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The Global Biography Working Group

PRESENTS

Greg Tomlin

Murrow’s Cold War

Thursday, 28 October 2021, 12 noon Eastern Standard Time, via Zoom

RSVP: info@global.bio

Chair, Victoria Phillips, London School of Economics

The Global Biography Working Group (GloBio) is an online platform and forum for the presentation, discussion and dissemination of all things concerning global biographies, particularly of the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. GloBio aims to facilitate the development of global biography as a lively and connected academic field with a distinct set of approaches.

History On-Line Presents: Professor Mark Kramer

Director of Cold War Studies at Harvard University, Senior Fellow of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and Director of Harvard’s Sakharov Program on Human Rights

• Russian State Archive of Recent History (RGANI)
• State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF)
• Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI)
• The Russian Foreign Policy Archive (AVPRF)

Conducted in English for non-Russian and Russian language scholars

Moderator: Sławomir Łukasiewicz, Professor of European Studies, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin; Visiting Scholar, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University

Chair: Victoria Phillips, Visiting Fellow, Department of International History, London School of Economics

Friday, 22 October 2021, 12 noon Eastern Standard Time, via Zoom

RSVP: History.OnLine2021@gmail.com

Please join us for this next presentation in a series of ad-hoc seminars to explore freely-accessible on-line digital collections with archivists internationally. With massive numbers of free-access collections globally going digital, how do we remain disciplined and targeted when searching, yet also let the information lead us to new findings? As with old-fashioned approaches, the archivists can guide us to new understandings via zoomed meetings.

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, and the Cold War collections at the British National Library, and sessions on Polish and Latin American sources. For recordings of these sessions, please 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.

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October 19, 2021
1:00 to 2:15 pm (EDT)
Online via Zoom (CLICK HERE)
Book launch and Panel Discussion for “Soft-Power Internationalism: Competing for Cultural
Influence in the 21st-Century Global Order”

“Soft Power Internationalism” is a global comparative history of how soft power came to define
the interregnum between the celebration of global capitalism in the 1990s and the recent
resurgence of nationalism and authoritarianism. The book, edited by Victoria de Grazia and
Burcu Baykurt, brings together case studies from the European Union, China, Brazil, Turkey, and
the United States, examining the genealogy of soft power in the Euro-Atlantic and its evolution
in the hands of other states seeking to counter U.S. hegemony by non-militaristic means. 
Panelists
 Victoria de Grazia, Moore Collegiate Professor of History, Columbia University
 Burcu Baykurt, Assistant Professor of Communication, UMass Amherst
 Pierre Vimont, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Europe
 Oliver Stuenkel, Associate Professor of International Relations, Fundação Getulio Vargas
 Stephen Wertheim, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Moderator: Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and Director of
the European Institute, Columbia University

Sponsored by the European Institute, the Department of History, the Columbia Global Centers,
the Communications Ph.D. Colloquium, and Columbia University Press

Purchase “Soft Power Internationalism” at Columbia University Press ! For 30% off use promo
code CUP30

The Barnard College Department of History
invites you to a guest lecture by:

Wendall Marsh, Assistant Professor of
African American and African Studies,
Rutgers University-Newark
“Reading the Islamic Historiography of
West Africa and the Decolonization of
Knowledge”

Monday, October 18
4:15-5:30
Zoom link: https://bit.ly/3nNdRfx
Meeting ID: 920 5269 5634
Passcode: 829862

Monday, October 18, 2021
https://bit.ly/VictoriaPhillips2021
4:00pm-5:30pm EDT on Zoom
This lecture is free and open to the public. For more information and to RSVP

WWWL Dorothy O. Helly Works-in-Progress Lecture: Victoria Phillips on “From Martha Graham to Eleanor Lansing Dulles: Women, Power, and Intrigue in Cold-War Berlin”

CATEGORIZING CURRENCIES: MAKING SUBJECTS, MAKING MONEY

October 15, 2021

12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT

Register

Professor Mae Ngai (Columbia University) and Professor Benjamin J. Cohen (UC Santa Barbara) will engage our seminar participants in an informal discussion of Categorizing Currencies as part of the Currency and Empire Sawyer Seminar Series.

