Date: Friday, June 9th, 2023

Time: 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM EST

Location: Lehman Center for American History (420 W 118th Street, New York, NY 10027)

Register here.

While the Covid-19 crisis is still unfolding, it has already revealed much about the history of our time, and left lessons that will be important to study before the next pandemic. But much depends on gaining a sense of perspective, and preserving information that might otherwise be lost. Even before it began, archivists and scholars were struggling to develop new methods to record and analyze history in the age of “big data.” Resource constraints and fights over access to information have only intensified because of pressures on public budgets and the partisan politics that surround any attempt at retrospective analysis.

Our plan is to assemble historians, journalists, archivists and public health experts to take stock of the first efforts to record and report this global crisis, identify the most important questions for new research, and in that way set priorities for long-term preservation.

Please see below our schedule for our event.

8:30-9:30: Coffee/Breakfast

9:30-10:00: Opening Remarks and Welcome

10:00-11:45: Panel I – Prevision

How do we assess efforts to predict and plan for pandemics, and how did they prepare us for Covid-19 (or leave us unprepared)? What was expected and what was unexpected about how events unfolded? And how do we assess the use of different modes of prevision to inform policy choices and educate the public once the pandemic was underway?

Moderator: Matthew Connelly, Columbia University, Professor of International and Global history, Co-Director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP)

Caitlin Rivers, John Hopkins, Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Gaia Dempsey, Metaculus, CEO

Jeff Shaman, Columbia University, ​​Professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and Director of the Climate and Health Program at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

12:00-1:00: Lunch

1:00-2:45: Panel II – Policy

There is a growing demand for understanding of how different scientific recommendations, political choices, and community responses shaped the course of the pandemic. Considering past pandemics, what are we likely to learn, and what questions may remain unanswerable?

Moderator: Wilmot James, Brown University, Senior Advisor to the Brown Pandemic Center, Professor of the Practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice

Stephen Hilgartner, Cornell University, Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Science & Technology Studies

Lawrence Stanberry, Columbia University, Associate Dean for International Programs and Director of the Programs in Global Health at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Jennifer Nuzzo, Brown University, Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health

3:00-4:45: Panel III – History

How do we place the pandemic in the longer history of emerging infectious diseases and structural trends that are making outbreaks more common, including encroachment on natural habitats and international travel? How do we connect and compare it to other events that may define our time, such as the recrudescence of authoritarianism and growing resistance to racial and social inequality?

Moderator: Steve Morse, Columbia University, Professor of Epidemiology at CUMC

Tom Ewing, Virginia Tech, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research and Professor of History

David Rosner, Columbia University, Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and Professor of History, Co-Director, Center for the History & Ethics of Public Health

James Colgrove, Columbia University, Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

5:00-6:00: Roundtable with Matthew Connelly, Wilmot James, and Steve Morse

This event is sponsored by ISERP.

Digital history and archiving are thriving, but the increasing volume of digitized and “born digital” materials for historical research also presents new challenges for archivists and historians. Typically, the only way to explore these resources has been through keyword searching. More direct access to the data creates tremendous new research opportunities, but the barriers to entry can seem daunting.

This NEH-funded program will offer practical training for historians and archivists in processing and analyzing textual data. Participants in the Archiving Digital Records workshop, designed for archivists, will learn how to use new technology to improve the description and arrangement of digital or digitized records, especially PDFs, and provide users with new ways to access them. Participants in the Text-as-Data workshop, designed for historians, will learn how to organize and analyze large document collections and use new methods to formulate original arguments. All participants will come together in seminar-style discussions on the novel challenges posed by doing archival research in the age of “big data,” including issues related to community representation, protecting private information in online archives, and the professional and scholarly pitfalls in navigating this new terrain.

The Institute will be led by Matthew Connelly and Courtney Chartier, with co-teachers Ray Hicks and Ben Lis, who have extensive experience processing and analyzing textual data. It will also feature presentations from archivists, historians, and data scientists (see list below). All classes will be in-person to facilitate informal discussions, though week two of the Archiving Digital Records workshop can be done remotely. Attendance is free, and funding is available for those who need to travel to participate.

The Institute is a joint project of Columbia’s History Lab and Columbia Libraries, and is funded by the NEH Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. Hands-on training will use textual data from the Freedom of Information Archive, a project that has aggregated the largest database of declassified government documents in the world. Here are the draft syllabi for the workshops.

When: May 22 – June 2, 2023. Sessions will be from 9am – 3pm each weekday. Another Institute is planned for May-June 2024. We hope to invite at least some workshop participants to a conference that will take place at Columbia at the same time the American Historical Association holds its annual meeting in NYC in January 2025.

Where: Columbia University Campus in New York City.

Eligibility: This workshop is open rank. Masters students through established scholars are encouraged to apply. Priority in the Text-as-Data workshop will be given to historians, while priority in the Archiving Digital Records workshop will be given to archivists. Others will be eligible to participate on a space-available basis.

Financial Support: We are happy to offer financial support for those workshop participants who need it for travel and accommodations. In your application, we will ask you to describe your budget and prospects for obtaining other funding. We will use the limited funds we have to ensure broad participation, including from under-resourced institutions.

How to Apply: Please use this form to apply. In addition to providing a CV, we will ask you to describe any previous experience or training in either processing digital collections (for archivists) or analyzing textual data (for historians). We will also ask you what motivates you to apply to the workshop and what you hope to gain from attending it. Feel free to contact us with questions.

Courtney Chartier is the director of Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. She has long-standing interest and experience in the archiving of electronic records, and was previously the Head of Research Services at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library at Emory University and taught at Georgia State University. Chartier is also the immediate past President of the Society of American Archivists.

