Confronting Silences: Columbia University and the Afterlife of Slavery

Join Professor Karl Jacoby and the students in the History Department’s seminar on Columbia and Slavery as they discuss their research into the connections between Columbia and the legacies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

Question and Answer session to follow. 

Dr. Karl Jacoby: Professor (Department of History and Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University) 

A student conference for Prof. Victoria Phillips’ course Cold War Power. 

Featuring Alexander Cooley, Victoria de Grazia, Bradley Gorski, Victori aPhillips, and Anderes Stephanson. 

Keynote: Alexander Cooley
Ordering Eurasia: The Rise and Decline of the Liberal Internationalism in the Post-Communist Space

Panels
– American Jazzmen and Boxers Fight the Cold War
– Words are a Weapon: Literature and Soft Power
– Location, Location, Location: Nixon in Disneyland, Nevada’s Nuclear Ballerina, and Bridges in Space

A light lunch and afternoon refreshments will be served

See the full program and RSVP at: europe.columbia.edu/events

See conference details 05.02.2018 Cold War Power Conference – Program (1). 

LSE-CU Research Seminar: Territory and Resources in International History

The Rennert Forum of Barnard College will be hosting a visit by medieval historian Elisheva Baumgarten on Thursday, April 19th. 

Her most recent project, which she is working on this year as a fellow at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, is called “Beyond the Elite,” and her public lecture will draw upon that work. 

Prof. Baumgarten’s work is on the social and religious history of the Jews of medieval northern Europe (1000-1400), and she teaches medieval history in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry and in the Department of History at Hebrew University (Jerusalem). Her research focuses on the social history of the Jewish communities living in the urban centers of medieval Europe and especially on daily contacts between Jews and Christians. Her work seeks to include those who did not write the sources that have reached us, with a special interest in women and gender hierarchies.

Co-Sponsored by: Barnard’s Medieval and Renaissance Studies program and Columbia’s History Department

“Songs for the ‘Great Leaders’: Ideology and Political Agitation in the Music of North Korea” 

Keith Howard, (Fellow of the National Humanities Center, North Carolina and Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London)
Moderated by Charles K. Armstrong, (Korea Foundation Professor of the Korean Studies in the Social Sciences in the Department of History)
No registration required. 

Abstract:

Songs have, for more than 70 years, taken a central role in North Korean cultural production. They form the dominant soundscape, reflecting ideology, whether in Soviet-inspired revolutionary songs of the first decade of North Korea’s existence, in the Chinese-inspired incorporation of folksongs into nationalist discourse in the second decade, or in more recent state-sanctioned pop. Songs mark political transitions: they function as newpaper editorials, promoting new policies and underpinning the monolithic unity of the leaders, the party and the people. Under North Korea’s juche ideology, ‘seeds’ are implanted in the lyrics and in the leitmotifs of songs. Songs are then recast in multiple forms to increase the penetration of the ‘seed’. They become background music, festival music, and the music of mass games: the message remains even when lyrics are replaced by instrumental or orchestral arrangements. This seminar provides an overview, then zooms in on two periods of leadership transition – from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il in 1994-1997, and from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un in 2009-2011 – to explore the politicization of song culture. I offer brief comparisons to Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Karimov’s Uzbekistan and Assad’s Syria, but argues that North Korea has gone further than anywhere else in embedding songs into the fabric of the theatre of daily life.

Bio:

Professor Keith Howard is a Fellow of the National Humanities Center, North Carolina. He is Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London, and was formerly Professor and Associate Dean at the University of Sydney. He has written or edited 20 books and 150 academic articles. He has been a regular broadcaster on Korean affairs for BBC, ITV, Sky, NBC and others. He was editorial chair for the SOAS Musicology Series (Ashgate/Routledge) for nine years (2008–2017), and founded and managed the SOASIS CD and DVD series as well as OpenAir Radio. He serves on the boards of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, International Council for Traditional Music, and sits on editorial boards for Music Theory Spectrum, Asian Ethnology, Papers of the British Association for Korean Studies andOMNES.

Co-sponsored by Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Presentation of the book The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War by Peter Guardino (Indiana U).
“Between Savage Tribes: Frontier Warfare, Vigilantism, and Atrocities against Mexican Civilians during the Mexican-American War.”
With comments from Karl Jacoby and Stephanie McCurry (Columbia).

See flyer: dead march2

Matthew Bogdanos: “ISIS & Antiquities Trafficking”

For more information, click here.
To register, click here. 

Matthew Bogdanos will speak about the Islamic State’s trafficking in looted antiquities and the global black market that emerged after the looting of the Iraq Museum in April 2003. He will also discuss the aims and efforts of the New York District Attorney’s newly formed Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which under his leadership has already taken several highly visible actions against prominent antiquities collectors, dealers, and cultural institutions.

