This symposium convenes an interdisciplinary conversation on political and ecological crisis in the Greater Caribbean. In the aftermath of adverse climatic and seismic events, Caribbean states and territorial dependencies are subjected to new regimes of disaster capitalism and political intervention. Meanwhile, crises of sovereign debt and governing legitimacy set off new grassroots mobilizations against austerity and fiscal control. Drawing on historical and ethnographic perspectives, symposium participants will engage the existential crisis of climate changes alongside a crisis in the state form as a vehicle of postcolonial political futures. 

At the Heymen Center for the Humanities at Columbia. 

For more information, or to RSVP please contact statesofcrisis@gmail.com. 

Book panel discussion with Isser Woloch, Victoria de Grazia, Ira Katznelson, and Adam Tooze

After the end of World War II, Britain, France, and the U.S. were faced with two very different choices: return to the civic order of pre-war normalcy or embark instead on a path of progressive transformation. In this ambitious and original new book, Isser Woloch assesses the progressive agendas that crystalized in each of the three allied democracies, tracing their roots in the interwar decades, their development during wartime, the struggles to establish them after the war’s end, and the mixed outcome in each country.

Isser Woloch is the Moore Collegiate Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. His books include Napoleon and His Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship and The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s.

Event co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française, European Institute, and Department of History.

Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Please arrive ahead of time to secure a spot.

For more information & to RSVP, click here.

Mythologized as the era of the “good war” and the “Greatest Generation,” the 1940s are frequently understood as a more heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of dread, alienation, and the haunting specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They probed the darkness that the war opened up and confronted bigotry, existential guilt, ecological concerns, and fear about the nature and survival of the human race. In Facing the Abyss, George Hutchinson offers readings of individual works and the larger intellectual and cultural scene to reveal the 1940s as a period of profound and influential accomplishment.

Facing the Abyss examines the relation of aesthetics to politics, the idea of universalism, and the connections among authors across racial, ethnic, and gender divisions. Modernist and avant-garde styles were absorbed into popular culture as writers and artists turned away from social realism to emphasize the process of artistic creation. Hutchinson explores a range of important writers, from Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy to Richard Wright and James Baldwin. African American and Jewish novelists critiqued racism and anti-Semitism, women writers pushed back on the misogyny unleashed during the war, and authors such as Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams reflected a new openness in the depiction of homosexuality. The decade also witnessed an awakening of American environmental and ecological consciousness. Hutchinson argues that despite the individualized experiences depicted in these works, a common belief in art’s ability to communicate the universal in particulars united the most important works of literature and art during the 1940s. Hutchinson’s capacious view of American literary and cultural history masterfully weaves together a wide range of creative and intellectual expression into a sweeping new narrative of this pivotal decade.

About the Speakers:

George Hutchinson’s teaching and research focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.  He is the author of Facing the Abyss:  American Literature and Culture in the 1940s(Columbia UP, 2018); In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Harvard UP, 2006), which won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa, among other honors; The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Harvard UP, 1996), a finalist for the Rea Non-Fiction Prize; and The Ecstatic Whitman: Literary Shamanism and the Crisis of the Union (Ohio State UP, 1986).  He brought to light Anita Thompson Reynolds’s previously unpublished memoir, American Cocktail: A ‘Colored Girl’ in the World (Harvard UP, 2014).  He also edited The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (2007) and co-edited with John K. Young Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850 (U Michigan Press, 2013).  His Penguin Classics edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane will appear in January 2019.  He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.  In addition to teaching in the English department, Hutchinson directs the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines.

Paula Rabinowitz’s research and teaching are in the areas of American materialist feminist cultural studies. Her work considers the interlocking roles of cinema, photography, painting and material culture in and through twentieth-century literature. She focuses on contemporary and modernist American women’s art and literature; her work explores hidden histories within working-class, pulp and popular cultures. Her books include LABOR AND DESIRE: WOMEN’S REVOLUTIONARY FICTION IN DEPRESSION AMERICA; THEY MUST BE REPRESENTED: THE POLITICS OF DOCUMENTARY; BLACK & WHITE & NOIR: AMERICA’S PULP MODERNISM; and AMERICAN PULP: HOW PAPERBACKS BROUGHT MODERNISM TO MAIN STREET, which won the 2015 DeLong Prize for Book History Book from Society for the History of Authorship, Readers and Publishing (SHARP). She is co-editor with Cristina Giorcelli of HABITS OF BEING, a four-volume series of essay on clothing, fashion, dress and identity; and co-editor, with Ruth Barraclough and Heather Bowen-Stryuk of RED LOVE ACROSS THE PACIFIC: POLITICAL AND SEXUAL REVOLUTIONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. She has also co-curated gallery exhibits on women and pulp fiction, women’s sound installation art and feminist film. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LITERATURE.