Matthew Connelly is a professor of history at Columbia University. He received his B.A. from Columbia in 1990 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1997. His publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era, and Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. His current book project, The Declassification Engine, will be published by Pantheon in 2023. He has taught courses on “Biopolitics in the 20th Century” and “The History and Future of Pandemic Threats and Global Public Health.” In 2011 he also co-directed (with Stephen Morse) a summer research program on “The History of the Next Pandemic.”

Raymond Hicks (Data Scientist) has been working with History Lab since 2017. Before starting at Columbia, he worked as the Statistical Programmer for the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. His research has appeared in the Journal of Politics, International Organization, and the British Journal of Political Science, among other journals. He received his B.A. from The College of William and Mary and his Ph.D. in political science from Emory University. He has taught a 2-week workshop on the introduction to text analysis for several different audiences, including economists, political scientists, and historians.

Benjamin Lis (Instructor – Archives Workshop) has been the History Lab’s data engineer since 2019, where he has developed some of the tools used in the workshop. He has also taught as an adjunct in the Applied Analytics department of Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies, and co-taught “Hacking the Archive” with Connelly in spring 2020. He has a B.S. from Montclair State University and an M.S. from Stevens Institute of Technology.

Cameron Blevins, University of Colorado Denver

Merlin Chowkwanyun, Columbia University

Greg Eow, Center for Research Libraries

Jo Guldi, Southern Methodist University

Tim Hitchcock, University of Sussex

Maria Matienzo, Tome

Chris Prom, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Lara Putnam, University of Pittsburgh

Barbara Rockenbach, Yale University

Heidi Tworek, University of British Columbia

Date: Friday, April 28th, 2023

Time: 12:00 – 12:30 PM EST

Location: Livestreamed on Zoom. Register here. If you need assistance, please send an email to events@nyhistory.org. 

Marked by periods of regional cooling in the North Atlantic extending from the 16th to 18th centuries, the Little Ice Age presented challenges to Dutch colonists living in New Netherland. Research shows weather during the Little Ice Age was irregular with sometimes harsh winters, dry growing seasons, floods, and failed harvests. But there were also many years without a noteworthy climate event. Chelsea Teale, in conversation with Deborah Hamer, offers a short climate history of New Netherland and explains how the people who lived there understood and adjusted to climate. 

Live From New Amsterdam is an ongoing series hosted by the New Netherland Institute and the New Amsterdam Project at the New-York Historical Society. Through vibrant conversations with scholars and historians, each program will investigate new and exciting research related to New Amsterdam, New Netherland, and the lasting legacies of Dutch rule in New York.  

Chelsea Teale is a lecturer in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Analysis at Cal Poly Humboldt. Her research emphasizes the integration of proxy records (primarily plant fossils and tree rings) with written sources to reconstruct past environments.

Deborah Hamer is Director of the New Netherland Institute, where she is responsible for initiatives aimed at identifying, preserving, digitizing, and translating Dutch language documents in repositories around the world. She is a historian of the Dutch Atlantic world and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Before the program, all registered attendees will receive a link and instructions for viewing the program on Zoom. If you do not receive a message, please check your spam folder. An additional reminder will be sent two hours prior to the program start time. 

Date: Thursday, April 27th – Friday, April 28th

Location: Heyman Center for the Humanities, Second Floor Common Room, 74 Morningside Drive, New York, NY 11027.

Time: April 27th: 5:00 PM, with keynote starting at 6:15 PM EST

April 28th: 10:15 AM – 3:30 PM EST

Register here.

The Refugee Cities Working Group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, presents an interdisciplinary public symposium, “Refugee Cities: Urban Dimensions of Forced Displacement.”

The Refugee Cities Working Group’s concerns lie at the intersection of urban studies on the one hand and, on the other, the humanistic and social justice-oriented study of the mass movement of people fleeing violence, war, and forced removal. This symposium will focus on the impact of refugees on cities and urban processes, both in the present moment and as a historical phenomenon.

A keynote lecture will take place on the evening of Thursday, April 27, with all other presentations to be scheduled throughout the day on Friday, April 28. All events will take place in person at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, New York.

Thursday, April 27

• 6:15 pm: Keynote lecture by Miriam Ticktin (CUNY Graduate Center), Borders and Commoning: The Struggle over Political Imagination

Friday, April 28

• 10:15 am –12:00 pm: Panel 1 — Diaspora and Resettlement, Wounded and Divided Cities
• 1:00 pm – 2:45 pm: Panel 2 — Refugees as City-Builders
• 2:45 pm – 3:30 pm: Closing roundtable

Date: Thursday, April 27th, 2023

Time: 12:15 PM EST

Location: 2nd Floor Common Room, The Heyman Center (74 Morningside Dr, New York, NY 10027) and via Zoom.

Register here.

Tami Navarro and Natasha Lightfoot will discuss Navarro’s book Virgin Capital, which explores racial capitalism and the failures of neoliberal development in the Caribbean and beyond. With their shared intellectual engagement in the region, this conversation will touch on the past, present, and possible futures of islands in the Caribbean.

Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands
by Tami Navarro

Virgin Capital examines the cultural impact and historical significance of the Economic Development Commission (EDC) in the United States Virgin Islands. A tax holiday program, the EDC encourages financial services companies to relocate to these American-owned islands in exchange for an exemption from 90% of income taxes and to stimulate the economy by hiring local workers and donating to local charitable causes. As a result of this program, the largest and poorest of these islands—St. Croix—has played host to primarily US financial firms and their white managers, leading to reinvigorated anxieties around the costs of racial capitalism and a feared return to the racial and gender order that ruled the islands during slavery. Drawing on fieldwork conducted during the boom years leading up to the 2008–2009 financial crisis, Virgin Capital provides ethnographic insight into the continuing relations of coloniality at work in the quintessentially “modern” industry of financial services and neoliberal “development” regimes, with their grounding in hierarchies of race, gender, class, and geopolitical positioning.

