Open Rapporteur Positions

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.

Chair/s

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.

Chair/s

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.

Chair/s

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.

Chair/s

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

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.

Chair/s

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.

Chair/s

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.

Chair/s

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.

Chair/s