech in a global context.

Welcome and introduction by Safwan M. Masri, Executive Vice President for Global Centers and Global Development.

In partnership with the Institute for Ideas and Imagination

Co-sponsored by: Columbia Global Freedom of Expression and Columbia University Press

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https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_llTMkfRGSr610N15QAnbsQ

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Regardless of Frontiers: Global Freedom of Expression in a Troubled World, published by Columbia University Press, is available for pre-order here.

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EVENT PARTICIPANTS

Lee C. Bollinger became Columbia University’s 19th president in 2002 and is the longest serving Ivy League president. He is Columbia’s first Seth Low Professor of the University, a member of the Law School faculty, and one of the nation’s foremost First Amendment scholars. Bollinger is widely published on legal and constitutional issues involving free speech and press. His books include: Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide Open: A Free Press for a New Century; Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era; Images of a Free Press; The Tolerant Society: Freedom of Speech and Extremist Speech in America, and The Free Speech Century, co-edited with Geoffrey R. Stone.

Bollinger serves as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. From 2007 to 2012, he was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he also served as Chair from 2010 to 2012.  From 1996 to 2002, Bollinger was the President of the University of Michigan. He led the university’s historic litigation in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, the first Supreme Court decisions to uphold and clarify the importance of diversity as a compelling justification for affirmative action in higher education. Bollinger is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and the recipient of ten honorary degrees and numerous awards, including the National Humanitarian Award from the National Conference for Community and Justice and the National Equal Justice Award from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Dr. Agnes Callamard was appointed U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary killings on August 1, 2016. She is the current Director of Columbia Global Freedom of Expression at Columbia University and is a Special Adviser to the President of Columbia University. She directed the global freedom of expression organization ARTICLE 19 for nine years, and led HAP International (the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership), which is the first international self-regulatory body for humanitarian agencies. She was Chef de Cabinet for the Secretary General of Amnesty International (AI) and AI’s Research-Policy Coordinator, leading its policy work and research on women’s human rights. Prior to this, she taught and conducted research on international refugee movements for the Center for Refugee Studies at York University in Toronto.

Dr. Callamard has lectured on human rights in universities in Europe and North America and has advised senior levels of multilateral organizations, most recently the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention. Dr. Callamard has led human rights investigations in more than 30 countries. As UN Special Rapporteur, she undertook the investigation into the extrajudicial execution of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. She has published extensively on human rights, including women’s rights, refugee movements and the methodology of human rights investigation. In particular, she has authored or directed volumes, on freedom of expression and information, political killings, excessive use of force and sexual violence in armed conflicts.

MODERATOR

Mark Mazower directs the Institute for Ideas and Imagination and the Stavros Niarchos Public Humanities Initiative at Columbia University where he is also the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History. He has written several books, including Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1998), Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (2004) and Governing the World: The History of an Idea (2012). His most recent work, What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home (2017), is about his father’s family. He works on and teaches the history of modern Europe and the international system and he has a particular interest in modern Greece. His reviews and commentaries on current affairs appear in the Financial Times and elsewhere.

The Perilous Public Square: Structural Threats to Free Expression Today

REGISTER

Americans of all political persuasions fear that “free speech” is under attack. This may seem strange at a time when legal protections for free expression remain strong and overt government censorship minimal. Yet a range of political, economic, social, and technological developments have raised profound challenges for how we manage speech. New threats to political discourse are mounting—from the rise of authoritarian populism and national security secrecy to the decline of print journalism and public trust in experts to the “fake news,” trolling, and increasingly subtle modes of surveillance made possible by digital technologies.

The Perilous Public Square brings together leading thinkers to identify and investigate today’s multifaceted threats to free expression. They go beyond the campus and the courthouse to pinpoint key structural changes in the means of mass communication and forms of global capitalism. Beginning with Tim Wu’s inquiry into whether the First Amendment is obsolete, Matthew Connelly, Jack Goldsmith, Kate Klonick, Frederick Schauer, Olivier Sylvain, and Heather Whitney explore ways to address these dangers and preserve the essential features of a healthy democracy. Their conversations with other leading thinkers, including Danielle Keats Citron, Jelani Cobb, Frank Pasquale, Geoffrey R. Stone, Rebecca Tushnet, and Kirsten Weld, cross the disciplinary boundaries of First Amendment law, internet law, media policy, journalism, legal history, and legal theory, offering fresh perspectives on fortifying the speech system and reinvigorating the public square.

