Past Events
The 2026 Lewis-Ezekoye Distinguished Lecture in Africana Studies will take place on Friday, February 20, 2026, at 6pm in the LeFrak Theatre. Allison Janae Hamilton is an artist and filmmaker whose work is represented in numerous permanent collections, including the Smithsonian Art Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. She is currently in post-production for her narrative short, Venus of Ossabaw, and is a 2026 Sundance Institute Screenwriting Fellow for her feature film, Floridaland. Hamilton holds a PhD in American Studies from New York University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.
Register here to attend: https://forms.gle/Zsfmqc1pTmaqQH4A8
To access the event via live stream, please utilize the provided link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/96732741315
This talk explores ethnographic moments of connection, misrecognition, and slippage between the laws and policies that govern nonprofit organizations who work with queer and transgender youth of color and one of the performance categories presented in the ballroom scene: Sex Siren. It asks, what does it mean to cultivate an ethic, politics, and culture of “sex positivity” in an institutional setting where sex, gender, and sexuality are surveilled, regulated, and policed? And how does the regulation and policing of sex, gender, and sexuality change the very structure of desire and experiences of pleasure?
Emily R. Bock is a cultural anthropologist whose research and writing is situated at the intersection of black studies, queer theory, and performance studies. She is currently completing her book manuscript, Ordinary Queens: Queer Performances of the Good Life, which is an ethnography of the strange and strained relationship between LGBTQ+ nonprofit organizations and the contemporary ballroom scene in New York City – an underground, predominantly black, queer community of performers, artists, dancers, designers, and activists. She is an assistant professor of American Studies at The George Washington University.
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. In-person. Non-CUID holders require advance registration for campus access. Please contact Jeanne Roche at jh3834@columbia.edu.
Speaker: Philip J. Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Harvard University
During the American Revolution, representatives of the Continental Congress sought to forge alliances with Native nations through treaties, much as they did with European powers like France. This talk will examine the failure of these early diplomatic efforts, focusing on the treaties signed with the Maliseet in 1776 (Treaty of Watertown) and the Lenape in 1778 (Treaty of Fort Pitt). Philip Deloria will highlight notable provisions in these agreements—including their shift from Native diplomatic forms to legalistic ones—and consider how truly reciprocal and respected treaties with Native nations might have altered the very nature of the United States. The talk will invite an imaginative rethinking of the course of American history, a creative thought experiment that centers Indigenous land, diplomacy, and sovereignty.
Free admission. Free event parking at the 52 Oxford Street Garage starting at 5:00 pm. Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. This lecture is presented to mark the 250th Anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence.
Advance registration recommended for in-person and online attendance.
The Oral History Archives at Columbia’s How We Listen sessions are delighted to invite you to a special online gathering that blends culture, history, and the timeless game of mahjong.
This event offers a chance to hear from The Mahjong Project’s history keeper, Nicole Wong about her efforts to preserve mahjong’s rules, etiquette, and personal anecdotes for generations. Her beautiful website and companion book, Mahjong: House Rules from Across the Asian Diaspora illustrates how the game bridges families across continents and creates a living archive of tradition. We’ll be in conversation about the project’s fascinating findings, sparking conversation about the rituals, homemade rules, and strategies that shape our communal identity. You’ll also have the opportunity to share your own experiences or questions about how games become cultural touchstones and imagine new ways to keep these stories alive.
We’ll open the floor and chat for an interactive discussion where you can ask questions, reflect on personal mahjong memories, and explore how these narratives can inform teaching, research, or community projects.
Who should come? Anyone curious about cultural heritage, oral history, or community storytelling. Students and scholars interested in anthropology, sociology, Asian studies, or game theory will find it especially enriching, as will faculty and staff seeking interdisciplinary inspiration for their work.
Tuesday, February 10th at 4pm EST | Join virtually via the Zoom link that will be provided after you register at this link.
Humanitarian Aid on Trial: The Harboring Law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and Undocumented Migration in the US-Mexico Borderlands
Dr. Scott Warren will speak on the topic of migration and humanitarian aid in the Sonoran Desert region of the U.S.-Mexico borderland. Specifically, he will discuss his arrest in 2018 by the U.S. Border Patrol for providing “food, water, clean clothes, and beds” to two men from Central America, and the subsequent trial in which he was ultimately acquitted on federal charges of harboring undocumented migrants. He will also share updates on the current state of humanitarian aid work in the borderland.
Scott Warren is a geographer and humanitarian aid organizer known for his work with No More Deaths in Ajo, Arizona, providing water, food and shelter to migrants in the deadly Sonoran Desert. His 2018 arrest for “harboring” was followed by a 2019 acquittal, affirming humanitarian aid as a moral imperative. He continues to document migrant deaths and provide aid, guided by his belief that all life is sacred.
