Past Events
Join the Division of Humanities in the Arts & Sciences for a wide-ranging discussion on mobility, migration and musical exchange; evolving art and sounds in a globalized world; approaches to performance and intellectual inquiry; and new directions in African music and performance studies.
Lunch will be served. This event is open to all. Registration is mandatory for those without a Columbia University ID; register at least 24 hours in advance in order to receive campus access. Registration for all others is requested, but not required.
Speakers will include:
- Kwasi Ampene Professor of Music, Tufts University
- Louise Meintjes Marcello Lotti Professor of Music, Duke
- Olabode Omojola Hammond-Douglass Five College Professor of Music, Mount Holyoke College
- Patricia Opondo Senior Lecturer in Music, Drama, and Performance, University of Kwazulu-Natal School of the Arts
- Chérie Rivers Professor of Geography, UNC Chapel Hill
Moderated by: Ruth Opara, Department of Music
Co-hosted by Ruth Opara, Department of Music and Bruno Bosteels, Dean of Humanities and Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities. Sponsored by the Division of Humanities in the Arts & Sciences.
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities presents: Activist Readings of Capital (Thursday Lecture Series, Pedagogy of the Deed)
In his Postface to the second edition of Capital Vol 1., Marx wrote that after 1830 in France and England, the intensification of class struggle sounded the death knell of scientific bourgeois economics and in place of disinterested inquirers there stepped hired prize-fighters. Does the same apply to the critique of political economy Marx inaugurated? Contemporary polarizations around how to read the relationship of colonialism and capitalism, race and class, in Marx’s Capital are a sign of accentuating class struggle in our times. They are also reminiscent of the 1960s and 70s, when theories of racial capitalism first emerged in activist contexts around the world, including in the US, which this talk will reconstruct in order to compare with the strategic interpretations of the present.
Speaker
Colleen Lye is Associate Professor of English and chair of the Asian American Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. She is affiliated with the Department of Rhetoricc and the Program in Critical Theory. She is a founding member of the UC Materialist Institute for Research and a former cochair of the Berkeley Faculty Association. Most recently, she is the coeditor of After Marx: Literature and Value in the 21st Century. She is writing a book on Asian American Marxism.
Register here: https://sofheyman.org/events/activist-readings-of-capital
From the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW): Why AI Needs Feminism brings together feminist critical technologists Lauren Klein (Emory University) and Meredith Broussard (NYU) with Barnard’s Saima Akhtar (Vagelos Computational Science Center) and Gabrielle Gutierrez (Neuroscience) to examine how algorithmic surveillance is reshaping everyday life—from predictive policing in New York neighborhoods of color to the data infrastructures sustaining global conflicts and occupations. This conversation challenges the myth of “data-driven decision-making” as neutral progress and asks how feminist approaches grounded in care and accountability can offer paths toward refusal and repair.
Across higher education, including at Barnard, the rapid adoption of AI reflects wider struggles over power and control. “Smart” campus security systems and learning analytics promise efficiency and personalization while quietly expanding surveillance of movement, behavior, and intellectual labor. While AI can support learning and connection, it is also worth discussing how it reinforces existing hierarchies or privileges efficiency over care, trust, and human judgment.
The feminism AI needs, we insist, is not the mainstream feminism of representation or inclusion alone, but one that confronts how race, class, gender, and colonial power are built into technological systems. We ask: Who designs and benefits from these systems? Who bears their risks? And what would it mean to build technologies guided by care rather than oversight and control?
This event invites collective critique and imagination—toward technologies and institutions that center people, not just data.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. A light reception will follow the conversation.
Slavery, Columbia University & the Livingstons: What Reparative Justice Looks Like from One Black Descendant’s Journey
RSVP HERE! RSVP deadline for non-CUID holders: 4/28 at 12PM
In this unique public lecture, genealogist and author Chris Rabb explores the intertwined histories of slavery, Columbia University, and the influential Livingston family through the lens of his own lineage. As a descendant of both enslaved people and the family that enslaved them, Rabb unpacks how elite institutions profited from bondage and how those legacies still shape American life.
Blending personal narrative, historical analysis, and public policy insight, Rabb challenges audiences to imagine what genuine reparative justice requires—and how descendants, communities, and institutions can take bold, long overdue action.
Organized by the Columbia University and Slavery Project in the Department of History in partnership with the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.
David Henry Hwang has a prolific career in theatre, television, and opera, from his Tony Award-winning play M. Butterfly to his most recent opera, The Monkey King, and his new rewrite of the book of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song. Fresh off the premiere of this new piece in Los Angeles, Hwang sits down with Heidi Kim, a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill, to discuss his work and his assessment of the artistic direction and economic needs of the arts in the United States today.