Location: Zoom

 

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Thursday, September 23rd, 2021
•  Japan, Parasitology, and Framing Developmental Ambitions
12:00 PM ET, WEBINAR via ZOOM
Click here for more information and registration. 

Fri. September 17, 2021 – pre-circulated paper – via Zoom

“Nation Time at the Coliseum: The Wattstax ’72 Concert & Black Power in Los Angeles” 

Frank Guridy, Associate Professor of History, Columbia University 

If you’d like to attend, you must RSVP for both virtual and in-person sessions. All workshops, except for Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2022, will begin at 10:30am PST. 

For Zoom sessions:  For Zoom sessions:  We will include Zoom sign-in information in the e-announcement. Please sign in on time. Please keep your video on and your audio muted until introductions and/or discussion begins. For those new to Zoom, please watch this video on etiquette (aimed at a student audience, but mostly apropos):  https://spark.adobe.com/video/IzGAneJs8BNJr.    

Adam Tooze + David Wallace-Wells: Shutdown

 

Join us for a virtual event with award-winning author and history professor Adam Tooze for a discussion of his new book Shutdown.

About this event

Join us for a virtual event with award-winning author and history professor Adam Tooze for a discussion of his new book Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy. Joining Adam in conversation is columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine David Wallace-Wells. This event will be held on Zoom and be livestreamed on the Strand’s Facebook page.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a copy of Shutdown here.

All book purchases will include a signed bookplate by the author.

————————————————REGISTER HERE

Deftly weaving finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative, a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything–from the acclaimed author of Crashed.

The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world’s economies were suffering all at the same time. Across the world hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death.

Adam Tooze, whose last book was universally lauded for guiding us coherently through the chaos of the 2008 crash, now brings his bravura analytical and narrative skills to a panoramic and synthetic overview of our current crisis. By focusing on finance and business, he sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are. The virus has attacked the economy with as much ferocity as it has our health, and there is no vaccine arriving to address that.

Tooze’s special gift is to show how social organization, political interests, and economic policy interact with devastating human consequences, from your local hospital to the World Bank. He moves fluidly from the impact of currency fluctuations to the decimation of institutions–such as health-care systems, schools, and social services–in the name of efficiency. He starkly analyzes what happened when the pandemic collided with domestic politics (China’s party conferences; the American elections), what the unintended consequences of the vaccine race might be, and the role climate change played in the pandemic. Finally, he proves how no unilateral declaration of ‘independence or isolation can extricate any modern country from the global web of travel, goods, services, and finance.

Adam Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University and the author of Crashed, winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize, a New York Times Notable Book of 2018, one of The Economist‘s Books of the Year, and a New York Times Critics’ Top Book. He lives in New York City.

David Wallace-Wells is a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He has been a national fellow at the New America Foundation and was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.

Workshop/Panel: Making, Knowing, Learning

These panelists’ pedagogical practices and scholarly research examine the intersection of education, creation, and curation. Collectively, the focus of their work spans centuries. They use making as a form of critical inquiry in historical and contemporary contexts and explore the broader environmental impact of the artifacts we make and those we discard. This discussion will critically examine the life cycle of objects in the past and present, and explore the benefits of centering making, artifacts, and curation in the liberal arts classroom. Moderated by Christina Neilson.

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PLAGUE AND PREJUDICE

HADLEY FREEMAN, SIMON SCHAMA

CHAIR: JULIA NEUBERGER

09/05/2021 7:00 PM GMT / 3PM EST

ON ZOOM, VIRTUAL EVENT

Ticket Price : £7.50

GET TICKETS

During the course of the pandemic – when the benefits of cooperative pursuit of knowledge have been so obvious – ignorance-based hatred and prejudice have seen a rapid rate of infection. Simon Schama explores how ‘viral prejudice’ has been an enduring plague for the Jewish people, examining the relationship between antisemitism and scientific scepticism – the rejection of knowledge. Turning to the hatred that overwhelmed the 20^th century, Hadley Freeman explores the memoirs of Esther Safran Foer and Arianna Neumann, presenting an engaging investigation of testimony and the generational shifts in memory. In a conversation chaired by Julia Neuberger, these three leading writers and thinkers look to the past for insight into the present, and lessons for the future.

