Past Seminars

1945-2024

This seminar is concerned broadly with the maintenance of international peace and security and with the settlement of international disputes. It considers specific conflicts and also discusses the contemporary role of the United Nations, multinational peacekeeping, humanitarian efforts and other measures for the resolution of international conflicts.

1954-1959

Description TK

1959-1966

This seminar had its inception in the spring of 1959 when a group of scholars affiliated with the historical and behavioral sciences met in order to discuss the various techniques of interpretation available in their respective disciplines. In the course of the discussion it became clear that the activity of interpretation whether applied to written texts, works of art or historical phenomena, involve a discernible logic and that a clarification of it would be of benefit to all concerned. It was decided to follow a case-study approach: A selected number of major interpretive efforts would be analized with a view of bringing to light the major alternatives available. During the first years of its work the seminar has been exploring the shifts between the allegorical and historical methods of interpretation occurring from the Renaissance to the present day. The study of hermeneutics as an analysis of the variety of methods of interpretation may help to lay the groundwork for an analysis of language as a “hermeneutic” of various modes of human expression and communication.

1956-1971

The seminar inquires into the comparative roles and collaborative relationship between the several professions providing health services and the problems involved in the continuous adjustment of their functions to changes in health and social needs. Participants include representatives of various disciplines concerned with health care and social welfare, consumers or recipients of health services, and voluntary and governmental groups responsible for the development of policies and programs for health services needed by the people of this country.

1955-1957

Description TK

1949-1992

The growth of world population is here considered in terms of the factors affecting the rate of growth, and the relationships between population change and social and economic change. Questions of fertility, mortality, migration, working force, agriculture, technology, urbanism, and others are considered as they impinge on, or are affected by, population growth.

1973-1985

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1958-1960

Description TK

1959-1985

Topics are drawn from general areas of sociology, psychology, economics, medical science, and other social sciences in which mathematics is used. Mathematical and statistical tools are applied to the study of certain measurement problems, to the development of mathematical models relating to certain substantive theories in the social sciences, and to the statistical estimation of certain quantities of interest in these mathematical models. Some of the topics considered during the year were: “Data Processing Systems and Social Research;” “Tests Auxiliary to Chi-square Tests in a Markov Chain;” “New Results on Pareto-Levy Random Processes and New Applications;” “Stochastic Latency Mechanisms;” “Utility, Uncertainty, and Subjective Probability;” “Finite-State and Nonfinite-State Models of Language.

1959-1975

Human evolution is here considered both historically and analytically. The seminar is concerned with such mechanisms involved in evolution as the genetic variability stored in the gene pool, the processes of mutation and natural selection, and the effects of population structure and isolation; it considers as well the interaction of culture with all these factors. Genetic variability leads to all aspects of human genetics. Among topics recently discussed are mutation, selective effects of known human genes, isolated populations, serological problems, human chromosomes, and fossil man. The aim of the seminar is to make a small start toward a synthesis, using the disciplines of cultural and physical anthropology, demography, ecology, genetics, mathematics, medicine, psychology, and serology.

1960-1969

The Seminar on Power and Social Structure consists mainly of Columbia University economists, economic historians, political scientists, and sociologists interested in the processes that govern the distribution and exercise of power in societies of the past and present. The following topics are among those discussed and indicate the nature of the subject matter: the kinds of groups that play active roles in modern political systems, the modes and their limits of financing governmental bodies, the major strains and interests in pre-revolutionary Cuba and their political expression.

1992-2003

The idea for this seminar was developed in conversations among Columbia University faculty members and visitors during the years of tremendous changes that shook Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (1989-1991). In a sense, the seminar is the reconstitution of the now defunct University Seminar on Communism. Its mission is to examine the post-totalitarian transformation of the ex-Soviet empire by drawing on the faculty resources at Columbia and the metropolitan area.

1960-1989

Description TK

1962-1981

This Seminar has met regularly twice a month during the academic year with approximately one third of the meetings led by foreign visitors, one third by American visitors, and one third by members of the Seminar. In order to make maximum use of our visitors, the program of meetings could not be highly structured. Inevitably, however, in 1963-1964 there has been a recurrent emphasis on the problems which have given rise to proposals for transforming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

1967-1998

This seminar developed in the late 1960s in response to the growing concern over the future of American cities. The interdisciplinary perspective of the seminar has allowed for consideration of a broad range of issues relating to urban governance and policy. The seminar has been particularly concerned with how changes in the socioeconomic condition of the city have affected the quality of life and service delivery for those who live in the city. The conflicts which manifest themselves through government and in the urban political arena remain central to the life of this seminar.

1962-1982

This seminar, started in the fall of 1962, is concerned with the causes, development, and impact of technological change. The membership is drawing on academic talent in the pure and social sciences, philosophy, and religion, as well as on specialists from business, government, and specialized research organizations. The papers and proceedings of the first year were devoted to identifying some of the basic issues and have been published by the Columbia University Press in a volume entitled “Technology and Social Change” The seminar has focused on the relationships between science and technology and the range of problems involved in applying the fruits of scientific innovation to the needs of the society at large. 