Speakers

Tami Navarro is an Assistant Professor and Chair of Pan-African Studies at Drew University. She is a Cultural Anthropologist whose work has been published in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Transforming Anthropology, Small Axe Salon, The Caribbean Writer, Social Text, and Feminist Anthropology. She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO) and a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Dr. Navarro is co-host of the podcast “Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean” and the Co-Director of the Transnational Black Feminismsworking group at Columbia University. She is the author of Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands (SUNY Press 2021), which has been recognized by the Association for Feminist Anthropology and the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.

Natasha Lightfoot is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and a Faculty Fellow in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests include Atlantic slavery and emancipation, Black community formation and acts of resistance, and daily practices of freedom in the nineteenth-century British Caribbean. She is the author of Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2015), which focuses on black working people’s struggles and everyday forms of liberation in British colonial Antigua after slavery’s end. She has also been published in The New York Times, as well as several academic journals, including The CLR James Journal, Slavery & Abolition, Small Axe, and most recently, The William and Mary Quarterly. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Ford Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and most recently from the American Council of Learned Societies. She is currently writing a book titled Fugitive Cosmopolitans about enslaved people’s mobility, imperial subjecthood, and struggles for freedom between empires in the Caribbean.

Date: Friday, April 14, 2023

Location: Union Theological Seminary, 3041 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

Time: 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM EST

Register here.

Please join us on Friday, April 14, from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm ET for Re-forming the history of the Reformation?. In this one-day colloquium, we will consider the recent achievements in the discipline of Reformation studies and explore pathways for future research. This event is being held in honor of the retirement of The Revd. Dr. Euan K Cameron, Henry Luce III Chair of Reformation Church History. Professor Cameron is the first and so far only holder of the Henry Luce III Chair of Reformation Church History, and will retire at the end of this academic year. Featured guest speakers include Kenneth G. Appold, James Hastings Nichols Professor of Reformation History at Princeton Theological Seminary; Bruce Gordon, Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School, and Kirsten Macfarlane, Associate Professor in Early Modern Christianities at the University of Oxford. 

Rev. Euan K. Cameron

Euan Cameron was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he graduated BA in History in the First Class in 1979 and received the D.Phil. in 1982. From 1979 to 1985 he was a junior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. In 1985 he moved to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where he worked in the Department of History for 17 years, receiving promotions to Reader (1992) and full Professor (1997) and serving as Head of Department. He was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 1996/7. In 2002 he was appointed as the first Henry Luce III Professor of Reformation Church History at Union Theological Seminary in New York, with a concurrent appointment in the Department of Religion in Columbia University. From 2004 to 2010 he also served as Academic Vice-President in the seminary. During 2010/11, while on sabbatical leave, he held a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford.

Cameron’s scholarly work analyses the role and transformations of religion in European society in the later Middle Ages and Reformation periods. His academic research first began in the area of religious dissent, especially the Waldensian heresy: he has published three books on that subject, The Reformation of the Heretics (1984), Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (2000) and A Companion to the Waldenses in the Middle Ages (2022) in collaboration with Professor Marina Benedetti of the University of Milan. Read more.

Kenneth G. Appold

Kenneth G. Appold is the James Hastings Nichols Professor of Reformation History at Princeton Theological Seminary. Appold earned his BA, MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University, and his Dr.theol.habil. from the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. Prior to coming to Princeton, he served as a research professor at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France, and taught church history at the Johannes-Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. His areas of interest include the history and legacy of the Reformation, the global history of Christianization, and the history of Christian ecumenism. He teaches courses on the Reformation in Europe, with particular focus on early Lutheranism, the Radical Reformation and the Catholic Reformation, the history of church-state relations, and the history of Christianization in the New World and East Asia. A member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Appold has served as co-chair of the Lutheran-Pentecostal International Study Group and is a member of the Lutheran World Federation’s ecumenical dialogue with the Orthodox churches. His ongoing projects include co-editing (with Nelson H. Minnich) the Cambridge History of Reformation Theology, and writing a book on Luther and the Peasants. Read more.

Bruce Gordon

A native of Canada, Bruce Gordon taught at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he was professor of modern history and deputy director of the St Andrews Reformation Studies Institute. He came to Yale in 2008. His research and teaching focus on European religious cultures of the late-medieval and early modern periods, with a particular interest in the Reformation and its reception. In 2021 he published The Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism (Oxford) and Huldrych Zwingli. God’s Armed Prophet (Yale). The biography of Zwingli explores the roots of the Reformation and the problematic relationship between religion and violence. His John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (Princeton 2016) looks at the reception from the sixteenth century to the age of YouTube of one of the defining works of the Reformation. He is the author of Calvin (Yale, 2009), a biography of the Genevan reformer, and the Swiss Reformation (Manchester, 2002), a Choice Magazine “Outstanding Publication” (2003). Read more.

Professor Kirsten Macfarlane

I gained my BA, MSt and DPhil at the University of Oxford, Lincoln College, before taking up a Title A Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge University in October 2017. In 2019 I returned to Oxford, where I am currently Associate Professor of Early Modern Christianities and Tutorial Fellow at Keble College. I have also held Visiting Fellowships at the Houghton Library, Harvard; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies; and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Read more.

