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

Thurs. Aug. 13 @ 4 pm EDT

Dr. Stephanie McCurry: The Confederate States of America 

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

Register for Dr. McCurry’s talk here.

For general public: live-stream on Facebook and YouTube!

For Columbia affiliates: register and attend via Zoom

This panel discussion will go into the history of abolition, the Reconstruction Era, Black resistance, white supremacy, and the Black Lives Matter movement. A live Q&A will be integrated into the panel, which makes this an interactive conversation.

• Christopher L. Brown, professor, specializes in the history of eighteenth century Britain, the early modern British Empire, and the comparative history of slavery and abolition, with secondary interests in the age of revolutions and the history of the Atlantic world. He is now at work on two projects, one on British experience along the West African coast in the era of the Atlantic slave trade, and a second on the decline and fall of the British Planter class in the era of abolition and emancipation.

• Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History, specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and 19th-century America. His book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery won the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Lincoln prizes for 2011. His latest book is Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.

• Stephanie McCurry, Professor of History, specializes in the American Civil War and Reconstruction, the nineteenth century United States, the American South, and the history of women and gender.  She is also interested in the study of Confederate Monuments and  memory, and Slavery and its Legacy in U.S.

• Bailey Yellen is a doctoral student at Columbia University studying History who studies slavery, the transatlantic antislavery movement and emancipation. Bailey’s research interests include black resistance in the Atlantic World and the circulation of abolitionist literature between the United States and the British Empire during the 19th century.

Register Here!

COVID in Queens: Public Trust & Justice

Livestream on YouTube and FacebookLive!

“Say it Ain’t Contagious: Reopening and Rethinking
Baseball in the Age of Pandemic”
A Live Conversation: Online via Zoom 7 p.m. EST, June 17, 2020

Three months ago, spring training was winding down and another baseball season
was about to begin. Then the coronavirus pandemic emerged and the season—as
well as so much else—was thrown into doubt. Where does the game go from here?

How does it return and, as importantly, how does a wary public engage with
spectator sports in an age without in-person spectators? How is the absence of
baseball affecting us as individuals and as a society? Join panelists Craig
Calcaterra, Steven Goldman, Frank Guridy, Lincoln Mitchell, and moderator Tova
Wang for an evening of analysis, opinion, and insight. The event is free. To get the
Zoom link, please RSVP to lincoln@lincolnmitchell.com.

Craig Calcaterra is the lead national baseball writer for NBCSports.com. He writes
about non-baseball things at CraigCalcaterra.com and is on Twitter
@craigcalcaterra.

Steven Goldman is the current Consulting Editor and former Editor-in-Chief of
Baseball Prospectus; the host of the Infinite Inning podcast on sports, history,
politics, and culture; and the author of Forging Genius: The Making of Casey
Stengel (Potomac Books, 2005). He is on Twitter @GoStevenGoldman.

Frank A. Guridy teaches history and African American and African Diaspora
Studies at Columbia University. His forthcoming book, The Sports Revolution: How
Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (University of Texas Press, 2021)
shows how Texas-based sports entrepreneurs and athletes from marginalized
backgrounds transformed sports. He is on Twitter @fguridy.

Lincoln Mitchell teaches in the political science at Columbia University. His most
recent book is San Francisco Year Zero: Political Upheaval Punk Rock and a Third
Place Baseball Team (Rutgers University Press, 2019). His writings on politics,
baseball and foreign policy can be found at www.lincolnmitchell.com. He on
Twitter @LincolnMitchell.

Tova Wang is a born and raised baseball and Yankee fan. She misses baseball. A
lot. She is also democracy fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, author of the
book The Politics of Voter Suppression: Increasing and Expanding Americans’ Right
to Vote (Cornell University Press, 2012). She is on Twitter @Tovawang1.