1963-1979

The seminar is intended to bring together directors of social research in business, government, and non-profit organizations with their colleagues engaged in empirical research at Columbia and other universities in the New York area. Its discussions will cover new developments in research methods and social science theory arising from both university and non-university social research, and problems in the application of social research. The creation of social research departments and programs in industry, government, and large voluntary associations (unions, welfare groups, professional associations) in recent years means that a large amount of serious scientific investigation of human behavior now takes place outside the university. Much of this research is concentrated in the New York area due to this city’s position as financial, marketing, and communications headquarters for the nation. The seminar is intended to provide an intellectual meeting ground for social scientists inside and outside the university.

1966-2023

Technologies, scientific transformations, and new areas of knowledge are continuously, and rapidly, being introduced. These developments are transforming social systems around the world. We have seen networked computers rapidly converging with telephones and TV into globally pervasive digital communications systems. These systems—and the emerging New Media they create—are increasingly impacting what and how we communicate with each other, as well as how we write history and interact among ourselves. The opportunities and threats these and other systems pose to personal and global quality of life, end even to human survival, are very real and relatively little understood. This seminar will consider these aspects, as well as alternative social systems that may lead to a better future for humankind. This seminar was formerly called Computers, Man, and Society.

1964-1965

Provisional Purpose: This seminar expects to meet regularly every three weeks to discuss questions members of the faculty, project directors in various research institutes, and advanced graduate students encounter in researching international problems.

1964-1998

Theory of literature is a distinct discipline in literary study which has gained increasing recognition in international scholarship. It seeks to define the character of that kind of writing which may be considered literary – to study the conditions under which it is created, its effect on the reader, and its relation to those human needs, intellectual, esthetic, moral, and social which it satisfies. It includes theory and methodology of literary criticism, study of the structure, composition, and style of literary works of various genres, and their analysis into constituent elements and devices. On one hand, theory of literature relates to the broader discipline of esthetics; on the other, with such types of literary study as comparative literature and the history of literature. But clear logical distinctions obtain which make it possible to define the scope and character of those questions which can best be investigated from the point of view of literary theory.

1964-1966

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1964-1987

This seminar focuses on the phenomena of maladaptation in human behavior in terms of their sources and effects upon the individuals’ function in society. Individual inability to adapt successfully to the environment can be the result of many causes acting in infinite combinations. With the blurring of lines among various psychoanalytic; sociological, genetic and other factors leading to social incapacities, it is imperative to examine major areas of human maladaptation from the points of view of many specialists in the life and behavioral sciences. Implicit in this effort is an exchange of the concepts and language of each discipline to clarify those which are held in common and those in which they differ. Its major goal will be the construction of models leading to practical solutions of adaptation. The seminar has studied the phenomenon of violence.

1981-1984

This seminar began under special circumstances. When Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister or India, clamped an emergency on India in 1975, a small group of scholars in New York became very concerned. They wanted a dialogue among themselves, without the ‘watchful eye’ of the Indian officials in New York, who often participated in the deliberations of the University Seminar on Tradition and Change in South and Southeast Asia. Among the early participants in the group were Baldya Nath Varma, Rajni Kothari, Owen Lynch, and Ainslie T. Imbree. The group met for a few years at the School of International Affairs and then it was decided to incorporate it as one of The University Seminars. The only stipulation has been to keep the membership small so that participation could be in-depth and interchange of Ideas extensive. There is a strong feeling In the seminar that the problem of reform always Incorporates tradition, but undue emphasis on religious tradition or comparison of a nation’s growth with the Western or Soviet model often overlooks reality and overshoots the mark of healthy change. Modernization and civilization are always In dialectical relationship.

1965-1971

This seminar is intended primarily to bring together all professors with tenure in Columbia, Barnard and Union Theological Seminary who teach in the fields of classical and near-eastern antiquity (which means roughly, everything from about 3000 BC to the rise of Islam). The Seminar’s meetings are principally discussion groups dealing with problems of common concern to these teachers, sometimes practical problems like matters of personnel and policy, sometimes scholarly topics touching on several fields. Although programs are occasionally scheduled a month or two in advance, the intention is to keep a fair number of the meetings free for treatment of current questions as they emerge, and for conversation between colleagues who otherwise too rarely meet.

1966-1968

The University Seminar on The Use of Language is concerned with the analysis of linguistic behavior in relation to problems of linguistic, cognitive and social structure. An immediate problem in view is the specification of the behavioral data which is needed for a satisfactory semantic and syntactic analysis of discourse, particularly in dealing with children’s and non -standard dialects. general, the seminar studies the ways in which social interaction between members of the speech community controls the development of language; and conversely, studies the established rules of language to uncover the assumptions about social structure that are the shared property of members of the speech community.

1967-2009

This seminar provides a forum for discussion on all aspects of traditional China. Scholars who specialize in various fields of Chinese studies—literature, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, social and economic history, or political science—offer papers and participate in the discussion, contributing their own research, thus providing a broad spectrum of analysis through which to study traditional China.

1967-1988

The University Seminar on Biomaterials concerns itself with the structure and concomitant function of living materials and the synthesis and assessment of artificial substances which functionally emulate living materials. Comparative study of the thrombotic properties of natural and real and hypothetical artificial blood vessels has concerned the seminar since its inception in the spring of 1967. Members include engineers, surgeons, chemists, and hematologists.

