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. ​

 

Co-hosted with Department of History at Columbia University and University of East LondonHistory, Culture and Diplomacy Series

Register here

This seminar moves from historical and legal perspectives on endings to set the framework for a discussion on the implications of the current pandemic as it winds down.

The seminar will use the historical context to address events and conditions that may influence the way in which COVID-[20]19 both concludes and lingers in 2021-2022 and beyond. “No matter how eloquently historical ‘endings’ are proclaimed and how sympathetically we may listen, what seems most striking is the inability to connect these endings to any pattern of meaning,” wrote Paul Corcoran in “Historical Endings: Waiting with Godot,” published in 1989 as the Cold War was beginning to end. On the cultural front, in the midst of 2020, a Scottish rock band, made famous by their first single, “Instant History,” released the album, A Celebration of Endings. What are the implications of endings that are framed as “instant” and how do events linger?

Mary Dudziak, Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law, author of War Time and Cold War Civil Rights, will open with her reflections on COVID in the context of her work on armed conflict and the indeterminate endings of global warfare and the dialogue between national policy and international relations. Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, will discuss the final section of her book, “The Post-Flu World” and the conclusion of the 1918 Spanish flu in the context of 1919-1920. Paula Larsson, vaccine historian at Oxford University, will discuss the idealized narrative of vaccines as the resolution and end of pandemics, and the complex realities of vaccine roll-out, popular hesitancy, and resistance. The legal and historical context sets the stage for Michel Goldman, founder of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Innovation in Healthcare (I3H), former Executive Director of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), who will address the meaning of endings, interdisciplinary cooperation, and how we learn from past crises to address the future.

This is the second event in the History, Culture and Diplomacy series. The first event was “Mind the Gap”: New Directions in History, Culture and Diplomacy in a Time of COVID.

Meet our speakers and chair

Mary Dudziak (@marydidziak), Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law, is a leading scholar of legal history and the United States and the World. She works at the intersection of US domestic law and international affairs. She is currently writing about war and political accountability in American history. Her earlier scholarship examined the intersection of race, civil rights, and US foreign affairs during the Cold War, and topics in twentieth century US legal history. Dudziak is the author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2012); Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey (Oxford University Press, 2008); Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2000) (2nd ed. 2011); editor of September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment? (Duke University Press, 2003); and co-editor (with Leti Volpp) of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders, a special issue of American Quarterly (September 2005), reissued by Johns Hopkins University Press in March 2006. Her next book, Going to War: An American History, is under contract with Oxford University Press. Other works on civil rights history and 20th-century constitutional history have appeared in numerous law reviews and other journals. She has published essays in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, Washington Post, and other periodicals. She founded the Legal History Blog, and contributes to Balkinization.

Laura Spinney (@lfspinney) is a science journalist and a literary novelist. She is the author of The Doctor (2001),The Quick (2007), Rue Centrale (2013) and Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World (2017). Her writing on science has appeared in National Geographic, Nature, The Economist and The Telegraph, among others. Born in the UK, she has also lived in France and Switzerland.

Paula Larsson (@paulalars)’s research focusses on the history of medicine, with specific interest on how historical social and racial factors influence medical equity today. She is currently writing a monograph on the history of vaccine policy in Canada. In addition to her research, Paula is incredibly passionate about Public Engagement and in 2018 she co-founded Uncomfortable Oxford, a public engagement project that highlights legacies of historical inequality within the city of Oxford. She is affiliated with the Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Oxford.

Michel Goldman (@MichelGoldman), MD, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at the Université Libre de Bruxelles where he is the Founder of the I3h Institute for Interdisciplinary Innovation in Healthcare .  He is a member of the Board of Directors of CQDM (Canadian consortium for precompetitive research), the Board of the Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative^, and of the Strategic and Scientific Advisory Board of GenomeQuebec. He also serves as chairman of the Scientific Committee of Effimune S.A., a French biotechnology company. Michel Goldman leads the Institute for Interdisciplinary Innovation in Healthcare (I3h), a ULB centre that has the mission of fostering research, education and outreach networks for the benefit of patients and other stakeholders. He is also the Chief editor of Frontiers in Medicine.

Michael Reynolds is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of International History, LSE. Michael Reynolds is a solicitor and chartered arbitrator, specialising in international arbitration. He was a lawyer and an arbitrator by profession before completing his PhD in Law at the LSE in 2008. His research focuses on the processes of international arbitration and its application in the resolution of disputes between states in the period 1870-1914. He is particularly interested in the inter-action of the processes of negotiation and settlement in the context of diplomacy and international law.

Victoria Phillips is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of International History, LSE. She is the author of Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy (Oxford University Press, 2020), which explores the international political life of Martha Graham to promote the United States in over thirty nations for every presidential administration from Dwight D. Eisenhower through George H.W. Bush. She is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics in the Department of International History, director of the Cold War Archival Research project (CWAR), the History, Culture and Diplomacy project, and History OnLine. Her articles have appeared in such varied publications as the New York Times, American Communist History, Dance Chronicle, Ballet News, and Dance Research Journal. She has curated several public exhibitions in the United States and Europe, and has lectured at renowned universities, colleges, high schools, and global institutes. At present she serves on the boards of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the European Institute at Columbia University, the British Dance Scholars Society, and chairs the SHAFR Task Force on Digital Resources. She is on the editorial boards of American Communist History and Dance Chronicle. Her primary research is held at the Library of Congress as the Victoria Phillips Collection.

More about this event

The Department of International History (@lsehistory) teaches and conducts research on the international history of Britain, Europe and the world from the early modern era up to the present day.

Sponsored by the department’s Contemporary International History and the Global Cold War research cluster.