Webinar Registration

Columbia Global Centers | Istanbul and Columbia Global Centers | Tunis invite you to a live webinar on “Rethinking Past Plagues in the Time of Coronavirus: The Ottoman Experience” with Nükhet Varlık, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University–Newark and the University of South Carolina, in conversation with A. Tunç Şen, Assistant Professor of History, Columbia University, on May 13 at 6:30 pm GMT+3. About the Talk We are currently experiencing one of the most disruptive pandemics in modern history. The outbreak of COVID-19 that was first recorded in Wuhan, China and quickly spread across the globe has resulted in nearly 3.7 million confirmed cases to date and more than a quarter-million deaths. Where we stand now, how many it will infect or kill worldwide, how long it will continue, and when—if ever—life will go back to normal are still uncertain. What we know for sure is that this is a pivotal moment and that we are experiencing a historic event that will transform our societies both profoundly and irreversibly. As we wade into this new age of pandemics, it is critical to rethink how we write the history of pandemics. With a conviction that the past helps us to understand the present and the present should help us to rethink the past, we will turn to the legacy of past plagues. This conversation will take stock of the lasting legacies of past plagues because they continue to shape the way we think about new pandemics. In particular, it will address persistent problems, such as European exceptionalism, triumphalism, and epidemiological orientalism that are not only ubiquitous in plague studies, but also staples of public opinion about pandemics, past and present. Send your questions in advance! Nükhet Varlık is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–Newark and the University of South Carolina. She is a historian of the Ottoman Empire interested in disease, medicine, and public health. She is the author of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (2015) and editor of Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (2017). Her new book project, “Empire, Ecology, and Plague: Rethinking the Second Pandemic (ca.1340s-ca.1940s),” examines the six-hundred-year Ottoman plague experience in a global ecological context. In conjunction with this research, she is involved in developing the Black Death Digital Archive and contributing to multidisciplinary research projects that incorporate perspectives from palaeogenetics (ancient DNA research in particular), bioarchaeology, disease ecology, and climate science into historical inquiry. She is the Editor of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA). A. Tunç Şen is an Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University. He is a historian of the Ottoman Empire whose research and records of publication revolve around questions about the history of science and divination, perceptions of time, and manuscript culture in the early modern era. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2016 with an award-winning dissertation on astrology and astrologers at the early-modern Ottoman court. His first book project, Masters of Time: Astrologers and Scientific Expertise at the Early Modern Ottoman Court, examines the role and corpus of stargazers in measuring, displaying, and interpreting time from chronological datings to the designation of precise auspicious moments. He is one of the collaborators of the international research project, Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition: Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the Strange in Ottoman Mentalities funded by the European Research Council and led by Dr. Marinos Sariyannis. He is also sitting on the advisory board for the Manuscripts of the Muslim World project currently undertaken at Columbia University.

Climate, Environment, and the Politics of Public Trust

New Books in the Arts & Sciences:
Celebrating Recent Work by Rashid Khalidi

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
By: Rashid Khalidi

In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

About the Author:

Rashid Khalidi is the author of Palestinian Identity, Brokers of Deceit, and The Iron Cage, among others. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and many other journals. He is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York and editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Speakers:

Rosie Bsheer is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. She has been published in journals including International Journal of Middle East Studiesand Past and Present, and has co-edited The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of An Old Order? with Bassam Haddad and Ziad Abu-Rish. She is currently writing a book provisionally titled Archive Wars: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Politics of History in Saudi Arabia.

Manan Ahmed is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. He is the author of A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and the Origins of Islam in South Asia, and the forthcoming book The Loss of Hindustan: Tarikh-i Firishta and the Work of History, among other publications. 

Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination; and, most recently, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, among other published works. 

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College and at Columbia University. She is the author of two books, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology, among other published works. Her forthcoming book is provisionally titled Soldier Trauma, The Obligations of Citizenship, and the Forever Wars.

Iraqi Studies: Past, Present, and Future
February 28-29, 2020

This two-day conference brings together a diverse group of established and emerging scholars working on the history of modern Iraq from the Ottoman period to the present to interrogate Iraqi studies; taking stock of its past, reflecting on the present, and looking towards its future. Studies of modern Iraq have grown qualitatively and quantitatively in recent years. There is now a critical mass of innovative scholars in the US, Europe, and the Middle East who work on Iraq and are exploring new lines of inquiry in a number of different directions. It is common to see Iraq-themed panels and round tables at international conferences. Given this volume of scholarly activity connected to modern Iraq, it is an opportune time to critically reflect on and examine Iraqi studies and its status as a burgeoning sub-field of Middle East Studies.