The essays included in “The Perilous Public Square” were commissioned by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and first published as part of a Knight Institute series that David Pozen edited in his capacity as the Institute’s inaugural Visiting Scholar.

Huamanquiquia: Making an Intercommunal Peasant Alliance against the Shining Path in Peru (1983-1992)

Hubert Harrison: A Harlem Radical’s Struggle for Equality

25.11.2020
16:30 – 18:00

https://www.oiip.ac.at/events/the-us-and-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict-one-state-solution-two-state-solution-or-no-solution-at-all/

Zoom link will be sent to registered participants, please register below

ONLINE DISCUSSION

THIS EVENT IS PART OF THE “A BRAND NEW WORLD? SHIFTING POWERS IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS OIIP ONLINE SERIES”

The online discussion will explore the situation on the ground, elaborate on whether and how the Trump administration’s policies have impacted the conflict in the long-run, its repercussions on the broader Middle East region, and assess the role a Biden administration might play in the next future?

Participants:
Raffaella A. Del Sarto
(Associated Professor of Middle East Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, SAIS Europe)

Rashid Khalidi
(Edward Said Professor Columbia University NY)

Gideon Levy
(Journalist, Haaretz)

Moderated by:
Cengiz Günay
(Austrian Institute for international Affairs)

Program

In cooperation with the U.S. Embassy Vienna and the Ministry of Defense.

On November 20, a conversation about Pablo Piccato’s book with students at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla.

1:00 PM–2:00 PM    ONLINE EVENT

PANEL DISCUSSION:

Denaturalized. How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France

Claire Zalc in Conversation with Rebecca Kobrin and Emmannuelle Saada

To sign up for this event, click here.

Thousands of naturalized French men and women had their citizenship revoked by the Vichy government during the Second World War. Once denaturalized, these men and women, mostly Jews who were later sent to concentration camps, ceased being French on official records and walked off the pages of history. As a result, we have for decades severely underestimated the number of French Jews murdered by Nazis during the Holocaust. In Denaturalized, Claire Zalc unearths this tragic record and rewrites World War II history.

At its core, this is a detective story. How do we trace a citizen made alien by the law? How do we solve a murder when the body has vanished? Faced with the absence of straightforward evidence, Zalc turned to the original naturalization papers in order to uncover how denaturalization later occurred. She discovered that, in many cases, the very officials who granted citizenship to foreigners before 1940 were the ones who retracted it under Vichy rule.

The idea of citizenship has always existed alongside the threat of its revocation, and this is especially true for those who are naturalized citizens of a modern state. At a time when the status of millions of naturalized citizens in the United States and around the world is under greater scrutiny, Denaturalized turns our attention to the precariousness of the naturalized experience—the darkness that can befall those who suddenly find themselves legally cast out.

More about the book here.

Claire Zalc is Professor of History at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Research Director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and Director of the Institute of Modern and Contemporary History at the École normale supérieure.

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University.

Emmanuelle Saada is Professor of French and of History, and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Columbia University.

This event is organized by the Maison Française. It is co-sponsored by the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Department of History, and Alliance Program. This event is made possible with the support of the Knapp Family Foundation.

American Society for Legal History (ASLH) 2020 ANNUAL MEETING

November 13–14, 2020

Virtual Mini-Conference

Friday, November 13, 2020
(All times are U.S. Eastern Standard Time)

2:45-4:15: Panel 3 – The Preyer Prize Panel

“‘Los Hijos Son La Riqueza Del Pobre:’ Postwar Mexican Child Migration and the Making of Domestic (Im)migrant Exclusion, 1940-1965”
Ivón Padilla-Rodriguez, Columbia University

Comment
Barbara Welke, University of Minnesota

Migration in crisis: Insights on Covid-19 from past pandemics

The second in a new series of virtual events, “The South Asia Development Dialogues: Economic Policy Lessons from History” – a collaboration between the Economic Growth Center and the South Asian Studies Council

Event Details 

• Migration in crisis: Insights on Covid-19 from past pandemics – the second in the series, “South Asia Development Dialogues: Economic Policy Lessons from History”
• Date and time: Friday November 13, 2020, 10AM EST (15:00 GMT, 20:30 IST)
• Advance registration is required: click here 
• Hosts: Yale Economic Growth Center and the South Asian Studies Council

Panelists describe their research:

Event Description 

Across South Asia, migrant workers have been among those most affected by the pandemic. In India the initial lockdown was imposed with only hours’ notice, leading to a mass exodus of migrant workers from major cities – an exodus that in turn proved to be a major conduit of infection. At the same time, South Asian migrant workers abroad found themselves subject to deportation, or else stranded and unable to return home.