Friday, April 14th, 2023
• New York City Latin American History Workshop (Co-Sponsored by Dept., Hosted by Baruch College) – Julio Esteban Vezub (Inst. Patagónico de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas/Columbia), “‘Act of War’: The Sketches of Major Francisco Host during the Conquest of Patagonia, 1879-1880”
11AM-1PM
Baruch College, Newman Vertical Campus, 55 Lexington Ave, Room 8-210
To register and obtain workshop paper please email: Mark Rice, mark.rice@baruch.cuny.edu

Date: Thursday, April 13th, 2023

Location: Book Culture, 536 W 112th St, New York, NY 10025.

Time: 7:00 PM EST

Register here.

Moderated by Rosalind Morris.

In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa, Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.

Rhiannon Stephens is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, author of A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900, and coeditor of Doing Conceptual History in Africa.

Carl Wennerlind is Professor of History at Barnard College. He is the author of  Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720, A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume and the Rise of Capitalism, together with Margaret Schabas, and, most recently, Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis, with Fredrik Albritton Jonsson.

April 12th from 4:20pm – 6:00pm  Workshop with Maria Adele Carrai (NYU, History). “The Human Frontier: The Chinese Overseas and the Making of Modern China” Commentator: Madeleine Zelin (Columbia, History).

Workshop location will be circulated closer to event date

*

See full calendar of Legal History Workshop schedule here

Date: Thursday, April 6th, 2023

Location: The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, 74 Morningside Dr, New York, NY 10027

Time: 5:00 – 6:30 PM EST

Register here.

Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis
by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind

A sweeping intellectual history of the concept of economic scarcity—its development across five hundred years of European thought and its decisive role in fostering the climate crisis.

Modern economics presumes a particular view of scarcity, in which human beings are innately possessed of infinite desires and society must therefore facilitate endless growth and consumption irrespective of nature’s limits. Yet as Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind show, this vision of scarcity is historically novel and was not inevitable even in the age of capitalism. Rather, it reflects the costly triumph of infinite-growth ideologies across centuries of European economic thought—at the expense of traditions that sought to live within nature’s constraints.

The dominant conception of scarcity today holds that, rather than master our desires, humans must master nature to meet those desires. Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind argue that this idea was developed by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Samuel Hartlib, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson, who laid the groundwork for today’s hegemonic politics of growth. Yet proponents of infinite growth have long faced resistance from agrarian radicals, romantic poets, revolutionary socialists, ecofeminists, and others. These critics—including the likes of Gerrard Winstanley, Dorothy Wordsworth, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt—embraced conceptions of scarcity in which our desires, rather than nature, must be mastered to achieve the social good. In so doing, they dramatically reenvisioned how humans might interact with both nature and the economy.

Following these conflicts into the twenty-first century, Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind insist that we need new, sustainable models of economic thinking to address the climate crisis. Scarcity is not only a critique of infinite growth, but also a timely invitation to imagine alternative ways of flourishing on Earth.

The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History
by Deborah Valenze

A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and environments later eclipsed by classical economics

With the publication of Essay on the Principle of Population and its projection of food shortages in the face of ballooning populations, British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus secured a leading role in modern political and economic thought. In this startling new interpretation, Deborah Valenze reveals how canonical readings of Malthus fail to acknowledge the theorist’s remarkably narrow understanding of what constitutes food production.

Valenze returns to the eighteenth-century contexts that generated his arguments, showing how Malthus mobilized a redemptive narrative of British historical development and dismissed the varied ways that people adapted to the challenges of subsistence needs. In an argument that combines history, anthropology, food studies, and animal studies, she redirects our attention to the margins of Malthus’s essay, where activities such as hunting, gathering, herding, and gardening were rendered extraneous. She demonstrates how Malthus’s omissions and his subsequent canonization provided a rationale for colonial imposition of British agricultural models, regardless of environmental diversity.

By broadening our conception of human livelihoods, Valenze suggests pathways to resistance against the hegemony of Malthusian political economy. The Invention of Scarcity invites us to imagine a world where monoculture is in retreat and the margins are recentered as spaces of experimentation, nimbleness, and human flourishing.

About the Authors

Deborah Valenze is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College. A recipient of numerous fellowships, she has written four previous books on British culture and economic life. Professor Valenze has taught courses on the history of Europe since the Renaissance, Britain since 1600, women and revolution, European poverty, and food. Her research and scholarship have been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Yale Center for British Art, the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, and the American Association of University Women. She has also received a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship.

Carl Wennerlind is a Professor of History at Barnard College, where he specializes in the history of early modern Europe, with a focus on intellectual history and political economy. He is particularly interested in the historical development of ideas about money and credit; ideas on the relationship between economy and nature; and ideas about “improvement” and “modernization.” He is the author of Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 and, with Margaret Schabas, A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume and the Rise of Capitalism.

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is an Associate Professor of History and of Conceptual and Historical Studies in Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism and, with Vicky Albritton, Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District.

About the Speakers

Alyssa Battistoni is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. She is a political theorist with research interests in environmental and climate politics, feminism, Marxist thought, political economy, and the history of political thought. She is the co-author, with Kate Aronoff, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019)

James Stafford is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. He specializes in the political and intellectual history of Ireland, Britain and Western Europe since 1750, with a particular interest in questions of political economy and international order. The Case of Ireland, his first book, offers a fresh account of Ireland’s place in European debates about commerce and empire during a global era of war and revolution.

This event will be in person at the Heyman Center and livestreamed online. Please register for both in-person and virtual attendance via the link. Registration is mandatory for in-person attendance.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.

The event is co-sponsored by the British History University Seminar.

Date: Monday, April 3rd, 2023

Location: Butler Library, Room 203, 535 West 114th Street, New York, NY 10027

Time: 6:00 – 7:00 PM EST

Register here.

Speaker: Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

Moderator: Pamela Smith, Columbia University

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1975. His special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. He is the author and coauthor of numerous books, including Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (1990); Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (2020); and The Art of Discovery: Digging into the Past in Renaissance Europe (2022).