David Henry Hwang, Professor of Theatre Arts in the School of the Arts, is best known as the author of M. Butterfly, which won the 1988 Tony, Drama Desk, John Gassner, and Outer Critics Circle Awards, and was a Finalist for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize. He also sits on the Council of the Dramatists Guild and is a Professor of Theatre at Columbia University School of the Arts. Prof. Hwang is a Tony Award winner and three-time nominee, a Grammy Award winner who has been twice nominated, a three-time OBIE Award winner.
Heidi Kim, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, served as the founding director of the Asian American Center. Works in progress include Asian American Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press) and Beyond Reparations, a study of the cultural and political history of American governmental apology and repair.
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Presented by the Center for American Studies and the Asian American Initiative at Columbia University. Register here.
A special evening of literature, culture, and community at Casa Hispánica with New York Times Bestselling Author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Xochitl González to celebrate and discuss her newest novel, Last Night in Brooklyn.
Hosted by Dr. Nick J. Figueroa from the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, the Hispanic Institute, and the Latinos Urbanos Book Club, this intimate event brings together readers, book lovers, and the community for an engaging discussion with one of the most exciting literary voices writing today.
A proud Brooklyn native, Xochitl is the acclaimed author of Olga Dies Dreaming and Anita de Monte Laughs Last, works celebrated by The New York Times, TIME, NPR, and The Washington Post. In addition to her fiction, she is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where her cultural commentary earned her recognition as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Commentary.
Her newest novel, Last Night in Brooklyn, continues her powerful exploration of identity, family, ambition, and the complexities of contemporary life – set against the vibrant backdrop of New York City.
Register Here For FREE = https://XochitlAtColumbia.eventbrite.com
Join ISERP on Friday, April 24 at Interchurch Center (suite 503) for an ISERP Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar Series on “Blackness across Geographies.” The workshop centers how formulations of Blackness appear and are grounded within local and global relations of power that construct racial differences. Another scope of the workshop is to bring forth underutilized or emerging concepts, e.g. Black dignity, grounded in African and Black diasporic experiences and histories. As such, we seek to continue an established lineage of work while exploring new concepts and frameworks that can push us forward in thinking about what Blackness is within contemporary broader scholarly racial-political frameworks.
The all-day workshop will feature papers by Columbia Ph.D. students in the social sciences and humanities on plantation afterlives, prisons and police, as well as Black self-determination and self-actualization. Dr. Audrey Célestine (NYU), Dr. Amelia Herbert (Barnard), and Dr. Jean Beaman (CUNY Graduate Center) will participate as discussants. The workshop will include lunch and a reception.
Please register at this link by April 21.
Jaquira Díaz, Assistant Professor of Writing, discusses her new novel, This is the Only Kingdom, with Edwidge Danticat, African American and African Diaspora Studies. Introduced by Sarah Cole, Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts and Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature.
About This is the Only Kingdom:
When Maricarmen meets Rey el Cantante, beloved small-time Robin Hood and local musician on the rise, she begins to envision a life beyond the tight-knit community of el Caserío, Puerto Rico—beyond cleaning houses, beyond waiting tables, beyond the constant tug of war between the street hustlers and los camarones. But breaking free proves more difficult than she imagined, and she soon finds herself struggling to make a home for herself, for Rey, his young brother Tito, and eventually, their daughter Nena. Until one fateful day changes everything.
Fifteen years later, Maricarmen and Nena find themselves in the middle of a murder investigation as the community that once rallied to support Rey turns against them. Now Nena, a teenager haunted by loss and betrayal and exploring her sexual identity, must learn to fight for herself and her family in a world not always welcoming. For lovers of the Neapolitan novels, This is the Only Kingdom is an immersive and moving portrait of a family—and a community—torn apart by generational grief, and a powerful love letter to mothers, daughters, and the barrios that make them.
Tickets: https://events.leapevents.com/event/this-is-the-only-kingdom
The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia is pleased to invite students and scholars to the 2026 MESAAS Graduate Conference: “(Re)Tracing Land.” The conference will host interdisciplinary and cross-regional work that analyzes how land is inextricably tied to questions of jurisdiction, migration, innovation, and resistance.
The conference will open with a keynote address by Professor Rosie Bsheer, titled “The Land Question,” on Thursday, April 23rd at 10:00 AM. The keynote will be screened in person only in Knox Hall, Room 208. Breakfast and lunch will be provided for in-person attendees.
Registration in advance is required. Attendees can find the conference details and registration link here: MESAAS Graduate Student Conference.
Join the Asian American Initiative for a conversation with author Ted Chiang and Professor Denise Cruz, Columbia University. Register here.
5:30pm Check-in
6:00pm Program Begins
7:00pm Reception
The Asian American Initiative at Columbia University is focused on making the experiences of Asian Americans central to our understanding of America. The goals of the initiative are to use evidenced-based research to drive change in our public narratives, and to forge a greater sense of belonging and pride for and among Asian Americans.
