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New Books
Columbia's Humanities faculty published a number of new books this summer and fall.  Some of these will also be featured in the New Books in the Arts & Sciences panel discussion series co-sponsored by the The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.  If you would like your next publication to be considered for inclusion in the series, please contact Jessica Lilien.

Stefan Andriopoulos (German)
Drawing together literature, media, and philosophy, Gespenster: Kant, der Schauerroman und optische Medien traces connections between Kant's philosophy, spiritualist theories, and the use of the magic lantern in spectral projections. At the same time Andriopoulos also explores the proliferation of ghosts in the contemporaneous Gothic novel and anxieties about "reading addiction" and the rise of popular print media.  

Gespenster was recently reviewed in Philosophie Magazin; a pdf of the article is available here.

Andrew Delbanco (English)
The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul From the Revolution to the Civil War illuminates what brought us to war with ourselves and the terrible legacies of slavery that are with us still.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne (French)
Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition traces Muslims’ intellectual and spiritual history of examining and questioning beliefs and arguments to show how Islamic philosophy has always engaged critically with texts and ideas both inside and outside its tradition.

Diagne discussed his book for the New Books in the Arts & Sciences lecture series on September 20.

Mathew Engelke (Religion)
Presenting a set of memorable cases, How to Think Like an Anthropologist encourages readers to think deeply about some of the key concepts with which anthropology tries to make sense of the world—from culture and nature to authority and blood.

Kaiama L. Glover (French)
Kaiama L.Glover translated Hadriana in All My Dreams, a prize-winning work of social satire by Haitian writer and revolutionary René Depestre, as part of an NEA grant awarded to exceptional translators for works of particular importance to English-speaking audiences.

Joseph Howley (Classics)
Long a source for quotations, fragments, and factoids, the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius offers hundreds of brief but vivid glimpses of Roman intellectual life. Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture: Text, Presence, and Imperial Knowledge in the Noctes Atticae demonstrates how the work may be read as a literary text in its own right, and discusses the rich evidence it provides for the ancient history of reading, thought, and intellectual culture.

Howley discussed his book for the New Books in the Arts & Sciences lecture series on September 17.

Eleanor Johnson (English)
Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama paints late Middle English contemplative writing as a broad genre that operated collectively and experientially as much as through radical individual disengagement from the world.

Ana Paulina Lee (LAIC)
In Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory, Ana Paulina Lee explores the centrality of Chinese exclusion to the Brazilian nation-building project, tracing the role of cultural representation in producing racialized national categories.

Lee will discuss her book for the New Books in the Arts & Sciences lecture series on October 3.

Tey Meadow (IRWGS)
Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century is a trenchant ethnographic and interview-based study of the first generation of families affirming and facilitating gender nonconformity in children. Drawing from sociology, philosophy, psychology, and sexuality studies, Meadow depicts the intricate social processes that shape gender acquisition. 

Meadow will discuss her book for the New Books in the Arts & Sciences lecture series on October 2.

Ed Morales (CSSD)
Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture explains how Latinx political identities are tied to a long Latin American history of mestizaje—“mixedness” or “hybridity”—and that this border thinking is both a key to understanding bilingual, bicultural Latin cultures and politics and a challenge to America’s infamously black–white racial regime. 

Sheldon Pollock (MESAAS)
Noted scholars of China and India pair up in each chapter of What China and India Once Were: The Pasts That May Shape the Global Future to detail how these two cultural giants arrived at their present state, consider their commonalities and divergences, assesse what is at stake in their comparison, and, more widely, question whether European modernity provides useful contrasts.

Alan Stewart (English)
The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern is the first survey of early modern life-writing as a whole including biographies, autobiographies, and diaries.  Based on original archival research, it brings readers into contact with the raw manuscript materials of early modern life-writing.

Stewart will discuss his book for the New Books in the Arts & Sciences lecture series on November 9.