1968-1988

The field of Soviet ethnic problems, including those experienced by many ethnic groups as well as important matters actively concerning the political leaders and management of the USSR, provide the broad analytical target of this Seminar. Basically, focused upon the general issues arising in the arena of nationality as such, this seminar sometimes concentrates attention on single groups and their dilemmas, in order to demonstrate the continuing diversity of nationality problems in the Soviet Union. The discussions mean to offer members good bases for comparing problems with non-Soviet areas.

1990-2012

The seminar addresses the interdisciplinary aspects of the environment including marine science, biology, water resources, pollution, social sciences, legal and political processes and implementation. Each session features an expert in an aspect of the seminar’s purpose who serves as a catalyst for discussion and exchange of positions.

1968-1978

The University Seminar on the Nature of Man carries on a continuing trans-disciplinary dialogue that seeks to identify man’s nature, physical, intellectual, and moral, and to understand him in the context formed by his social, historical, and natural environments. In carrying on this dialogue, the Seminar examines proposed syntheses by which scientific knowledge and humanistic insight might converge and be subsumed under some general thematic hypothesis.

1970-2004

The changing relationships among health, medicine, and society are considered, with special emphasis on emerging modes of professional practice and public and institutional intervention.  Interdisciplinary participation is encouraged, including health and sociomedical sciences, health administration and policy, as well as medicine.  Recent foci include health policy for disadvantaged groups, the changing role of the individual profession in the larger health care system, and the lessons of foreign experience for US debates about health care reform. 

1970-1975

This seminar has been organized to bring together a group interested in literature, philosophy, history, and the arts for discussions of nineteenth-century Western civilization with special emphasis on the Romantic movement.

1971-1988

Problems and prospects of both Koreas are considered in historic, contemporary, and futuristic regards emphasized. Two Koreas’ internal dynamics and their external behaviors are emphasized.

1971-1984

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1973-1974

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1974-1976

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1974-1981

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1974-1979

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1974-1975

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1992-2019

The seminar focuses primarily on Europe and the United States. It brings together historians, sociologists, political scientists, literary critics, and other scholars to discuss current research on diverse cultural, social, and political theses, especially those that stimulate comparative perspectives.

1975-1991

The historical study of labor and the working class in their various dimensions: a) Institutional: local, national formation, structures, and later associations of labor Including and international organizations; b) social: origins, development, and composition of the working class, including ethnic, racial, religious, and gender attributes and the diverse features of working-class subcultures; c) ideological: utopian, Christian, Marxist, anarchist, and syndicalist formulations. Concentration on problems with comparative and interdisciplinary implications.

1978-1988

Neurobiology is a rapidly developing field which cuts across the traditional disciplines of anatomy, biochemistry, neurology, pharmacology, physiology, and psychology. The goal of the seminar is to bring together faculty and students from different departments who share a common interest in the properties of neurons, the individual units of the nervous system, and their integration In the control of behavior.

1978-1982

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1979-1983

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1982-2009

This seminar is designed to meet an urgent need by business executives, government officials, and scholars for information and analysis of rapid developments in China’s new relations with international business. Topics included are frequently interdisciplinary; they range from government and company strategies to lessons of successes and failures in the emerging relationships.

1982-1983

Description TK

1982-1992

The seminar is engaged in sustained and sequential study of selected arms control issues. In the past, the group has concentrated on first principles: stability, deterrence and extended deterrence. The group has moved to explore the ways in which changing military technology has affected the goals to which arms control efforts should be directed and the political obstacles to achieving verifiable arms limitation agreements.

1982-2016

The purpose of this seminar is to bring together researchers in human genetics, epidemiology, and related disciplines, to discuss issues of common interest. Topics focus primarily on genetic and environmental contributions to disease, and gene-environment interaction. Our goal is to use information from both human genetics and epidemiology to arrive at a methodology for understanding the complex etiology of common diseases.

1982-1992

Description TK

1983-1990

The University Seminar on Global Habitability brings together eminent scientists in the physical, chemical, and biological sciences central to scientific research issues, as well as policy makers, to define, discuss, and illuminate scientific and social issues relating to the global environment and man’s impact on it. We believe that, while the earth has always been characterized by change, we now have entered an era when the human race has the ability to modify its environment at rates never before experienced. We therefore feel an urgency to improve our understanding of global physical, chemical, and biological systems and their complex Interactions, as well as the influence of man on the overall system and the implications for mankind.

1983-1990

A discussion of the philanthropic tradition in terms of Its underlying philosophical principles as well as its current scope and practice. Emphasis is on private giving for public purposes, with more limited attention to voluntary service, public altruism, and for-profit activity In the philanthropic sector. A series of four sessions is exploring corporate philanthropy.

1983-1985

This interdisciplinary seminar is concerned with four types of issues: a) sociological and historical studies of specific values (e.g. friendship) and specific structures of values (e.g. biblical values), b) the conceptual and empirical links between values and psychological phenomena (e.g. desires, needs), c) the analysis and justification of specific values and their role in the Justification of human rights and political programs, d) the relationships between values and rational decision and rational change of value.

1984-1997

This seminar is based on the thesis that the modes of public communication in any society help to determine the level of its efficiency and productivity, the distribution of power within that society, that society’s perceptions of reality, and the structure of its thought. They also have a major influence on education and scholarship and on varieties of literature and art. The seminar will examine, in both a contemporary and historical context, a diversity of institutions’ and procedures that contribute a comprehensive structure of book, magazine, and newspaper publishers; motion picture producers and theaters; broadcasting; cable; computer networks; libraries, and professional schools. These modes of communication are in turn shaped by three groups of factors: the technologies employed, structures and controls, and government policy.