This event is planned to celebrate the international relaunch of  The Jewish Quarterly. Ticket holders will receive a discount code for one year’s subscription to the print and digital editions of The Jewish Quarterly for just £35.

Click here for full price subscriptions to The Jewish Quarterly

 

Friends in Times of Trouble with Simon Schama

• Monday, May 3, 2021
• 12PM EST

WORKING-CLASS NEW YORK REVISITED: 

THE PAST AND FUTURE OF STRUGGLES FOR PROGRESSIVE CHANGE

Friday, April 23, 2021 * via Live Stream

Program is scheduled in U.S. Eastern Time

During the two decades since its publication, Joshua B. Freeman’s Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II has had a major influence on the efforts of labor and urban historians and New York activists to reckon with the achievements and failures of working-class people in shaping the city.  WORKING-CLASS NEW YORK REVISITED: THE PAST AND FUTURE OF STRUGGLES FOR PROGRESSIVE CHANGE will bring together scholars, activists, and political leaders to reconsider the book’s themes, explore subsequent scholarship on New York working-class movements, and present visions for progressive urban change.

Opening * 9:30am – 10:15am

Chair:  Stephanie Luce, Graduate Center and School of Labor and Urban Studies, City University of New York

Jack Metzgar, Emeritus Professor of Humanities, Roosevelt University

Samir Sonti, School of Labor and Urban Studies, City University of New York

This opening session will consider the contributions of Working-Class New York and suggest the challenges and possibilities for progressive urban change.

New York Labor Struggles in the Post-WW II era * 10:15am – 12:00pm

Chair/commentator:  Kimberly Phillips-Fein, Professor of History, New York University

Andy Battle, Bard Early College High School

Will Jones, Professor of History, University of Minnesota

Marc Kagan, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Premilla Nadasen, Professor of History, Barnard College, Columbia University

Since the publication of Working-Class New York, there has been a wealth of studies of labor struggles in New York City in the post-World War II era.  This panel will present some of the best recent work, examining factory move-outs and the efforts of public employees, transit worker dissidents, and domestic workers to build strong organizations and improve their jobs.

African American and Puerto Rican Movements in Postwar New York * 12:45pm – 2:30pm

Chair/commentator:  Martha Biondi, Professor of African American Studies, Northwestern University

Aldo Lauria-Santiago, Professor, Department of Latino & Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University

Johanna Fernández, Associate Professor of History, Baruch College, City University of New York

LaShawn D. Harris, Associate Professor of History, Michigan State University

Brian Purnell, Geoffrey Canada Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History, Bowdoin College

Leading scholars of African American and Puerto Rican history will discuss their work on postwar struggles in New York City, including Puerto Rican labor activism, the Young Lords, the fight against police brutality, and the Black freedom movement.

Roundtable:  Social Democracy in New York and the Nation *  2:45pm – 4:30pm

Moderator:  Joel Suarez, School of Labor and Urban Studies, City University of New York

Steve Fraser, Independent Scholar

Nelson Lichtenstein, Research Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara

Touré Reed, Professor of History, Illinois State University

Ruth Milkman, Graduate Center and School of Labor and Urban Studies, City University of New York

Roundtable participants will consider the utility of social democracy as a way of understanding New York and the country in the postwar era, and will discuss its past and future strengths and limitations as an idea and a program.

Toward a Progressive Urbanism * 4:45pm – 6:30pm

Chair/commentator:  Penny Lewis, School of Labor and Urban Studies, City University of New York

Frances Fox Piven, Professor Emeritus, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Nikil Saval, Pennsylvania State Senator

Kafui Attoh, School of Labor and Urban Studies, City University of New York

Marta Gutman, Professor, Graduate Center and Spitzer School of Architecture, CCNY, City University of New York

In recent years, cities have been a center for progressive action in the United States.  Coming from a variety of disciplines and positions, panelists will present their visions for a progressive urbanism, and how to get there.  