Where did ICE and mass deportation come from? Join us for an urgent talk on this by the eminent historian of immigration, Columbia University’s own Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian-American Studies and History and prize-winning author of multiple books on the topic. The talk is at 4 PM EST, February 9th, Monday. To register, use the QR code in poster below or click the link below:
Register: https://tinyurl.com/ngai2026
From time to time, the Mailman School of Public Health’s Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health sponsors quickly organized, urgent talks on issues of major public concern unfolding rapidly at the moment. This is one of them. Because of the quick organization, they can’t be in-person, but one bonus is anybody can come to them. There’s nobody better than Prof. Ngai, an intellectual titan and leading historian, to bring needed historical context and clarity.
Morgan examines the legal and cultural expectations of indentured servitude and race in the case of Elizabeth Key, who, upon discovering that she was to be defined as a slave rather than a servant, successfully sued for her freedom in colonial Virginia in 1656.
Jennifer L. Morgan is The Silver Family Professor of History in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis and the Department of History at New York University. In 2024 she was the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” Award and was the Andrew R. Mellon Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2024-25. She is currently working on The Eve of Slavery—a project about slavery and freedom in the seventeenth century that centers around Elizabeth Key—a black woman who successfully sued for her freedom in Virginia in 1656. In conjunction with that project, she serves as an Executive Producer for Key to Freedom a narrative film project written and directed by her daughter Emma “Zinha” Morgan-Bennett. Morgan served as the Council Chair for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture. She is the past Vice President of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and is a lifetime member of the Association of Black Women Historians.
The Barnard Center for Research on Women presents: The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life, a reading and discussion featuring Marisa Solomon, J.T. Roane, Mon Mohapatra, and C. Riley Snorton. Co-Sponsors: The Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College
Join BCRW for an exciting book salon in celebration of Barnard Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies Marisa Solomon’s The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life with J.T. Roane (Geography, Rutgers) and Mon Mohapatra (Community Justice Exchange), moderated by C. Riley Snorton (English & Comparative Literature and ISSG, Columbia).
In The Elsewhere Is Black, Solomon examines how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of settler colonial racial capitalism. Tracing the flow of trash and waste across Black spaces, from Brooklyn’s historically Black Bedford-Stuyvesant to the post-plantation towns of Virginia’s Tidewater, Solomon contends that waste infrastructures concentrate environmental risk in an elsewhere that is routinely Black. She theorizes the relationship between the devaluation of land and Black and more-than-human life to reveal how the risks of poisoning, police violence, dispossession, and poverty hold Black life captive. Highlighting the creativity and resilience that emerge amid these conditions, Solomon, Roane, and Monhapatra will invite us to consider collaborative conversations across new eco-political possibilities that center the book’s fundamental ask: What forms of environmentalism arise when Black un/freedom has always been entangled with waste?
Part of the Justice Forum series for the discussion of books and ideas on justice, equality, and mass incarceration.
“What does this haunting reveal?” asks Brandi Summers, delineating the historical and contemporary destruction and disinvestment of Black Oakland as a form of Black urbicide—the forcible and intentional unmaking of Black urban spaces that enables the state and private capital to slowly but methodically chip away at the Black city through multiple and varied sets of processes and practices. In conversation with Rosalyn Deutsche, Brandi Summers will argue that the intended death of the Black city produces ghosts that haunt its cultural and material landscapes, leaving only traces of a past Black presence. These ghosts reveal the power dynamics that contribute to social transformation and what has been hidden by those who engage in repressive tactics.
About the Speakers
Brandi T. Summers is Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, A&S African American and African Diaspora Studies. Director of Graduate Studies. Her research engages theoretical themes that cut across multiple domains of social life. She builds on epistemological and methodological insights from Black studies, cultural and urban geography, urban sociology, and media studies by examining the cultural, political, and economic dynamics by which race and space are reimagined and reordered.
Summers’ first book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), explores how aesthetics and race converge to map blackness in Washington, D.C. In it, she demonstrates the way that competing notions of blackness structure efforts to raise capital and develop land in the gentrifying city. Her second book, Oakland Echoes: Reimagining and Reclaiming the Black City explores and highlights the roots and routes of resistance and reclamation, not only as a response to urban gentrification and related economic policies in her hometown, Oakland, but also as a quest to think about the past, present, and future of a Black city.
Rosalyn Deutsche is an art historian and critic who taught modern and contemporary art at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York City. She has written extensively and lectured internationally on such interdisciplinary topics as art and urbanism, art and the public sphere, art and war, art and psychoanalysis, and feminist theories of subjectivity in visual representation. Her essays have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Grey Room, October, Society and Space, among other journals, in many exhibition catalogues and anthologies, and in numerous translations. Deutsche is the author of Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (MIT Press, 1996), Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War (Columbia University Press, 2010), and Not-Forgetting: Contemporary Art and the Interrogation of Mastery (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Join the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race as we celebrate the beginning of the semester with our Spring 2026 Welcome Back Social! Dinner from Roti Roll will be provided.
