Book Launch & Discussion
“Splendor, Turbulence, and Dreams: Late Medieval Courts and Culture in the Burgundian North”
Rereading Huizinga: Autumn of the Middle Ages, a Century Later

Featuring Peter Arnade, Marc Boone, Martha Howell, Matt Jones, & Adam Kosto

Wednesday, October 30th, 2019
6:00 – 7:30 PM
Maison Française, Buell Hall

Please RSVP at bit.ly/medieval-culture

Wednesday, October 30th, 2019
New York Premier screening & Panel Discussion of Frances Perkins documentary: Summoned: Frances Perkins and the General Welfare

4PM-7PM, Pulitzer Hall, 2950 Broadway

Event page and registration here.
 

Description and registration info to come.

Speakers:
Katharina Pistor | Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law
Adam Tooze | Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History; Director of the European Institute; Member of the Committee on Global Thought
Jean Cohen | Nell and Herbert M. Singer Professor of Contemporary Civilization in the Core Curriculum

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Economic Policy: Priorities for Europe in 2020
Featuring

• Marco Buti, Director General for Economic and Financial Affairs, European Commission
• Tano Santos, David L. and Elsie M. Dodd Professor of Finance , Columbia Business School
• Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History & Director of the European Institute, Columbia University

RSVP for Economic Policy: Priorities for Europe in 2020

This event is made possible thanks to the support of the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

Me The People: How Populism Transforms Democracy by Nadia Urbinati
Book Launch & Discussion

Panel:
Nadia Urbinati
Sheri Berman
Federico Finchelstein
Bernard Manin
Adam Tooze

RSVP here.

This talk explores the intersections of politics, philosophy, and radical psychiatry in 20th century France. It focuses on a psychiatric reform movement called “institutional psychotherapy” which had an important influence on many intellectuals and activists, including François Tosquelles, Jean Oury, Felix Guattari, Frantz Fanon, Georges Canguilhem, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in Marxism and in Lacanian psychoanalysis, institutional psychotherapy advocated a fundamental restructuring of the asylum in order to transform the theory and practice of psychiatric care. More broadly, for many of these thinkers, the psychiatric offered a lens to rethink the political in the particular context of postwar France.

Camille Robcis is an Associate Professor of History and French at Columbia Unversity. Camille Robcis specializes in modern European intellectual history, with a focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. Her interests have circled around three issues: the historical construction of norms, the intellectual production of knowledge, and the articulation of universalism and difference in modern French history. Prior to coming to Columbia, she taught at Cornell for ten years.

This event is free and open to the public.

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

Sponsoring Organizations:

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

Panel Discussion:
The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940-1945
Olivier Wieviorka, with responses by Robert O. Paxton and Mark Mazower

To RSVP, please click here. 

Olivier Wieviorka talks about his newly translated book, The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2019), a sweeping analytical history of the underground anti-Nazi forces during World War II. Examining clandestine organizations in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Italy, Olivier Wieviorka sheds new light on the factors that shaped the resistance and its place in the grand scheme of Anglo-American military strategy. While national actors played a leading role in fomenting resistance, British and American intelligence services and propaganda as well as financial, material, and logistical support were crucial to its activities and growth. Wieviorka illuminates the policies of governments in exile and resistance actors regarding cooperation with the British and Americans, pointing to the persistence of national self-interest and long-standing historical tensions. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources and bringing together the political, diplomatic, and military dimensions of the conflict, this book is the first account of the resistance on a continental scale and from a trans-European perspective. 

Olivier Wieviorka is professor of history at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris-Saclay. His books in English include The French Resistance (2016), also translated by Jane Marie Todd. Robert O. Paxton is the Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science at Columbia University.  Mark Mazower is the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia. 

Event co-sponsored by the Knapp Family Foundation, Department of History, Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Alliance Program, and European Institute.

Colloquium on Global Hồ Chí Minh
October 4, 9:30am – 5:45pm

Held on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Hồ Chí Minh, this international colloquium will interrogate Hồ’s role in the formation of modern Vietnam and explore the country’s position in world affairs in the 20th Century. Participants will share their new multi-lingual and multi-archival research and past works on the life, career, and legacy of Hồ Chí Minh. This colloquium also serves to announce a new partnership between Columbia University and the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi. 

