Open Rapporteur Positions

The Modern Japan Seminar is concerned with the history, politics, society, and culture of Japan from the late nineteenth century to the present. It emphasizes interdisciplinary dialogue among historians, anthropologists, sociologists, literary critics and other scholars from the New York area institutions. The seminar meets regularly to discuss a paper from a work in progress by a member or invited speaker. Pre-circulation of papers and discussant comments encourage in-depth discussion and debate.

This seminar was created to coordinate the archaeological chronologies of the regions of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean. It meets from six to eight times a year to discuss new research and hear reports of recent fieldwork. A number of relevant papers were published in the American Journal of Archaeology from 1968 until 1988, and in 1992 in the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society. Since then, the focus of the seminar has been widened to include all aspects of the ancient cultures of the Near East and its adjoining regions.

The Culture, Power, Boundaries Seminar is a forum for work and work-in-progress that strives for a critical analysis of contemporary power relations at local and global scales and how such power relations affect the analysis, reproduction, and transformation of inequality and its cultural expressions. The seminar began forty years ago with a focus on immigration and developed into a broad forum for critical social science. While the majority of seminar members are anthropologists, and presentations tend to focus on case studies, the seminar continues to welcome, as both guests and speakers, other social scientists interested in investigating the power dimension of cultural formations and the cultural aspects of inequality.

This seminar serves as an interdisciplinary forum on all aspects and periods of Irish culture. Seminar participants come from a wide variety of fields: history, literature, art history, film studies, political science, sociology, anthropology, music, and folklore. These scholars bring to any topic under discussion a diversity of background which is stimulating and informative for all present. The concern for Irish studies as a field of scholarly inquiry is reflected in the collegial sharing of information about resources and repositories for research in the field.

What can the study of language contribute to our understanding of human nature? This question motivates research spanning many intellectual constituencies, for its range exceeds the scope of any one of the core disciplines. The technical study of language has developed across anthropology, electrical engineering, linguistics, neurology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, and influential research of the recent era of cognitive science have occurred when disciplinary boundaries were transcended. The seminar is a forum for convening this research community of broadly differing expertise, within and beyond the University. As a meeting ground for regular discussion of current events and fundamental questions, the University Seminar on Language and Cognition will direct its focus to the latest breakthroughs and the developing concerns of the scientific community studying language.

This Seminar addresses the legacy of slavery in the western hemisphere, focusing on African-American slavery in the United States. Presenters and discussants participate in dialogue on the history of slavery, its neurobehavioral and cultural underpinnings, the social, economic, and political factors facilitating ongoing racism and inequities, and the consequences for ancestors of enslaved peoples and enslaving peoples in the modern world. Members of this seminar include anthropologists, clergy, historians, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, and other scholars and guests who share an interest in learning from the collective memories of slavery, determining what must be done to heal the wounds left behind by slavery, and determining how to move toward equitable and healthy societies in which all peoples can thrive.

Chair/s: John Delfs, john@goodwolf.org

The seminar series continues the line of research established by Professor of Linguistics William Diver. The aim in this approach, as contrasted with formal linguistics, is to account for observed language use, with authentic text as the main source of data. For grammar, this typically entails hypotheses about linguistic signals and their meanings; for phonology, hypotheses about the relevant phonetic characteristics of phonological units. The roles of communication and a human factor are explicitly acknowledged as supporting the explanations offered. The series was begun in 1968 by Diver for the benefit of graduate students working on doctoral theses under his guidance. Since his death in 1995, the series has continued under the auspices of the Columbia School Linguistic Society, with participants presenting analyses or work in progress. Occasionally, it hosts by invitation presenters doing compatible work outside the Columbia School tradition. Work coming out of the seminar has led to numerous conference presentations and publications.

Historically, the global health agenda has prioritized communicable and non-communicable diseases other than mental health; however, the data now unequivocally and overwhelmingly point to the essential need to make mental health an integral component of the global health agenda. This will require innovative thinking, multidisciplinary collaboration, and strategic initiatives. The GMH University Seminar is supported by faculty from across multiple departments at Columbia; it provides the opportunity for intellectual discourse on the essential issues in global mental health, and it serves as a seminal component of the multidisciplinary program in global mental health at Columbia University. The GMH University Seminar aims to facilitate professional collaborations and contribute to the field by hosting programs that address and advance the scientific, policy, and practical aspects of making mental health a core component of the global health agenda.

Chair/s: Claire Greene, mg4069@cumc.columbia.edu; Kathryn L. Lovero, kll2153@columbia.edu

Animal behavior is the ultimate complex and integrated trait, shaped not only by gene, protein, neural, endocrine interactions but also by interactions among animals of the same and even different species. This Seminar takes an integrative approach to explore animal behavior by bringing together scientists that work in the lab and field to study neuroscience, behavioral ecology, behavioral endocrinology, functional genomics, population genetics, comparative physiology, and more.

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. The USWP seeks to learn about these histories, simultaneously aware of the sordid colonial past of modern European philologies and philology-derived disciplines, and also of the elitism that characterized their precolonial antecedents the world over. The project of the USWP proposes to confront these inheritances openly as we move forward. The USWP aims to bring together faculty from these departments at Columbia and Barnard, as well as from other colleges and universities in the New York area.