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Dear Seminars Community,

As the fall semester gets underway, seminars are meeting and the administration of The University Seminars is busy preparing for its upcoming public event–Open Seminar Day on the afternoon of Friday, October 17 from 1:30-5:00 pm.

This event is free and will take place in Faculty House. Registration is required.

Register HERE for Open Seminar Day.

The first part of Open Seminar Day will be conversations among seminar chairs about the impact of their seminars on research. The eight seminars taking part in these discussions will be divided into two panels. The first panel will bring together the co-chairs of the seminars on Death, (Christina Staudt and Karla Rothstein), Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity (Trudy Goldberg), Public Humanities (Eileen Gillooly), and Shakespeare (Lauren Robertson). The second will include the seminars on Brazil (Vânia Penha-Lopes), Human Rights (George Andreopoulos), Law and Politics (Simon Baatz), and The Ancient Near East (Allan Gilbert). Printed materials about all the seminars will be circulated at the event. The discussions among these seminars will doubtless yield new insights.

Following these discussions, we will celebrate the edited volume A Community of Scholars: 75 Years of The University Seminars at Columbia, which was published five years ago, for the 75th anniversary of The University Seminars. The speakers will be Sidney Greenfield (co-chair of the Seminars on Brazil; Contents and Methods in the Social Sciences; Studies in Religion) and Cynthia Pyle (co-chair of the Seminar on the Renaissance), who both wrote the chapters about their seminars that appeared in A Community of Scholars. The afternoon will provide an opportunity to reflect on what The Seminars have made possible and what they continue to offer to their participants.

In closing, I wish to acknowledge with the utmost gratitude the decades of service dedicated to the Executive Committee by two of its members: the EC chair, David Johnston (Professor of Political Science and co-chair of the Seminar on Studies in Political and Social Thought) and former chair Robert Remez (Professor of Psychology, Barnard College, and chair of the Seminar on Language and Cognition), whose terms ended with the conclusion of the last academic year. The new chair of the EC is Alan Stewart (Professor of English and Comparative Literature and co-chair of the Seminar on the Renaissance).

Sincerely,

Susan Boynton
Director, The University Seminars