Scholars across disciplines are increasingly treating “Black Europe” as a pertinent object of study. Yet conversations continue to take place regarding what “Black Europe” is. Does Black Europe describe a place, an identity, an aspiration, or something else? Scholars oscillate between terms such as “Afropean,” “African-European,” and “Black European.” The institutionalization of Black European studies remains a work in progress, and views vary on whether it is an academic field, a subsection of Black Studies or African Diaspora Studies, or a reference point for a set of inquiries and practices that exceed the bounds of academic discipline. Black Europe: A Field […]

Sponsored by The University Seminar on Affect Studies This workshop seeks to explore the tension between the universal normative claim to truth and the singular claim to truth in affect, focusing on one of the strongest human emotions and experiences: erotic desire. In the absence of an absolute in a post-secular society, the role of affect has stepped in to substantivize many normative claims—either culminating in a ‘politics of feeling’ or in prioritizing individual emotions and affective economies over normative categories such as justice or freedom. This has major implications for two of the most contested concepts in religious, philosophical, […]

Sponsored by The University Seminar on The History and Philosophy of Science Many recent works in the history of science and knowledge address various aspects of materiality, including material culture, agentive matter, and the trajectories of materials, objects, and knowledge across geographic and epistemic borders. This workshop, which accompanies a new graduate history course taught by Professor Pamela Smith, seeks to introduce and discuss some of these new approaches. Visiting scholars Anna Grasskamp (University of Oslo), Dana Leibsohn (Smith College), and Alisha Rankin (Tufts University) will present their research in conversation with the work of local graduate students and scholars […]

Sponsored by The University Seminar on Beyond France This symposium on architecture and urban planning in Twentieth-Century Senegal spotlights new research on how the built environment in and around Dakar registered the continuities and ruptures between French rule and independence, indigenous heritage and colonial legacies. What role did the built environment play in constructing citizenship? What opportunities did Senegal’s independence usher in for French and African designers? What effect did Léopold Sédar Senghor’s emphasis on the arts as a path to Négritude have on architectural production and training? Each panel will address one architectural scale: urban, housing, and monumental. Speakers include: […]

Co-sponsored by The University Seminar on Studies in Modern Italy Italians in/and the Maghreb will expand discussions of colonialism, migration, race, decolonial movements, and postcolonial issues in Italian and Italian diaspora studies. While the study of Italian colonialism has blossomed in recent years with the country’s official colonies in Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, Ethiopia, and the Dodecanese Islands now the topic of many scholarly studies, the history of Italians in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia has tended to remain marginal, and mostly examined as an example of Italy’s aggressive emigration policies and attempts to pursue informal colonies. This seminar explores the exchanges […]

Co-Sponsored by The University Seminars on Cultural Memory and Public Humanities: Expanding Scholarship and Pedagogy (Faculty House and Heyman Center for The Humanities) For the past 50 years, the Columbia Society of Fellows has welcomed early-career researchers into a community of scholars whose research projects and teaching open new avenues of inquiry both within and across disciplines.  From its earliest years when it gathered in Faculty House, the Society of Fellows has enjoyed a longstanding partnership with University Seminars in bringing together researchers to think together.  In celebration of this partnership and of the milestone anniversaries of both the Society […]

Sponsored by The University Seminar on Shakespeare This symposium brings together scholars and artists to consider the intersections of racial, social, and environmental justice in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The interlinked racial and environmental crises of our time seem to compound faster than mitigating efforts, let alone the human imagination, can keep up. But the reparative work they demand requires a deep investigation of the early modern past. As the imaginative literature from this period demonstrates, premodern ideas of racial difference were inseparable from questions of geographical distance, understandings about “nature,” and the complexity of the more-than-human […]