Fall 2016

This is the first seminar in the Nietzsche 13/13 seminar series. 1/13: Heidegger. During the years 1936 to 1939, Martin Heidegger delivered a series of influential lectures on Nietzsche that would be published in a multi-volume book called, simply, Nietzsche. Despite being delivered at the time of his Nazi allegiance, the lectures nevertheless transcend fascism to develop a wide-ranging interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophical contributions. They have been formative in subsequent readings of Nietzsche.

• Virginia Heffernan, Journalist,

A New Aesthetic Called 'Aesthetic': Online Frescoes, Instagram Self-Portraiture and What Digital Humanities Can Be. Conversation with Virginia Heffernan.

A Centennial Celebration of 409 and 555 Edgecombe Avenue.

This year, 2016, Small Axe turns twenty years old. And this year too, our fiftieth issue was published. We are not big on celebrations, it is true, but to mark the occasion we are organizing a roundtable conversation around the theme “What Is Journal Work?” We have invited editors (or founders) of notable journal platforms to help us think about the distinctive work (in all its dimensions) of journals in intellectual and artistic innovation and intervention.

Visual artists and filmmakers, writers and hip-hop poets played a key role in linking discontent and unrest in Harlem, Los Angeles and Chicago with anticolonial revolutions in Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, and elsewhere, and frequently looked to struggles in the Muslim Third World for inspiration and solidarity in the quest for social justice. In the words of Malcolm X said in 1962, “the same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia, is existing in the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country who have been just as thoroughly colonized as the people in Africa and Asia.”

Reading and Q&A by Horatio Castellanos Moya.

This is the second seminar in the Nietzsche 13/13 seminar series. 2/13: Georges Bataille.

From Charles Dickens and the Star Wars epic, to The Sopranos, Orange is the New Black, and the Serial podcast, seriality’s iteration of installments, gaps, sequences, and seasons has drawn audiences into storyworlds both vast and intimate.  "The New Seriality Studies" looks at the past, present, and future of serial storytelling across media, periods, and disciplines.  Three panels explore periodicals, novels, television, comics, film, and music in light of the cross-genre play of seriality’s formal, spatial, temporal, material, and social effects. The closing roundtable, moderated by Sharon Marcus (Columbia), features discussion with A.O. Scott (film critic, The New York Times), Julie Snyder (co-creator and executive producer, the Serial podcast), and Lev Grossman (book critic, TIME, and author of the Magicians trilogy). 

Please join Columbia’s new global initiative, Black Sea Networks, for its inaugural event, a lecture with Ivan Krastev. America and Europe created the post-1989 world, yet today they have begun to fear and even hate it. As we look back at the turbulent decades since 1989, we are astounded by the speed with which yesterday’s euphoric victory has turned into today’s anxiety and distress. Explaining why and how this change occurred in different parts of the wider Black Sea region (Russia, Turkey, Eastern Europe) is the principal ambition of this lecture.

In the 1960s, former colonial officials, who had newly joined the ranks of the European administration, played a central role in devising and implementing the European Community development policy. Véronique Dimier shows how these officials built a management system devised to deal with the nascent political African elite, which recycled methods they experimented during colonial times (especially the Indirect Rule). Dimier also examines how this administrative system evolved following the successive enlargements of the European Community and a new international environment influenced by the World Bank and the IMF. 

This year's seminar, Burning Issues in African Philosophy, is curated by Drucilla Cornell and Souleymane Bachir Diagne and presented by the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. It includes six seminars with Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Paget Henry, Nkiru Nzegwu, Olufemi Taiwo, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, and Lewis Gordon. It builds off of the sophisticated work that has now become part of an international conversation on how African philosophy makes unique interventions into almost every important question of politics, ethics, aesthetics, ontology and epistemology. It begins by challenging the conventional Afro-pessimistic view of time as being unable to organize a future perspective that would allow for adequate industrialization and development. If time is what happens inseparable from events, this does not mean that there is no future in African philosophy. What it means is that there is no future that can be foreclosed or known in advance and thus possibilities for the future remain open. It is therefore up to our actions to bring about the future that we want.  

Liz Ševčenko will speak about her work bringing together faculty, students, and community partners around the country into public engagement with urgent social issues. Liz was Founding Director of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, Director of the Guantanamo Public Memory Project at Columbia's Institute for the Study of Human Rights and is currently Director of the Humanities Action Lab at the New School. 

