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Rashid Khalidi (MESAAS)
Khalidi received the Award for Outstanding Contributions to Middle Eastern Studies from the International Advisory Council of WOCMES in a ceremony in Seville. WOCMES said of the award: "Khalidi is the highest authority on interpretations of the Arab-Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. It is impossible to understand this region and its historical experiences without Khalidi’s works."
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Ellie Hisama (Music)
Hisama's project "For the Daughters of Harlem: Working in Sound" has won an Action Grant from Humanities New York and a Public Outreach Grant from Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society to host a campus workshop in October 2018 for young women of color from New York’s public high schools. Faculty and students from the Music Department and Sound Arts Program will collaborate to assist students in engaging with music as thinkers, composers, musicians, and producers.
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David Freedberg (AHAR)
Freedberg will receive the Sigillum Magnum of the University of Bologna, the highest honour of the Alma Mater, from Rector Francesco Ubertini. The event is presented in collaboration with Genus Bononiae - Musei nella Città and the Accademia Nazionale di Agricoltura di Bologna, which will give him the title of Honorary Academician.
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Allison Busch (MESAAS)
Busch was awarded the Vishwa Hindi Samman (the World Hindi Award) by the Government of India, through through the World Hindi Conference. She was presented with the Vishwa Hindi Samman by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Indian Ambassador to the US Navtej Sarna, in honor of her "remarkable and outstanding contributions to the spread of Hindi language and Hindi literature."
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Kumiko Makihara (WEAI)
When her five-year-old son passed the rigorous entrance exams to one of Japan's top private elementary schools, Makihara thought they were on their way. Taro would wear the historic dark blue uniform and learn alongside other little Einsteins while she basked in the glory of his high achievements with the other perfect moms. Together they would climb the rungs into the country's successful elite. But Taro had other things in mind. Dear Diary Boy chronicles one mother and child's experience in a prestigious private Tokyo school, and asks how best to educate our children and what is in their best interests, versus what is in our own.
An excerpt from Makihara's Dear Diary Boy was featured in Salon and an op-ed by Makihara related to the book was published in the Washington Post.
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Andreas Huyssen (Germanic)
Huyssen wrote "The Memory Works of Vivan Sundaram" in Vivan Sundaram: Disjunctures, edited by Haus der Kunst. The exhibition catalogue accompanied the presentation of Vivan Sundaram's work at Haus der Kunst.
Huyssen also contributed the prologue to Ricardo Brodsky's Trampas de la Memoria, as well as a response in October to "A Questionnaire on Monuments," to questions on recent conflict over statues and monuments involving histories of racial conflict.
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Wael Hallaq (MESAAS)
Since Edward Said’s foundational work, Orientalism has been singled out for critique as the quintessential example of Western intellectuals’ collaboration with oppression. But has Orientalism come to stand in for all of the sins of European modernity, at the cost of neglecting the complicity of the rest of the academic disciplines? Hallaq's new book, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge, reevaluates the critique of Orientalism in order to deploy it for rethinking the foundations of the modern project.
Hallaq spoke about Restating Orientalism at the Heyman Center, with Mamadou Diouf, Rashid Khalidi, Sudipta Kaviraj, and Islam Dayeh, on October 17. The podcast recording of that event will be available on the Heyman Center's website.
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Noam Elcott (AHAR)
In Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media, Elcott explores how artificial darkness shaped modern art, film, and media, and addresses seminal and obscure works alongside their sites of production - such as photography darkrooms, film studios, and laboratories - and their sites of reception. Artificial Darkness won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award and was a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize.
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (English)
"What is really important for the state is that if one silences the creative artists and intellectuals, then the conscience of the state is killed, because it's the role of the creative artists and intellectuals to make constructive criticism so that the state can be a real democracy."
Spivak spoke out during a protest outside the UN General Assembly to demand the release of Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam and make a public call for freedom of the press and protection of journalists in Bangladesh. Alam was arrested on August 5 for "inciting violence by making provocative statements in the media" and has been held without bail since that time.
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Joseph Slaughter (English)
"I am using the legal concept of forum shopping to name a comparative literary practice...of scholars seeking out texts, genres, and authors from elsewhere (often from historically marginal or marginalized locations) to serve as literary data for the purposes of making sweeping opportunistic claims about literature...that give their arguments the imprimatur of the 'global' or 'cosmopolitan.'"
The Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry published a cluster of responses to Slaughter’s 2017 Presidential Lecture for the American Comparative Literature Association, "Locations of Comparison." Responses include essays by Souleymane Bachir Diagne (French) ("Remarks on Inclusive Comparison"), David Damrosch ("Relocating Comparison"), former ACLA President Ali Behdad ("The History of Comparison Matters"), and Jeanne-Marie Jackson ("Comparison Re-Justified"). The Journal also published Slaughter’s response to their commentaries: "More Locations of Comparison: On Forum Shopping and Global South Envy in a Globalizing Discipline."