This has happened before. During the plague epidemic of the 1890s – far more lethal than Covid-19 – and again during the “Asian influenza” of 1957-58, migrant workers were the subject of intensive scrutiny, and their movements posed challenges to health policy. This virtual panel discussion will bridge insights from research into past pandemics in South Asia, and current research on the impact of Covid-19 on migrant workers. How can the interests of migrant workers be better protected? In times of crisis, what sorts of interventions have been most, and least, effective in balancing the interests of workers, their families, employers, and the interests of public health?  

 The event is the second in a new series, “The South Asia Development Dialogues: Economic Policy Lessons from History.” A collaboration between the Economic Growth Center and the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University, the series convenes economists, historians, journalists, and policymakers to apply insights from history and economics to the most pressing policy issues confronting contemporary South Asia.

Panelists 

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History, and current chair of the South Asian Studies Council. His research focuses on histories of environment, migration, and public health across South and Southeast Asia. 

Charity Troyer Moore is Director for South Asia Economics Research at Yale MacMillan Center. Her research has included large-scale phone surveys of women, migrant workers, and other vulnerable groups affected by the Covid-19 crisis. 

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan Is Associate Professor, Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University. She is a scholar focused on global public health history and South Asian history, with interests in the history of epidemics, and the politics of health.

Rory Stewart is a Senior Fellow at Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he focuses on contemporary politics in crisis and on international development and intervention in fragile and conflict affected states. Stewart served as the UK Secretary of State for International Development where he doubled the U.K.’s investment in international climate and environment.

Moderator 

Catherine Cheney ‘10 is a Senior Reporter for Devex, covering the West Coast of the U.S., focusing on the role of technology, innovation, and philanthropy in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

Register here

Monday, November 2nd, 2020
All Water Has a Memory: Rivers and American History Series

“Rivers and the Environmental Movement”
Chris Manganiello, Janisse Ray, and Fred Tutman
6PM – 7:30PM EST
All panels will be held over zoom, registration is free and open to all. 
Register here

Monday, October 26th, 2020 
All Water Has a Memory: Rivers and American History Series

“Rivers and Indigenous Resistance”
Ashley Smith, Zachary Bennett, Dustin Mack
6:30PM – 7:30PM EST
All panels will be held over zoom, registration is free and open to all. 
Register here

 Register

The Revolution Looks Inward: Internal Reflections on Elites and the Countryside in Atatürk’s Turkey, 1931-1938

Wednesday, October 21, 2020
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM EDT
ONLINE via Zoom
(Zoom meeting link to be sent after RSVP)

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-revolution-looks-inward-elites-and-the-countryside-ataturks-turkey-tickets-124183027779

We are delighted to welcome Ryan Gingeras (Naval Postgraduate School) for a talk jointly organized by The Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies & The Department of History.

By 1931, the men who governed the Republic of Turkey were confident that they had built a strong, centralized state upon the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. Yet doubts within the inner circle of Atatürk’s government remained. Beginning in 1931, ruling party officials in Ankara commissioned a series of investigative surveys of political, economic, and social life in the Turkish countryside. These surveys reveal much about how Turkey’s leaders genuinely perceived both the achievements and limits of the revolution inaugurated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This talk takes a critical look at these internal reports and places them in the context of other revolutionary and post-imperial states in the aftermath of the First World War.

Apocalypse Pending: Religion, Politics, and Social Media (Panel 1)

Click here to register.

This event will also be livestreamed on our YouTube page.

As the historian Richard Hofstadter famously pointed out more than half a century ago, conspiracy thinking or “the paranoid style” runs deep in the American political psyche.  With an eclectic religious population (many of whose ancestors fled persecution in Europe for their beliefs: Puritans, Quakers, Anabaptists, Huguenots, Catholics, Jews), the United States may be exceptional in its political DNA—a combination of religious fervor and persecutory fear that, while generally latent, sporadically erupts in the body politic.  The right-wing fear of social welfare policies as godless and unholy is one current manifestation of this particular political psychology.  Another is the increasing online presence of apocalyptic religious sects, of which QAnon is an articulation.

