Columbia’s African Development Group presents their 2025 symposium, Africa’s Youth in the 21st Century: Empowerment, Innovation, and Cultural Sovereignty.

Africa’s youngest generation is stepping into its power and reshaping the continent’s political, economic, and cultural future. This symposium explores how youth can drive sustainable growth, reclaim cultural identity, challenge neocolonial structures, and expand access to education while advancing gender equity. Bringing together voices from the arts, business, policy, and social justice, the conference highlights real, actionable strategies for building a more self-reliant and globally influential Africa.

Please join Frank A. Guridy (Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Professor of History; Executive Director of the Holder Initiative at Columbia University) and Jeanne Theoharis (Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York) as they discuss Professor Theoharis’s new book, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South.

The first 50 attendees to check in will receive a free copy of Professor Theoharis’s book.

6:30 – 7:30 p.m. (Doors open at 6:00 p.m.) | Conversation on King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South & Audience Q & A

7:30–8:30 p.m. | Reception (refreshments will be served)

Registration for this event is required.

This roundtable brings together distinguished senior academics from different fields to reflect on their experiences with realizing a vision for academic innovation. By what steps does a shared vision emerge, and what does it take to bring it to fruition? Are there predictable challenges in realizing an innovative academic vision, and how can these be overcome or avoided?

Together, we will brainstorm successful practices for bringing academic visions to life, particularly those grounded in shared governance and academic freedom. Can our past experiences offer insight into today’s challenges? What guidance might we offer younger colleagues striving to realize their own visions.

To help us coordinate access for off-campus guests, please register in advance using this link. Hosted by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Please join the Middle East Institute and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights for a discussion of the recently published report, ‘Our Genocide’ by the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’tselem. Speakers Yuli Novak and Kareem Jubran will be joined by Professor Diana Greenwald to discuss the research and its significance in the fight against genocide in Palestine.

Registration is required. Non-Columbia attendees will receive a QR code in order to access the campus for the event.

ENCUENT(R)OS FALL 2025

Curated by Angie Cruz and Deborah Paredez; Presented by the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Aster(ix) Journal, and Casa Hispánica

Conversation and Dinner with Alex Rivera: Cinema, Cyberpunk, and the Border Mind Virus

Tuesday, November 18th, 6-8PM

Casa Hispánica (612 W 116th St.)

DINNER PROVIDED!

Alex Rivera’s films explore themes of globalization, migration, and technology. They include the cyberpunk thriller set in Mexico, Sleep Dealer, and the documentary/scripted hybrid film set in an immigrant detention center, The Infiltrators. He is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Sundance Fellow, and former Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University. https://alexrivera.com/

Co-sponsored by Barnard College Creative Writing Fellows and The Radio in the Orchard

Respondents: Sonali Thakkar and Jack Halberstam

Please join the University Seminar on Cultural Memory for a discussion with David L. Eng (University of Pennsylvania) about Reparations and the Human (2025). Eng’s new book investigates a history of reparations across the Transpacific. He analyzes how concepts of reparation established during colonial settlement and the European Enlightenment shape contemporary configurations of the human and human rights, determining who can be recognized as victims, who must be seen as perpetrators, and who deserves repair. As demands for reparations now occupy center stage in debates concerning unresolved legacies of dispossession and Transatlantic slavery, Eng considers how the Cold War Transpacific provides a limit case for the politics of repair and definitions of the human.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Please register for the event here.

Join the School of the Art Dean’s Office for a New Faculty Salon. You will have a chance to meet our wonderful new faculty colleagues in the School of the Arts — Minhal Baig (Film), Angie Cruz (Writing), James Ijames (Theatre), and Hilary Leichter (Writing) — and to learn about their work.

Please register here, but drop-ins are also welcome. Hosted by Sarah Cole, Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts and Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Refreshments will be served. Questions? Contact Gavin Browning at gdb2106@columbia.edu

Current undergraduate students are invited to an informal conversation and lunch with Prof. Qin Gao, who is Acting Director of the Asian American Initiative (AAI) at Columbia University. This is a great opportunity for undergraduate students to meet Dr. Gao and share thoughts and ideas for Columbia’s AAI. Lunch will be provided.

Please scan the QR code on the flyer to RSVP or follow this link. RSVP is required. For more information on AAI, please visit their website.

“Black Europe: A Field on the Move” is a one-day, interdisciplinary graduate student conference open to the entire Columbia community and members of the public. Scholars across disciplines are increasingly treating “Black Europe” as a pertinent object of study. Yet much disagreement remains on what “Black Europe” is. Does Black Europe describe a place, an identity, an aspiration, or something else? Scholars oscillate between terms such as “Afropean,” “African-European,” and “Black European.” Moreover, the institutionalization of Black European studies remains a work in progress, and views vary on whether Black European studies is an academic field, a subsection of Black Studies or African Diaspora Studies, or a reference point for a set of inquiries and practices that exceed the bounds of academic discipline. See the attached flyer and registration link for panel details.

The conference is free to attend but registration is required. Questions for the organizers? Reach us at blackeurope2025@gmail.com

Organizers: Rochelle Malcolm (PhD candidate, History), Mayaki Kimba (PhD candidate, Political Science), and Zarino Lanni (PhD student, Anthropology)

Sponsors: Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Arts and Sciences Graduate Council, European Institute, Department of Political Science, Department of Africana Studies (Barnard College), Department of Anthropology, Department of History, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Department of French, Small Axe Project, Department of Germanic Languages