We aim to discuss research trends, to identify promising new questions and sources, to exchange experiences and insights, and to encourage networking across period-specializations and field boundaries. Each panel will comprise a discussant and several speakers. A keynote panel of senior scholars will critically reflect on the state of Iraqi studies. Confirmed speakers for the Keynote Panel: Dr. Dina Khoury (George Washington University); Dr. Orit Bashkin (University of Chicago); Dr. Eric Davis (Rutgers University); Dr. Sara Pursley (New York University).

Among the questions we seek to explore are: How do we define Iraqi studies? What various methodological approaches inform our study of Iraq? Is Iraqi studies an inherently nationalist endeavor? How do different frameworks support or break with nationalist conventions? How has Iraq’s recent turbulent history affected how scholars access sources to study the country, its geography, its people, its history, its literature, etc.? How can we move past the sectarian and ethnic narratives of understanding the Iraqi past and present?

Organisers:
Zeinab Azarbadegan (Columbia University)
Amnah Almukhtar (Columbia University)
Natasha Pesaran (Columbia University)

Sponsors:
Department of History
Center for International History
Center for the Study of Muslim Societies
Seminar on Ottoman and Turkish Studies
Department of Art History and Archaeology
Middle East Institute (MEI)
Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies
The Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP)

In order to attend and to be added to our mailing list for updates related to the conference, please register here.

Saturday

10:00- 11:30      Panel 5: State Power and Natural Resource Development

Discussant: Natasha Pesaran (Columbia U.)

Dale Stahl (U. of Colorado, Denver), The Third River: Oil, Water, and the Iraqi Development Board

Tiffany Floyd (Columbia U.), “He who saw the Deep:” Petromodernity, Deep Time, and Dia Al-Azzawi as Gilgamesh

Isacar Bolaños (Loyola U., Maryland), The French Connection: Informal Empire, Environmental Management, and Foreign Technocrats in Hamidian Iraq

Şehnaz İyibaş (Koç U., Istanbul), Irrigation in the Late Ottoman Iraq: The Hindiya Barrage 1890-1914

11:30-11:45     Break

11:45-13:15     Panel 6: Formation of Iraqi Identities and Social Classes

Discussant: Orit Bashkin (U. of Chicago)

Hala Fattah (Independent Scholar), The Invisible Iraqis: Georgian, Daghistani and Circassian Families in Early Twentieth Century Iraq

Pelle Valentin Olsen (U. of Chicago), Iraqi Jews and the Production and Consumption of Leisure

Andrew Alger (CUNY), Clinical Behavior: Institutionalized Medicine and Urban Space in Baghdad, 1917 – 1958

Zachary Sheldon (U. of Chicago), The Cosmopolitan National: Development and Crisis in the Iraqi Diaspora

13:15-14:00     Lunch

14:00-15:30     Panel 7: Beyond the Nation: Iraq in Global Perspective

Discussant: Nadje Al-Ali (Brown U.)

Esmat Elhalaby (NYU Abu Dhabi), India in Iraq/Iraq in India

Noga Efrati (Open University of Israel),, Revisiting early women’s activism in Iraq: a transnational perspective

Hilary Falb Kalisman (U. of Colorado, Boulder), Global Iraq: Gender, Education and Travel

Kate Tietzen (Kansas State U.), Iraqis in Russia: The Organizations of Iraqis Outside the Region-Moscow in the 1990s

15:30-15:45     Break

15:45-17:15     Roundtable

Iraqi Studies: Past, Present, and Future
February 28-29, 2020

This two-day conference brings together a diverse group of established and emerging scholars working on the history of modern Iraq from the Ottoman period to the present to interrogate Iraqi studies; taking stock of its past, reflecting on the present, and looking towards its future. Studies of modern Iraq have grown qualitatively and quantitatively in recent years. There is now a critical mass of innovative scholars in the US, Europe, and the Middle East who work on Iraq and are exploring new lines of inquiry in a number of different directions. It is common to see Iraq-themed panels and round tables at international conferences. Given this volume of scholarly activity connected to modern Iraq, it is an opportune time to critically reflect on and examine Iraqi studies and its status as a burgeoning sub-field of Middle East Studies.

