Open Rapporteur Positions

The Seminar in the Renaissance, founded in 1945 by Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Herman Randall, Jr., hosts presentations of about 50 minutes on various aspects of Renaissance thought (including Renaissance humanism) and its ramifications in the arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature) and the sciences (physical, natural, historical, and philological), as well as history and philosophy. The Renaissance is taken to include the period from about 1350 to about 1650. We meet on the second Tuesday of each academic month (except January). Since April 2020, during the pandemic, we have been meeting earlier via Zoom, and we will continue meeting in a hybrid format, i.e. in person and by Zoom, at 4 pm, New York (US Eastern) Time, allowing until 6 pm for the talk and ample discussion of the talk, followed by dinner at Faculty House and further informal discussion. We have found that this allows colleagues from other parts of the globe to join the talk and discussion, to our great mutual profit. In 2025-26, we will have 9 meetings, including two by Zoom only: one in November and one in late January.

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This seminar is concerned with methodology and theory in the social sciences as well as with its substantive results. As a rule, members and sometimes guest speakers present their current research in a manner which enlightens the seminar on various theoretical and methodological advances and helps the researcher to solve his difficulties and formulate a codified view of ongoing research in social sciences.

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Laws come and go, constantly shifting their meaning and significance to reflect the beliefs and traditions of the societies in which they are embedded. Yet, despite its mutable and inconstant nature, the law is indispensable for the harmonious functioning of human relationships. “The purpose of the law,” according to the English philosopher, John Locke, “is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. . . . Where there is no law, there is no freedom.” A century later, the French revolutionary, Maximilien Robespierre, proclaimed that “any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.” The Law and Politics seminar, established at Columbia in 1963, focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on topics that remain relevant for our understanding of the law in the twentieth-first century.

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This interdisciplinary seminar critically engages with aspects of death, dying, disposal and grief. Presentations and discussions explore topics from both academic and clinical perspectives in areas as diverse as medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, religion, law, politics, architecture, and the media. In recent years the seminar has focused on contemporary developments in technology, culture and society. Attendance is maintained at a level that provides members with ample opportunity for active participation.

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The process of learning—in individuals, organizations, and society—is the subject of this seminar. Its scope includes learning throughout the lifespan and via major institutions such as mass media, libraries, voluntary organizations, and educational systems.

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This seminar covers all aspects of population biology, broadly defined to include ecology, evolution and other aspects of modern organismal biology. It also encompasses studies of animal behavior in the field and laboratory, paleontology, theoretical and experimental biology, genetics and genomics.

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This seminar was founded to study the most compelling questions of the day, which then related to the war in Southeast Asia, its causes, and consequences. Today the seminar continues to examine vital current issues from the perspective of critical and social theory with an emphasis on their economic, political, and philosophical dimensions and roots in political economic structures. It focuses particularly, though not exclusively, on the relationship between political economy and the transformation of the natural world, addressing pressing issues like climate change, the rights of nature, and resource extraction, while also attending to the ways that nature and society are represented in core concepts of political economy like scarcity, growth, and property.

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This seminar provides a forum for the scholarly exchange of information among key representatives of the chemical dependency research, treatment, prevention, and policy development communities. It seeks to address the important and complex questions relating to the root causes of chemical dependency and abuse, to examine and evaluate epidemiological studies, to determine the effectiveness of various treatment and prevention strategies, and to discuss the wisdom and value of current international, national, and local policies. Membership is comprised of prominent researchers, established leaders in the treatment and prevention fields, and government policymakers. Speakers in the seminar are drawn from the membership itself and by invitation from other institutions.

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Recently completed field studies and research from primary sources on Brazil constitute the main interest of this seminar. Brazilian, the U.S. and other visiting scholars participate, contributing their interpretations of recent events. Portuguese may be spoken whenever convenient.

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This seminar is concerned with the contemporary political economy of Southeast Asia, and in particular with its international dimensions. The agenda includes current problems of economic and political change in the countries of the region, as well as issues in relations with the United States, Japan, China, and Russia. The seminar membership includes policymakers from the public and private sectors, as well as scholars, and the group as a whole has a strong policy orientation.

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This seminar, made up of theoreticians, researchers, and educators, examines the themes of ethics, moral education, and society in a genuinely interdisciplinary fashion, covering such topics as moral motivation, moral development, moral education, and moral theory. Membership is drawn from the fields of psychology, philosophy, sociology, education, political theory, and religion. The seminar provides a meeting ground for communication and support unique to the New York metropolitan region.

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The seminar focuses on the analytical and policy issues related to full employment, social welfare, and equity. These include crossnational perspectives, primarily in other industrialized economies. The purpose is to identify and clarify the more difficult and central intellectual questions which relate to and affect the national commitment and capability to assure full employment, social welfare, and equity over long periods.