Matthew Bogdanos is a New York Assistant District Attorney and a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps. He has served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is the co-author of Thieves of Baghdad (2005), his account of tracking down looted antiquities in the wake of the plundering of the Baghdad Museum (his royalties go to the Baghdad Museum). Bogdanos holds a JD and an MA in Classical Studies from Columbia University, and an MA in Strategic Studies from the United States Army War College. He was awarded a Bronze Star for counterterrorist operations in Afghanistan and a National Humanities Medal from President George Bush in 2005 for his work recovering Iraqi antiquities.

Co-sponsors: Columbia University’s Department of History; Department of Classics; Classical Studies (CLST) Graduate Program; Center for the Ancient Mediterranean.

Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity

Editors Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna will be in conversation with
Volker Berghahn
Yasmine Ergas
Linda Gordon
Frances Fox Piven

Books will be available for sale.
Reception to follow.

JPG: 

Presentation of the book From Fascism to Populism in History  by Federico Finchelstein (New School). With comments from Carol Gluck, Mark Mazower, Nadia Urbinati, Pablo Piccato (Columbia) and Hugo Drochon (Cambridge). 

See flyer: from-fascism.pdf

Protestants Abroad: How missionaries tried to change the world but changed America 
David Hollinger (University of California, Berkeley)
and
Susan Pedersen
Wayne Proudfoot
Casey N. Blake

Please see attached flier: 

Korematsu V. United States: The History and Legacy of the WWII Japanese American Incarceration Cases

In 1943 and 1944 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the military orders that forced over 120,000 Japanese Americans into American prison camps. It took almost 40 years to overturn the convictions of Fred Korematsu and others who violated the orders with the “smoking fun” evidence of governmental misconduct. 

A panel discussion with:

-Prof. Peter Irons of the University of California at San Diego, author of Justice at War and a leader of the 1983 legal team representing Fred Korematsu

– Karen Korematsu, daughter of Fred Korematsu and Founder & Executive Director, Fred T. Korematsu Institute

Moderated by Michael Hindus
Lecturer in History and American Studies

Presented by the Center for American Studies
with support from the Jack Miller Center 

Carol Anderson (Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies)

“One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy”

Reception to follow in 411 Fayerweather Hall 

International History Workshop presents: Rockefeller Archives Center information session and archives workshop, featuring 

Bob Clark, Director of Archives

Renee Pappous, Assistant Archivist, Reference

Barb Shubinksi, Assistant Director, Research and Education

for more information and to submit a question in advance please contact Sam Coggeshall at sfc2117@columbia.edu

How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Police the World

A talk by Stephen Wertheim

An optional dinner follows the talk. 
We will dine in Faculty House at 6:00pm. Meals, buffet style, cost $30. 

RSVP for dinner to slezkine@gmail.com
If you sign up for dinner, please be sure to attend. There is no need to register for the talk alone. 

Abstract: Some historians have long criticized the simplism of understanding U.S. foreign policy in terms of a struggle between internationalism and isolationism. Yet many historians continue to structure their narratives around these concepts — which remain rife in popular politics — partly because they have yet to ask how and to what effect Americans came to speak in these terms. In this talk, I sketch a conceptual history of the internationalism/isolationism dualism in U.S. political discourse. U.S. officials and intellectuals developed the concept of “isolationism†only in the 1930s, in order to caricature neutrality advocates who almost universally disclaimed such a labeling. Early in World War II, positioning themselves against the specter of “isolationism,†they determined that the United States should become the supreme political-military power in the world. From 1943 to 1945, they reclaimed the older concept of “internationalism,†now redefining it primarily against “isolationism†rather than against its previous opposite, power politics. The effect was to make America’s domination of power politics seem equivalent to, or a condition of, the transcendence of power politics — an elision that continues to legitimate U.S. global supremacy seven decades later.

Bio: Stephen Wertheim is a Lecturer in History at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Junior Research Fellow at King’s College, University of Cambridge. He specializes in the United States and world order since the late nineteenth century. His first book, forthcoming from Harvard University Press, examines the birth of U.S. global supremacy in World War II. His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Journal of Global History, and Journal of Genocide Research. Stephen held a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton in 2015-16 and received his PhD from Columbia in 2015. He also writes essays and reviews for Foreign Affairs, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere 

Book Launch: “The Limits of Westernization” by Perin Gurel 

Book launch and discussion with author Perin Gürel, for her recent book The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey.

Moderated by A. Tunç Şen, Assistant Professor of History, Columbia University.