Pamela Smith is Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, Director of the Center for Science and Society, and chair of the Studies of the Dutch-Speaking World.

Professor Grafton will speak about the intellectual culture of Dutch humanism in the early modern period, focusing on the University of Leiden. The talk will give new exposure to the collection of early Dutch books from the library of the Holland Society of New York, on deposit in the collections of Columbia University since 1901. 

The Lecture is organized by Arnoud Visser, Queen Wilhelmina Visiting Professor, Columbia University, and Professor of Textural Culture in the Renaissance, University of Utrecht, in collaboration with the Studies of the Dutch-Speaking World at Columbia University, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the European Institute, and the Holland Society of New York.

Date: Monday, April 3rd, 2023

Location: Fayerweather 411

Time: 1:00 – 2:30 PM EST

Zoom link here.

This paper examines the shifting meaning of the two main conceptual categories through which Korean socialists had long imagined revolution, gender and class. Through an examination of issues such as the promotion of a universal socialist language, the gendered mobilization of labor, and consumption in newly built apartment homes, the paper argues that gender and class were emptied of their radical potential for critique after the war. In their place, a discourse developed focusing on the individual and culture that redefined the means of ‘struggle’ for socialism, helped to consolidate Party-state rule, and left little room for the critique of the postwar growth of gendered social hierarchies.

Andre Schmid is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. where he teaches modern Korean and East Asian histories. He is the author of Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919, and North Korea’s Mundane Revolution: Socialist Living and the Rise of Kim Il Sung, 1953-1965 (forthcoming).

Date: Thursday, March 30th, 2023

Location: Fayerweather Hall, Room 513, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027

Time: 5:00 – 6:00 PM EST

Register here.

Presenter: Mark Ponte, City Archives Amsterdam

Moderator: Arnoud Visser, Queen Wilhelmina Visiting Professor, Columbia University, and Professor of Textural Culture in the Renaissance, University of Utrecht

In the seventeenth century, steadily more people of African descent came to the Dutch Republic, as servants (whether enslaved or free) or as seafarers. Recent research has revealed that from c. 1630 onward a small free black community emerged in Amsterdam, which can be located in the area around the Jodenbreestraat (‘Jewish Broad Street’). This was an area where also many painters lived, among whom Rembrandt. This new research is based on combining marriage registers with new archival findings, made possible by the progress of All Amsterdam Acts, a large-scale digital humanities project that aims to unlock the complete notary archives of Amsterdam.

Through a combination of presentation and interactive work, this workshop will explore the opportunities and challenges of this type of research, focusing on three components: archival research, digital humanities, and public history (public debates, social media, and exhibitions about the history of slavery).

Mark Ponte is a historian at the Amsterdam City Archives. He has been (co-)curator of recent exhibitions in Amsterdam (‘Black in Rembrandt’s Time’, Museum Rembrandthuis, 2020. ‘Amsterdammers and Slavery’, Amsterdam City Archives, 2020) and Alkmaar (‘Plantation Alkmaar’, Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar, 2022-23).

Preparation:

Mark Ponte, ‘Black in Amsterdam around 1650‘ in: Kolfin and Runia ed., Black in Rembrandt’s Time (W Books/Museum Rembrandthuis 2020) 44-61.

Further literature for those who read Dutch
Mark Ponte, ‘Zwarte vrouwen in het midden van de zeventiende eeuw’, in: Maarten Hell ed., Amstelodomum. Alle Amsterdamse Akten. Ruzie, rouw en roddels bij de notaris, 1578-1915 (Amsterdam 2022) 130-143.
Mark Ponte, ‘Al de swarten die hier ter stede comen’ Een Afro-Atlantische gemeenschap in zeventiende-eeuws Amsterdam’, TSEG/ Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, 15(4), pp.33–62. DOI: https://lnkd.in/eEvRw32X

This workshop is cosponsored by the Studies of the Dutch-Speaking World and the European Institute.

March 22nd from 4:20pm -6:00pm  Workshop with Kunal Parker. (U Miami, History). “The Turn to Process: Legal, Political, and Economic Thought in America, 1870-1970” Commenter Alma Steingart (Columbia)

Workshop location will be circulated closer to event date

*

See full calendar of Legal History Workshop schedule here

Date: Thursday, March 9th, 2023

Location: 411 Fayerweather Hall, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027

Time: 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM EST

As part of the current upsurge of authoritarian politics and blood-and-soil ethnonationalism, U.S. Christians have rediscovered in Holy Russia an unlikely polestar. But this surge in the international “family values” movement is only the most recent iteration of a century-long relationship. From the Bolshevik Revolution through the present bromance with Putin, U.S. theocrats have used Russia as a resource for promoting sexual conformity, racial purity, and gender rigidity. Far from serving as mere “culture wars” distractions from law and economics, these theocratic ambitions are meant to secure a free market under God. This history suggests that when Christian nationalists tell us what they want, we should take them at their word.

Bethany Moreton is Professor of History at Dartmouth College and a series editor for Columbia University Press’s Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism.  Her first book, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 2009), won the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in U.S. history and the John Hope Franklin Award for the best book in American Studies.  Her most recent book is Entre Dios y el capital (Txalaparta, 2022). 

Date: Tuesday, March 7th, 2023

Location: International Affairs Building, Room 1501, 420 West 118th Street, New York, NY 10027

Time: 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM EST

Register here.

Every year, the U.S. government creates tens of millions of new secrets. Top secret documents have been turning up in the strangest places, triggering Justice Department investigations of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. What are the consequences for national security and democratic accountability? And what can possibly be done to advance a more rational, risk-management approach to safeguarding dangerous information while accelerating the release of public records?

