Annual Events

Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lecture Series

Leonard Hastings Schoff (1884-1978) was a textile manufacturer, economist, and educator. In 1948, he was appointed “life membership” as Associate Member of The University Seminar on Rural Life (1945-1968). In 1970, Leonard Hastings and Suzanne Levick Schoff made a generous bequest to aid in the publication of manuscripts in the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, penology, or the behavioral sciences, which began The Leonard Hastings Schoff and Suzanne Levick Schoff Memorial Fund. This fund has been used to support hundreds of authors whose scholarly work was presented and discussed at a University Seminar prior to publication. The Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lecture Series was established in collaboration with Columbia University Press in 1993. With few exceptions, each fall, a speaker is invited to give a series of three consecutive lectures. These lectures become the manuscript for a book then published by Columbia University Press as part of the Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures series.

Lectures are free and open to the public. Registration is required. REGISTER HERE.

FALL 2026

ART OF THE LECTURE

Lecture I: “Talking in and out of School”
Monday, November 9, 2026, 6:00 PM

Lecture II: “A Brief History of the Podium Shuck”
Monday, November 16, 2026, 6:00 PM

Lecture III: “Accompaniments of the Utterance”
Monday, November 23, 2026, 6:00 PM

Although lecture courses are a staple of university teaching, there is oddly little scholarship considering the lecture as a format. This series of lectures is framed neither as a straightforward history nor as a practical how-to guide, but instead as an argument for the unique generic qualities and political stakes of the lecture as a mode that hovers between pedagogy and performance.

Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Since 2021 he has served as the editor of the journal PMLA. Edwards’s books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003); Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard UP, 2017); and the English translation of Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa (Seagull, 2017). He is the Harlem Renaissance period editor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (4th Ed., 2025) and has published scholarly editions of classic works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Joseph Conrad, and Claude McKay. His most recent books are Écrire le monde noir (Rot-Bo-Krik, 2024), a collection of the interwar writings of the pioneering Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal; and Easily Slip into Another World (Knopf, 2023), the co-written autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, which won the 2024 American Book Award. Edwards was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015, and in 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.