1983-1985

The purpose of this seminar is to further an understanding of the policy implications of the information revolution. Rapid developments in technology have altered the landscape of electronic mass media, individual communication, and data processing. These changes in turn affect program options in mass communications, market structures in domestic telephony, international cooperation, the nature of computer networks, and the dispersion of economic activity. The seminar brings together experts from academia and outside to trace these changes, and to discuss appropriate societal policies.

1986-1993

This seminar Is devoted to diagnosis and policy analysis In the field of financial structures and policies. Our agenda includes (a) the blockage to Third World development imposed by debt stringencies and by the transfer to USA and other financial havens of Third World equity capital; (b) the brittleness of financial structure in USA and other industrial countries and the shortening of horizons on the part of governments, financial Institutions, companies and Individuals; (c) demagogic, anti-saving and pro-gambler financial policies; (d) problems of international policy coordination and of monetary standards. We aim at mutual understanding among policy-makers, financial practitioners, and academics.

1985-1986

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1985-1986

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1986-1990

The Seminar on Modernism has explored definitions of modernism in the arts by examining sources and analyzing central works and successors, especially post-Modernism. This year we heard papers on Chekhov’s role as a precursor, an analysis of the period of high Modernism in English literature, an account of Edmund Wilson’s criticism as an early attempt to define Modernism, and a survey of the work of two recent poets who evolved into Post-Modernists.

1986-1987

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1987-2016

In view of the widespread concern with the notion of scientific literacy on the part of scientists, educators at all levels, industrialists, politicians, and the media, this seminar aims to analyze the wide diversity of views as to how a greater measure of scientific literacy might be obtained. There are many ways of teaching science, looking at science, and practicing science. The notion of a universal scientific literacy as a unique set of things is not at all defined; the seminar’s goal is to delineate its significance and implications.

1988-2012

The seminar looks at the state-of-the-art in cancer research and treatment approaches, including public policy issues, as well as public health implications.

1989-1993

We are an inter-disciplinary, inter-university group of scholars and teachers who have long been interested in ethics in business. In recent years, of course, many colleagues and universities have introduced courses to extend the scholarly examination of ethics in a variety of organizational situations. Moreover, many business and professional practitioners have instituted programs in their organizations to encourage the kind of reflective reasoning about practical concerns that has always marked the discipline of ethics. The purpose of the seminar is to establish a forum where academics can meet practitioners to exchange ideas and discuss experiences in this area. Specifically, we believe we need to share our successes and failure in teaching and applying ethics in the rapidly changing worlds of business and the professions.

1989-1997

This is a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary scholarly forum for the study and discussion of past homosexualities, male and female, recent and more remote, Western and non-western, from the various perspectives of the historian, anthropologist, sociologist, historian of literature, religion, art and law, all within the context of the larger history of sexuality and the still wider cultural contexts in which human sexuality is itself embedded.

1990-1992

This seminar brings together faculty from history, literature, anthropology, art history, architecture and other disciplines for the discussion of programmatic and scholarly issues in the field of American Culture Studies.

1990-1995

Since the late 1970s, and particularly in the last five years, the advent of readily accessible techniques of recombinant DNA analysis have transformed the field of evolutionary biology. In particular, RFLP analysis and PC amplification and sequencing of DNA are being used to address questions of systematics, speciation, coevolution of gene complexes, molecular clocks, and the population biology of molecular evolution. This seminar brings together molecular geneticists and evolutionary biologists in an effort to explore the interface between these two fields and facilitate discussion and future research in this new and exciting area of evolutionary study.

1990-1992

The seminar is co-sponsored by the Temple Hoyne Bull Center for the Study of American Architecture. Its goal is to consider in depth some of the intellectual and methodological issues central to American architectural history, drawing insight from a wide range of disciplines. We are concerned to explore some of the possible connections between this domain and European art history, as well as American studies, aesthetics, and cultural history. Both the aesthetic and creative processes of architectural designers and the social and political issues relevant to the public realm are given equal consideration. Issues of public symbolism, public and private patronage, and relationship between high culture,

vernacular traditions and commercialism are relevant to our discussions. To be sure, these concerns are emerging in other disciplines and cultures, but they are inescapable in the study of American architectural history. Each year the sessions focus around a general theme: the history of architectural profession in the United States; writings by American architects; site and context in American architecture; and American modernism in an international context.

1991-1993

This seminar addresses a wide variety of questions concerning land policy and development through legal, policy, business, panning, design, economic, sociological, historical, financial, and political perspectives. Among these questions are: what role do economic and financial trends play in land policy and development, how have conflicts over unwanted land uses shaped current patterns; what is the impact of changing perceptions of environmental risk, how will legal debates over land use regulation and individual rights affect the future; who will pay for expansion of infrastructure and coordinate public and private responsibilities for its maintenance and improvement, why does the US system vary by locality, state and region; how do other countries deal with comparable issues; and what is the historical evolution of land policy and development.

1992-1993

The seminar brings together theatre scholars and theatre professionals to discuss issues and problems in dramatic history and theory, textual interpretation, and performance. Major aims are to re-examine influential theories of drama and performance, to re-examine the work of major figures in the field, to situate theatre studies in the context of related fields, and to discuss current productions of classic and modern dramas. Seminar meetings consist of group discussion of a pre-arranged topic. There are no formal presentations.