An event organized and sponsored by The Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies and co-sponsored by The Department of Art History and Archaeology & Columbia University Press.

Free and open to the public; RSVP required.
Perin Gürel is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Concurrent Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her research and teaching explore the United States in the world and the world in the United States through transnational feminist lenses, with special focus on U.S.-Middle East relations and Islam in the United States after World War I.

The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (Columbia University Press, 2017), explores how gendered stock figures and tropes associated with the concept of “westernization” in Turkey have intersected with U.S.-Turkish relations in the twentieth century

7:30pm: Reception 

Brexit: A Leap in the Dark? 
Featuring Simon Coveney, Deputy Prime Minister & Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Ireland.

Opening remarks by David Madigan, Executive Vice President and Dean of The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Statistics, Columbia University.

Address by Simon Coveney, Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland: “Ireland: A Global Island – Meeting the Brexit Challenge”.

Discussion moderated by Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History, Director of The European Institute, Columbia University.

Free and open to the public; RSVP required. Please note than an RSVP is not a confirmed seat. We encourage you to arrive on time as seating may be limited. (Event is almost at capacity; few seats remaining) 

An event co-sponsored by The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, The European Institute, The Committee on Global Thought, SIPA’s International Finance and Economic Policy concentration, The Columbia European Union Student Association, and The Consulate General of Ireland.

The History Department and the Janey Program in Latin American studies at NSSR invite you to the book discussion – A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico 

With:
Pablo Piccato (Columbia University)
Brenda Elsey (Hofstra University)
Marcela Echeverri (Yale University)
Robert Karl (Princeton University)
Federico Finchelstein (The New School) 

WHERE: Wolff Conference Room, 6 East 16th St, The New School 

Germany Past and Present: A Conference in Honor of Volker Berghahn

Program

1:45–2:00 p.m.  REGISTRATION

2:00 p.m.  WELCOME

2:15 p.m.  KEYNOTE ADDRESS

 Paul Kennedy, Dilworth Professor of History, Yale University
“Der Primat der Innenpolitik: Volker Berghahn, Admiral Tirpitz, and the ‘Turn’ in the Historiography of Wilhelmine Germany”

3:15 p.m.   PANEL 1

Chair: Derek Bleyberg, Deputy Director Emeritus, International School, Berlin
Dagmar Herzog, Distinguished Professor of History, CUNY Graduate Center
“Bodies and Souls: Love and Death (and Religion), 1848–2018”
Margaret Crosby-Arnold, Adjunct Associate Research Scholar, History Department, Columbia University
“A Model for the Present:  Complex Diversity in the German Past, German Migration and the Rise of Pragmatic Abolitionism in the Atlantic World”
Jonathan Wiesen, Professor of History and Department Chair, Southern Illinois University
“Memory, Consumption, and the Transnational Turn: Research Trends in German History since the 1990s”

4:45–5:00 p.m.   BREAK

5:00 p.m.  PANEL 2

Chair: Marion Kaplan, Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History, New York University
Mark Roseman, Pat Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor in History, University of Indiana
“Diagonal Reading: From Recasting the Ruhr to Rescued Lives”
Jennifer Foray, Associate Professor of History, Purdue University
“Occupational Aftershocks: The Legacies of War, Imperialism, and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century”
Jeremy Eichler, Head of Classical Review Department, Boston Globe, and Visiting Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
“Hearing Echoes: Reception History, the Musical Memorial and the Case of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto”

6:15 p.m.   CONCLUDING REMARKS

Volker Berghahn, Seth Low Professor of History Emeritus, Columbia University

6:30–7:30 p.m.  RECEPTION 

The Italian and Mediterranean Colloquium presents: From the Mediterranean to the Pacific Ocean: Ideas and Agents of Italian Colonization in South America, c. 1840 to c. 1880. 

Lucy Riall, (European University Institute, Florence)
Presenter

Mark Mazower, (Columbia University)
Respondent

Konstantina Zanou, (Columbia University)
Moderator 

To RSVP please email kz2269@columbia.edu or pmt2114@columbia.edu 

Phantom Africa by Michel Leiris
Brent Edwards, in conversation with Denis Hollier, Brian Larkin, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, and Emmanuelle Saada

Brent Edwards discusses his new English translation of Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa with invited colleagues. One of the towering classics of 20th century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of French Surrealist writer Michel Leiris’s compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal—by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic, and morose—as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition in sub-Saharan Africa, the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, led by anthropologist Marcel Griaule. Hired to serve as the “secretary-archivist,” Leiris kept a diary where he noted not only a given day’s activities but also his impressions, states of mind, anxieties, dreams, and even his erotic fantasies, and decided to publish it on his return to Paris. The book, never before available in English translation, bears witness to the full range of social and political forces reshaping the African continent in the period between the World Wars.