“Apocalypse Pending: Religion, Politics, and Social Media” explores the growing popularity of conspiracy thinking in our current moment and its place in the history of millenarian movements, particularly in the US context.  It considers how new media technologies have made it possible for the dissemination of such thinking on a scale unimaginable in the past, how the moral panic it generates is impacting social and political life worldwide, and whether there are measures available to control its spread or mitigate its effects.  

Sponsored by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, The Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Committee on Global Thought, Columbia Global Centers, and the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. 

Owing to limited capacity for this event, we will be sending registration confirmation and a Zoom webinar access link the day before the event. If you do not receive the access link, that means we were not able to accommodate you for this event, but we will notify you should the recording later become available online.

Speakers:

Stephanie McCurry, Professor of History at Columbia University, specializes in the American Civil War and Reconstruction, the nineteenth century United States, the American South, and the history of women and gender. Her most recent book is Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War (2019).

Brandy Zadrozny is an award-winning investigative and features reporter for NBC News where she covers misinformation, extremism, and the internet. Previously, Brandy was at The Daily Beast where she covered politics and the internet as a senior reporter. She has an MLIS and in a former life, worked as a librarian and instructor in news, college, and public libraries.

Moderator: Matthew L. Jones teaches history of science and technology at Columbia University. With Chris Wiggins, he will soon be publishing How Data Happened, which tells the story of the growth of data and the ways it changed power, and asks what to do now.

Monday, October 19th, 2020 
All Water Has a Memory: Rivers and American History Series 

“Rivers of Slavery and Freedom”
J.T. Roane, Tony Curtis Perry, Adrienne Troy-Frazier
6:30PM – 7:30PM EST
All panels will be held over zoom, registration is free and open to all. 
Register here 

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

The Government of Religious Life in Idi Amin’s Uganda
A lecture by Derek Peterson (University of Michigan)
Wednesday, October 14 @ 4:10pm EST
On Zoom: register here to receive the webinar link

Judith Surkis, in conversation with Stephanie McCurry, Karuna Mantena, and Emmanuelle Saada, moderated by Camille Robcis and Stefanos Geroulanos

Register here!

For general public: Livestream on Facebook and YouTube!

For Columbia affiliates: register and attend via Zoom

This panel will cover immigration justice issues including xenophobia, ICE, CBP and their presence at BLM protests, the US-Mexico border, histories of borders and immigration, histories of state violence, and related current events!

Organized and moderated by Saeeda Islam (Faculty Affairs Coordinator) and Emma Sheinbaum (Communications & Development Coordinator)

Brianna Nofil is an Assistant Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. She earned her PhD from Columbia University (GSAS ’20). Nofil’s research areas focus on immigration, borders and borderlands, carceral state, and legal.

Pablo Piccato, professor, specializes in Mexican 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.

Mae M. Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. Before becoming a historian she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education.

Karl Jacoby is a specialist in environmental, borderlands, and Native American history. His books include Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation and Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History.

PANEL DISCUSSION: 20/20 Vision in a Time of Crisis

A conversation with Etienne Balibar, Adam Tooze, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Emmanuelle Saada, moderated by Bernard Harcourt

To sign up for this virtual transatlantic event, RSVP here.

The Covid-19 pandemic and public health crisis; economic collapse; waves of anti-racist protests; threats to democracy and rising authoritarianism in the U.S. and elsewhere, all against a backdrop of an ever-worsening climate crisis… how can we make sense of the current moment in history? Bernard Harcourt engages Etienne Balibar, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Adam Tooze, and Emmanuelle Saada in a wide-ranging discussion about these destabilizing developments that bring into focus fundamental fault lines in the world today. 

Etienne Balibar teaches at Columbia every Fall semester. He is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X – Nanterre and Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Emmanuelle Saada is Professor of French and of History, and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Columbia. Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia. Souleymane Bachir Diagne is the Director of the Institute of African Studies, Professor of French and of Philosophy at Columbia. Bernard Harcourt is the Isidore and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia.

This event is presented by the Columbia Maison Française. It is co-sponsored by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, the European Institute, and the Alliance Program.

Faculty & Instructor Roundtable: Partnering with Columbia University Libraries on Remote Research-Assignment Design and Learning

Thurs. Aug. 13 @ 4 pm EDT

Dr. Stephanie McCurry: The Confederate States of America 

What was the Confederacy and what did it stand for? These are important questions in both history classrooms and public debate. Dr. McCurry will discuss what Confederate leaders believed they were doing; the challenges they faced both from within the South and outside it; the experiences of Black and white women in the Confederacy; and the role of women in the history of war.

Register for Dr. McCurry’s talk here.