News
American Studies' Salon Talk with Dr. Valerie Paley
Director of the New-York Historical Society Patricia D. Klingenstein Library
In conversation with Prof. Hilary Hallett
Director of Center for American Studies
Wednesday September 21st, 2022 from 4:00 - 5:30 pm
Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive, New York NY 10027
Garden Room #1
To register click here
As Hilary A. Hallett writes in her new biography, “Inventing the It Girl,” the modern Nell would forge a long, lucrative career out of this raw material: the glamour and scandal of the upper classes, and pulsing below, the inadmissible longing — her own and her readers’ — to be swept away by passion without dying on the rocks.
Read more about the book and reviews at:
Andrew Delbanco will deliver his lecture, “The Question of Reparations: Our Past, Our Present, Our Future,” on October 19, 2022, at President Lincoln’s Cottage historic site and museum in Washington, D.C., at 6:30 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public and will stream online at neh.gov.
Click here for more.
For 22 years, Women and the Silent Screen (WSS), a biennial international conference sponsored by Women and Film History International (WFHI), has brought together researchers focused on women’s pivotal roles in the first decades of motion picture history. WSS has supported the creation of a new view of the film industries that demonstrates the centrality of women in economic and labor history, criticism, aesthetics, narrative development, film culture, and film production in a globalized world.
In June 2022, Columbia University in New York hosts WSS XI: Women, Cinema, and World Migration to highlight new scholarship connecting early cinema history to the migration and social mobility that caught up women globally when motion pictures arrived more than a century ago. We invite students, scholars, distributors, curators, and archivists from around the world to return to where the U.S. film industry began to explore how the new medium intersected with women’s movement across boundaries of gender, ethnicity, race, and class, considering occupational and national borders that excluded some women and welcomed others. For the first time, WSS XI features Jump Start, a platform for research sharing before the conference begins.
Join Jason Resnikoff (History Department PhD Alum '19) and Nelson Lichtenstein for a virtual event celebrating the release of "Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work" on March 1 at 11am PT / 2PM EST.
Learn more about the book: https://go.illinois.edu/f21resnikoff
Jason Resnikoff is a Core Lecturer in the History Department at Columbia University. He specializes in labor history, the history of global capitalism, intellectual history, and the history of technology. His book, "Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work," explores the ideological origins of automation in the US in the middle of the twentieth century. You can find his work in Labor, International Labor and Working-Class History, Tropics of Meta, Zócalo Public Square, Western Humanities Review, Paris Review Daily, and the Encyclopedia of American Recessions and Depressions. He is affiliated with Columbia University’s American Studies Department, where he advises undergraduate senior theses, as well as Columbia’s Justice in Education initiative, through which he teaches incarcerated students. His time working as an organizer for the United Auto Workers grounds his scholarship. His current research interests include the intersection of racism and technology.
Join the event here.
American Studies mourns the loss of Todd Gitlin, who taught a course on The Sixties for the Center for American Studies. Read more about his legacy and work in The New York Times.
In an essay for the Wall Street Journal, Roosevelt Montás argues, "Far from being elitist, a college curriculum focused on the Western classics can open a new world for students of all backgrounds."
Read article here.
Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work, explores the ideological origins of automation in the US in the middle of the twentieth century. Jason's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Labor, International Labor and Working-Class History, Tropics of Meta, Western Humanities Review, Paris Review, and the Encyclopedia of American Recessions and Depressions. Labor's End will be released on December 28 by University of Illinois Press.
In this very personal book, Roosevelt reflects on the experience of immigrating to the United States as a teenager and attending Columbia as a low-income student in the early 1990s—where his encounter with the Core Curriculum profoundly reoriented his life. Drawing on more than two decades teaching in the Core Curriculum and a decade serving as its director, Roosevelt examines why liberal education is imperiled in today’s university and makes a compelling case for its revitalization. You can read an early review of the book here. It will be released on November 16 by Princeton University Press.
Thursday, May 13, 2021
7:00 pm ET Zoom
Renowned civil rights attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative Cathleen Price will explore social justice in the U.S. through the lens of her work as an attorney, educator and advocate of death-sentenced prisoners, offenders subject to excessively harsh punishments and communities marginalized by poverty and discrimination.
Featuring opening remarks by former U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. CC’73, LAW’76, and closing remarks by Bernard E. Harcourt, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science.
American Studies Lecturer Cathleen Price interviewed in Columbia College Today on the legacy of injustice. Read article here.
Fifty years on, in the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, activists and writers Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore have gathered an unprecedented collection of works—many long out-of-print and hard to find—that catalyzed and propelled the movement, visionary and radical writing as relevant and urgently needed as ever, ready to inspire a new generation of feminists.
Thursday, March 18, 2021
6:00-7:00 pm
The past year has been a historic stress test for American democracy. Where do we stand now? What can our tradition of political writings tell us about what lies ahead?
New Yorker writer and Columbia University Professor of Journalism Nicholas Lemann, editor of Library of America’s new anthology American Democracy: 21 Historic Answers to 5 Urgent Questions, leads a conversation on the controversies and flashpoints that will shape the future course of our democratic experiment. Featuring Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed and Professor of Political Science and Chair of Constitutional Studies at Notre Dame University; Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne; Michele Moody-Adams, Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University; and Nicole Hemmer, political historian at Columbia University specializing in media, conservatism, and the far-right.
Registration is required to attend this event. After registering on Eventbrite, you will receive a confirmation email from Zoom with instructions on how to join the presentation. We ask that you download the Zoom app in advance for the best user experience.
This event is co-presented by the Center for American Studies at Columbia University.