Director’s Letter

Dear Seminars Community,

In this year, the eightieth since the first University Seminars were approved, we have much to commemorate. The Schoff Lectures, delivered by Volker Berghahn in October, reflect on the history of Germany and the Holocaust. Details of the lectures can be found HERE.

The Seminars community affectionately remembers two longstanding members who passed away in the summer. Emily Butler Anderson, co-chair of The University Seminar on Memory and Slavery, died in June. Professor Emerita and former Chair of the Department of Social Sciences & Human Services at the City University of New York and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Social Work, Emily Anderson had a lasting impact in social services, child welfare, early childhood education, and psychiatric social work.

Elizabeth A.R. (Peggy) Brown, a longstanding member of The University Seminar on Medieval Studies and an active participant in The University Seminar on the Renaissance, died in August. Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College, Brown was an eminent historian of medieval France. Her ample publication record (encompassing politics, ritual and liturgy, government, church architecture, manuscripts, women’s history, and many other topics) was matched only by her generosity to students and colleagues and her lively interest in those around her.

New this fall is the redesigned website of The University Seminars. The reconfigured home page displays the covers of recent books published with subventions from The Seminars, complementing the complete listing of such publications on the Books page. The revised History page links to the 1944 memo known as the Charter in which 19 Columbia faculty members in political science proposed the founding of the University Seminars, self-governing interdepartmental units that could function as extended dissertation committees for graduate students writing on related topics. The memo concludes: “It is assumed that such a harnessing of energy … would stimulate intellectual cooperation within the faculty, influence the teaching, vitalize the student’s interest in his graduate work, attract students from outside of the University and from other parts of the world, who would become votaries of one or other of these institutions, and would lead both by writing and through the training of personnel to a more direct participation of the University in resolving the many issues that afflict our contemporary world.”

Sincerely,

Susan Boynton
Director, The University Seminars