Humanities War & Peace Initiative
Call for Proposals
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 The deadline for proposals involving summer projects has been extended. Those projects are now due Friday, March 8.
Proposals for projects that will begin in the fall are still due on Monday, April 1.
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Branka Arsic (English)
Arsic was elected President of the Melville Society. Founded in 1946, the Society is a scholarly organization whose principal aims are to study, preserve, and disseminate scholarship about the life, works, and historical context of Herman Melville.
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Paul Kreitman (EALAC)
Kreitman is the winner of the 2018 Leopold-Hidy Award for the best article published in Environmental History, an interdisciplinary journal that addresses issues relating to human interactions with the natural world over time. The article, "Attacked by Excrement: The Political Ecology of Shit in Wartime and Postwar Tokyo," was recognized for its superb writing style, quality of argument and research, and contribution to the fields of environmental history and forest history.
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Alondra Nelson (IRWGS)
Nelson was elected as a director of the Teagle Foundation. Walter C. Teagle III, chair of the board, said of her appointment, "Professor Nelson brings great intellectual depth to the Foundation that will be invaluable in our efforts to extend the benefits of liberal education and improve teaching and learning in the arts and sciences."
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Madeleine Zelin (EALAC, History)
Zelin has been elected a trustee of the Business History Conference. Trustees are elected for three-year terms and with the elected officers administer the organization. The Business History Conference is a scholarly organization devoted to encouraging all aspects of research, writing, and teaching about business history and about the environment in which businesses operate.
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 Christopher Peacocke (Philosophy)
The Primacy of Metaphysics presents a new view of the relation between metaphysics and the theory of meaning, broadly construed. Peacocke develops a general claim that metaphysics is always involved, either as explanatorily prior, or in a no-priority relationship, to the theory of meaning and content. Meaning and intentional content are never explanatorily prior to the metaphysics. He aims to show, in successive chapters of The Primacy of Metaphysics, how the general view holds for magnitudes, time, the self, and abstract objects. For each of these cases, the metaphysics of the entities involved is explanatorily prior to an account of the nature of our language and thought about them. Peacocke makes original contributions to the metaphysics of these topics, and offers consequential new treatments of analogue computation and representation. In the final chapter, he argues that his approach generates a new account of the limits of intelligibility, and locates his account in relation to other treatments of this classical conundrum.
The Primacy of Metaphysics is available from Oxford University Press.
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Courtney Bender (Religion)
"[M]odern enchantments - mesmerism, UFOs, psychic experimentation, and magic among them - have been the irresistible, perhaps necessary, alters that prove the rational subject, and modernity’s claim, to be real."
Bender introduced "Modernity’s Resonances: New Inquiries Into the Secular," a forum on The Immanent Frame featuring a number of essays reflecting on how four different books "challenge and correct the discursive and philosophical modes of investigation into secularity’s histories and manners of operation." Read Bender's "Modernity's Resonances - An Introduction."
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Seth Cluett (Music)
"What I'm hoping this exhibition to show is that these are real human beings engaging with other real human beings, trying at a time when there are no references, no precedents, to come up with a new way of making sound."
Cluett is the currator of Sounding Circuits: Audible Histories, an exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center until March 23, which looks at the early beginnings of electronic music and the technologies that composers used to create it. Cluett was interviewed about the show on WNYC and by Columbia News.
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Farah Griffin (English, AAADS)
"I’m most excited when I’m sitting around a table with my colleagues, thinking, 'Wow, we did it; we built this.' I love being in their company. All this started out as a vision and a dream, and we built it together. What we’ve done, for me, that’s evidence of what we can do."
Griffin, with colleagues Frank Guridy, Josef Sorett, and Mabel Wilson, spoke with Spectator about the history and importance of creating the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies.
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Saidiya Hartman (English)
Hartman's newest book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, was described in the The New York Times as "a rich resurrection of a forgotten history, which is Hartman’s specialty. Her work has always examined the great erasures and silences - the lost and suppressed stories of the Middle Passage, of slavery and its long reverberations. Her rigor and restraint give her writing its distinctive electricity and tension. Hartman is a sleuth of the archive; she draws extensively from plantation documents, missionary tracts, whatever traces she can find."
