The Heyman Center is Columbia University's central site for the Humanities.
Built in 1980 to be a home for the nascent Society of Fellows, the Heyman Center today provides the physical space for members of the entire Columbia community—in the humanities, social and natural sciences, law, medicine and public health, journalism, business, and the arts—to share thinking, debate ideas, and collectively consider methodological, conceptual, and ethical issues of common interest and concern. Besides affording offices and meeting spaces to the Fellows and SoF/Heyman Center administrators, the Heyman Center now also houses the Society of Senior Scholars and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and it makes meeting spaces available to its affiliated members and programs (including the Friends of the Heyman Center). Since 2005, the SoF/Heyman Center staff has organized lectures, conferences, readings, performances, workshops, and other forms of public discussion as Heyman Center events—including (since 2014) public humanities outreach efforts that serve those in our neighboring communities who might significantly benefit from focused humanities programming, such as those participating in the Justice-in-Education Initiative.
A list of our conferences, lectures, workshops, roundtables, panel discussions, readings and other offerings can be found under "Events" on this website.
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities welcomes requests for co-sponsorship of events and conferences from members of its Governing Board and its Fellows, directors of Columbia institutes and centers, and department chairs.
Established in 2014, The Heyman Center for the Humanities Public Humanities Initiative fosters and enhances community engagement with the humanities at Columbia and university engagement with Columbia’s diverse neighboring communities. Often collaborating with other Columbia centers and institutes, with local educational and cultural institutions, and with community organizations, it sponsors a wide range of programming, service, and research activities intended to interest and include audiences beyond the university.
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Funded by the Office of the Executive Vice-President of the Arts & Sciences, the Heyman Center Fellowships provide four junior and four senior Columbia faculty with course relief during the academic year. These yearlong fellowships provide course relief to reduce teaching loads to a minimum of one course per semester during the award year in order to conduct research and to participate in a regular weekly seminar. Four post-MPhil graduate students are also appointed, receiving a $5,000 research allowance for their participation.
The Friends of the Heyman Center, under the direction of Gareth Williams, comprises people who help ensure the advancement and vitality of the Heyman Center for the Humanities. For more than twenty-five years, tuition and donations from the Friends colloquia have contributed to a variety of activities, most significantly the Lionel Trilling Seminar which is free and open to the public.
The Heyman Center collaborates closely with a number of institutions, within the university and beyond.
Animated by, and aiming to promote, the spirit of Professor Said, this fellowship will support promising scholars early in their careers to produce scholarship that crosses disciplinary boundaries, promotes humanistic inquiry in the service of intercultural communication and understanding, and engages the public. Literary critic and theorist, political analyst and activist, spokesman without peer for the Palestinian cause: Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of his time.