Casey Nelson Blake works on modern U.S. intellectual and cultural history, with an emphasis on the relationship between artistic modernism, cultural criticism and democratic citizenship.  His publications include Beloved Community:  The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne,Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford, The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State, and The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution—the last a catalogue for a major exhibition on the centennial of the 1913 Armory Show at the New-York Historical Society for which he served as Senior Historian.  He is currently at work on At the Center: American Thought and Culture, 1948-63, co-authored with Howard Brick and Daniel Borus, as well as a cultural biography of the writer and critic Paul Goodman.  He also writes regularly for Commonweal, Dissent, Raritan, and other journals of opinion. Professor Blake came to Columbia in 1999 as founding Director of the Center for American Studies after directing American Studies programs at Indiana University and Washington University, and teaching at Reed College.  While at Columbia Professor Blake has overseen the development of a civic engagement initiative within the Center, which has as its centerpiece the “Freedom and Citizenship” partnership program with the Double Discovery Center.

For more information, click here. 

https://www.bookculture.com/event/112th-david-greenberg-alan-brinkley

Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Monday, April 8th at 7pm as we welcome David Greenberg to discuss his new book Alan Brinkley: A Life in History. Nicholas Lemann will be joining David in the discussion.

Few American historians of his generation have had as much influence in both the academic and popular realms as Alan Brinkley. His debut work, the National Book Award–winning Voices of Protest, launched a storied career that considered the full spectrum of American political life. His books give serious and original treatments of populist dissent, the role of mass media, the struggles of liberalism and conservatism, and the powers and limits of the presidency. A longtime professor at Harvard University and Columbia University, Brinkley has shaped the field of U.S. history for generations of students through his textbooks and his mentorship of some of today’s foremost historians.

Alan Brinkley: A Life in History brings together essays on his major works and ideas, as well as personal reminiscences from leading historians and thinkers beyond the academy whom Brinkley collaborated with, befriended, and influenced. Among the luminaries in this volume are the critic Frank Rich, the journalists Jonathan Alter and Nicholas Lemann, the biographer A. Scott Berg, and the historians Eric Foner and Lizabeth Cohen. Together, the seventeen essays that form this book chronicle the life and thought of a working historian, the development of historical scholarship in our time, and the role that history plays in our public life. At a moment when Americans are pondering the plight of their democracy, this volume offers a timely overview of a consummate student—and teacher—of the American political tradition.

David Greenberg, a historian of American politics, teaches at Rutgers University. His latest book is Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (2016). He is a regular contributor to Politico Magazine and was formerly managing editor and acting editor at the New Republic. He is co-editor, along with Moshik Temkin and Mason B. Williams, of Alan Brinkley: A Life in History.

Nicholas Lemann is Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus at Columbia Journalism School.  He has published five books, most recently Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, and regularly contributes to the New Yorker as a staff writer.

Book talk with Harry Harootunian and Laura Neitzel about Harootunian’s Uneven Moments: Reflections on Japan’s Modern History (Columbia University Press, 2019). Moderated by Carol Gluck.

For the flyer, click Harry Harootunian flyer. 

For more information, click Uneven Moments Reflections on Japan’s Modern History. 

EVENT DETAILS

For centuries, people from all over the world have made their way to the United States in search of a better life for themselves and their families. How has migration in turn shaped American life and culture? Discover how immigration has transformed the country and why it has become one of the most divisive issues in American politics.

Mae Ngai is an immigration historian and professor of history at Columbia University. She is the author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America and writes on immigration matters in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other publications. Denny Chin (moderator) is United States Circuit Judge for the Second Circuit.

Presented as a part of Migrations: The Making of America, a citywide festival hosted by Carnegie Hall

LOCATION

The Robert H. Smith Auditorium at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024

PURCHASING TICKETS

By phone: Contact New-York Historical’s in-house call center at (212) 485-9268. Call center is open 9 am–5 pm daily.
Online: Click on the orange “Buy Tickets” button at the top of this page.
In person: Advance tickets may be purchased on site at New-York Historical’s Admissions desk during museum hours.

For more information and to buy tickets, click here. 

