Heyman Center for the Humanities

Co-Sponsored by The University Seminars on Cultural Memory and Public Humanities: Expanding Scholarship and Pedagogy (Faculty House and Heyman Center for The Humanities) For the past 50 years, the Columbia Society of Fellows has welcomed early-career researchers into a community of scholars whose research projects and teaching open new avenues of inquiry both within and across disciplines.  From its earliest years when it gathered in Faculty House, the Society of Fellows has enjoyed a longstanding partnership with University Seminars in bringing together researchers to think together.  In celebration of this partnership and of the milestone anniversaries of both the Society […]

Sponsored by The University Seminar on Affect Studies This workshop seeks to explore the tension between the universal normative claim to truth and the singular claim to truth in affect, focusing on one of the strongest human emotions and experiences: erotic desire. In the absence of an absolute in a post-secular society, the role of affect has stepped in to substantivize many normative claims—either culminating in a ‘politics of feeling’ or in prioritizing individual emotions and affective economies over normative categories such as justice or freedom. This has major implications for two of the most contested concepts in religious, philosophical, […]

Scholars across disciplines are increasingly treating “Black Europe” as a pertinent object of study. Yet conversations continue to take place regarding what “Black Europe” is. Does Black Europe describe a place, an identity, an aspiration, or something else? Scholars oscillate between terms such as “Afropean,” “African-European,” and “Black European.” The institutionalization of Black European studies remains a work in progress, and views vary on whether it is an academic field, a subsection of Black Studies or African Diaspora Studies, or a reference point for a set of inquiries and practices that exceed the bounds of academic discipline. Black Europe: A Field […]