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“The University Seminar is an independent universe. Its boundaries are limited only by its horizons.”

Frank Tannenbaum

Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lecture Series

Art of the Lecture

Brent Hayes Edwards

Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University

November 9, 16, and 23, 2026

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Fall 2026

Seminar News

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“I have always been a great admirer of this institution, which to me looks like an authentic republic of letters …”

Hannah Arendt

Seminar supported books

The Sounds of Poetry Viewed as Music

Fred Lerdahl (2018 Schoff Lectures)
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The Inner Life of Mrs. Dalloway

Edward Mendelson (2017 Schoff Lectures)
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Seminar supported books

Democracy and Beauty

The Political Aesthetics of W. E. Du Bois

Robert Gooding-Williams (Fall 2022 Schoff Lectures)
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Seminar supported books

Antagonistic Cooperation

Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture

Robert O'Meally (2016 Schoff Lectures)
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Seminar supported books

Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can

Herbert Terrace (2012 Schoff Lectures)
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Seminar supported books

Cinematic Overtures

How to Read Opening Scenes

Annette Insdorf (2014 Schoff Lectures)
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Seminar supported books

Plots

Robert L. Belknap (2011 Schoff Lectures)
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Seminar supported books

Dispossession and the Environment

Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea

Paige West (2013 Schoff Lectures)
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Deaths in Venice

The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach

Philip Kitcher (2009 Schoff Lectures)
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Losing Control?

Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization

Saskia Sassen (1995 Schoff Lectures)
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Reforming Democracies

Six Facts About Politics That Demand a New Agenda

Douglas Chalmers (2007 Schoff Lectures)
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Seminar supported books

The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith

Robert Pollack (1999 Schoff Lectures)
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Beyond Pure Reason

Ferdinand de Saussure's Philosophy of Language and Its Early Romantic Antecedents

Boris Gasparov (2006 Schoff Lectures)
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Serious Play

Desire and Authority in the Poetry of Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto

Robert Hanning (2005 Schoff Lectures)
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Bodies, Commodities, & Biotechnologies

Death, Mourning, & Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer

Lesley A. Sharp (2004 Schoff Lecture)
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Seminar supported books

Globalization Challenged

Conviction, Conflict, Community

George J. Rupp (2003 Schoff Lecture)
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Seminar supported books

The Invention of Painting in America

David Rosand (2002 Schoff Lecture)
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Seminar supported books

The Politics of the Governed

Partha Chatterjee (2001 Schoff Lecture)
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Seminar supported books

Desolation and Enlightenment

Political Knowledge after the Holocaust, Totalitarianism, and Total War

Ira Katznelson (1997 Schoff Lecture)
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Seminar supported books

The Rise & Fall of Class in Britain

David Cannadine (1993 Schoff Lecture)
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Seminar supported books

The Romantic Legacy

Charles Larmore (2002 Schoff Lecture)
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Annual Events

Schoff Memorial Lecture Series

Annual Dinners

“The strength of its structure lies in the very multiplicity of its forms; each a small living world in itself …”

Margaret Mead