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

Political Convicts: Transnational Actors of the Risorgimento A live virtual event Friday, April 9, 2021 | 12:00 – 2:00 pm EDT

REGISTER HERE

Presenter: Elena Bacchin (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice & Columbia University, Marie Curie Global Fellow) Discussant: Mark Mazower (Columbia University) Moderator: Konstantina Zanou (Columbia University) During the Risorgimento, numerous Italian intellectuals, patriots, and political activists spent parts of their lives in prison and built around this experience an identity based on the concepts of sacrifice and martyrdom. Focusing on the early 1830s, and in particular, on reactions to the Austrian incarceration of the 1831 insurgents, Elena Bacchin aims to free political detainees from the shackles of legal and political history and insert them within the context of the questions raised by transnational and humanitarian history. While liberal jurists’ and intellectuals’ perceptions of political crime were being reconfigured over the first decades of the 19th century, political convicts acted as transnational actors of the Italian Risorgimento, with international and popular support, thus challenging the idea that political prisoners emerged as political figures and international actors only in the 20th century. This event is part of the Italian and Mediterranean Colloquium series, sponsored by the European Institute & the Department of Italian.

Victoria Phillips on Martha Graham’s Cold War

Tuesday April 6 (5:00 PM ET) Martha Graham’s Cold War frames the story of Martha Graham and her particular brand of dance modernism as pro-Western Cold War propaganda.Although modern dancer Martha Graham claimed, “I am not political,” she and her company performed at the behest of the State Department on five continents during the administrations of eight U.S. presidents. From a White House performance for the Roosevelts in 1937, to a planned tour under George H.W. Bush to Eastern Europe in November 1989, noted scholar Dr. Victoria Phillips, Ph.D., connects readers to the depths to which Graham and her company infiltrated the American propaganda machine. Join Phillips as she discuss her new book, Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy. Victoria Phillips specializes in Cold War history, cultural diplomacy, and international relations. Her articles have appeared in such varied publications as the New York Times, American Communist History, Dance Chronicle, and Dance Research Journal. She has curated several exhibits on dance and politics in Europe and Washington, DC. Before her academic career, she was a dancer and then a portfolio manager on Wall Street. Her papers are held at the Library of Congress as the Victoria Phillips Collection. This event is presented in Zoom. Live closed captioning will be available. Image description: book cover for Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy, which depicts a shadow of Martha Graham, seated, in profile.

RSVP

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. 

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

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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. 

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

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

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

Register here!

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

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

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

About the participants

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

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

Register here

Thursday, February 18 

Outsider Art (Art Brut): Symbolism of Body Adornments

Lucienne Peiry in conversation with Camille Robcis

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

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

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

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

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

www.maisonfrancaise.org

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

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

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

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

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

Chronic complication poster
Register here

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

Friday, January 29

A panel discussion with  Manan Ahmed (History)

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

Panelists:

Vishakha Desai (Chair, Committee on Global Thought)

Purnima Dhavan (History, University of Washington)

Ayesha Ramachandran (Comparative Literature, Yale University)

Time:  10:10am – 12:00pm

Registration details to be announced

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

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

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

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

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

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

Columbia University affiliates: Register here!

Public audience: Livestream on our YouTube and Facebook!

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

January 8 @ 12:30 PM via Zoom

Register Here: https://bit.ly/3bCK3u2

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

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2020
7:00 PM

Click here for AAWW Event Info

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

 

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

Debating the Future of Europe Can the EU Lead the Fight against Climate Change? A live virtual debate Tuesday, December 15, 2020 | 1:00 – 2:15 pm  EST

REGISTER HERE

The third session of the “Debating the Future of Europe” series will focus on the European Green Deal. What has been achieved since the launch of the EU Green Deal in December 2019? What is the impact of the Covid crisis on efforts to address climate change? How is the EU partnering with other international actors to fight climate change? Join Jason Bordoff (SIPA Center on Global Energy Policy, Columbia), Alex Halliday (Earth Institute, Columbia), Enrico Letta (PSIA), and Laurence Tubiana (European Climate Foundation), in a debate moderated by Adam Tooze (European Institute, Columbia). This discussion is part of the series “Debating the Future of Europe,” organized by Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the European Institute and the Alliance Program. View the full series here. Co-sponsored by: Columbia Alumni Association, Columbia Maison Française, Columbia University Libraries, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, European Legal Studies Center at Columbia Law School,  Le Grand Continent, La Maison de l’Europe de Paris , and Sciences Po American Foundation. With additional support from the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union and the Advisory Board of the Paris Global Center.

The Perilous Public Square: Structural Threats to Free Expression Today

REGISTER

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

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

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

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

Hubert Harrison: A Harlem Radical’s Struggle for Equality

The US and the Israeli –Palestinian Conflict: One-state solution, two-state solution or no solution at all?

25.11.2020
16:30 – 18:00

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

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

ONLINE DISCUSSION

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

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

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

Rashid Khalidi
(Edward Said Professor Columbia University NY)

Gideon Levy
(Journalist, Haaretz)

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

Program

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

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

1:00 PM–2:00 PM    ONLINE EVENT

PANEL DISCUSSION:

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

Claire Zalc in Conversation with Rebecca Kobrin and Emmannuelle Saada

To sign up for this event, click here.

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

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

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

More about the book here.

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

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

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

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

American Society for Legal History (ASLH) 2020 ANNUAL MEETING

November 13–14, 2020

Virtual Mini-Conference

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

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

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

Comment
Barbara Welke, University of Minnesota

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

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

Event Details 

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

Panelists describe their research:

Event Description 

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

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

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

Panelists 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

Moderator 

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