Seminar News

Dear Seminars Community,

As the spring semester begins, The University Seminars is launching two new seminars recently established by Columbia faculty. The University Seminar on Artificial Intelligence for Social Good and Society (823), founded by Nabila El-Bassel (Social Work) and Tian Zheng (Statistics), provides a forum for multifaceted discussion of research and policy related to AI. Crossing disciplinary and professional boundaries, the seminar will address the questions that the pervasive role of AI raises about equity, accountability, relationships between institutions, communities, and systems. The Seminar on Latinx Studies (825), founded by Lori Flores (History and Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race) and Carlos Alonso Nugent (English and Comparative Literature and Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race) focuses on people with ties to Latin America who have become part of the United States through colonization and/or migration. The seminar draws on media studies and performance studies as well as a range of traditional disciplines.

On April 29, 2026, we will gather for the Annual Dinner. The eminent dance historian Lynn Garafola (Barnard College) will deliver the Tannenbaum lecture, “Arthur Mitchell: The Extraordinary Life of Harlem’s Ballet Visionary,” and David Johnston (Political Science) will receive the Tannenbaum-Warner Award. Professor Johnston has been an active member of The University Seminars community for several decades. He has been a chair of the Seminar on Studies in Political and Social Thought since 1988, and in 2025 concluded several years of distinguished service as Chair of the Executive Committee. As a member of the EC (previously the Advisory Board) since 2006, David Johnston has made crucial contributions to the governance of The Seminars as a whole, including to the revision of its bylaws.

As The University Seminars and its community continue to grow, it has become necessary to update processes related to formal membership. Formal membership in the individual seminars is the foundation of The Seminar’s governance structure because the seminar chairs are elected by the official members of their seminars. (Many seminars involve their voting members in other aspects of governance as well.) Overhauling the membership process and its associated record keeping has been one of my goals for the last three years. Thanks to the dedicated effort of Gary Mayta-Lizarraga in The Seminars office, seminar rosters are now available (through login with a Columbia UNI) in a new web portal developed by Gary for this purpose: memberportal.universityseminars.columbia.edu. I hope that this resource will enable collaboration between seminars, in addition to facilitating routine access to membership lists.

Sincerely,

Susan Boynton
Director, The University Seminars