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Pablo Piccato (LAIC)
"New York must know they will have a Mexican government that will have more popular support, that will probably be more insistent on protecting the rights of Mexicans in the US - and that is very important not only for Mexicans in New York but for everyone who is concerned about migration and the relations between the two countries."
Piccato spoke on NY1's "Inside City Hall," discussing Mexico's presidential election.
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Alondra Nelson (IRWGS)
"Let’s hope use of genetics doesn’t open up a Pandora’s box for other uses and other populations. It seems like it’s okay in these cases because they are extraordinary cases, but it opens up a kind of normalizing and cooperation between private sector and the state with regards to collecting people's sensitive genomic information."
Nelson was interviewed for a piece on The Intercept examining the use of DNA testing as a way to reunite families separated by recent US immigration policy.
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Ed Morales (CSSD)
"Last October, my sister and I traveled to Puerto Rico to pick up our 89-year-old mother and take her back to New York. Hurricane Maria had battered her remote mountain community in Río Grande, near the El Yunque National Forest. My mother, who coincidentally is named María, had long resisted our pleas to move to the mainland, but we knew that in the chaos after the storm, many Puerto Ricans, especially older people, would die. We didn’t want her to be one of them. She finally agreed to leave."
Morales writes in The New York Times about the lasting effects of Hurricane Maria on the people who make their home where it landed.
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Roosevelt Montás (Center for American Studies)
"What kind of knowledge is most valuable when you consider the students' entire education - and life - and not just their training in your field of expertise and interest?"
Montás spoke with Inside Higher Ed about his experience as Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum and the importance of a common intellectual experience for students.
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Mahmood Mamdani (MESAAS)
"The future of South Sudan is likely to be marred by continuing chaos until a single dominant group emerges out of it. When this happens, regional powers will likely be further drawn into the conflict. To forestall that development is to recognize the key deficiencies in the present agreement - its tribal architecture and the absence of a pan South Sudan political process - by finding ways to give primacy to a political process over a military contest."
Mamdani explained and critiqued South Sudan's new peace agreement in The New York Times.
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Shamus Khan (IRWGS)
"How could a man who appears to value honor and the integrity of the legal system explain this apparent mendacity? How could a man brought up in some of our nation’s most storied institutions - Georgetown Prep, Yale College, Yale Law School - dissemble with such ease? The answer lies in the privilege such institutions instill in their members, a privilege that suggests the rules that govern American society are for the common man, not the exceptional one."
Khan wrote in The Washington Post about the role Brett Kavanaugh's privileged upbringing played in what he said and how he said it during his Senate testimony.
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Kellie Jones (AHAR)
"The Getty is telling the world, through its actions, that American art has many facets. The Getty has set out to create benchmarks and expand the field of art history. This initiative and its focus on archives is another approach to embracing a bigger idea of what art history is, by creating an important repository that will greatly impact the field and peer institutions."
Jones will be a senior consultant to the recently-announced African American Art History Initiative, through the Getty Research Institute. The Initiative's first major acquisition is the papers of assemblage artist Betye Saar.
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Bernard Harcourt (ICLS)
"It was a spontaneous reaction to the hearing. ... It organically came together, the result of a surge of law professors remarking on Judge Kavanaugh's lack of judicial temperament at the hearings."
Harcourt was quoted in a number of venues, including the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, commenting on the letter to the Senate that he co-signed, along with over 2,400 other law professors, stating that Brett Kavanaugh "did not display the impartiality and judicial temperament requisite to sit on the highest court of our land." Read the letter in full in The New York Times.
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Jack Halberstam (English, IRWGS)
"The form of embodiment that, in the 20th and 21th centuries, we have come to call transgender is not simply a gender switching, a wrong body replaced by a right body, a shift in morphology. Trans* embodiment, rather, is the visual confirmation that all bodies are uncomfortable and wrong-ish, situated as they are within confining grammars of sense and security."
Halberstam explores the interplay between art, architecture, and the trans* body, in Places.
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Katherine Franke (IRWGS)
"When you pay close attention to the litigation strategy pursued by the federal government’s lawyers, what you see is that this administration is not committed to an overarching principle of religious liberty - or even rights for Christians, in general. Like so much of the current political climate, the administration is not defending a neutral constitutional principle - religious liberty - for all people, but rather only for those who share the administration’s political perspective."
Read Franke's "Religious freedom for me, but not for thee," in The Washington Post.