Schedule

9:30am – 10am:      Comments by Co-Organizers, Professors Pham Quang Minh and Lien-Hang T. Nguyen    

10am – 12pm:   Panel 1: Hồ and the Imperial Powers

• Do Quang Hung, Professor, Department of Political Science at Vietnam National University
• Alec Holcombe, Assistant Professor, Department of History at Ohio University

12pm – 1pm       Lunch break

1pm – 3:30pm:        Panel 2: Hồ in the Global Cold War, 1945-1969

• Pham Quang Minh, Rector and Professor, Historian and Political Scientist, Department of International Studies at Vietnam National University
• Tran Viet Nghia, Associate Professor and Director of the Office for the Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vietnam National University
• Pierre Asselin, Professor and Dwight E. Stanford Chair in American Foreign Relations, Department of History at San Diego State University

3:30pm – 3:45pm:     Coffee break

3:45pm – 5:45pm:     Hồ’s Global Legacy

• Pham Hong Tung, Historian, Professor and Director of the Institute of Vietnamese Studies and Development Science at Vietnam National University
• Olga Dror, Associate Professor, Department of History, College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University and Fellow at the National Humanities Center

1619 And Its Legacies: Symposium, Roundtable Discussion, & Poetic Reading

Observing the 400th Commemoration of the arrival of Africans in Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English colony in North America. Exploring the ongoing impact and legacy of chattel slavery and anti-Black racism. 

1619 And Its Legacies: Symposium, Roundtable Discussion, & Poetic Reading

Observing the 400th Commemoration of the arrival of Africans in Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English colony in North America. Exploring the ongoing impact and legacy of chattel slavery and anti-Black racism. 

Speakers:
Nara B. Milanich, Barnard College
Dorothy Y. Ko, Barnard College
Maya Jasanoff, Harvard University
Emmanuelle Saada, Columbia University

For most of human history, the notion that paternity was uncertain appeared to be an immutable law of nature. The unknown father provided entertaining plotlines from Shakespeare to the Victorian novelists and lay at the heart of inheritance and child support disputes. But in the 1920s new scientific advances promised to solve the mystery of paternity once and for all. The stakes were high: fatherhood has always been a public relationship as well as a private one. It confers not only patrimony and legitimacy but also a name, nationality, and identity.

The new science of paternity, with methods such as blood typing, fingerprinting, and facial analysis, would bring clarity to the conundrum of fatherhood—or so it appeared. Suddenly, it would be possible to establish family relationships, expose adulterous affairs, locate errant fathers, unravel baby mix-ups, and discover one’s true race and ethnicity. Tracing the scientific quest for the father up to the present, with the advent of seemingly foolproof DNA analysis, Nara Milanich shows that the effort to establish biological truth has not ended the quest for the father. Rather, scientific certainty has revealed the fundamentally social, cultural, and political nature of paternity. As Paternity shows, in the age of modern genetics the answer to the question “Who’s your father?” remains as complicated as ever.

For our first event in the Talks with Professors Series this semester, we’re excited to have Professor Frank Guridy join us for an intimate discussion about “Sports and Politics in a Time of Political Polarization.”

This symposium convenes an interdisciplinary conversation on political and ecological crisis in the Greater Caribbean. In the aftermath of adverse climatic and seismic events, Caribbean states and territorial dependencies are subjected to new regimes of disaster capitalism and political intervention. Meanwhile, crises of sovereign debt and governing legitimacy set off new grassroots mobilizations against austerity and fiscal control. Drawing on historical and ethnographic perspectives, symposium participants will engage the existential crisis of climate changes alongside a crisis in the state form as a vehicle of postcolonial political futures. 

At the Heymen Center for the Humanities at Columbia. 

For more information, or to RSVP please contact statesofcrisis@gmail.com. 

Book panel discussion with Isser Woloch, Victoria de Grazia, Ira Katznelson, and Adam Tooze

After the end of World War II, Britain, France, and the U.S. were faced with two very different choices: return to the civic order of pre-war normalcy or embark instead on a path of progressive transformation. In this ambitious and original new book, Isser Woloch assesses the progressive agendas that crystalized in each of the three allied democracies, tracing their roots in the interwar decades, their development during wartime, the struggles to establish them after the war’s end, and the mixed outcome in each country.

Isser Woloch is the Moore Collegiate Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. His books include Napoleon and His Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship and The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s.

Event co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française, European Institute, and Department of History.

Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Please arrive ahead of time to secure a spot.

For more information & to RSVP, click here.