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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.

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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.

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The world is facing unprecedented systemic challenges of both ecological and economic nature that are straining not only our resources but also the intellectual frameworks and finance/economics theories on which we have relied for several generations. We continue to be burdened by a lack of political resolve and a market system that, in pursuing short-term profits, has directed trillions of dollars of global capital into economic activities that are now posing a danger to not only markets and economies, but also to our society and our planet. These disconnects need urgent attention. To address them, we must do more than tinker on the margins of our existing disciplines. We need to break through and create new understandings about the true systems of interdependence, correlation, and causality that link and drive our world. What we need, in effect, is a thoughtful rewiring of the source code of capitalism. Yet, the creative force that hurls people into new corners of thought must be matched by efforts to find common ground. To make progress, a blend of creation and consensus, innovation and standardization, vision and practicality is required. This takes time and can only be accomplished through careful discussions among the innovators. Some of those discussions can take place in writing. Others need to happen through careful, curated conversations. The University Seminar on Sustainable Finance provides a platform for such discussions.

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This seminar explores and examines the intersection of scholarship and practice around higher education institutions’ (HEIs) civic engagement with a specific focus on youth and families within their communities. The membership consists of researchers and practitioners from Columbia University as well as the community who share this common interest. As such, the seminar is uniquely positioned to cultivate an intersection of scholarship and practice through discussions focused on HEIs’ approaches to defining, fulfilling, and assessing their roles as engaged anchor institutions within their communities; and the implications of their efforts to the community and the institutions.

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The Public Humanities Workshop features the work of scholars engaged in public-facing modes of scholarship and pedagogy. Meeting two to three times per semester, each seminar highlights one or more public humanities projects in progress with the aim of nurturing interdisciplinary thinking and new, imaginative collaborations that bridge scholarly and applied knowledge. These intellectual projects will draw on a variety of disciplinary methods while engaging non-academic partners such as community members, civic organizations, artists, and activists. Meetings have a thematic focus while enabling participants to examine topics of concern to the public humanities broadly, including intellectual dynamics, research strategies, program access, and pedagogy.

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The history of Cuba is a highly complex and controversial topic. Beginning in the sixteenth century it has been the locus of repeated encounters between diverse cultures and subcultures. The sixteenth century witnessed devastating contacts between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. As the Spanish presence expanded in subsequent centuries, so did the role of Cuba as a economic and political linchpin of the Spanish empire. Armadas loaded with goods and riches from the Spanish colonies throughout the hemisphere rendezvoused in Cuba prior to their departure for Spain in an effort to reduce the depredations of European competitors. The increased importation of Africans as slave labor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries diversified Cuba demographically and culturally even more, as did Cuba’s increasing reception of Haitians, Jamaicans, Mexicans, Chinese, and North Americans, among others. Proximity to the emerging power to the North resulted in increased US influence to the extent that Cuban independence from Spain was circumscribed by the Platt Amendment (1903-34) written into its constitution. This limited Cuban sovereignty and helped feed movements throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to eliminate US influence. This struggle culminated in the 1959 emergence of a revolutionary government that resulted in ongoing tensions between the island and the US. The complexities of Cuban history, including its relationship with the US continues to ensnare the two countries. This University Seminar will focus on the political, economic, social, and cultural issues and complexities of the island, as well as its relationship with the US.

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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 humanities and humanistic social science departments at Columbia and Barnard, as well as from other colleges and universities in the New York area.

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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. It also touches on early iterations (comics supplements, wordless novels, etc.), popular veins (editorial cartoons, adult comix magazines, and webcomics), and non-fiction forms (graphic memoir, comics journalism, graphic medicine, etc.). Comics are not only central to various national cultures (like manga to Japan or bandes dessinées to Belgium and France) but in the last half century, have increasingly been accepted as a legitimate 9th art. Beyond the works of legendary comics creators like Winsor McCay or Hergé, or the sheer staying power of multimedia conglomerates like Marvel or DC, the artform has achieved its iconic status through the graphic novel. If comics studies have long been an interdisciplinary field—originally housed in art history and popular culture studies—it now reaches comfortably into multiple humanistic fields (like new media studies, language pedagogy, narrative medicine, etc.) and into various subfields (like queer, disability, memory, or Black studies). Columbia University has a long history of supporting, teaching, and legitimizing scholarship in comics studies. Our unparalleled collection of graphic albums, curated by Karen Green since 2005, includes over 19,000 titles in two dozen languages. This seminar envisages future partnerships with publishers, non-profit organizations, and institutions throughout New York City and the tristate area.

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