Join us for a panel discussion about the history, and future, of official secrecy. It will feature new discoveries from Columbia’s History Lab, which has been using artificial intelligence to analyze the world’s largest database of declassified documents. Participants will also bring fresh perspectives from the frontlines of law, journalism, and data science, and discuss whether it would be possible – and wise – to build a “Declassification Engine.”

Panelists:

Emily Bazelon, Senior Research Scholar in Law and Truman Capote Fellow at Yale Law School
Matthew Connelly, Professor of History at Columbia; author of The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets
Barton Gelman, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner; staff writer at The Atlantic
Timothy Naftali, founding director of the Nixon Presidential Library; clinical associate professor of public service at NYU
Chris H. Wiggins, Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics at Columbia; Chief Data Scientist of The New York Times

Friday, March 3rd, 2023
• New York City Latin American History Workshop (Co-Sponsored by Dept., Hosted by Baruch College) – Andrei Guardarrama (Columbia), “Automobiles, Urban Business, and Industrialization in Mexico City, 1920-1940”
11AM-1PM
Baruch College, Newman Vertical Campus, 55 Lexington Ave, Room 8-210
To register and obtain workshop paper please email: Mark Rice, mark.rice@baruch.cuny.edu

Date: Thursday, March 2nd, 2023

Location: Fayerweather Hall, Room 411, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027

Time: 4:00 PM EST

Register here.

Presenter: Riva Kastoryano, Senior Research Fellow at the CNRS and Professor at Sciences Po Paris

Moderator: Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History, and Director of the European Institute, Columbia University

How to reconcile diversity and integration in the multi-level European public space? This particular issue pertains to the settlement of ethno-religious groups along with their expression of collective identities, participation and recognition. Taking as a point of departure four normative approaches – multiculturalism, interculturalism, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism – the goal is to develop a new normativity based on their similarity, differences and/or complementarity empirically evaluated by minorities themselves and political actors.

This event is co-sponsored by the European Institute and by the Alliance Program.

Date: February 21st, 2023

Location: 1219 International Affairs Building, 420 W 118th Street, 12th floor

Time: 12:00PM -1:30PM

Register here (for both in-person and virtual attendance)

The arctic climate is currently changing faster than the climate of the planet; this phenomenon is known as ‘Arctic amplification.’  However, even before the beginning of the anthropogenic global climate change, the Arctic climate was quite changeable. The observations of the rapid warming of the Arctic caused by natural factors in the 1920s-1940s led scientists to acknowledge the possibility of short-term changes of the climate in general. This talk, on the one hand, illustrates climate as a driver for changes in abundance and migrations patterns of fish species important for the ecosystems of these seas and for the economy. On the other hand, the talk focuses on Russian scientists and their international networks, through which new knowledge on the changes of Arctic climate circulated. In addition, the legacy of this period for the Soviet / Russian climate science is discussed.

Julia Lajus received her degree in the history of science (the Russian equivalent of Ph.D. degree) from the Institute for the History of Science and Technology in Moscow in 2004 with a dissertation devoted to the history of relations between fisheries science and fisheries in the European North of Russia/Soviet Union. She is now working on a book manuscript, “Linking People through Fish, Climate and Environment: Transnational Connections of Russian/Soviet Science and Their Mediators,“ which explores encounters between international and national interests at governmental, institutional and individual levels, in which all parties needed to craft strategies for successful scientific cooperation.

Date: Friday, February 17th, 2023

Location: Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, 74 Morningside Drive, New York, NY 10027 and online via Zoom.

Time: 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM EST

Register here (for both in-person and virtual attendance)

In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa, Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.

Rhiannon Stephens is an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University and specializes in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the late first millennium CE through the twentieth century. She is the author of Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History (Duke University Press, 2022), an interdisciplinary history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. Her first monograph, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), traced the history of motherhood as a social institution and an ideology across over a millennium of Ugandan political, economic and social change.

About the Speakers

Laura Fair is a historian of twentieth-century urban East Africa and the author of several award-winning books. She teaches in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. Her scholarship focuses on gendered social and economic change, and urban popular culture in Swahili-speaking communities. Her first book, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Ohio University Press, 2001), illustrates how former slaves used the social and cultural tools at their command to demonstrate their freedom from slavery and articulate alternative visions of justice under colonialism.

Raevin Jimenez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. Her work examines the gender history of Nguni-speakers in southern Africa between the 9th-20th century. Over a millennium, Nguni-speakers innovated and reconfigured masculine propriety and male relationships. Changing ideas of gender allowed Nguni-speakers to congregate young men into vast networks, define male identity, establish obligations of men as sons and husbands, and orient junior men towards political and economic opportunities.

Pablo Piccato is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931, published by Duke University Press, and a co-editor of True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico. His research and teaching focus on modern Mexico, particularly on crime, politics, and culture. He has taught as visiting faculty in universities in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and France.

Caterina Pizzigoni is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. She specializes in the colonial history of Latin America. Her interests include indigenous populations and the study of sources in Nahuatl (indigenous language of central Mexico), social history, household and material culture, religion and gender. Her current research focuses on household saints in colonial Mexico.

Date: Thursday, February 16th, 2023

Location: The Skylight Room, 9100 Graduate Center, CUNY 365 5th Avenue New York, NY 10016

Time: 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM EST

Register here for in-person attendance and here for Zoom attendance.

