Open Rapporteur Positions

These are in-person positions.

Rapporteurs serve as liaisons between the seminar and the department of The University Seminars, performing all duties necessary to ensure that meetings are successfully held. Seminars generally meet once a month during the evening. This position takes approximately 8-10 hours a month and rapporteurs are compensated $25.00/hour in their first and second years, and $30 in their third and subsequent years. Full-time Columbia University graduate students are eligible for this posting. Normally, students are not invited to attend seminars, which features distinguished speakers on contemporary issues and lively discussion by individuals with a special interest in the respective subject matter. Rapporteurs are expected to take notes on the meeting, help The Seminars office with organizational details, and to prepare notes for publication on The Seminars website and for use by attendees.

NOTE: Applicants must make sure to take into account hourly commitments to teaching fellowships, DRA and/or RA, TA positions.

Full time Columbia University students may not work more than 20 hours per week for any on-campus employment, and university and academic holidays must be observed. If you are interested in one of the positions listed below, contact the respective seminar chair/s.

791 | Science and Subjectivity

The Seminar on Science and Subjectivity was established in 2018 after a prior period of a few years as a class in the Hovde Seminar series at the Heyman Center. The Seminar continues to follow the format that worked well in that earlier iteration: we all read a book in advance of the session, then we all have something to say about it. In the past we then would all have dinner and continue the conversation. Since Covid we have met by zoom earlier in the day, and then those members who are in the area have come together to continue the discussion over dinner at 6:00 at Faculty House. We have begun to invite authors of our books, and other scholars who are focused on the work we are discussing to join our discussions; regardless, we plan to remain a convivial group of interested and articulate readers willing to delve deeply into the intersection of science and individual subjective experience.

*Note: Aptitude for meeting technologies is a requirement for this position

Chair/s

Robert Pollack
pollack@columbia.edu

 

Elaine Bernstein
ESBern@aol.com

819 | Comics and Graphic Albums

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.

Chair/s

Aubrey Gabel
aag2188@columbia.edu