Mark C. Taylor (Religion)
Offering an alternative genealogy of deconstruction that traces its pedigree back to readings of Paul by way of Luther, Abiding Grace: Time, Modernity, Death presents a thoroughgoing critique of modernity and postmodernity’s will to power and mastery. In this new philosophical and theological vision, history is not over and the future remains endlessly open.

Konstantina Zanou (Italian)
Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation explores the different traditions and conjunctures between the Mediterranean, northern Europe, the Ottoman world, and the Russian Empire, and proposes a new and exciting way of writing history through individual biographies and microhistories.

Awards & Honors
Teodolinda Barolini (Italian)

Barolini has been elected Foreign Member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, in the Class of Moral, Historical, and Philological Sciences.  Founded in 1603, the Academy’s mission is to promote, coordinate, integrate and spread scientific knowledge in its highest expressions in the frame of cultural unity and universality.
Kathy Ewing (Religion)

Ewing received a 3-year grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for the project "Rethinking Public Religion in Africa and South Asia."  This project, a partnership between IRCPL, the South Asia Institute, and the Institute for African Studies at Columbia, was envisioned to further scholarly and public understanding of the changing dynamics of interactions among religious communities in the modern world, considering the ways in which religion becomes public through diverse forms of encounter. 
Philip Kitcher (Philosophy)

Kitcher is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institut fuer Wissenschaftgeschichte in Berlin, where he is delivering a series of seven lectures, "Thinking about Progress," at the University of Louvain, as holder of the Chaire Mercier.
Carmela Vircillo Franklin (Classics)

Vircillio Franklin was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies. The Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, located at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem (established 1975), is a national institution that seeks to advance collaborative and inter-disciplinary research bringing leading Israeli scholars from all of Israel’s universities together with their foreign counterparts for extended periods of research and learning.
Humanities in the News
Katherine Franke (IRWGS)

The "interests of neither party have been adequately attended to, and the Judiciary Committee’s leadership has allowed a damaging free-for-all to unfold."

Franke commented on Senator Feinstein's handling of accusations against Kavanaugh as the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares to vote on his confirmation, in The Cut.
Shamus Khan (IRWGS)

"Even an organization which is purportedly a social-scientific organization has a really hard time drawing upon social research to actually institute policy and solutions."

Khan spoke with The Chronicle of Higher Education about the field of sociology's #metoo moment.
Sharon Marcus (English)

"It made the library a space of permission, not encouragement that pushed you in a certain direction, where you feel like people are watching you and like giving their approval, but just freedom to pursue what you want."

Marcus was featured in an article in The Guardian, an edited excerpt from Eric Klinenberg's book Palaces for the People, on the importance of community libraries.

Marcus will also deliver the Annual Lecture in Literature and Cultural Theory, "The Drama of Celebrity–Imitation," at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, sponsored by the program in Literature and Culture Theory. 
Alondra Nelson (IRWGS)

"[The Black Panthers made the problem of sickle-cell anemia] about their concerns for how healthcare, and the neglect of healthcare, is a way of doing harm to black communities.  Not only is it a kind of benign neglect, they accused it of being a kind of genocide."

Nelson spoke on NPR's Code Switch about the history of black revolutionaries' struggle with legitimizing healthcare issues like sickle cell anemia. 
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (English)

"For me, the question 'Who should speak' is less crucial than 'Who will listen?'"

Spivak was quoted in the New York Times Sunday Review article by Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Go Ahead. Speak for Yourself." 

Spivak also has recently delivered a number of talks and participated in discussions including "Planetary Utopias?" a conversation with Angela Davis and Nikita Dhawan at Akademie der Kunst in Berlin (which may be watched here), and "Spivak dans le siècle," the opening and closing talks at a three-day conference on Spivak's own work at Sorbonne 3 in Paris.
 
Nicole Wallack (English)

"The strength of words is that they expand within us as we read them, and we also take them in or take them on to try them on, and that changes our consciousness and that's very powerful."

Wallack was among the authors, educators, and readers interviewed for the PBS television special "What Makes a Great Book?