In this groundbreaking portrait of a courageous icon of independence, Hilary A. Hallett traces Elinor Glyn’s meteoric rise from a depressed society darling to a world-renowned celebrity author who consorted with world leaders from St. Petersburg to Cairo to New York. After reporting from the trenches during World War I, Glyn was lured by American movie producers from Paris to Los Angeles for her remarkable third act. Weaving together years of deep archival research, Hallett movingly conveys how Glyn, more than any other individual during the Roaring Twenties, crafted early Hollywood’s glamorous romantic aesthetic. She taught the screen’s greatest leading men to make love in ways that set audiences aflame, and coined the term “It Girl,” which turned actress Clara Bow into the symbol of the first sexual revolution.

Hilary A. Hallett is the Mendelson Family Professor and director of American studies and associate professor of history at
Columbia University. The author of Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood, she has written for the Los Angeles Times.

David Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History Emeritus at the CUNY Graduate Center and a past president of the Society of American Historians. His most recent book is The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War. He is also the author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, a New York Times “Ten Best Books of the Year” and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography. His bestseller Andrew Carnegie was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and the winner of the New-York Historical Society’s American History Book Prize. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst was honored with several awards, include the Bancroft Prize for History.

Date: Tuesday, February 14th, 2023

Location: Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street New York, NY 10018

Time: 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM EST

Register here for in-person attendance and here for remote livestream attendance.

This Valentine’s Day, discover the story behind the modern romance novel and its connection to the life of celebrity author Elinor Glyn. From rose petals and silken lingerie to smoldering looks and lingering caresses, Elinor Glyn’s work in fiction and film laid the foundations for much of modern romance on the page and the screen. Her scandalous, sexually charged 1907 novel, Three Weeks, was simultaneously a bestseller and one of the most denounced books of its time. Working in early Hollywood films, she coined the term “It Girl” and turned actor Clara Bow into a symbol of America’s first sexual revolution.

Hilary A. Hallett’s biography, Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood, traces Glyn’s sensational life. She wrote it during her 2016–2017 Fellowship at the Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She will be discussing the book with historian Alice Kessler-Harris.

Hilary A. Hallett is the Mendelson Family Professor and director of American Studies and Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. She is also the author of Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood, and has written for the Los Angeles Times.

Alice Kessler-Harris is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor Emerita of American History at Columbia University and Professor Emerita at Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She is the author of many books, most recently A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman.

Talk in French by Patrick Boucheron with English text available.

Date: Wednesday, February 8th

Location: Maison Française, 515 West 116th Street New York, NY 10027

Time: 6:00 – 7:00 PM EST

Held by Patrick Boucheron (History of Powers in Western Europe from 7th to 16th century, Collège de France)

Register here.

How do we tell the history of the Black Death today? A global history of humanity’s largest demographic catastrophe over the longue durée, from our present pandemic times? Drawing from his teachings at the Collège de France and his Theatre of the Plague production with the Théâtre National de Bretagne, acclaimed medievalist Patrick Boucheron reflects back on his long standing engagement with the plague and its contagious, overflowing metaphors.

Patrick Boucheron is a Professor and Chair of the History of Powers in Western Europe from the 7th to the 16th century at Collège de France. He specializes in the Middle Ages, particularly in Italy. His work also concerns the writing of history and changes in the discipline. It was in this spirit that he wrote Histoire mondiale de la France (Seuil, 2017). Since 2017, he has partnered with the Théatre National de Bretagne (TNB) headed by actor and stage director Arthur Nauzyciel. For each program, he invites associates, academics, and artists to imagine and create with him a monthly gathering, “Rencontrer l’Histoire” (“A Rendez-vous with History”), based on the program’s themes or current affairs.

This performance is co-sponsored by Columbia Maison Française, ICLS Medical Humanities, Department of French, and Department of History.

Date: Wednesday, February 8th, 2023

Location: Low Memorial Library Rotunda, 535 West 116th Street, New York, NY 10027

Time: 4:30 PM – 7:00 PM EST (Event runs from 4:30 – 6:00 PM, followed by a reception from 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM)

Register here.

SPEAKER: Chinh Chu, Founder & President of CC Capital

HOST: Professor Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Founder, Vietnamese Studies, Director, Weatherhead East Asian Institute

INTRODUCTIONS: Naja Pham Lockwood, Founder and CEO, RYSE Media Ventures

MODERATOR: Anh Do, Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times

Chinh Chu has had an illustrious 30-plus-year career as a private-equity investor and executive. He is the former Co-Chair of Blackstone Private Equity. He joined Blackstone in the early 1990s and spent 25 years at the firm, becoming head of the Software and Technology, Financial Services, Chemicals and Healthcare groups. He served on Blackstone’s Executive Committee, co-chaired its Private Equity group, and was a member of its Investment Committee. Mr. Chu led some of the most prominent and successful private equity deals at Blackstone. Mr. Chu founded CC Capital in 2016 and has since spearheaded both traditional private-equity investments as well as a series of SPACs (special purpose acquisition companies). He led the $7.2 billion going-private transaction of Dun & Bradstreet in February 2019  — and less than 18 months later, Dun & Bradstreet was taken public at a 3.5x return for CC Capital’s equity investors. CC Capital has created 5 SPACs since 2016, 3 in partnership with Neuberger Berman. Its SPACs have invested in high-quality businesses including Getty Images ($4.8 billion), the global leader in photo imaging and distribution; UTZ ($1.6 billion), the 100 year-old leading manufacturer of salty snacks; E2 Open ($2.6 billion), the leading supply chain software company; and FG Insurance ($2.1 billion), the life and annuities insurer. Mr. Chu has served on over 20 public and private corporate boards including: City Harvest, Getty Images, E2 Open, Dun & Bradstreet, NCR Corporation, Catalent, Kronos, SunGard Data Systems, Biomet, Celanese Corporation, Nalco, Nycomed, Alliant Insurance Services, London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE), Graham Packaging, AlliedBarton, and BankUnited. Before joining Blackstone, Mr. Chu worked at Salomon Brothers in the Mergers & Acquisitions department. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Buffalo’s School of Management.  