We aim to discuss research trends, to identify promising new questions and sources, to exchange experiences and insights, and to encourage networking across period-specializations and field boundaries. Each panel will comprise a discussant and several speakers. A keynote panel of senior scholars will critically reflect on the state of Iraqi studies. Confirmed speakers for the Keynote Panel: Dr. Dina Khoury (George Washington University); Dr. Orit Bashkin (University of Chicago); Dr. Eric Davis (Rutgers University); Dr. Sara Pursley (New York University).

Among the questions we seek to explore are: How do we define Iraqi studies? What various methodological approaches inform our study of Iraq? Is Iraqi studies an inherently nationalist endeavor? How do different frameworks support or break with nationalist conventions? How has Iraq’s recent turbulent history affected how scholars access sources to study the country, its geography, its people, its history, its literature, etc.? How can we move past the sectarian and ethnic narratives of understanding the Iraqi past and present?

Organisers:
Zeinab Azarbadegan (Columbia University)
Amnah Almukhtar (Columbia University)
Natasha Pesaran (Columbia University)

Sponsors:
Department of History
Center for International History
Center for the Study of Muslim Societies
Seminar on Ottoman and Turkish Studies
Department of Art History and Archaeology
Middle East Institute (MEI)
Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies
The Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP)

In order to attend and to be added to our mailing list for updates related to the conference, please register here.

Preliminary Program

Friday

9:00-9:30 Registration and Opening Remarks by Zainab Bahrani (Columbia University)

9:30- 11:00      Panel 1: Methods and Approaches: Writing Iraqi History

Discussant: Dina Rizk Khoury (George Washington U.)

Wisam Alshaibi (UCLA), The Dark Archive of the Wars in Iraq: Introducing the Kanan Makiya Papers

Nadje Al-Ali (Brown U.), Feminist Approaches to Iraqi Studies: Beyond an add-women- and- stir approach

Sara Farhan (American U. of Sharjah), Towards a History of Medicine of Modern Iraq

Orcun Okan (Columbia U.), Reflections on the Use of First-Person Narratives for Writing Histories of Modern Iraq

11:00-11:15     Break

11:15-12:45     Panel 2: The Iraqi Nahda

Discussant: Marwa Elshakry (Columbia U.)

Annie Greene (College of William and Mary), The Nahda in Iraq

Camille Cole (Yale U.), “The Last Vestiges of Arab Independence”: Khaz‘al Khan and the Making of Gilded Age Basra and Khuzestān, 1897-1914

Kevin Michael Jones (U. of Georgia), Baghdad Days and Cairo Nights: The Arab Nahda and the Construction of Iraqi National Identity

Gabriel Young (NYU), On India’s Path: Transnational Histories of Iraq and the Political Economy of ʿAbd al-Fattah Ibrahim

12:45-13:30 Lunch

13:30-15:00     Panel 3: State Formation and Resistance

Discussant: Sara Pursley (NYU)

Mélisande Genat (Stanford U.), State Justice and Tribal Law in the Sinjar Region (1932-1958)

Carl Shook (Loyola U., Chicago), Imperialist Invention or Uncertain Enterprise? Understanding British power through the political geography of Iraq

Huma Gupta (MIT),  The Architecture of Dispossession and State-Building in Iraq

Amir Taha (Utrecht U.), War and Insurgency in Southern Iraq: The Case Study of Shinafiyah, 1979-1991

15:00-15:15     Break

15:15-16:45     Panel 4: Beyond Sectarianism

Discussant: Eric Davis (Rutgers U.)

