Seminar News

Fall 2024

Seminars Community

429 | American Studies

Jordan Stein recently published Fantasies of Nina Simone (Duke University Press) with support from the Schoff Fund.

431 | Medieval Studies

IN MEMORIAM

Elizabeth A.R. (Peggy) Brown, a longstanding member of the University Seminar on Medieval Studies, passed on August 8, 2024. She was Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College and mentor to innumerable colleagues, Peggy specialized particularly in the history of France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, authoring major studies on politics, ritual and liturgy, government, church architecture, manuscripts, women’s history, and many other topics.

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Hannah Weaver, co-chair of The University Seminar on Medieval Studies, recently published Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past (Cornell University Press), which was supported with a subvention from the Schoff fund after she presented ideas from it at The University Seminar on Material Texts.

435 | Studies in Contemporary Africa

IN MEMORIAM

This year’s seminar is dedicated to our dear colleague, Elleni Centime Zeleke (1972-2024), author of Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016 (Brill).

451 | The Study of the New Testament

The University Seminar on the Study of the New Testament congratulates member Julia Kelto Lillis, Assistant Professor of Early Church History at Union Theological Seminary, on winning the North American Patristics Society’s Best First Book Prize for Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity (University of California Press). Her groundbreaking work explores the significance of virginity in early Christianity and the Mediterranean world, highlighting the complex ways early Christian thinkers defined virginity, moving beyond anatomical understanding to a diverse, culturally contextualized view.

459A | The City

IN MEMORIAM

Ron Grele was a long-time member of the The University Seminar on the City. His illustrious career pioneering Oral History is well-known. He served as the Director of Columbia’s Oral History Research Center for many years. Ron mentored many academics who incorporated oral history into their research. He was a charming, erudite, and engaging scholar; he was a popular figure often seen walking around the Columbia Campus.

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Last Spring, The University Seminar on The City welcomed Willow S. Lung-Amam, Associate Professor, Urban Studies and Planning and Director of the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network at the University of Maryland, College Park. She presented on the efforts of activists, community groups, and political leaders fighting for communities’ “right to suburbia”—that is, their right to stay put and benefit from new neighborhood investments. Her book, The Right to Suburbia: Combating Gentrification on the Urban Edge (University of California Press), is now available.

511 | Innovation in Education

Co-chair Ronald Gross’ Independent Scholar’s Handbook has inspired a new version created by the National Coalition of Independent Scholars (NCIS), which is available as a free download.

Free Download from NCIS

545 | Women and Society

Presentations at the The University Seminar for Women and Society during the 2023-2024 academic year resulted in the following two publications.

From October and November 2023 presentations, a two-part project appeared over the summer.

Samantha Majic, Melissa Ditmore, and Jun Li. 2024. “440 Sex Workers Cannot Be Wrong: Engaging and Negotiating Online Platform Power” Social Sciences 13, no. 7: 337.

Dr. Majic is a professor of Political Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the CUNY Graduate Center, while Professor Ditmore is a collaborating independent scholar who writes about global women’s issues.

Work from the April 2024 presentation was published this fall.

Owen Brown, Women and the Civil Rights Movement: Sexualized Violence, Legal Criminalization, and a Tradition of Resistance, Journal of Race and Policy, Volume 18, no. 1 (2024), pp. 5-30.

Dr. Brown is a Professor of Sociology at Medgar Evers College, CUNY where he is also Dean of the Humanities.

557 | Brazil

Vânia Penha-Lopes, co-chair of the Brazil Seminar, was one of the speakers at “Os Usos Políticos do Holocausto e do Genocídio” (The Political Uses of the Holocaust and Genocide”), a symposium at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro on August 21, 2024. She presented on Donald Trump’s uses of the Black and the Jewish identities in his current presidential campaign.

585 | Ethics, Moral Education, and Society

Elizabeth Cohn, co-chair of The University Seminar on Ethics, Moral Education and Society, will be honored as a 2024 Whole Health Hero for innovation and leadership, by Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, on Oct. 17th.

613 | Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity

The National Jobs for All Network (formerly Coalition) has been closely associated with the Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity since its founding in 1994. The leaders of the Seminar, including Columbia Professor Sumner Rosen who initiated the Full Employment Seminar in 1987—and Professors Sheila Collins, Helen Lachs Ginsburg, June Zaccone, and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg who served as the Full Employment Seminar co-chairs, were, along with Professor Rosen and some others, co-founders of the National Jobs for All Coalition (later Network). Founders of Jobs for All noted, in a publication setting forth their plans, that the Columbia Seminar on Full Employment had “provided us with a forum for presenting research and testing ideas.”

Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg’s article The Economic Bill of Rights and the National Jobs for All Network (NJFAN) is published in the NJFAN August 2024 Newsletter.

Some of this history is recounted in the essay “Keeping Alive the Dream” published in A Community of Scholars: 75 Years of The University Seminars at Columbia University.

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689 | Memory and Slavery: Social and Human Consequences

IN MEMORIAM

Dr. Emily Butler Anderson, Co-Chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Memory and Slavery, died on June 17, 2024, after a several-year battle with cancer.

Emily, a 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, leaves a rich legacy. Her professional career spanned social services, child welfare, early childhood education, psychiatric social work, and higher education teaching and administration. A proud alumnus of South Carolina State University, an HBCU, she earned three graduate degrees from New York University and Teachers College of Columbia University. Her research work at the City University of New York was instrumental in shaping the field of education.

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701 | Modern British History

Simeon Koole recently published Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain’s Cerebral Age (University of Chicago Press). The book was a Warner Fund recipient, which helped cover the costs of the index.

Asheesh Siddique recently published The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British Empire (Yale University Press), with support from the Warner Fund.

Welcome to the Seminars Community!

Two new seminars began meeting in fall 2024.

817 | World Philology

Founded by Mana Kia and David Lurie

The University Seminar in World Philology (USWP) aims to unite humanistic and social-scientific scholars across a range of departments and schools around the discipline-based study of texts. Philology, defined over the course of its history as everything from text criticism to “slow reading” to “all erudition in language,” is at base the practice of making sense of texts. This history includes modern European projects explicitly called philology, as well as those belonging to older and more diverse textual traditions around the world.

819 | Comics and Graphic Albums

Founded by Aubrey Gabel

This seminar is devoted to the medium of comics, across multiple languages and (trans)national cultures. The “comics medium” can refer to many historical forms, which conventionally feature some of the following elements: hand-drawn and hand-colored imagery; hand-written or typographic text; and a sequential narrative composed of several frames, arranged into rows on a larger panel. Research includes familiar forms like comic books or graphic novels, as well as precursors in popular print culture, like serial engravings, caricatures, broadsheets, the Imagerie d’Épinal—and so on.