The review, "An Exhilarating Work of History About Daring Adventures in Love," can be read at nytimes.com.
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Frances Negrón-Muntaner (English)
Negrón-Muntaner has been featured in a number of outlets recently, discussing Valor y Cambio, a unique new project beginning this February in Puerto Rico. Read about this enterprise combining storytelling and small-scale community currency in English at Manhattan Times, The Bronx Free Press, and Voices of NY, and in Spanish at Noticel, 80grados, Artishock, El Calce, and El Nuevo Dia, among other outlets. She was also featured in television news segments on WAPA TV – Noticentro and Nación Z – Zeta 93 FM y Mega TV.
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Robert O'Meally (English)
"He was the person who codified what we now call jazz. He did, in a certain sense, what Chaucer did for English literature."
O'Meally spoke on PBS News Hour Weekend, and discussed Louis Armstrong and the massive archives that he left behind, now digitized by the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens.
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Joseph Slaughter (English)
"Recent histories of human rights identify the 1970s as the 'breakthrough' period when they gained traction globally. However, most of the new historiographers adopt a restricted Americo-Eurocentric perspective that disregards events and peoples in the Global South as makers of human rights history. From that perspective, the Western 'rediscovery' of human rights in the 1970s looks more like a hijacking, part of a larger 'rollback' of Third World agendas to decolonize and reshape the international order."
Slaughter has published an expansive critique of the recent revisionist histories of human rights in the journal Human Rights Quarterly: "Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World."
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Alan Stewart (English)
"I think the mistake we make is to think we have stable ideas about sexuality now. And I don’t think that’s the case, and anyone that’s lived long enough knows that that’s not the case. The ways in which we now think about sexuality are different from how they were in 1990, and that was massively different from 1960. It will keep changing. We’re continually evolving, so our relationship to the past has to keep changing."
Stewart was interviewed in Town & Country about the portrayal of queerness in the film The Favourite.
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 Ramon Llull's Learning Machines: A Technological Fiction
with Noel Blanco Mourelle, William & Mary
MIME / Poetics of the Archive Workshop
Thursday, March 7, 6:00pm
Biblioteca Sobejano, Casa Hispánica
Is it possible to fit a corpus of more than two-hundred and fifty works into a single book? In 1321, five years after the death of the Majorcan preacher and philosopher Ramon Llull, the most important of his direct disciples, physician Thomas Le Myésier, presented Queen Jeanne of Burgundy with a simplified version of Llull’s works. The manuscript, commonly known as Breviculum, presents a series of twelve rich illuminations representing Llull's life and thought. In one of these images, Llull is famously depicted complaining about the way the volume reduces the complexity of his thought. With the closest disciple openly manipulating Llull’s oeuvre to fit his own vision of how the diffusion of said works should be optimized, down the road, Lullism did not need to be strictly about Llull. Llull’s ideas served as a point of departure, a launching platform for others’ flights of fancy. Rather than a history of the reception of Llull’s ideas, Lullism is the history of a collective fascination, I would go as far as call it an obsession, with a specific technological form and its folkloric inventor. This technology knew its most distilled form in Llull’s Art, yet Llull explored it in other works as well. The great invention of the Art was the mechanization of the heuristic process, a technique that externalizes the process of generating logic arguments about the world away from the mind. Lullism is the archive of this technological fiction.
The series Poetics of the Archive / Poétique des Archives is an initiative of Columbia University, ENS Paris, and Paris PSL.
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 Sanctuary Law: Can Religious Liberty Protect Immigrants?
Panel Discussion and CLE Program (2 NYS CLE Credit Hours)
Wednesday, March 13, 6:30pm
Jerome Greene Hall, Room 105
RSVP Required
In an era in which the idea of “religious liberty” has largely been co-opted by the Christian Right to signify protections for conservative beliefs about sex, marriage, and reproduction, what does “religious liberty” mean for undocumented people and immigration activists of faith? (How) should the law accommodate the religious belief that families and communities should not be torn apart by deportation, or that individuals have a right to migrate? Moreover, what effect will arguing for these rights in religious terms have on LGBTQ+ immigrants or immigrants who need reproductive health care?