Michael Degerald (Lund U., Sweden), Race in modern Iraqi History: Questioning the not-so-sectarian dimensions of social tensions

Christopher Cooper-Davies (Cambridge U.), Between sectarian populism and anti-sectarianism: mechanisms for Shi’i national integration in Hashemite Iraq

Joseph Edward Kotinsly (U. of Texas at Austin), The Politics of Suffering: An examination of the Iraqi Shi’i Opposition Movement’s response to the 1991 March Uprisings 

Jinan Al-Habbal (LSE), The Evolution of the Iraqi Army

16:45-17:00     Break

17:00-18:30     Keynote Panel: Prof. Orit Bashkin (U. of Chicago), Prof. Dina Rizk Khoury (George Washington U.), Prof. Eric Davis (Rutgers U.), Prof. Sara Pursley (NYU)

*

Saturday

10:00- 11:30      Panel 5: State Power and Natural Resource Development

Discussant: Natasha Pesaran (Columbia U.)

Dale Stahl (U. of Colorado, Denver), The Third River: Oil, Water, and the Iraqi Development Board

Tiffany Floyd (Columbia U.), “He who saw the Deep:” Petromodernity, Deep Time, and Dia Al-Azzawi as Gilgamesh

Isacar Bolaños (Loyola U., Maryland), The French Connection: Informal Empire, Environmental Management, and Foreign Technocrats in Hamidian Iraq

Şehnaz İyibaş (Koç U., Istanbul), Irrigation in the Late Ottoman Iraq: The Hindiya Barrage 1890-1914

11:30-11:45     Break

11:45-13:15     Panel 6: Formation of Iraqi Identities and Social Classes

Discussant: Orit Bashkin (U. of Chicago)

Hala Fattah (Independent Scholar), The Invisible Iraqis: Georgian, Daghistani and Circassian Families in Early Twentieth Century Iraq

Pelle Valentin Olsen (U. of Chicago), Iraqi Jews and the Production and Consumption of Leisure

Andrew Alger (CUNY), Clinical Behavior: Institutionalized Medicine and Urban Space in Baghdad, 1917 – 1958

Zachary Sheldon (U. of Chicago), The Cosmopolitan National: Development and Crisis in the Iraqi Diaspora

13:15-14:00     Lunch

14:00-15:30     Panel 7: Beyond the Nation: Iraq in Global Perspective

Discussant: Nadje Al-Ali (Brown U.)

Esmat Elhalaby (NYU Abu Dhabi), India in Iraq/Iraq in India

Noga Efrati (Open University of Israel),, Revisiting early women’s activism in Iraq: a transnational perspective

Hilary Falb Kalisman (U. of Colorado, Boulder), Global Iraq: Gender, Education and Travel

Kate Tietzen (Kansas State U.), Iraqis in Russia: The Organizations of Iraqis Outside the Region-Moscow in the 1990s

15:30-15:45     Break

15:45-17:15     Roundtable

New Books in the Arts & Sciences:

Celebrating Recent Work by Stephanie McCurry

Thursday, February 20, 2020  6:15pm

Heyman Center Common Room

Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War

Please note: This event is free and open to the public, but photo ID is required to enter the building. First come, first seated.

We think of war as a man’s world, but women have always played active roles in times of violence and been left to pick up the pieces in societies decimated by war. In this groundbreaking reconsideration of the Civil War, the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning invites us to see America’s bloodiest conflict not just as pitting brother against brother but as a woman’s war.

When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief. Through a trio of dramatic stories, Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. We meet Clara Judd, a Confederate spy whose imprisonment for treason sparked heated controversy, defying the principle of civilian immunity and leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved women escaped across Union lines, upending emancipation policies that extended only to enslaved men. The Union’s response was to classify fugitive black women as “soldiers’ wives,” regardless of whether they were married—offering them some protection but placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. In the war’s aftermath, the Confederate grande dame Gertrude Thomas wrestled with her loss of status and of her former slaves. War, emancipation, and economic devastation affected her family intimately, and through her life McCurry helps us see how fundamental the changes of Reconstruction were.

Women’s War dismantles the long-standing fiction that women are outside of war and shows that they were indispensable actors in the Civil War, as they have been—and continue to be—in all wars.