The Comparative Media Initiative seeks to broaden our understanding of media by critically examining how the same technologies work in radically different ways across the globe, juxtaposing media practices in Africa, Latin America, and Asia as well as in Western centers.  At the same time, we do not study one medium in isolation but focus on the interaction between emerging, dominant, and residual media which always exist side by side.  Both modes of comparison aim to decenter dominant modes of media historiography by highlighting the reciprocal exchange between aesthetic forms and technological innovations as they take place in specific contexts that range from state socialism to advanced commodity cultures to Islamic theocracies.  

João Emanuel Carneiro is one of Brazil's most prolic and acclaimed storytellers across all audiovisual media. Following the success of his adapted screenplay for the 1998 Academy Award nominated feature Central do Brasil, Carneiro ably transitioned to the small screen, writing for several of Brazil's most popular television series before creating the ground-breaking Brazilian telenovela Avenida Brasil.

Norm Hirschy, Senior Editor in the Academic and Trade Division of Oxford University Press, will speak about the process of successfully getting a scholarly book published — including advice for turning the PhD dissertation into a book and stylistic techniques for crafting the book proposal. The event is co-sponsored by the Heyman Center for the Humanities and the Dean of Humanities. Postdoctoral fellows and graduate students in the humanities are invited to attend. 

Horst Bredekamp presents the next installment of the Lionel Trilling Seminar. 

Reading and discussion of Flores Forbes' new book Invisible Men: A Contemporary Slave Narrative in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Poetry reading by Shane McCrae and Moniac Youn. 

A special film series curated by Nora Philippe and presented by the Columbia Maison Française. Co-sponsors at Columbia University are the Columbia Maison Française, European Institute, the European Union's Getting to Know Europe Program, School of the Arts, MA in Film Studies – School of the Arts, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Theory, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Alliance Program, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Institute of African Studies, and Columbia Global Centers – Europe. 

From The Waste Land to recent sprawling Conceptualist and computer generated mega-texts, the long poem has paradoxically operated as both a kind of generic contradiction (as Ezra Pound put it, “dichtung=condensare”) and as the apotheosis of the poetic mode altogether. How do we understand the dynamics of such a form, and how do we classify its various instantiations? What does the long poem reveal about the world that is unknowable in another form?  

Being “free to choose” has arguably become a stand-in for broader concepts of freedom in many parts of the world today. How did this happen? Meanwhile, neuroscientists and behavioral economists have steadily been collecting evidence that the human brain is often quite poor at making choices. Where does this leave us, in an age when choice has become a proxy for freedom?

This is the third seminar in the Nietzsche 13/13 seminar series. 3/13: Maurice Blanchot. Maurice Blanchot was heavily influenced by Nietzsche early on, and wrote several works that directly and indirectly engaged Nietzsche’s thought. Like Bataille, Blanchot took a holistic approach and often focused on the fragments. This session will explore his relation to Nietzsche and how it influenced subsequent critical thinkers.

A special film series curated by Nora Philippe and presented by the Columbia Maison Française. Co-sponsors at Columbia University are the Columbia Maison Française, European Institute, the European Union's Getting to Know Europe Program, School of the Arts, MA in Film Studies – School of the Arts, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Theory, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Alliance Program, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Institute of African Studies, and Columbia Global Centers – Europe. 

In conditions of shrinking private liberty and growing public apathy and personal anomie, what is meaningful individuality? How is individual freedom to be thought fruitfully in the face of the threat of surveillance, by the state as well as private actors? What are origins of individual docility, and possible sources of resistance? This conference brings together scholars from various fields to examine in an interdisciplinary discussion the meaning of individuality and individual liberty in today’s society. 

A special film series curated by Nora Philippe and presented by the Columbia Maison Française. Co-sponsors at Columbia University are the Columbia Maison Française, European Institute, the European Union's Getting to Know Europe Program, School of the Arts, MA in Film Studies – School of the Arts, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Theory, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Alliance Program, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Institute of African Studies, and Columbia Global Centers – Europe. 

New Books in the Arts & Sciences          —panel discussions celebrating recent work by the Columbia Faculty

A poetry reading by Dorthea Lasky and Robyn Schiff

A special film series curated by Nora Philippe and presented by the Columbia Maison Française. Co-sponsors at Columbia University are the Columbia Maison Française, European Institute, the European Union's Getting to Know Europe Program, School of the Arts, MA in Film Studies – School of the Arts, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Theory, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Alliance Program, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Institute of African Studies, and Columbia Global Centers – Europe. 