Co-hosted by the The Law, Rights, and Religion Project (formerly the Public Rights / Private Conscience Project, Columbia Law School), and the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL), this program will comprise a panel discussion with a diverse group of experts considering the role of religion in the immigrants’ rights movements of the 1980s and today.
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 Agents of Change: A Symposium in Honor of Marcellus Blount
Tuesday, March 26, 1:00-4:30pm
Low Library, Rotunda and Faculty Room
The Committee on Equity and Diversity (CED) in Arts & Sciences will celebrate the life and work of Professor Marcellus Blount in Agents of Change: A Symposium in Honor of Marcellus Blount, in the Low Library Rotunda and Faculty Room on Tuesday, March 26, 1:00-4:30 pm. This afternoon symposium will recognize Professor Blount's research, teaching, mentoring, and activism, and will feature a panel and a roundtable.
Speakers will include George Aumoithe, Sarah Cole, Zinga Fraser, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Jack Halberstam, Ellie Hisama, Jean Howard, Dennis Mitchell, Robert O’Meally, Rebecca Pawel, Richard Sacks, James Shapiro, Joseph Slaughter, Alan Stewart, Kendall Thomas, and Maya Tolstoy. Lloyd Knight, Principal Dancer of the Martha Graham Dance Company, will perform at the event.
Further information, including registration details, will be available at fas.columbia.edu/home/diversity-arts-and-sciences. Agents of Change is sponsored by the Office of the Executive Vice President of Arts & Sciences; the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department; the Department of English and Comparative Literature; the Division of the Humanities; the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities; the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality; the Department of Music; and the Center for Jazz Studies.
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 New Books in the Arts & Sciences
Celebrating Recent Work by Claudio Lomnitz
Nuestra América: utopía y persistencia de una familia judía
Tuesday, April 2, 6:15pm
The Heyman Center, 2nd Floor Common Room
Almost fifty years ago, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni published the manifesto “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” helping to set the agenda for a generation of film theory that used cinema as a means of critiquing capitalist ideology. In recent decades, film studies has moved away from politicized theory, abandoning the productive ways in which theory understands the relationship between cinema, politics, and art. In Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, Nico Baumbach revisits the much-maligned tradition of seventies film theory to reconsider: What does it mean to call cinema political?
Featuring:
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Fellowships, Grants, & CFPs
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Public Books is hosting a 2019 Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow for a two-year position as Associate Editor. This new position comes with extensive training, entrepreneurial opportunities, and the potential to grow into the role of Editor. Fellows receive a stipend of $68,000 per year and have access to individual health insurance, a relocation allowance, and up to $3,000 to be used toward professional development activities over the course of the fellowship term. Applications are now open for recent humanities and social sciences PhDs.
More details and application instructions are available here.
Deadline: March 13, 2019
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The Russell Sage Foundation announces a call for papers for a journal issue on: Asian Americans: Diversity and Heterogeneity. Papers are sought from many disciplines and perspectives, including (but not limited to) sociology, political science, psychology, economics, education, geography, ethnic studies, and urban studies. The journal issue is being edited by Jennifer Lee, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University; and Karthick Ramakrishnan, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at University of California, Riverside. All questions regarding this issue should be directed to Suzanne Nichols, Director of Publications, at journal@rsage.org. More details available here.
Deadline: April 2, 2019
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The National Humanities Center (NHC) is launching a new residency program for PhD students to take place July 15-26, 2019. “Objects and Places in an Inquiry-Based Classroom: Teaching, Learning, and Research in the Humanities,” is an intensive program that will allow PhD students to work in multidisciplinary teams under the guidance of established scholars and expert educators to identify and map solutions to a compelling instructional challenge. Drawing on advanced humanities research, participants will gain hands-on experience in writing effective instructional materials, using geospatial tools in a classroom setting, and applying inquiry-based pedagogical methods. Further information is available here.
Deadline: April 8, 2019
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