Brent Edwards is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, Denis Hollier is Professor of French at NYU, Brian Larkin is Professor of Anthropology at Barnard, Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor of French and Philosophy at Columbia, and Emmanuelle Saada is Professor of History and French at Columbia.

Event co-sponsored by the Maison Française, Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, and Institute of African Studies. Featured in the New Books in the Arts & Sciences series.

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/phantom-africa-by-michel-leiris-brent-edwards-in-conversation-with-denis-hollier-brian-larkin-tickets-41314148731

Democratic Entropy and the Tools for Democratic Regulation
Cynthia Fleury

What does democratic entropy mean, exactly? For Tocqueville, the answer is simple: it refers to a tragic equation of democratic principles; in sum, all principles grow extreme when put into democratic practice. For example, liberty becomes omnipotence, equality becomes egalitarianism, and individuation becomes individualism. How do we currently define the condition of democracy? And what tools are available to bridge the gap between democratic principles and practices? Institutional tools are needed, surely, but also tools for citizens, linked to civil society. 

Cynthia Fleury is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Paris.

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/democratic-entorpy-and-the-tools-for-democratic-regulation-tickets-42008081302

Annual Columbia University Department of French and AATF Workshop for Teachers of French 

This year’s free, annual workshop for teachers of French is on the theme, “Enseigner le français en dialogue avec les arts.”

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/annual-columbia-university-department-of-french-and-aatf-workshop-for-teachers-of-french-tickets-41120743250

Music at the Maison Française (M@MF) 
A concert by Aimee Toner (flute) and Melody Tai (harp), and Serina Chang (piano)

Program – Mozart: Concerto in C Major for Flute and Harp, Mvmnt 1; Debussy: Syrinx; Faure: Sicilienne & Pavane; Marcel Tournier: Etude de Concert Au Matin; Jules Massenet: Meditation from Thais for Flute and Harp

Aimee Toner is a sophomore at Barnard College majoring in Ethnomusicology. She performs in Columbia University’s Orchestra, Jazz program, and Pops Orchestra. She will be making her solo debut with the Columbia University Orchestra on April 22nd and 24th, 2018. She is also the principal flutist of the New York Youth Symphony for the 2017/18 Season.

Melody Tai is a junior at Columbia College majoring in Sustainable Development. She has played on various stages, including at the 57^th Grammy Awards with Usher and Stevie Wonder, and as the Principal Harpist for the U.S. West Coast premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Frieze.

Serina Chang is a junior at Columbia University, where she is double majoring in Computer Science and Sociology. She she has performed in such venues as Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Weill Recital Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center, and more.

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/music-at-the-maison-francaise-mmf-aimee-toner-melody-tai-tickets-41473026940

Reset (Relève: Histoire d’une création)
Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai, 2015, 110 min.

Film in French, with English subtitles
In 2014 Benjamin Millepied, French choreographer and dancer, is named director of the National Opéra de Paris, a crucial position in the French cultural landscape. His youth and innovative eye, his fame and notoriety are meant to bring a fresh renewal to this old institution. Reset tells the story of the creative process of Millepied’s new, code-breaking ballet.

Screening followed by a moderated discussion in French.

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/reset-releve-histoire-dune-creation-tickets-42011514571

Uprising 13/13
8/13 Breaking Silence

Seyla Benhabib (Yale University), Robert Gooding-Williams (Columbia University), Bryan Stevenson (Equal Justice Initiative) (invited), and Brandon Terry (Harvard University). Moderated by Jelani Cobb (invited) and Bernard E. Harcourt.

What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion Thomas Dodman, in conversation with David Bell and Emmanuelle Saada

From the late 17th through the late 19^th century, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes be deadly. What Nostalgia Was unearths that history. Thomas Dodman traces the invention of nostalgia as a medical diagnosis in Basel, Switzerland, its spread through the European republic of letters and into Napoleon’s armies, its subsequent transformation from a medical term to a more expansive cultural concept, and its shift in meaning in the colonies, where Frenchmen worried about racial and cultural mixing came to view moderate homesickness as salutary.

Thomas Dodman is Assistant Professor in the Department of French at Columbia, David Bell is a Professor of History at Princeton, and Emmanuelle Saada is Professor of History and French at Columbia.

Event co-sponsored by the Maison Française and Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities. Featured in the New Books in the Arts & Sciences series.

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/what-nostalgia-was-war-empire-and-the-time-of-a-deadly-emotion-tickets-41313161779