As we celebrate Latino Heritage Month, please join us for a panel discussion that will outline the various benefits derived from facilitating access to higher education for Black and Latino men and women, who are disproportionately impacted by mass incarceration.

A special film series curated by Nora Philippe and presented by the Columbia Maison Française. Co-sponsors at Columbia University are the Columbia Maison Française, European Institute, the European Union's Getting to Know Europe Program, School of the Arts, MA in Film Studies – School of the Arts, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Theory, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Alliance Program, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Institute of African Studies, and Columbia Global Centers – Europe.

This conference will explore how history can also engage with conflict resolution processes and the work of mass atrocity prevention. Topics will include textbooks, museums, historical commissions, archives, collective memory, and performative history.

New Books in the Arts & Sciences: Panel discussions celebrating recent work by the Columbia Faculty 

Escaping the liberal urban bubble, award-winning playwright and performer Dan Hoyle spent 100 days traveling through small-town America. Living out of his van, he found himself sharing meals and conversations with union coal miners, rural drug dealers, anti-war Veterans, and closeted gay creation theory experts, among others. Hoyle sought to see the world through their eyes, and found himself at ground zero of our country’s growing economic inequality and polarized politics. For event details, please click here. 

A special film series curated by Nora Philippe and presented by the Columbia Maison Française. Co-sponsors at Columbia University are the Columbia Maison Française, European Institute, the European Union's Getting to Know Europe Program, School of the Arts, MA in Film Studies – School of the Arts, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Theory, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Alliance Program, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Institute of African Studies, and Columbia Global Centers – Europe.

A special film series curated by Nora Philippe and presented by the Columbia Maison Française. Co-sponsors at Columbia University are the Columbia Maison Française, European Institute, the European Union's Getting to Know Europe Program, School of the Arts, MA in Film Studies – School of the Arts, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Theory, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Alliance Program, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Institute of African Studies, and Columbia Global Centers – Europe.

A special film series curated by Nora Philippe and presented by the Columbia Maison Française. Co-sponsors at Columbia University are the Columbia Maison Française, European Institute, the European Union's Getting to Know Europe Program, School of the Arts, MA in Film Studies – School of the Arts, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Theory, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Alliance Program, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Institute of African Studies, and Columbia Global Centers – Europe.

Are you interested in community impact? Do you wish your students were more civically engaged? Come to our workshop on Bringing Engaged Scholarship to the Humanities Classroom. You’ll learn about models for engaged scholarship, be inspired by service learning projects around the country, and begin to map out your own path to creating service learning experiences for your students.

This is the fourth seminar in the Nietzsche 13/13 series. Perhaps more than many other critical theorists, Gilles Deleuze’s thought was highly influenced by Nietzsche, and Deleuze’s name is inextricably linked to Nietzsche’s through his two signature books. In this session, we will focus on these two important works. 

A special film series curated by Nora Philippe and presented by the Columbia Maison Française. Co-sponsors at Columbia University are the Columbia Maison Française, European Institute, the European Union's Getting to Know Europe Program, School of the Arts, MA in Film Studies – School of the Arts, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Theory, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Alliance Program, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Institute of African Studies, and Columbia Global Centers – Europe. 

Zora Neale Hurston, a graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University, has received great acclaim for her literary work, particularly the highly influential novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In honor of the 125th anniversary of her birth, Barnard celebrates Hurston’s legacy with a one-day symposium that brings together emerging scholars whose work builds upon Hurston’s less wellknown training in anthropology and interdisciplinary modes of expression. 

A book project and two conferences at Columbia University and UC Berkeley. Epistemology After Sextus Empiricus covers themes from Sextus Empiricus that have greatly shaped the history of epistemology. Relevant topics include the nature of investigation, perception and illusion, perceptual relativism, ignorance, belief-formation, induction, infinite regress, assertion, disagreement and conflicting appearances. Some chapters in the book are concerned with the reception of ideas from Sextus Empiricus; others are more immediately about skeptical arguments and themes. The book is part of a larger effort, namely to bring to the fore the philosophical sophistication of Hellenistic philosophy which continues to be less widely studied than Plato and Aristotle. Ancient skepticism addresses questions which remain highly relevant today.

