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The University Seminars University the 2015 Seminars, Speakers, & Topics of Directory THE2015 UNIVERSITY SEMINARS COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 DIRECTORY OF SEMINARS, SPEAKERS, & TOPICS Contents Introduction . 4 History of the University Seminars . 6 Annual Report . 8 Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures Series . 10 Schoff and Warner Publication Awards . 13 Digital Archive Launch . 16 Tannenbaum-Warner Award and Lecture . .. 17 Book Launch and Reception: Plots . 21 2015–2016 Seminar Conferences: Women Mobilizing Memory: Collaboration and Co-Resistance . 22 Joseph Mitchell and the City: A Conversation with Thomas Kunkel And Gay Talese . 26 Alberto Burri: A Symposium at the Italian Academy of Columbia University . 27 “Doing” Shakespeare: The Plays in the Theatre . 28 The Politics of Memory: Victimization, Violence, and Contested Memories of the Past . 30 70TH Anniversary Conference on the History of the Seminar in the Renaissance . .. 40 Designing for Life And Death: Sustainable Disposition and Spaces Of Rememberance in the 21ST Century Metropolis . 41 Calling All Content Providers: Authors in the Brave New Worlds of Scholarly Communication . 46 104TH Meeting of the Society of Experimental Psychologists . 47 From Ebola to Zika: Difficulties of Present and Emerging Infectious Diseases . 50 The Quantitative Eighteenth Century: A Symposium . 51 Appetitive Behavior Festchrift: A Symposium Honoring Tony Sclafani and Karen Ackroff . 52 Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and Unreported Struggles: Conflict and Peace . 55 The Power to Move . 59 2015– 2016 Seminars . 60 Index of Seminars . 160 Directory of Seminars, Speakers, & Topics 2015–2016 3 ADVISORY COMMITTEE 2015–2016 Robert E. Remez, Chair Professor of Psychology, Barnard College George Andreopoulos Professor, Political Science and Criminal Justice CUNY Graduate School and University Center Susan Boynton Professor of Music, Columbia University Jennifer Crewe President and Director, Columbia University Press Kenneth T. Jackson Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences Columbia University David Johnston Professor of Political Philosophy, Columbia University Lisa Keller Professor of History, Purchase College, Adjunct Research Scholar of History, Columbia University David Magier Associate University Librarian for Collection Development Princeton University Alan Stewart Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University Paige West Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University STAFF Robert E. Pollack, Director pollack@columbia .edu Alice Newton, Deputy Director an2113@columbia .edu Pamela Guardia, Program Coordinator pfg2106@columbia .edu Gesenia Alvarez-Lazauskas, Associate Director, Budget & Operations ga2030@columbia .edu Summer Hart, Associate Director for Archives, Web Management & Design sh3040@columbia .edu John Jayo, Office Assistant jcj2127@columbia .edu THE UNIVERSITY SEMINARS COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Faculty House 64 Morningside Drive, 2nd Floor MC 2302 New York, NY 10027 (212) 854-2389 universityseminars .columbia .edu univ .seminars@columbia .edu Introduction he University Seminars are groups of professors and Tother experts from Columbia and elsewhere, who gather once a month to work together on problems that cross the boundaries between university departments . Each seminar elects its own officers, plans its own program and selects its own membership: members from Columbia, associate members from elsewhere, Faculty House, 1923 and any speakers or other guests it invites to its ses- sions . About half the seminars admit selected graduate scholarly or professional news, or explore either side of students as guests . Seminar participants and speak- the job market . ers attend by invitation and neither pay nor are paid, Seminars are closed to the general public, and in although a central office supports travel and hotel ex- particular to the press and other media . Minutes are penses for speakers when its endowment income per- taken at all seminar meetings . These minutes may be mits . open and available immediately among members or Some seminars are tight, restricted discussion kept closed for five years before being included in the groups that study unfashionable problems; others are University Seminars Digital Archive and available to broad-based lecture series where eminent visitors dis- scholars through the Columbia University Rare Book & seminate the latest knowledge . Frank Tannenbaum, the Manuscript Library . Individual seminars decide which founder of The University Seminars, believed that uni- of these policies to adopt . The central office maintains a formity imposed from above would destroy them . website and each seminar has a dedicated page . As independent entities, the Seminars can take The Seminars