Each semester, the Heyman Center presents, co-sponsors, and provides support to events, conferences, and themed-lecture series in all subject areas of the humanities. Our themed-lecture series include those highlighted below. A full list of our themed-lecture series can be found in the left-hand tool bar on any events page. 
This series is made possible by the generous funding of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Events examine the state of various disciplines throughout academia. Recent topics have included the state of social science during the Cold War, the historiography of modern science, and the origins of Great Books courses.
The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture is given once a year in honor of the public intellectual and literary critic, Edward W. Said, who taught in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia from 1963 until 2003. Professor Said was perhaps best known for his books Orientalism, published in 1978, and Cultural Imperialism, published in 1993, both of which made major contributions to the fields of cultural and postcolonial studies. The Annual Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture pays tribute to Professor Said by bringing to Columbia speakers who embody his beliefs and the legacy of his work.
The Program in World Philology (PWP) aims to unite Columbia scholars across departments and schools around the discipline-based study of texts. Philology, defined over the course of its history as everything, from text criticism to “slow reading” to “all erudition in language,” is at its base the discipline of making sense of texts. Under this description, philology is almost as old as the production of written texts themselves. Over time it has proven to be as central to knowledge as mathematics or philosophy, and its methods, like theirs, have similarly been adopted in other disciplines.
Sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, with support from the Heyman Center for the Humanities.
The Heyman Center sponsors workshops that bring together faculty and students from a variety of disciplines to explore topics, issues, and problems of common concern. Recent workshops have included Subaltern Urbanism, Neuroscience and History, and the current workshop On Method in the Humanities. Select workshops may be by invitation only, require advanced readings, and require registration. Please see the details in the event listing.
Lionel Trilling (1905-75), one of Columbia's most celebrated faculty members, was among the great humanist scholars and public intellectuals of the 20th century. In his memory, the Heyman Center sponsors a series of intellectual conversations, known as the Lionel Trilling Seminars.
In response to the 2008 global financial crisis, the Heyman Center established a series of events featuring leading economists, anthropologists, and historians to foster debate and encourage discussion of how the humanities can contribute to a broader understanding of the causes of the crisis and its implications.
The Public Humanities Initiative sponsors cultural events, discussions, and collaborative projects that advance public engagement with the humanities. These projects involve faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, community organizations, and local artists. In the coming months, programming will include events on a range of topics, including "narratives of inclusion" and "art as activism.”
This series features prominent novelists, poets, memoirists, and others who chronicle their own lives and those of others.
The seminar series that focused on Michel Foucault’s Collège de France lectures and produced the Foucault 13/13 series during the 2015-2016 academic year; the seminar series that focused on critical readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and produced the Nietzsche 13/13 series during the 2016-2017 academic year; and the seminar series that will focus on various modalities of disobedience and revolt and will produce the Uprising 13/13 series all follow a similar format. At each session, two or three guests, from different disciplines, are invited to discuss the readings and present on the themes of the seminar, after which there is an open discussion on the presented themes and questions. Each seminar will host specialists from across disciplines, from Columbia University and from outside the campus. It will also frame and interrelate with a Paris Reading Group that will run alongside the seminar.