This year's seminar, Burning Issues in African Philosophy, is curated by Drucilla Cornell and Souleymane Bachir Diagne and presented by the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. It includes six seminars with Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Paget Henry, Nkiru Nzegwu, Olufemi Taiwo, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, and Lewis Gordon. It builds off of the sophisticated work that has now become part of an international conversation on how African philosophy makes unique interventions into almost every important question of politics, ethics, aesthetics, ontology and epistemology. It begins by challenging the conventional Afro-pessimistic view of time as being unable to organize a future perspective that would allow for adequate industrialization and development. If time is what happens inseparable from events, this does not mean that there is no future in African philosophy. What it means is that there is no future that can be foreclosed or known in advance and thus possibilities for the future remain open. It is therefore up to our actions to bring about the future that we want.  

In this event on the ascension of “Illiberal Populism in Europe”, Pippa Norris and Jan Kubik will discuss the various manifestations of illiberal populism-past and current, mainstream and fringe- in both Eastern and Western Europe. The panel, with discussant Sheri Berman and moderator Alan Timberlake, will probe issues such as the origins of illiberal populism and its effects on the political systems in Europe and the future of the European Union.

REGISTER HERE Dramatic reading featuring work by three veteran playwrights-- Maurice Decaul, Jenny Pacanowski, and Johnny Meyer-- read by actors and military veterans from the Bedlam Outreach community. Performance followed by a roundtable discussion moderated by playwright Dan Hoyle.

At the end of her life, Hannah Arendt was writing a series of volumes on The Life of the Mind, the second of which engaged the thought of Nietzsche. This session will explore her engagement With Nietzsche. With Seyla Benhabib, Simona Forti, Ayten Gundogdu, and Linda Zerilli. 

Participants in this symposium will discuss how site-specific discourse and practices have moved across media, space, and time. They will ask whether it’s contradictory to demand a general theory of site-specificity. And they will question whether the localizing language of site is adequate to social or environmental challenges that emerge at a planetary scale, or that embrace technologies unimagined by the pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s. Above all, speakers will try to identify what is living and what is dead in site specificity. Is site worn out? Is this once-insurgent practice anything more, these days, than a generalized idiom for attaching social values to artistic objects?

Over the past three decades, since the creation of the Mind and Life Institute in the 80s under the auspices of the Dalai Lama and the neurobiologist Francisco Varela, a series of conferences have introduced the idea of a convergence between Buddhism and neuroscience. Neuroscientists have been particularly interested in the possible neural correlates of Buddhist meditation, and their experiments have contributed to the current popularity of Mindfulness and derived techniques, such as “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.” Apart from meditation, a number of important issues, such as notions of self and non-self, or Buddhist ethics and neuroethics, have been discussed. Yet, because of the media attention and a desire to reach consensus, problems and disagreements between the two fields have sometimes been ignored or downplayed, and the conversation has been limited to certain forms of Buddhist thought and practice. 

However we define philology it always entails some understanding of the contexts in which texts are produced and in which they circulate/d. In this lecture I shall examine some of the practices that often shape such contexts through looking at the place of manuscripts as they travel from a writer’s working space into collections. Such collections are never stable but grow or disintegrate and in attempting to re-constitute a work from disparate manuscript copies the micro-histories of manuscript movements have to be taken into account. Working in Timbuktu’s manuscript libraries we have found the limitations of working solely from published texts and catalogues and similar scholarly apparatuses. 

Columbia graduate students are engaging with local and global communities in amazing ways. Columbia scholars are collaborating with high school students, the formerly incarcerated, underserved groups, and public audiences globally, bridging the gap between the academy and the world. Come hear them speak at our lightning talk event. Get inspired! This talk is part of Engaged Scholarship, a series of talks, workshops, and panels to promote partnerships for developing engaging learning experiences and sharing resources across the university/community divide.

Populists are on the rise across the globe, but what exactly is populism? Does populism bring government closer to the people or is it a threat to democracy? Who are "the people" anyway and who can speak in their name?

SOLD OUT *Please Note Location Change* REGISTRATION REQUIRED HERE. Orhan Pamuk, Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor of the Humanities; Fellow, The Committee on Global Thought N. Turkuler Isiksel, James P. Shenton Assistant Professor of the Core Curriculum, Political Science Mark Mazower, Commentator, Ira D. Wallach Professor of History Carol Gluck, Moderator, George Sansom Professor of History; Chair, The Committee on Global Thought

Efforts abound to “understand” climate change. But what kind of understanding is needed? Does “understanding” mean the same thing to concerned citizens as it does to scientists, humanities scholars, or policy makers? At this public event, climate scientist Isaac Held, philosopher of science Philip Kitcher, and science journalist Jonathan Weiner will compare the work of understanding undertaken by different communities engaged with climate change, and address the question of what remains to be understood.