Sharon Marcus (English) was also interviewed for that show, as well as for the second installment of the program, "Authors and Their Hometowns."
Patricia Williams (CSSD)

"[T]here is a kind of quantitative magic in the ordering of things—in the imaginative assembly of images, in this gathering of ephemera that simultaneously quicken the dead and freeze-frame all life."

Williams wrote about turning over 100 years' worth of photographs and other ephemera belonging to her family into an archive given to Harvard's Schlesinger Library, in the A-Line.
Inga Winkler (CSSD)

"Generally the development sector wants quick fixes, and it seems so easy to give pads to girls and then have a solution to the problem—but the reality is so much more complex, and without addressing that we will not see real change."

Winkler commented on an increase in menstruation health management research and its place within the human right to sanitation at devex.com.
Named Lectures & Keynote Presentations
Robert Gooding-Williams (Philosophy)

Gooding-Williams delivered the Plenary Address to the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association's Annual Meeting in Boston. His talk was titled "Propaganda, Beauty, and the Moral Psychology of White Supremacy: On the Political Aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois."
Christia Mercer (Philosophy)

Mercer, a 2018–2019 Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, will deliver the inaugural public lecture at Radcliffe Institute.  Her talk, "Feeling the Way to Truth: Women, Reason, and the Development of Modern Philosophy," will examine some of the important contributions late medieval women made to the development of modern philosophy.
Upcoming Events
New Books in the Arts & Sciences
Celebrating Recent Work by Tey Meadow:
Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century

Tuesday, October 2
6:15pm
The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room

Tey Meadow, in conversation with Shamus Khan, Ken Corbett, and Julia Serano

Trans Kids is a trenchant ethnographic and interview-based study of the first generation of families affirming and facilitating gender nonconformity in children. 
Drawing from sociology, philosophy, psychology, and sexuality studies, sociologist Tey Meadow depicts the intricate social processes that shape gender acquisition. Where once atypical gender expression was considered a failure of gender, now it is a form of gender. Engaging and rigorously argued, Trans Kids underscores the centrality of ever more particular configurations of gender in both our physical and psychological lives, and the increasing embeddedness of personal identities in social institutions.
New Books in the Arts & Sciences
Celebrating Recent Work by Ana Paulina Lee:
Mandarin Brazil; Race, Representation, and Memory

Wednesday, October 3
6:15pm
The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room

Ana Paulina Lee, in conversation with Alberto Medina, Graciela Montaldo, Denise Cruz, and Barbara Weinstein

In Mandarin Brazil, Ana Paulina Lee explores the centrality of Chinese exclusion to the Brazilian nation-building project, tracing the role of cultural representation in producing racialized national categories. Lee considers depictions of Chineseness in Brazilian popular music, literature, and visual culture, as well as archival documents and Brazilian and Qing dynasty diplomatic correspondence about opening trade and immigration routes between Brazil and China. In so doing, she reveals how Asian racialization helped to shape Brazil's image as a racial democracy.
Just Societies Speaker Series
Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition
Katherine Franke, Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Thursday, October 4
4:00-5:30pm
World Room of the Columbia Journalism School, in Pulitzer Hall
RSVP: justsocieties-franke.eventbrite.com

The Just Societies Speaker Series returns for the fall 2018 semester. These lectures offer platforms for distinguished scholars working on a host of critical issues, including economic inequality, the experience of marginalized communities, and the impacts of policy and history on society's present and future. All lectures are free with RSVP and guests are encouraged to reserve seats at justsocietiesspeakerseries.eventbrite.com

The next lecture in the series will be:
 
November 15
Imani Perry, Princeton University
Black Letters and the Law
Global Language Mellon Sawyer Seminar
The Tower of Babel: Human Rights and the Paradox of Language
Moria Paz

Thursday, October 4
6:15pm
The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room

A key promise of human rights law is the robust protection of minority languages and cultures. The reality, however, is that major human rights courts and quasi-judicial institutions are not prepared to force upon states the costs of a true diversity-protecting regime. In this talk, Moria Paz argues that the human rights regime, as applied by judicial bodies, actually encourages states to incentivize assimilation into the dominant majority culture and language. The true concern of human rights law is therefore assimilation on fair terms, not the preservation of minority languages and cultures as often claimed.
Fellowships, Grants, & CFPs
For additional information on upcoming Humanities opportunities,
subscribe to the monthly Humanities Opportunities Newsletter.  

Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program advances research in the social sciences and humanities. The 2019 program will award up to 35 fellowships of $200,000 each, lasting one or two years.  Institutional nominations are invited in the following themes: Global connections & global ruptures, Strengthening U.S. democracy and exploring new narratives, Environments, Natural and human technological & cultural creativity—potential & perils.  

Deadline: October 3, 2018
 

The Wolf Humanities Center awards five one-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships each year to junior scholars in the humanities who are no more than eight years out of their doctorate and who are not yet tenured. Scholars spend the year (August–May) in residence at Penn. The 2019-20 topic is KINSHIP. The Fellowship carries a stipend of $56,225 and a $3000 research fund. Fellows teach one undergrad course in the fall or spring.

Deadline: October 15, 2018

 


The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is now accepting applications for the new Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society program, which offers opportunities for faculty who teach and advise doctoral students to pursue humanities scholarship beyond the academy and to deepen their support for doctoral curricular innovation on their campuses. Scholars & Society Fellowships are tenable in the 2019-20 academic year and provide: A $75,000 stipend, up to $6,000 for research and related project costs, $10,000 in support for the fellow’s host organization, and more.  Questions? Visit the program FAQ page or contact fellowships@acls.org.

Deadline: October 24, 2018

While the university community mourns the passing of former University Trustee Gerry Lenfest, his legacy lives on. The Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award recognizes the excellence of faculty as teachers and mentors. The Award provides an unrestricted stipend of $25K each year for three years. Full-time faculty appointed in the Arts and Sciences are eligible for nomination. Nominations can be submitted to Ruby Cruz at rc32@columbia.edu.

Deadline: October 12, 2018

Radcliffe Fellows at the Institute for Advanced Study are in residence Sept 1 - May 31 and receive a stipend of $77,500 plus $5,000 to cover project expenses. Single-semester fellows receive a $38,750 stipend plus $2,500 for project expenses. Applications related to the broad theme of the human body, a one-year initiative across the programs of the Institute, as well as those that involve the study of women, gender, and society, are of special interest.

Deadline: October 15, 2018

The Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination at Reid Hall in Paris offers full fellowships to Columbia faculty, and encourages applications in all disciplines from candidates interested in participating in a creative community of scholars, artists, and thinkers. Fellows receive $37,500 per term, or $75,000 for a full academic year, an office at the Institute, and access to Columbia’s libraries and various research facilities in Paris and Europe. Group projects are welcome; each participant in the group must apply individually. Apply for the 2019-20 fellowship here.  Contact Director Mark Mazower or Administrative Director Marie d’Origny with questions. 

Deadline: October 26, 2018

The Princeton University Center for Human Values is currently accepting nominations for its Visiting Professorship for Distinguished Teaching. Candidates in all fields are eligible but special consideration for Spring 2020 and Spring 2021 will be given to scholars with expertise in teaching related to ethics and public policy, particularly with a normative lens to questions involving either race and ethnicity, artificial intelligence, or the environment.

Deadline: October 12, 2018

The National Endowment for the Humanities Humanities Connections program supports innovative curricular approaches that foster productive partnerships among humanities faculty and their counterparts in the social and natural sciences in order to encourage and develop new integrative learning opportunities for students.  The deadline for both Planning Grants and Implementation Grants is October 17, 2018 for projects beginning May 2019.

Deadline: October 17, 2018

 




Baylor University’s Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching honors outstanding professors in the English-speaking world who are distinguished by their ability to communicate as classroom teachers. Nominations should correspond with academic units engaged in undergraduate teaching at Baylor. The award recipient will receive $250,000 and will teach in residence at Baylor University during the 2020 fall or 2021 spring semester. The award recipient’s home department will receive $25,000.

Deadline: November 1, 2018

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