Description

A critical discussion of the global impacts of the Treaty of Versailles. Scholars and authors examine the centennial of the peace agreement that ended the First World War, tracing its impact on democracy and tyranny, international governance, and the shaping of the modern world.

Ted Widmer, CUNY Macaulay Honors College.

Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University
Erez Manela, Harvard University
Patricia O’Toole, author of The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made

Register Here

This event is co-sponsored by the History Department and the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History

You are cordially invited to attend the Department of History’s S.T. Lee Lecture for AY18-19 titled, “Consumer Capitalism, Racialization, and ‘Black is Beautiful’” with Professor Lynn M. Thomas. Lynn M. Thomas is a Professor of History at the University of Washington, Seattle where she is also an adjunct faculty member in Anthropology and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. Thomas is the author of Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (2003), co-editor of The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (2008) and Love in Africa (2009), and a former co-editor of the Journal of African History (2010-15). Her book Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners is forthcoming with Duke University Press. 

A reception with light refreshments will follow the lecture and ensuing Q&A, and we very much hope that you will join us!

For the flyer, click S.T.LeeLecture – LynnThomas3.13.19. 
For the topic sheet, click LynnThomasSTLeeTopicsheet3.13.19. 

Moderator: Amy Chazkel

Panelists: Marcia Tiburi, Kendall Thomas, & Joao Nemi Neto

For more information, click . 

Lecture by Roham Alvandi 

Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the Iranian student opposition abroad, developed contending narratives of human rights in Iran. While Iranian students worked with Western human rights organizations to highlight the use of torture against political prisoners in Iran, the Pahlavi state responded by embracing a Third World narrative of human rights that emphasized state sovereignty at the 1968 UN International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran. In this lecture, Dr. Roham Alvandi examines how both the Shah and his opponents sought to instrumentalize human rights in the international struggle that sparked the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79.

For more information, click here. 

Featuring

• Ido de Haan, Professor of Political History, Utrecht University, & Queen Wilhelmina Visiting Professor, Columbia University.
• Beatrice de Graaf, Professor of History of International Relations & Global Governance,Utrecht University.
• Brian Vick, Associate Professor of History, Emory University.

Moderated by

• Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History & Director of the European Institute.

After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the leaders of Europe aimed to establish a new balance of power. The 1815 Congress of Vienna ushered in the emergence of a genuinely European security culture. Securing Europe after Napoleon offers new insights into the military cooperation, ambassadorial conferences, transnational police networks, and international commissions that helped produce stability.

To RSVP, click here. 

“Complaint as Diversity Work” – Sara Ahmed 

What can be learnt about the workings of power from those who challenge power? This lecture draws on interviews conducted with staff and students who have made complaints within universities that relate to unfair, unjust or unequal working conditions and to abuses of power such as harassment and bullying. The lecture approaches complaint as a form of diversity work: the work some have to do in order to be accommodated. Making a complaint requires becoming an institutional mechanic: you have to work out how to get a complaint through a system. It is because of the difficulty of getting through that complaints often end up being about the system. The lecture explores how the experiences that lead to complaint and the experiences of complaint are hard to untangle. It reflects on the role of academic networks and professional intimacies in shaping what happens to complaints and to those who complain. 

Featuring: Pamela Ballinger (University of Michigan) Presenter
Victoria De Grazia (Columbia University) Respondent
Konstantina Zanou (Columbia University) Moderator

Pamela Ballinger reexamines Italy’s decolonization by demonstrating the visible and deeply felt impacts of repatriation by Italian settlers to the metropole and the continued visibility of these experiences in public debates during succeeding decades. She argues that films, novels, and other cultural artefacts can be seen as encoding multidirectional memories: of fascism, of Italian colonialism, of the experience of Italians in other powers’ colonies.

To RSVP, email kz2269@columbia.edu 

Sheri Berman, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jack Snuder, Alexander Stille, Adam Tooze

Panel discussion of new book by Sheri Berman, in discussion with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jack Snyder, and Alexander Stille, moderated by Adam Tooze

Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe (Oxford University Press, 2018) explains how democracy actually develops, and how we should interpret the current wave of illiberalism sweeping Europe and the rest of the world. Sheri Berman is Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of Italian and History at NYU. Jack Snyder is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Columbia. Alexander Stille is the San Paolo Professor of International Journalism at Columbia. Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History & Director of the European Institute at Columbia.

Presented as part of the New Books in the Arts and Sciences series. Event co-sponsored by the European Institute, Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, Office of Divisional Deans 
and Maison Française

To RSVP, click here.