1992-1999

Two heretofore overlooked yet increasingly important aspects of international relations form the focus of this seminar: the significance of multilateral diplomacy in Japanese foreign policy and the impact of Japan on the United Nations and other multilateral institutions. As part of a larger program sponsored by the East Asian Institute, the seminar seeks to stimulate innovative scholarly research in these areas through the development of a cadre of scholars and other experts who combine an understanding of the new role of international institutions with a firm grasp of Japanese foreign policy.

1993-1995

The NIH and DOE programs to map and sequence the human genome will produce genetic information, new reagents, and technologies that will transform clinical medicine and basic biology, and have profound social, ethical, legal, and economic impacts. The purpose of this seminar is to explore these societal issues in depth, as an important object of scholarly analysis, and as a conduit for ideas and proposals that may influence public policy and national legislation. Seminar participants are drawn from the fields of medicine, public health, biology, genetics, law, economics, psychology, philosophy, and sociology.

1993-1997

The seminar presents and examines current work on modernism and modernity with a special emphasis on theoretical investigations. Topics include the recodifications of modernist art and literature, analyses of mass culture, institutional critique, the fate of the avant-garde, apparatuses of cultural control, and the constructions of gender and sexuality. Membership draws on the humanities and social sciences as well as on the art world of New York.

1993-1997

This seminar seeks to formulate an adequate societal response to the needs and situation of children and their families in big cities. The overall focus is on conceptual, policy, and program issues concentrating on service delivery, financing, and political issues concerning community-based child and family services. Seminar participants consist of faculty and researchers from Columbia and other centers in the northeast as well as social agency administrators and citizen leaders. The seminar will meet for a limited period of time–one and a half to two years–and plans to publish its findings. Its work is supported by grants from the Ford Foundation and the Foundation for Child Development.

1993-1998

Computer science, statistics, and operations research have played a central role in the advancement of natural and applied sciences by introducing a mathematical structure to the study of complex problems. Mathematics also has an ever increasing prominence in social, medical, and psychological sciences, and in diverse other areas including philosophy, public health, and linguistics. The seminar examines this changing role of mathematics from historical, philosophical, professional, educational, and practical viewpoints.

1993-2010

The seminar focuses on the debate over national health and science policy and their impact on priorities in medicine, science, and funding for them. Seminar participants are drawn from city, state, and federal government and from the faculty and administration of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, the Cornell faculty, the administration of New York Presbyterian Hospital, and other universities and hospitals.

1993-1999

The scholarly focus of this seminar is on the textual study of Indian traditions, with a particular focus on Hinduism and its interaction with other traditions scientific, political, and religious. The seminar’s textual emphasis, which includes oral as well as written texts, reflects the philological concerns of traditional Indology, but within a new, more historical framework. In our textual study, we are also concerned with how the brahmanical traditions–Vedic, classical, and contemporary–have been defined and used within the course of Indian history. Our scope thus includes the analysis of authoritative texts from the history of Indian science, medicine, religion, politics and linguistics. This broad framework allows us to use textual study to examine again the problem of what constitutes authoritative cultural knowledge in India, and the social and intellectual tensions that are entailed in the production of that knowledge.

1995-1995

In the second half of the Twentieth Century, New York City experienced sweeping transformations of its economy, society, and politics. Some interpret the city’s development prospects as poor (the New York descendant model) while others see a more positive future. The University Seminar on New York in the Twenty-First Century explores selected topics that bear on New York City’s development, including the economics of agglomeration, race and ethnicity, and urban politics.

1995-1996

The seminar brings together specialists from the fields of medicine, veterinary medicine, dentistry, biomedical sciences, bioengineering, and computer sciences. Discussions utilize a non-clinical approach to current topics in the broad field of mineralized tissues.

1995-1996

The seminar concerns itself with topics related to the dissemination of information in written or printed form, and to the history of reading, printing, authorship, and publishing. Stimulated by a growing interest in such topics on the campus and elsewhere, the seminar addresses such issues as the art and craft of bookmaking, censorship, the distribution of texts, narrative markets, editorial practice, and the impact of the codex book on political and cultural history. Topics addressed cut across several disciplines and many historical periods, allowing for lively and stimulating interdisciplinary discussions.

1995-1997

This seminar was founded to prepare for the one hundredth anniversary of the creation of Columbia’s campus on Morningside Heights, which is to be celebrated in 1997 with an exhibition and colloquium. Although the focus is on the physical campus, the seminar attends to research and interpretation of this seminal event in Columbia’s emergence as a modern metropolitan research university in relation to the overlapping contexts of the political, social, and economic history of New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the history of higher education; and the relationship between Columbia’s development and that of its neighborhood on Morningside Heights. Interdisciplinary research is especially encouraged and the seminar currently includes historians, architects, architectural historians, historians of the city, historians of education, as well as members of the Columbia University faculty and administration who are concerned with both the history and future of the University as it has been shaped by the grand design of its campus.

1996-1998

The sciences, the humanities, the arts and the law conceptualize identity and the body in different ways, and these differences have consequences for the lives of people, and for the procedures and policies that govern those lives. We attempt to identify and address the conflicts among narratives about identity and the body: how disciplines give rise to different narratives and how conversations across disciplines can productively challenge and expand each of those narratives. Each session of the seminar is, in other words, given over to the following inquiry: how can we speak to each other across our different disciplines about identity and the body– in particular about race, gender, and sexuality?