Etienne Balibar discusses his new book, Citizen Subject, in conversation with Steven Miller, Stathis Gourgouris and Emily Apter.

Escaping the liberal urban bubble, award-winning playwright and performer Dan Hoyle spent 100 days traveling through small-town America. Living out of his van, he found himself sharing meals and conversations with union coal miners, rural drug dealers, anti-war Veterans, and closeted gay creation theory experts, among others. Hoyle sought to see the world through their eyes, and found himself at ground zero of our country’s growing economic inequality and polarized politics.

Russian artist Olga Chernysheva (b. Moscow, 1962) mines the post-Soviet aspirations and realities of her native Russia in her photographs, videos, paintings and drawings. This screening and discussion of Chernysheva's moving image work will be introduced by Nova Benway, curator of Vague Accent, Chernysheva's current exhibition at The Drawing Center, and Julia Tulovsky, Curator of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. 

In addition to the 13 Nietzsche 13/13 seminars, we are delighted to present several extraordinary lectures and workshops to complement the conversation. These events are also open to the public. The first is: Alain Badiou, École normale supérieure, with Bruno Bosteels, Columbia University Lectures on Nietzsche Please click here for details and more information.

On June 23, 2016 a slim majority of the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union by national referendum. The reasons that led to this historic vote, ending forty-three years of UK membership in the EU, are still being widely debated, as are the potential ramifications. This two-day event brings together journalists and scholars from European and American universities to uncover both the underlying issues that precipitated the UK's decision to separate from the EU as well as the ongoing fallout from the "Brexit" vote, especially for those of us working in global universities. 

With fresh insights and vivid prose, Anderer engages the Great Earthquake of 1923, the dynamic energy that surged through Tokyo in its wake, and its impact on Kurosawa as a youth. When the city is destroyed again, in the fire-bombings of 1945, Anderer reveals how Kurosawa grappled with the trauma of war and its aftermath, and forged his artistic vision. Finally, he resurrects the specter and the voice of a gifted and troubled older brother—himself a star in the silent film industry—who took Kurosawa to see his first films, and who led a rebellious life until his desperate end. Bringing these formative forces into focus, Anderer looks beyond the aura of Kurosawa’s fame and leads us deeper into the tragedies and the challenges of his past. Kurosawa’s Rashomon uncovers how a film like Rashomon came to be, and why it endures to illuminate the shadows and the challenges of our present.

Constitutionalism has become a byword for legitimate government, but is it fated to lose its relevance as constitutional states relinquish power to international institutions? This book evaluates the extent to which constitutionalism, as an empirical idea and normative ideal, can be adapted to institutions beyond the state by surveying the sophisticated legal and political system of the European Union. Having originated in a series of agreements between states, the EU has acquired important constitutional features like judicial review, protections for individual rights, and a hierarchy of norms. Nonetheless, it confounds traditional models of constitutional rule to the extent that its claim to authority rests on the promise of economic prosperity and technocratic competence rather than on the democratic will of citizens. Critically appraising the European Union and its legal system, this book proposes the idea of 'functional constitutionalism' to describe this distinctive configuration of public power. Although the EU is the most advanced instance of functional constitutionalism to date, understanding this pragmatic mode of constitutional authority is essential for assessing contemporary international economic governance.

Roundtable: Austin Graham, Mason Golden, Anton Vishio, and Carina del Valle Schorske

Alessia Ricciardi (Professor Of Italian And Comparative Literature, Northwestern University) discussing "A Story of Entrustment: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels" and David Kurnick (Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University) discussing "Ferrante Talk and the Scales of Contemporary Realism” with Respondent: Rebecca Falkoff (Assistant Professor of Italian, NYU). 

Cuala Foundation, Inc. (formerly Cuala Productions) will return to the Heyman Center for the Humanities to partner for one more New York event of 2016 with a CualaNYC Story Shebeen on Friday 9 December at 6:15. The event will be live streamed and will launch 'New York Rising, 'a graphic novel that tells the story of New York and the Irish 1916 Rising, and how it affected many communities in New York at the time and people such as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Marcus Garvey, Cyril Briggs and Joyce Kilmer and Claude McKay who were inspired to organize, to write and to make their voices heard in creative ways.

Please join us for a screening of Mark Mazower and Constantine Giannaris's 2016 film Techniques of the Body and a discussion between Mark Mazower (Ira D. Wallach Professor, Department of History, Columbia University) and Naor Ben-Yehoyada (Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University). This is The Seminar in Modern Greek's third meeting of the year.