About the Author:

Stephanie McCurry, Professor of History, specializes in the nineteenth century United States, the American South, the American Civil War and the history of women and gender.  Current interests include the history of the United States in the immediate post-Civil War moment, the history of postwar societies and processes of reconstruction in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the matter of marriage, politics and the state in the modern period.

About the Speakers:

Drew Gilpin Faust is President Emeritus and the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. Faust served as the 28th president of Harvard University from July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2018.  She was Harvard’s first female president, and the first Harvard president without a Harvard degree. 

She is the author of six books, including “Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War” (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), for which she won the Francis Parkman Prize in 1997. Her most recent book, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), looks at the impact of the Civil War’s enormous death toll on the lives of 19th-century Americans. It won the Bancroft Prize in 2009, was a finalist for both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and was named by The New York Times one of the “10 Best Books of 2008.”  “This Republic of Suffering” is the basis for a 2012 Emmy-nominated episode of the PBS American Experience documentaries titled “Death and the Civil War,” directed by Ric Burns. She is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

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

Robcis is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France which was published by Cornell University Press and which won the 2013 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize. It examines how and why French judges and legislators turned to structuralism – and more specifically, to some of the most difficult and abstract concepts of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan – to reassert the centrality of the heterosexual family in political debates around bioethics, same-sex unions, single-parent households, family names, surrogacy, and adoption.

Jeremy K. Kessler, Professor of Law, is a legal historian whose scholarship focuses on First Amendment law, administrative law, and constitutional law generally. He joined the Columbia Law School faculty in 2015 and is co-director of Columbia University’s 20th Century Politics and Society Workshop and Columbia Law School’s Legal History Workshop. He also serves on the ABA’s Committee on the History of Administrative Law.

Kessler’s forthcoming book, Fortress of Liberty: The Rise and Fall of the Draft and the Remaking of American Law, Harvard, explores how the contested development of the military draft transformed the relationship between civil liberties law and the American administrative state. His articles on First Amendment law, administrative law, constitutional theory, and American legal history have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Texas Law Review, among other publications. Kessler also writes about law and history for non-academic publications, including The New Republic, n+1, The Boston Review, and Jacobin.

Panel Chair:

Christopher L. Brown, professor, specializes in the history of eighteenth century Britain, the early modern British Empire, and the comparative history of slavery and abolition, with secondary interests in the age of revolutions and the history of the Atlantic world. He is now at work on two projects, one on British experience along the West African coast in the era of the Atlantic slave trade, and a second on the decline and fall of the British Planter class in the era of abolition and emancipation.

Sponsors:

Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), The Office of the Divisional Dean of Social Sciences, The Heyman Center for the Humanities

Click here to RSVP

“Mestizaje in Arab Amairka”
Sarah Gualtieri, University of Southern California

Toxic City: Lead Poisoning and Its Silent Attack on the Vulnerable
Brooklyn Historical Society

Tuesday, February 11
Doors: 6:00 pm
Event: 6:30 pm
$10 General Admission / $5 for Members
Purchase tickets here

 

Hidden in decaying walls and aging infrastructure, lead is an insidious threat to the health of Brooklynites and citizens throughout New York City, especially children and communities that have been historically marginalized by structural inequalities. Dr. David Rosner, Co-Director of Columbia’s Center for the History & Ethics of Public Health, shares this tainted history and joins a conversation with staff lawyer at North Manhattan Improvement Corporation Matthew Chachère, activist in the fight against lead poisoning Cordell Cleare, and Director of Lead Poisoning Prevention and Treatment at Montefiore Children’s Hospital Dr. Morri Markowitz about the efforts being made to treat illnesses caused by lead, to hold industrial interests accountable, and to secure the future of healthy communities in our city. Moderated by Christopher Werth, senior editor at WNYC whose reporting on lead poisoning has spurred citywide inspections of classrooms and other facilities.

Presented in connection with the exhibition Taking Care of Brooklyn: Stories of Sickness and Health

For questions about this event or other inquiries, contact our Visitor Services desk at 718-222-4111, ext. 250.

Victoria Phillips Book Launch:
Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy

Monday, February 10th, 2020
6:30PM
Maison Française 

 Register here.

