Monday, October 26th, 2020 
All Water Has a Memory: Rivers and American History Series

“Rivers and Indigenous Resistance”
Ashley Smith, Zachary Bennett, Dustin Mack
6:30PM – 7:30PM EST
All panels will be held over zoom, registration is free and open to all. 
Register here

 Register

The Revolution Looks Inward: Internal Reflections on Elites and the Countryside in Atatürk’s Turkey, 1931-1938

Wednesday, October 21, 2020
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM EDT
ONLINE via Zoom
(Zoom meeting link to be sent after RSVP)

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-revolution-looks-inward-elites-and-the-countryside-ataturks-turkey-tickets-124183027779

We are delighted to welcome Ryan Gingeras (Naval Postgraduate School) for a talk jointly organized by The Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies & The Department of History.

By 1931, the men who governed the Republic of Turkey were confident that they had built a strong, centralized state upon the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. Yet doubts within the inner circle of Atatürk’s government remained. Beginning in 1931, ruling party officials in Ankara commissioned a series of investigative surveys of political, economic, and social life in the Turkish countryside. These surveys reveal much about how Turkey’s leaders genuinely perceived both the achievements and limits of the revolution inaugurated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This talk takes a critical look at these internal reports and places them in the context of other revolutionary and post-imperial states in the aftermath of the First World War.

Apocalypse Pending: Religion, Politics, and Social Media (Panel 1)

Click here to register.

This event will also be livestreamed on our YouTube page.

As the historian Richard Hofstadter famously pointed out more than half a century ago, conspiracy thinking or “the paranoid style” runs deep in the American political psyche.  With an eclectic religious population (many of whose ancestors fled persecution in Europe for their beliefs: Puritans, Quakers, Anabaptists, Huguenots, Catholics, Jews), the United States may be exceptional in its political DNA—a combination of religious fervor and persecutory fear that, while generally latent, sporadically erupts in the body politic.  The right-wing fear of social welfare policies as godless and unholy is one current manifestation of this particular political psychology.  Another is the increasing online presence of apocalyptic religious sects, of which QAnon is an articulation.

“Apocalypse Pending: Religion, Politics, and Social Media” explores the growing popularity of conspiracy thinking in our current moment and its place in the history of millenarian movements, particularly in the US context.  It considers how new media technologies have made it possible for the dissemination of such thinking on a scale unimaginable in the past, how the moral panic it generates is impacting social and political life worldwide, and whether there are measures available to control its spread or mitigate its effects.  

Sponsored by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, The Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Committee on Global Thought, Columbia Global Centers, and the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. 

Owing to limited capacity for this event, we will be sending registration confirmation and a Zoom webinar access link the day before the event. If you do not receive the access link, that means we were not able to accommodate you for this event, but we will notify you should the recording later become available online.

Speakers:

Stephanie McCurry, Professor of History at Columbia University, specializes in the American Civil War and Reconstruction, the nineteenth century United States, the American South, and the history of women and gender. Her most recent book is Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War (2019).

Brandy Zadrozny is an award-winning investigative and features reporter for NBC News where she covers misinformation, extremism, and the internet. Previously, Brandy was at The Daily Beast where she covered politics and the internet as a senior reporter. She has an MLIS and in a former life, worked as a librarian and instructor in news, college, and public libraries.

Moderator: Matthew L. Jones teaches history of science and technology at Columbia University. With Chris Wiggins, he will soon be publishing How Data Happened, which tells the story of the growth of data and the ways it changed power, and asks what to do now.

Monday, October 19th, 2020 
All Water Has a Memory: Rivers and American History Series 

“Rivers of Slavery and Freedom”
J.T. Roane, Tony Curtis Perry, Adrienne Troy-Frazier
6:30PM – 7:30PM EST
All panels will be held over zoom, registration is free and open to all. 
Register here 

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

The Government of Religious Life in Idi Amin’s Uganda
A lecture by Derek Peterson (University of Michigan)
Wednesday, October 14 @ 4:10pm EST
On Zoom: register here to receive the webinar link

Judith Surkis, in conversation with Stephanie McCurry, Karuna Mantena, and Emmanuelle Saada, moderated by Camille Robcis and Stefanos Geroulanos

Register here!

For general public: Livestream on Facebook and YouTube!

For Columbia affiliates: register and attend via Zoom

This panel will cover immigration justice issues including xenophobia, ICE, CBP and their presence at BLM protests, the US-Mexico border, histories of borders and immigration, histories of state violence, and related current events!

Organized and moderated by Saeeda Islam (Faculty Affairs Coordinator) and Emma Sheinbaum (Communications & Development Coordinator)

Brianna Nofil is an Assistant Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. She earned her PhD from Columbia University (GSAS ’20). Nofil’s research areas focus on immigration, borders and borderlands, carceral state, and legal.

Pablo Piccato, professor, specializes in Mexican history. He has worked on the political and cultural history of Mexico, and on the history of crime. He is currently working on an overview of crime in Mexico during the twentieth century.

Mae M. Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. Before becoming a historian she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education.

Karl Jacoby is a specialist in environmental, borderlands, and Native American history. His books include Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation and Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History.

PANEL DISCUSSION: 20/20 Vision in a Time of Crisis

A conversation with Etienne Balibar, Adam Tooze, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Emmanuelle Saada, moderated by Bernard Harcourt

To sign up for this virtual transatlantic event, RSVP here.

The Covid-19 pandemic and public health crisis; economic collapse; waves of anti-racist protests; threats to democracy and rising authoritarianism in the U.S. and elsewhere, all against a backdrop of an ever-worsening climate crisis… how can we make sense of the current moment in history? Bernard Harcourt engages Etienne Balibar, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Adam Tooze, and Emmanuelle Saada in a wide-ranging discussion about these destabilizing developments that bring into focus fundamental fault lines in the world today. 

Etienne Balibar teaches at Columbia every Fall semester. He is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X – Nanterre and Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Emmanuelle Saada is Professor of French and of History, and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Columbia. Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia. Souleymane Bachir Diagne is the Director of the Institute of African Studies, Professor of French and of Philosophy at Columbia. Bernard Harcourt is the Isidore and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia.

This event is presented by the Columbia Maison Française. It is co-sponsored by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, the European Institute, and the Alliance Program.

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.