1996-1998

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1997-2009

This seminar examines the complexity of social conflicts and their resolution within a multidisciplinary framework—assembling faculty from throughout the University to present works in progress, explore opportunities for collaborative research, and discuss pedagogy in the context of conflict resolution. University scholars and practitioners in the field have presented on a wide range of topics relating to the context of conflict, social-political, economic, social-historical, and social-psychological dynamics.

1997-2003

This seminar was organized to discuss the significance of cultural heritage, its interpretation and site conservation.  The seminar hopes to promote understanding of issues regarding the protection of cultural heritage.  The organizers believe that such an understanding is urgently needed due to the pressures and threats of modern society. 

1998-2003

The seminar is devoted to understanding the purposes of oral history as a research methodology and an emerging field in the humanities for documenting the lives of individuals in communities:  across localities, cultures, and nationalities.  Scholars will present research using oral history to document questions and issues such as:   the construction of identity, memory, communities, multiculturalism, ethnicity, race, gender, and class formation.  The seminar will also focus on theoretical issues and interdisciplinary methodological approaches to questions of research, interviewing, and the interpretation of historical data, including ways in which qualitative and quantitative data are created and assimilated in various disciplines. Faculty from the humanities and the social sciences, along with community historians and activists who are interested in documenting the history of their communities, are invited to engage in these discussions.  The seminar receives additional support from the Rockefeller Foundation through a humanities fellowship program. 

1999-2006

This seminar addresses and encourages interdisciplinary dialogue and work regarding the relationship among sexuality, gender, health, and human rights, both in domestic and international contexts.  Core issues cut across many departments, institutes, and disciplines at Columbia, involving scholars in law, policy studies, human rights, gender studies, the social sciences, social work, public health, and the humanities.  The seminar is co-sponsored by the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights at Columbia University, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Arts and Humanities Division.

1999-2002

The seminar addresses major theoretical and methodological changes in the field of cultural studies over the last two decades.  Participants are drawn from Asian, African, and Latin American studies to create an interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective on the critical examination of cultures.

1999-2004

Co-sponsored by the Institute on Child and Family Policy at Columbia University School of Social Work, the seminar focuses on interdisciplinary efforts to address intractable problems in child and family policy.

2000-2005

Created in 1995 with the generous support of the Ford Foundation, this faculty study group, which official became part of the University Seminars Program in November of 1999, has grown to include more than 60 of the nation’s leading jazz scholars, musicians, artists, and writers from over 18 universities and professional associations.  This group meets twice each academic year at Columbia to share their new work in jazz studies.  Each member is invited to bring a graduate student as a guest to the meeting.  This keeps the pipeline moving in this new field by introducing the next generation of scholars to the senior experts writing in this field.  The seminars are organized around a particular theme—e.g. “The Ellison/Baraka Debate” (10/95), “Thelonious Monk and Jazz Biography” (5/96), “Jazz and Dance” (5/97)—and consist of the formal presentation of academic papers, followed by informal conversation between members.  The group offers serious intellectual debate but in a more relaxed and convivial atmosphere than that of most academic conferences.  The Jazz Study Group represents the intellectual backbone of the Center for Jazz Studies.

2000-2011

For many years, computing and education has been a robust and challenging field, but esoteric to many. From the time of the first browser that expanded the demographic base of users exponentially, the use of digital technologies and new media has become part of an explosive reconsideration of educational practice. The breadth of this reconsideration has touched on the content of education, its pedagogy, its place and, by inference, its range of possible participants. In response to this phenomenon, most major universities, including Columbia University, have reacted over the past 10 years with a diversity of initiatives. Some represent the need for attending to generic infrastructure, represented at Columbia by Academic Information Systems (AcIS), Administrative Information Systems (AIS) and Electronic Data Service (EDS). Many are content specific initiatives that grow out of the intrinsic needs of specific fields, represented at Columbia by organizations such as the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College, the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, Center for New Media in the School of Journalism, Media Center for Art History in Arts and Sciences, the Center for Academic Information Technologies at the Medical School, and Digital Knowledge Ventures. What is lacking across the range of initiatives is a unifying conversation that would focus upon the essential questions at this moment of accelerated change in the educational universe. Since the field in its many expressions and through its many entities is engaged primarily in active invention, it is all the more necessary that the time scale of sharing not be driven by the glacial movement of knowledge through scholarly journals, but by the immediate possibilities provided by face to face discourse as well as mediated asynchronous communications, in order to provide benchmarks for good practice.

2000-2010

No description available.

2001-2006

No description available.

2002-2007

This seminar will focus on two main topics: one, analysis of issues that lie at the margin of science(s) and religion(s) in both Eastern and Western versions of these two different ways of viewing the world, with a particular focus on interdisciplinary approaches; two, studying Love in all its complex manifestations, from the biological to the spiritual. Both groups will work with the template of presentations of primary materials by the speaker (a specialist in the selected area under study, both from within and without Columbia University) followed by discussion. A primary aim of both groups is the development of appropriate curricula for the two respective fields.