subsidize the publication of certain intellectual risks the schools and departments of the books written under their auspices, and arrange con- Uni versity might not otherwise assume . They provide ferences to make public their discoveries or to work something every great institution needs: a small area quietly with scholars too distant to be regular seminar where intellectual activity is fast, cheap, and beyond participants . central control . Columbia is one of the few universities, Scholars and others interested in attending a semi- or businesses, with the courage to institutionalize such nar should email their credentials to the appropriate independence . chair . Seminars active in the 2015–2016 academic year The Seminars link Columbia with the intellectual are listed alphabetically as well as by seminar number resources of the surrounding communities . This out- in the index . reach also offers to both worlds the fruits of interaction For a complete list of current seminars and chairs, and mutual criticism, as well as the advantages of close please visit our website: universityseminars .columbia . contacts: a place to network, establish ties, exchange edu . Directory of Seminars, Speakers, & Topics 2015–2016 5 History of the Seminars n the 1930s, Professor Frank Tannenbaum and IColumbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler discussed the idea of creating ongoing groups of Columbia professors and experts from the region to ex- plore matters no single department had the breadth or the agility to study . Butler saw the idea as a quick way to mobilize the intellectual resources of the University to confront suddenly emerging problems, but World War II supervened . It was 1944 before Butler’s succes- sor, Frank Fackenthal, approved the first five University Seminars . Three of these seminars still meet: Peace, Studies in Religion, and The Renaissance. The Seminars continue to serve Tannen baum’s and Butler’s purposes . They have also become an intrinsic part of the enterprise that Columbia does better than any great university in the world—the ongoing educa- tion of its own faculty . Most of this education takes place within the academic departments, but Tannenbaum was continuing a tradition of General Education in a Frank Tannenbaum 1893–1969; historian of Latin America; Slavery; Core Curriculum that Columbia had been developing and Prison Systems. Professor Tannenbaum was a founder and the first Director of The University Seminars. for thirty years . The Contemporary Civilization and the Human ities courses are famous for the breadth they give Columbia undergraduates, but are astonishingly Columbia’s endowment . Tannenbaum wrote a charter unrecognized as a boot camp where econometricians to “protect the spontaneity of the Seminars from an acquire sophistication by conducting rough and tumble unstructured situation [in which] interference is inevi- discussions of Plato . table, because the desire for general rules and unifor- This tradition positioned Columbia professors mity is irresistible ”. The Director of the Seminars was to to invent the interdisciplinary regional institutes that be appointed by the President of the University but se- trained graduate students to handle post-war com- lected and guided by a smaller Advisory Board chosen plexities beyond their departments, and forced politi- by the General Committee, consisting of Columbia’s cal scientists, economists, and literary scholars to learn president, provost, and the chairs of all the seminars . from each other . Over the past seventy-three years, the In 2003, Seminars Director Robert Belknap first con- Seminars have offered specialists from Columbia and ceived and then over several years implemented the elsewhere the chance to learn and discover things to- project of scanning 50 years of the pre-digital minutes gether . of the seminars . Under his supervision, over a half When Tannenbaum died in 1969, there were fifty million pages were scanned and preserved . In 2011, seminars . He and his wife, Jane Belo, left the Seminars Seminars Archivist Summer Hart began the task of approximately $1 .7 million in their wills (1969 & 1972), unifying the various components of the archive . Since to be invested and reinvested as a dedicated part of 2016, this treasure trove of intellectual history has been 6 Columbia University—The University Seminars available for scholarly research in the Rare Books and Manuscript Library Reading Room . In the four decades since Frank Tannenbaum’s death, the number of Seminars has grown to the 87 listed in this Directory . About half the Seminars that were founded in past years are still meeting, while half have merged, split, or dissolved . James Gutmann fol- lowed Tannenbaum as Director from 1969 to 1975, fol- lowed by Aaron Warner from 1976 to 2000, and Robert Belknap from 2001 to 2011, when his
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