Mythologized as the era of the “good war” and the “Greatest Generation,” the 1940s are frequently understood as a more heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of dread, alienation, and the haunting specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They probed the darkness that the war opened up and confronted bigotry, existential guilt, ecological concerns, and fear about the nature and survival of the human race. In Facing the Abyss, George Hutchinson offers readings of individual works and the larger intellectual and cultural scene to reveal the 1940s as a period of profound and influential accomplishment.

Facing the Abyss examines the relation of aesthetics to politics, the idea of universalism, and the connections among authors across racial, ethnic, and gender divisions. Modernist and avant-garde styles were absorbed into popular culture as writers and artists turned away from social realism to emphasize the process of artistic creation. Hutchinson explores a range of important writers, from Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy to Richard Wright and James Baldwin. African American and Jewish novelists critiqued racism and anti-Semitism, women writers pushed back on the misogyny unleashed during the war, and authors such as Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams reflected a new openness in the depiction of homosexuality. The decade also witnessed an awakening of American environmental and ecological consciousness. Hutchinson argues that despite the individualized experiences depicted in these works, a common belief in art’s ability to communicate the universal in particulars united the most important works of literature and art during the 1940s. Hutchinson’s capacious view of American literary and cultural history masterfully weaves together a wide range of creative and intellectual expression into a sweeping new narrative of this pivotal decade.

About the Speakers:

George Hutchinson’s teaching and research focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.  He is the author of Facing the Abyss:  American Literature and Culture in the 1940s(Columbia UP, 2018); In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Harvard UP, 2006), which won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa, among other honors; The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Harvard UP, 1996), a finalist for the Rea Non-Fiction Prize; and The Ecstatic Whitman: Literary Shamanism and the Crisis of the Union (Ohio State UP, 1986).  He brought to light Anita Thompson Reynolds’s previously unpublished memoir, American Cocktail: A ‘Colored Girl’ in the World (Harvard UP, 2014).  He also edited The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (2007) and co-edited with John K. Young Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850 (U Michigan Press, 2013).  His Penguin Classics edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane will appear in January 2019.  He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.  In addition to teaching in the English department, Hutchinson directs the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines.

Paula Rabinowitz’s research and teaching are in the areas of American materialist feminist cultural studies. Her work considers the interlocking roles of cinema, photography, painting and material culture in and through twentieth-century literature. She focuses on contemporary and modernist American women’s art and literature; her work explores hidden histories within working-class, pulp and popular cultures. Her books include LABOR AND DESIRE: WOMEN’S REVOLUTIONARY FICTION IN DEPRESSION AMERICA; THEY MUST BE REPRESENTED: THE POLITICS OF DOCUMENTARY; BLACK & WHITE & NOIR: AMERICA’S PULP MODERNISM; and AMERICAN PULP: HOW PAPERBACKS BROUGHT MODERNISM TO MAIN STREET, which won the 2015 DeLong Prize for Book History Book from Society for the History of Authorship, Readers and Publishing (SHARP). She is co-editor with Cristina Giorcelli of HABITS OF BEING, a four-volume series of essay on clothing, fashion, dress and identity; and co-editor, with Ruth Barraclough and Heather Bowen-Stryuk of RED LOVE ACROSS THE PACIFIC: POLITICAL AND SEXUAL REVOLUTIONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. She has also co-curated gallery exhibits on women and pulp fiction, women’s sound installation art and feminist film. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LITERATURE.

Casey Nelson Blake works on modern U.S. intellectual and cultural history, with an emphasis on the relationship between artistic modernism, cultural criticism and democratic citizenship.  His publications include Beloved Community:  The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne,Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford, The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State, and The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution—the last a catalogue for a major exhibition on the centennial of the 1913 Armory Show at the New-York Historical Society for which he served as Senior Historian.  He is currently at work on At the Center: American Thought and Culture, 1948-63, co-authored with Howard Brick and Daniel Borus, as well as a cultural biography of the writer and critic Paul Goodman.  He also writes regularly for Commonweal, Dissent, Raritan, and other journals of opinion. Professor Blake came to Columbia in 1999 as founding Director of the Center for American Studies after directing American Studies programs at Indiana University and Washington University, and teaching at Reed College.  While at Columbia Professor Blake has overseen the development of a civic engagement initiative within the Center, which has as its centerpiece the “Freedom and Citizenship” partnership program with the Double Discovery Center.