Mr. Chu was born in Vietnam and emigrated to America at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. He is the eldest of 6 children born to Dennis and Linda Chu.  Mr. Chu currently lives in New York City and is passionate about philanthropy, music, mountaineering, and, most importantly, his two daughters.

Lien-Hang Nguyen is the Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia, Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and co-founder of Vietnamese Studies at Columbia University. She is author of Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (2012), which won the Society for Military History Edward M. Coffman Prize and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Stuart L. Bernath Prize. Professor Nguyen serves as the general editor of the Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, 3 vols., as well as co-editor of the Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations. She is currently working on a comprehensive history of the 1968 Tet Offensive with Random House. She has appeared on numerous documentaries including PBS History with David Rubenstein, CNN Documentary, and MSNBC’s A Rachel Maddow Special Report. Professor Nguyen received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University.

Naja Pham Lockwood has produced multiple documentary and narrative films focusing on social justice issues including 76 Days, Try Harder!, Coming Home Again, Gook and Cries From Syria. She is the co-founder of RYSE Media Ventures, which supports stories of diverse voices, and an investor in Impact Partners Films, where she has financed the Academy Award winning documentary, Icarus as well as Won’t You Be My Neighbor and Audrie and Daisy. She served on the Sundance Utah Advisory Board and partnered with Sundance Institute to build and fund the Sundance Screenwriters Fellowships for Asian American filmmakers. She currently serves on the Board of the Utah Film Commission and Center for Asian American Media (CAAM). Naja is an associate instructor at the University of Utah teaching the Power of Storytelling: Asia and the Global Cinema. She is the Founder and CEO of www.najalockwooddesigns.com to support female artisans of Southeast Asia. Born in Vietnam, Naja immigrated to Massachusetts during the Fall of Saigon. She was the first Vietnamese-American to be appointed by Mayor Willie Brown and Mayor Gavin Newsom to be Arts Commissioner of San Francisco with a focus on community and diversity and the expansion and capital campaign development of the Asian Art Museum. Throughout Naja’s life, there has always been a commitment to social justice and making sure the voices of the under-represented, the minority and the oppressed are heard.

Anh Do is a Metro reporter covering Asian American issues and general assignments at the Los Angeles Times. A second-generation journalist, she has worked at the Seattle Times, the Orange County Register and Nguoi Viet Daily News, the largest Vietnamese-language newspaper in the US, based in California and founded by her late father. Born in Saigon, Do is a graduate of the University of Southern California with degrees in journalism and English and she has reported from Cuba, India, Mexico, Peru and Vietnam, elevating on-the-ground storytelling with cultural research and techniques honed from five years of living in Mexico City. Her writing on diaspora, race and trauma has won awards from Columbia University, Freedom Newspapers Sweepstakes and the Asian American Journalists Association. She is a recipient of Yale’s Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, and in 2016, she was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its breaking news coverage of the San Bernardino terrorist attacks. Apart from words, she’s passionate about all things canine, spending 27 years volunteering in dog rescue campaigns around the globe.

This event is sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

Feburary 8th from 4:20pm – 6:00pm  Workshop with Jungwon Kim (Columbia, Legal History). “Who Triggered My Death: Suicide and Punishment in Early Modern Korea” Comment by Pablo Piccato (Columbia, History).

Workshop location will be circulated closer to event date

*

See full calendar of Legal History Workshop schedule here

Date: Monday, February 6th, 2023

Location: Jerome Greene Hall, 435 W 116th Street, New York, NY 10027

Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST

Register here.

U.S. Senator Senator Sheldon Whitehouse will be making a special visit to the Community University community on Monday. February 6, 2023 to connect and speak to students, staff and faculty regarding Climate Change, U.S policy and give a special in-depth discussion on his new book : “The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court, and the damage the Court is doing to the fight against climate change.”

This event is sponsored by the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia’s Center for the History & Ethics of Public Health, and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

Friday, February 3rd, 2023
• New York City Latin American History Workshop (Co-Sponsored by Dept., Hosted by Baruch College) – Stephanie Huezo-Jefferson (Fordham), “Continuity in the ‘Promised Land’: Resistance as Embodied Memory in San José las Flores, El Salvador”
11AM-1PM
Baruch College, Newman Vertical Campus, 55 Lexington Ave, Room 8-210
To register and obtain workshop paper please email: Mark Rice, mark.rice@baruch.cuny.edu

Date: Thursday, February 2nd, 2023

Location: Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, 74 Morningside Drive, New York, NY 10027 and online via Zoom.

Time: 6:15 PM EST

Register here (for both in-person and virtual attendance)

Hosted by James Stafford (Columbia University) with panelists Isaac Nakhimovsky (Yale University), Susan Pedersen (Columbia University), Pablo Piccato (Columbia University), and Nadia Urbinati (Columbia University).

Join us for our New Book Series event honoring The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire, and the European Order by James Stafford. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have long been seen as a foundational period for modern Irish political traditions such as nationalism, republicanism, and unionism. The Case of Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2022) offers a fresh account of Ireland’s neglected role in European debates about commerce and empire in what was a global era of war and revolution. Drawing on a broad range of writings from merchants, agrarian improvers, philosophers, politicians, and revolutionaries across Europe, this book shows how Ireland became a field of conflict and projection between rival visions of politics in commercial society associated with the warring empires of Britain and France. It offers a new perspective on the crisis and transformation of the British Empire at the end of the eighteenth century and restores Ireland to its rightful place at the center of European intellectual history.

This event is organized by the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy and cosponsored by the Office of the Divisional Deans in the Faculty of Arts and Science and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.