Reflections *  6:30pm – 7:15pm

Chair:  Stephen Brier, Graduate Center and School of Labor and Urban Studies, City University of New York

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University

Joshua B. Freeman, Professor Emeritus, Queens College, Graduate Center, and School of Labor and Urban Studies, City University of New York

This concluding session will reflect on the significance of Working-Class New York and the career of Joshua B. Freeman, whose retirement this conference marks. ​

DASER Experiments: Studio K.O.S. in Conversation with Dr. Samuel K. Roberts: Register here

Join a live presentation by author Frank Andre Guridy on his book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics, followed by a question-and-answer session with guests.

Roman Settlers in the Eastern Mediterranean: Comparing Delos and Phrygia

Sailakshmi Ramgopal, Columbia University

Fri, 3/26 · 12:00 pm—1:30 pm

Please register here for the Zoom link

Program in the Ancient World, Princeton University

This lunch talk explores how associations of Roman citizen businessmen and traders employed mechanisms of self-differentiation to claim status, legitimacy, and authority on Delos in the second and first centuries BCE and in Phrygian cities in the first and second centuries CE. The act of making joint dedications with non-Roman populations was crucial to the Roman associations’ pursuit of power at local levels. On Delos, such interactions involved Athenians; in Phrygia, they involved local boulai and demoi. These interactions were mediated through local and regional histories of violence by Rome and suggest forms of provincial administration that evade easy classification in accordance with the traditional dichotomy of state and non-state actors, and that of colonizer and colonized. This talk represents a portion of Ramgopal’s in-progress book, which explores how associations of Roman citizens aimed to maximize their share of material and symbolic resources in non-Roman legal-cultural environments throughout the Roman world.

Sailakshmi Ramgopal is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University. Her research addresses the identities, mobilities, and sociopolitical dynamics that emerge in the Roman world. She has published on the associations of Roman citizens in mainland Greece, and the mobility of women, freedpeople, and enslaved people in the Roman world more broadly. She is currently writing on differential expressions of identity and power by Romans and Italians before the Social War and the use of magic by enslaved people. Ramgopal also maintains research interests on environmental change in Roman North Africa and the reception of classical literature in literary movements of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia, North Africa, West Africa, and Ireland.

Thursday, March 25th, 2021 | 6:30 PM
Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R.B. More, by Satyendra More
Edited by Anupama Rao, Translated by Wandana Sonalkar

This event is virtual; RSVP here for the Zoom link!

Join Anupama Rao, Sheetal Chhabhria, Premilla Nadasen and Sudipta Kaviraj for a book talk and discussion on internationalist and anti-racist perspectives on caste, class, and social life. 

R.B. More (1903–1972) was a leader in Babasaheb Ambedkar’s movement, a trade unionist and a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). More’s life, narrated in his words and those of his son Satyendra, illuminates the conflict between the promise of Marxist emancipation and the hard reality of the hierarchies of caste. His radicalism challenged both the limits of the politics of caste and the politics of the Left; his was a politics that frontally challenged the rigidities of the caste system and of the class structure. This memoir, written in Marathi, is here published for the first time in English. This is a rare work that brings together family history, political thought, and the social experience of urban workers whose lives are intertwined with the city they built, Bombay.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Anupama Rao has research interests in anticaste and African American political thought, feminist theory and histories of gender, anticolonialism, and global urbanism. Her books include The Caste Question, Gender, Caste and the Imagination of Equality (edited), and the recently published Memoirs of a Dalit Communist. She is Senior Editor, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She currently teaches in the History department at Barnard College, and the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.

Sheetal Chhabria is a historian of South Asia with interests in the global histories of capitalism, urban studies, and the production of poverty and inequality. She is the author of Making the Modern Slum: the Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay (University of Washington Press 2019). Her current research entails analyzing the imbrications of caste and capital in the subcontinent’s long history and the failures of decolonization. She currently teaches in the department of History at Connecticut College.