2003-2010

Global aging is emerging as one of the foremost challenges confronting scholars in the 21st century. The unprecedented aging of the population during the next half-century portends a dramatic demographic shift with significant local, national, and worldwide implications. The seminar provides a forum to address complex, pressing aging-related issues such as increasing longevity, changes in the family system and modifications in the scope, delivery and financing of health care. Established jointly by the School of Social Work and the Mailman School of Public Health, the seminar is designed to strengthen existing linkages and augment interdisciplinary dialogue among faculties at the Morningside Heights and Health Sciences campuses and between the university and the community on health-related policy, practice and research issues specific to later stages of the life course.

2003-2016

This new Seminar takes a broad interdisciplinary approach to Disability Studies—a rapidly expanding field informed by the knowledge base and methodologies of the traditional liberal arts and post-positivist perspectives. Disability Studies focuses on a sociopolitical analysis of disability: it examines both the social meaning we give to variations that exist in human behavior and appearance—implicit or explicit valuings that construct exclusionary categorical binaries—and the role that disability has played, currently plays and can potentially play in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and education.

2004-2010

The Seminar “Romanticism and Its Aftermath” explores various facets of Romanticism in their mutual relationships and cross-pollination by bringing together scholars representing a variety of disciplines: different European literatures, music, art, philosophy, history, linguistics, and theology. While the primary focus of the Seminar is the so-called “early” and “high” Romanticism of the 1790s–1800s and 1810–30s, it also addresses related phenomena that preceded and followed that epoch, such as the philosophical and aesthetic heritage of the Enlightenment, late and post-Romantic trends in late-nineteenth century music, and neo-Romantic trends in early twentieth-century modernism.

2005-2006

No description available.

2005-2019

The inaugural meeting of the University Seminar on Early Modern France was held on October 7th, 2005, in 512 Philosophy Hall. Professor Pierre Force, acting as the Seminar Chair, warmly welcomed new and current members of what was formerly the “Early Modern Salon” and explained that the group would continue to function in much the same way now that it was a University Seminar; the Seminar would continue to welcome a guest at each meeting as it had for the past years and the aim would still be to engage in lively discussion (with texts read in advance of each session), rather than promote formal presentations on the part of the guests.

2005-2010

The Seminar examines the ways in which the world’s major religions define their relationships, roles and responsibilities towards one another and the world at large. In addition to the empirical and legal dimensions, the Seminar encourages research on the meaning, hermeneutics and role of core religious beliefs and practices and internal debates in a historical context, as well as the contemporary situation. The Seminar is designed to promote new research on the texts, customs, social organizations, practices and other factors that influence political, cultural and theological relations among the world’s major religions and their relationship with the community at large. The Seminar also seeks to build a local and an international collaborative research network of institutions and individuals committed to these goals.

2007-2009

This seminar explores the complex roles of religious groups, practices, and movements in New York City’s present and past through multiple disciplinary perspectives, including sociology, history, urban planning, theology, and visual and material cultures. Members’ work and scholarship investigates numerous topics, including the varying role of religion in transnational and global migration, interfaith organizing and civic engagement, and the impact of religious congregations and groups in rapidly changing urban neighborhoods.

2007-2008

Established by the faculty from the Department of Sociomedical Sciences in the Mailman School of Public Health, this interdisciplinary colloquium welcomes participation by the Columbia University faculty, the professional community and key stakeholders in the New York metropolitan area. This seminar addresses a wide range of issues in the field of occupational health and provides an opportunity for seminar participants to analyze and evaluate new and continuing issues of growing significance with respect to occupational health. Current topics of interest include the impact of urbanization on the health of urban workers, emergency preparedness of the workforce, the aging U.S. workforce and the implications of aging on workers’ health and safety. The seminar provides a framework for a multidisciplinary scholarly exchange of ideas on emerging issues, research, practice and policies affecting the health and well-being of workers in the 21st century.

2008-2014

The Seminar on Modern Europe is a monthly gathering featuring outside speakers who present their new books to the Columbia community for debate and discussion. The Seminar seeks to advance knowledge on the region’s history, politics, and society. We approach Europe from diverse perspectives, complementing nation-oriented studies while placing Europe in transatlantic, multi-national, and global contexts. Emphasizing interdisciplinary dialogue, the seminar provides a venue for sustained discussion with colleagues to contribute to the enrichment of our intellectual community.

2008-2010

The seminar brings together University faculty and K–12 educators to explore models for universities to contribute to strengthening elementary and secondary education, with a focus on science. The goals are to understand successful approaches and then implement them, first in Columbia’s many community outreach programs with New York City teachers and children, and ultimately more broadly. What models are effective for university-school partnerships? What are the challenges in implementing partnerships that have lasting impact on science education in a large urban school system? We hope that the Seminar participants can work collaboratively to answer these questions and offer leadership in implementing solutions.

2009-2018

Historical redress continues to occupy public and political debates as well as scholarly research. The study of human rights abuses and the ways in which redress addresses past injustices has gained broad recognition across a wide range of academic fields. Despite, or perhaps because of this widespread attention, there has been no systematic attempt to integrate what remain largely disconnected efforts into a trans-disciplinary enterprise let alone paradigmatic approach. In short, the history and the contemporary culture of redress remain a scholarly subject matter that is still in search of its own field. The objective of this seminar is to forge a more structured exchange among scholars and practitioners who engage a set of issues that are yet to self-identify as an academic field and is addressed in different disciplinary spaces. The seminar provides a forum for interdisciplinary work on issues at the intersection of history, memory and contemporary politics with particular emphasis on redressing past wrongs and gross violations of human rights. It encompasses questions among others of transitional justice, cultural resolution, and reconciliation. Its main principle revolves round the question of how history and memory inform contemporary politics, around conflict and post conflict societies.