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Named Lectures & Keynote Presentations
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Jean Howard (English)
Howard delivered the Dean Family Lecture at Wake Forest University on "Edward Bond's Bingo: Shakespeare Revisited." The Dean Family Lectures bring nationally and internationally recognized scholars to Wake Forest to encourage critical conversations and dialogue related to the study of English.
Howard also led a seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America in Los Angeles on "Shakespeare and Marx Now."
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Rita Charon (CSSD, ICLS)
Charon will deliver the 2018 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. The lecture is the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. Her lecture, titled "To See the Suffering: The Humanities Have What Medicine Needs," will stream online at neh.gov.
Charon spoke about the lecture and her work with The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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 Inaugural Ambedkar Lectures 2018
Ambedkar Now
Friday, October 19
6:30-8pm
Wikipediathon: Rewriting Dalit History
Saturday, October 20
11am-3p
B. R. Ambedkar is one of Columbia University’s most illustrious alumni, and a political thinker and constitutional lawyer whose thought and activism has shaped the world’s largest democracy. In 2018, the Inaugural Ambedkar Lectures have been planned as a series of three public events to recognize Ambedkar’s continuing relevance for social justice activism and democratic thought in global frame.
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 Crazy Rich Asians: Race, Representation, Resistance?
Tuesday, October 23
6:00pm - 8:00pm
Diana Center, Barnard College
Inspired by but not limited to the recent success - and tensions - represented by the release of the film Crazy Rich Asians, please join us for the first event of the Transnational Asian American speaker series: a panel discussion featuring: David Henry Hwang, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Monique Truong, Jeff Yang, and James Schamus. Moderated by Denise Cruz.
This event is free and open to the public, no RSVP necessary. |
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 Undead Texts: Grand Narratives and the History of the Human Sciences
Thursday - Friday, November 1 & 2
Butler Library, Room 523
They are the undead texts. Once they bestrode disciplines like colossi: assigned on every reading list, cited in almost every book and article, endlessly discussed and debated. These texts refuse to die. They have never been out of print, continue to be translated into various languages, and appear on the syllabi of undergraduate classes - not infrequently assigned by the very scholars who made their reputations challenging these works. They persist because no new narrative of comparative sweep and power has replaced them, and because pedagogy thrives on grand narratives. But these texts are not yet classics; instead, they dwell in the twilight zone between primary and secondary sources, not yet considered keys to a bygone era, but distinctly dated.
Participant details and full schedule available at english.columbia.edu. |
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 New Books in the Arts & Sciences
Celebrating Recent Work by Nicole Wallack: Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies
Friday, November 9
12:15pm
Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room
With Nicole Wallack, Sharon Marcus, Leslie Jamison, Howard Tinberg, and Jean Howard.
Essays are central to students’ and teachers’ development as thinkers in their fields. In Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies, Nicole B. Wallack develops an approach to teaching writing with the literary essay that holds promise for writing students, as well as for achieving a sense of common purpose currently lacking among professionals in composition, creative writing, and literature. |
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Fellowships, Grants, & CFPs
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In cooperation with the The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, ACLS offers an integrated set of fellowship and grant competitions supporting work that will expand the understanding and interpretation of Buddhist thought in scholarship and society, strengthen international networks of Buddhist studies, and increase the visibility of innovative currents in those studies.
Research Fellowships:
Fellowships offer support for research and writing in Buddhist studies for scholars who hold a PhD degree, with no restrictions on time from the PhD. These fellowships provide scholars time free from teaching and other responsibilities to devote full-time to research and writing on the project proposed. The fellowship period may last up to nine months, during which time no teaching, commissioned research on other topics, or administrative duties are allowed. Stipend: up to $70,000.
Grants for Critical Editions and Scholarly Translations: Critical editions are of crucial importance to the expanding field of Buddhist studies. Translation has been at the core of Buddhism since the Buddha’s instruction to his monks to teach the dharma in many languages. These grants support a broad range of endeavor, from the creation of critical editions (with full scholarly apparatus), to translation of canonical texts into modern vernaculars, to the translation of scholarly works on Buddhism from one modern language into another.Grant amount: Up to $80,000 for twelve months.
Deadline: November 14, 2018
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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
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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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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.
Deadline: October 26, 2018
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A number of Cambridge University Early Career Research Fellowships are offered this year by the colleges (Churchill College, Fitzwilliam College, Murray Edwards College, Selwyn College and Trinity Hall). The Fellowships are normally tenable for three years and are open to graduates of any University who have recently completed their doctorate or are close to completion. The function of these Fellowships is as initial (normally) post-doctoral positions appropriate to the start of an academic career.
Deadline: November 13, 2018
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