Premilla Nadasen researches and writes about race, gender, social policy, and labor history. She is the author of several books, including Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (2005), which chronicles the emergence of a distinctive brand of feminism forged by black women on welfare, and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (2015), a history of domestic worker activism in the postwar period. She is most interested in visions of social change and the ways poor and working-class people, especially women of color, have fought for social justice. She currently teaches in the History department at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Sudipta Kaviraj is a specialist in intellectual history and Indian politics. He works on two fields of intellectual history – Indian social and political thought in the 19th and 20th centuries and modern Indian literature and cultural production. Kaviraj’s books include The Imaginary Institution of India, Civil Society: History and Possibilities co-edited with Sunil Khilnani, Politics in India (edited), and The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India. He currently teaches in the departments of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and Political Science at Columbia University.

Register now here

Join here

LAWS MATTER
Women’s Rights and the Japanese Constitution:
Beate Sirota Gordon’s Legacy and its Implications Worldwide
UN Commission on the Status of Women — 65th Conference NGOCSW

Webinar URL Access – Easy and Free to All. 

Beate Sirota Gordon, 22 year-old drafter of Article 24 on Women’s Rights in the Japanese Constitution

Monday, March 22, 2021 7:30 pm -8:45 pm Eastern Time (USA)
[Tuesday, March 23, 2021 830am- 945am Japan Time]

Speakers
Reiko Aoki, Former Visiting Researcher, NWEC (National Women’s Education
Center, Japan)
The Impact of Article 24 – Women’s Rights and Japanese Women Today

Professor Carol Gluck, Columbia University
Marriage Shall Be Based on Mutual Consent: Beate Sirota Gordon and the
Japanese Constitution

Dr. Elizabeth L. Hillman, President, Mills College
How the Law Matters to Women, Girls, and the Rest of Us

Nicole Gordon, Moderator, Distinguished Lecturer, Baruch College
(daughter of Beate Sirota Gordon)
Serendipity and Opportunity

Sponsors:
NWEC (National Women’s Education Center, Japan), Saitama, Japan
Mills College, Oakland, California

Beate Sirota Gordon’s story is recounted in her memoir The Only Woman in the Room

See NY Times article

Register here

PANEL DISCUSSION:

Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir

A Panel with Judith G. Coffin, Gisèle Sapiro, Susan Pedersen, Judith Surkis, moderated by Camille Robcis and Stefanos Geroulanos

To RSVP, please click here.

Sex, Love, and Letters is the first study of a virtually unexplored cache of letters to Simone de Beauvoir, the brilliant, magnetic, and polarizing French feminist and philosopher from ordinary women and men around the world. This author-reader bond was fraught with misunderstanding, thwarted desire, and illusions, but also, Judith Coffin argues, emphatically reciprocal. It transformed the author and her readers. Sex, Love and Letters traces this relationship from The Second Sex (1949) through four volumes of autobiography. It is a fascinating example of letters as an historical source and of what letters can reveal about writing, philosophy, and transformations of sexuality and the self. Beauvoir’s interests and experiences prompted letters about an astonishing array of subjects: painful memories of World War Two; shame and rage at colonial violence; marital unhappiness and unwanted pregnancies; struggles with sexual desires or old age; and the dilemmas and exhilarations of gay liberation and feminism. These dramatic letters pivot from Beauvoir to the intimate and emotionally charged politics of the postwar decades. They capture the vividly-imagined relationship between readers and author that is central to cultural and intellectual history. Sex, Love, and Letters looks forward as well, to the soaring popularity of memoir and interactive reading experiences in our own time.

This panel is organized by the Columbia Maison Française and the NYC Consortium for Cultural and Intellectual History.

Register here

Please register here to receive your Zoom link to join.

On Wednesday, March 3, at 12 p.m. (EST) / 7 p.m. (Greek time), guest speaker Mark Mazower, Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia, along with discussant Nicolas Prevelakis, Assistant Director of Curricular Development at the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University, will explore how our understanding of the Greek uprising has been changed by recent scholarship and ask what questions remain.

Revolution? War of Independence? The question of what happened in the spring of 1821 and after was vigorously debated at the time and remains a lively subject of discussion today. Among the topics to be covered will be the role of the Filiki Etaireia, the importance of European diplomacy, and the emergence of public opinion as a factor in reshaping the continent. The interlocutors will also look at the value and drawbacks of focusing on heroes and the role played by religion and ethnicity.