For more information, click here. 

https://www.bookculture.com/event/112th-david-greenberg-alan-brinkley

Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Monday, April 8th at 7pm as we welcome David Greenberg to discuss his new book Alan Brinkley: A Life in History. Nicholas Lemann will be joining David in the discussion.

Few American historians of his generation have had as much influence in both the academic and popular realms as Alan Brinkley. His debut work, the National Book Award–winning Voices of Protest, launched a storied career that considered the full spectrum of American political life. His books give serious and original treatments of populist dissent, the role of mass media, the struggles of liberalism and conservatism, and the powers and limits of the presidency. A longtime professor at Harvard University and Columbia University, Brinkley has shaped the field of U.S. history for generations of students through his textbooks and his mentorship of some of today’s foremost historians.

Alan Brinkley: A Life in History brings together essays on his major works and ideas, as well as personal reminiscences from leading historians and thinkers beyond the academy whom Brinkley collaborated with, befriended, and influenced. Among the luminaries in this volume are the critic Frank Rich, the journalists Jonathan Alter and Nicholas Lemann, the biographer A. Scott Berg, and the historians Eric Foner and Lizabeth Cohen. Together, the seventeen essays that form this book chronicle the life and thought of a working historian, the development of historical scholarship in our time, and the role that history plays in our public life. At a moment when Americans are pondering the plight of their democracy, this volume offers a timely overview of a consummate student—and teacher—of the American political tradition.

David Greenberg, a historian of American politics, teaches at Rutgers University. His latest book is Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (2016). He is a regular contributor to Politico Magazine and was formerly managing editor and acting editor at the New Republic. He is co-editor, along with Moshik Temkin and Mason B. Williams, of Alan Brinkley: A Life in History.

Nicholas Lemann is Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus at Columbia Journalism School.  He has published five books, most recently Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, and regularly contributes to the New Yorker as a staff writer.

Book talk with Harry Harootunian and Laura Neitzel about Harootunian’s Uneven Moments: Reflections on Japan’s Modern History (Columbia University Press, 2019). Moderated by Carol Gluck.

For the flyer, click Harry Harootunian flyer. 

For more information, click Uneven Moments Reflections on Japan’s Modern History. 

EVENT DETAILS

For centuries, people from all over the world have made their way to the United States in search of a better life for themselves and their families. How has migration in turn shaped American life and culture? Discover how immigration has transformed the country and why it has become one of the most divisive issues in American politics.

Mae Ngai is an immigration historian and professor of history at Columbia University. She is the author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America and writes on immigration matters in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other publications. Denny Chin (moderator) is United States Circuit Judge for the Second Circuit.

Presented as a part of Migrations: The Making of America, a citywide festival hosted by Carnegie Hall

LOCATION

The Robert H. Smith Auditorium at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024

PURCHASING TICKETS

By phone: Contact New-York Historical’s in-house call center at (212) 485-9268. Call center is open 9 am–5 pm daily.
Online: Click on the orange “Buy Tickets” button at the top of this page.
In person: Advance tickets may be purchased on site at New-York Historical’s Admissions desk during museum hours.

For more information and to buy tickets, click here. 

Description

A critical discussion of the global impacts of the Treaty of Versailles. Scholars and authors examine the centennial of the peace agreement that ended the First World War, tracing its impact on democracy and tyranny, international governance, and the shaping of the modern world.

Ted Widmer, CUNY Macaulay Honors College.

Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University
Erez Manela, Harvard University
Patricia O’Toole, author of The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made

Register Here

This event is co-sponsored by the History Department and the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History

You are cordially invited to attend the Department of History’s S.T. Lee Lecture for AY18-19 titled, “Consumer Capitalism, Racialization, and ‘Black is Beautiful’” with Professor Lynn M. Thomas. Lynn M. Thomas is a Professor of History at the University of Washington, Seattle where she is also an adjunct faculty member in Anthropology and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. Thomas is the author of Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (2003), co-editor of The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (2008) and Love in Africa (2009), and a former co-editor of the Journal of African History (2010-15). Her book Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners is forthcoming with Duke University Press. 

A reception with light refreshments will follow the lecture and ensuing Q&A, and we very much hope that you will join us!

For the flyer, click S.T.LeeLecture – LynnThomas3.13.19. 
For the topic sheet, click LynnThomasSTLeeTopicsheet3.13.19. 

Moderator: Amy Chazkel

Panelists: Marcia Tiburi, Kendall Thomas, & Joao Nemi Neto

For more information, click .