Join us for a book launch and panel discussion for Martha Graham’s Cold War: the Dance of American Diplomacy (Dec 20, 2019, Oxford University Press).

The panel will include:

Victoria Phillips, author of Martha Graham’s Cold War: the Dance of American Diplomacy
Victoria de Grazia, Moore Collegiate Professor of History, Columbia University
Lynn Garafola, Professor Emerita of Dance, Barnard College
Richard R. John, Professor of Journalism, Columbia University
Whitney Laemmli, Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University

Martha Graham’s Cold War is the first book to frame the story of Martha Graham and her particular brand of dance modernism as pro-Western Cold War propaganda used by the United States government to promote American democracy. Representing every seated president from Dwight D. Eisenhower through Ronald Reagan, Graham performed politics in the global field for over thirty years. Why did the State Department consistently choose Martha Graham? As with other art forms such as jazz or avant-garde paintings, modern dance was seen to demonstrate American values of individualism and freedom; the choreographer used the freed body to make a new dance technique that could find the essence of human narratives. Graham targeted elites and its youth with modern dance to propound the ‘universalism’ of human rights under the banner of American democracy. In her choreography, argues author Victoria Phillips, Graham recast the stories of the Western canon through female protagonists whom she captured as timeless, seemingly beyond current politics, and in so doing implied superior political and cultural values of the Free World. Centering on powerful yet not demonstrably American female characters, the stories Graham danced seduced and captured the imaginations of elite audiences without seeming to force a determinedly American agenda. When her characters grew mythic on stage, they became the stories of all mankind, as Graham termed it. “My dances are ages old in meaning,” she declared. But Graham took the pro-American argument one step further than her artistic compatriots. She added the trope of the frontier to her repertory.

In the Cold War, Graham’s particular modernism and the woman herself ossified, as did political aims of a cultural diplomacy based on an appeal to foreign elites. Phillips lays bare the side-by-side trajectories between the aging of Graham’s choreography, her work as an ambassador, and the political dominance of the United States as a global power. With her tours and Cold War modernism, she demonstrated the power of the individual, immigrants, republicanism, and freedom from walls and metaphorical fences through cultural diplomacy with the unfettered language of movement and dance.

Register here.

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to ynn2000@columbia.edu by February 4.

Erin McElroy is a postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s interdisciplinary AI Now Institute, researching the digital platforms used by landlords in order to surveil and racialize tenants. Erin is also cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a data visualization, critical cartography, and multimedia collective documenting dispossession and resistance struggles upon gentrifying landscapes. Erin earned a doctoral degree in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a focus on the politics of space, race, and technology in Romania and Silicon Valley. More recently, Erin co-launched the Radical Housing Journal to foster housing and racial justice transnationally.

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data visualization, critical cartography, and multimedia collective documenting dispossession and resistance struggles upon gentrifying landscapes. The AEMP was founded in 2013 in the midst of the San Francisco Bay Area’s Tech Boom 2.0 and resultant gentrification. Since then, it has expanded to New York City and Los Angeles as well. As a volunteer-based collective, it prioritizes producing maps, data, and stories with those most impacted by gentrification, racial dispossession, and technocapitalism.

This seminar series is organized by the Center for Spatial Research with the Mapping Historical New York City project and is supported in part through a workshop grant from ISERP.

The Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and The Urban and Social Policy Concentration at the School of International and Public Affairs presents

Critical Global Studies: What, Why, and How

In That Time: Michael O’Donnell And the Tragic Era of Vietnam
An evening with Daniel Weiss

Featuring Daniel Weiss
(CEO and President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Hosted by Lien-Hang Nguyen
(Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia)

Register here.

Icons and Images: Objects of Commemoration and Presence
Tuesday, January 28 @ 5:30 PM
Deutsches Haus, 420 W 116th Street

German artist Heide Hatry, who creates portraits out of cremated remains of her subjects, will discuss issues of presence, our relationship to the dead, and the place of art in the process of grieving. She will be in conversation with celebrated historian Caroline Walker Bynum, University Professor emerita at Columbia University.

This event is organized by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life and cosponsored by the Departments of Art History, History, and Germanic Languages.