2009-2010

No description available.

2009-2018

The purpose of the University Seminar on Japanese Culture is to address the rich tradition of Japanese culture, with special focus on literary and visual arts. The seminar takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the fields of literature, art history, religion, and cultural and social history, to shed new light on the multitude of visual, textual, material, and performative genres that are hallmarks of Japanese culture.

2011-2015

Our world is becoming increasingly complex. Due in large part to biological, technological and human cultural evolution, we are being confronted with progressively more complex ecological, political, economic, technical and social problems. These problems place extreme demands on our capacities to comprehend and react adaptively, and as a consequence we may very well reach the limits of the Earth’s capacity to support our increasing population if we remain unable to understand the complexities of the human-environment interface. In this emerging world, our scholarship and evidence-based practices require new metaphors, methods, and measures. This Columbia University Seminar will provide an intellectual forum to explore and cultivate these new perspectives and tools.

2011-2011

The Global Strategy Seminar is an interdisciplinary group that employs historical analysis to confront future problems in world politics. Each year focuses on a different critical issue in international affairs, ranging from nuclear proliferation to epidemic disease to global warming to religion intolerance. The basic premise of the seminar is that many threats cannot be understood within a framework defined by national borders. It also presumes that we can scarcely begin to consider emerging transnational threats, and the prospects for a more coordinated response, until we better understand the historical successes, and failures, of previous attempts at “global governance.” The seminar thus brings together faculty members and experts from a variety of disciplines, including history, political science, public health, religious studies, and climatology, and paves the way for new methods of collaborative, interdisciplinary research on pressing global challenges. The seminar meets weekly for an intensive 12-week period each summer, running alongside a summer-long seminar on the same topic. Thus, while demonstrating how to think strategically about these global policy challenges, the Global Strategy Seminar also helps orient professional aspiring academics towards the most pressing contemporary problems.

2012-2013

Scholars now have access to unprecedentedly large and rich bodies of information generated from the digitization of archived materials and the explosion of new content through social media. Computational methods make it possible to answer traditional research questions with greater rigor and tackle new kinds of projects that would once have been deemed impracticable. This seminar will consider the research agenda ahead and discuss what might be gained, or lost, in this methodological transformation.

2012-2016

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.

2013-2014

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.

2016-2016

No description available.

2017-2018

The Water in America Seminar discourse will address the implications of emerging socio-economic, ethical, technical and policy failures and threats to our water supply. We will arrive not just at an assessment of what water means in a changing America, but strategies for achieving the human right to water and sanitation that should be a birthright of all residents of the United States. Our focus will encompass the competing demands for water resources in a twenty first-century global society, including: a growing population, transboundary conflicts, persistent poverty, intensifying agriculture, growth of extractive industries, and crumbling infrastructure. And it will examine the needed technical, business and policy models that could address the concomitant social, economic and ecological concerns.

2019-2019

Thinking Europe Now forms a New York-based community of scholars dedicated to thinking about the urgent situation confronting Europe, both inside the EU and on its borders in the South and East and in its relations to the wider world. The seminar draws on all disciplines that can contribute to this task: historians, political scientists, anthropologists, literary scholars, legal and constitutional theorists, economists and those working in journalism. What unifies the discussion is not a narrow focus on the present, but a sense of the actuality of the intellectual task.

2021-2024

This workshop will prepare Columbia University faculty and graduate students to teach in prison contexts and to contribute to an on campus Special Concentration in Social Justice. The work will have both theoretical and practical components. We will read texts together that consider the relationship of prison education programs to prison abolition activism; that take up the special pedagogical circumstances that obtain in most prison contexts; and that analyze the imbricated economic structures, racial systems, and carceral formations that challenge social justice initiatives and prove their necessity. We invite participants who already teach in local prisons; those with an interest in doing so; alums of those programs; and faculty and grad students with an interest in developing a roster of campus courses that could contribute to a special concentration in social justice for undergraduates. We welcome those who work in the arts and humanities, the social sciences, sciences, and health fields. The group will decide in the first year what different forms its work will take; much of the second year will be devoted to the collaborative creation of courses and the public presentation of the various aspects of our work.

2021-2023

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.

2021-2024

The University and Society Workshop facilitates an interdisciplinary inquiry into the present and possible futures of the university. There is a growing consensus that the university as a social institution is in “crisis.” What this crisis means and what its nature is, however, is subject to considerable debate. Across many contexts, there is concern about the university’s finance model based on student debt; its corporate governance structure; the shrinking job opportunities for recent graduates, the largely Eurocentric curriculum; and the “irrelevance” of a diploma in a constantly changing labor market. Simultaneously, organizing, and other actions aimed at transforming the university have driven curriculum and policy changes at numerous colleges and universities throughout the United States and other parts of the world. At this time of both crisis and transformation for the higher education system of the United States, this workshop brings together scholars from several disciplines and institutions, as well as education experts, artists, and storytellers to critically engage with the shifting landscape of higher education in times of social, cultural, and economic change.