Poet, musician, filmmaker, actor and intellectual Saul Williams discusses the relationships between aesthetic forms and political education in conversation with Dr. Shana Redmond, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference. Reflecting on practices of Black experimentation—in language, music, and film—this dialogue explores the various sites of enclosure and foreclosure, from the nation state to the university, that bear upon the present and what practices are necessary to enact more just futures. Register here.

This conversation is the second installment of the University in/and Crisis working group, a collaboration between the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study at Teachers College, and is supported by The Radio in the Orchard. It is presented as part of The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cultures’s Black On Screen: A Century of Radical Visual Culture, a centennial series capturing 100 years of local and transnational Black movement work and artistic evolution on film.

Join us for a 2 day conference in collaboration with the University of Connecticut’s (UConn) Department of History, Columbia Department of History, Columbia Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race, and the University Seminars of Columbia University.

This conference will revisit the discussion on the comparative historiography of indigenous borderlands. Beginning from with mid-1990s scholarship, it will incorporate the great but until now largely separate advances in South and North America, while taking stock of important shifts towards the more prominent role of indigenous scholars, settler colonialism theory, environmental history, and scholarly engagement with contemporary struggles. The conference will bring together scholars working in History, Anthropology, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and related fields. The proposal is to go beyond national historiographical frameworks, opening the way to transnational approaches. The workshop aims to deepen the continental comparisons of indigenous borderlands, tracing similarities and differences to develop connected approaches.

More details and RSVP here.

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 Patricia Engel

Tuesday, October 28th, 6-7:30PM

Casa Hispánica (612 W 116th St.)

DINNER PROVIDED!

Patricia Engel is a New York Times bestselling novelist. Her short story collection, The Faraway World, was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and her novel Infinite Country won the New American Voices Award and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. https://patriciaengel.com

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

Join students, faculty, and staff at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) to learn about the Ethnicity and Race Studies major and minor, as well as CSER’s programming slate and student-led initiatives!

At the Open House, you’ll hear from CSER’s Director of Undergraduate Studies about the major and minor in Ethnicity and Race Studies, as well as from CSER’s Senior Project Seminar instructor about the thesis writing process. Finally, you’ll hear from current students, faculty, and staff about CSER’s vibrant student community, robust history, and integral role as Columbia’s main interdisciplinary space for the study of ethnicity and race.

• View CSER’s major requirements
• View CSER’s minor/concentration requirements
• Learn about CSER’s origins and history
• Follow CSER on Instagram

The Barnard Center for Research on Women presents a book salon with Kim F. Hall, in conversation with Patricia A. Matthew, Debapriya Sarkar, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, and Jennifer Morgan, moderated by Tapiwa Gambura.

Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Africana Studies Kim F. Hall’s forthcoming book The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean (The University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2025) centers the complicated history of sugar in order to ask what lies beyond its narrative of pleasure. Hall explores how the unique emphasis the English placed on confections as a marker of status and national identity in the seventeenth century offers a framework for grappling with changing notions of race, gender, labor, and domesticity that shaped early colonization. Drawing from a wide range of early Anglo-Caribbean texts—from cookbooks and banquet menus to economic poetry, to maps and treatises on plantation labor and health—Hall uncovers colonial discourses deployed across representations of Caribbean colonization and slavery. Working across the fields of Early Modern, Critical Race, and Food Studies, Hall offers us the language of plantation aesthetics in order to expose the violence ingrained in sugar that is made to disappear through the pleasure derived from whiteness, purity, and perfection.

This event is free, open to the public, and will stream online on BCRW’s YouTube page. ASL interpretation and live transcription will be provided. Get tickets HERE.

For the Helen Pond McIntyre ‘48 Lecture, Tourmaline will discuss her new biography of Marsha P. Johnson, followed by conversation with Professor C. Riley Snorton. Finding creative guidance in the archive, they will explore the power of Johnson’s life as a blueprint for living today and the continued struggle for queer and trans liberation.

Tourmaline’s new book, MARSHA: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson (Penguin Random House, 2025), is the first definitive biography of the Black trans activist and icon. Richly researched and vividly written with extensive access to Marsha’s friends and family, this book brings to light her legacy and unwavering commitment to the fight for queer and trans liberation. It was named a National Bestseller, received a Starred Review by Publishers Weekly, and was selected by The New York Times for inclusion in the Nonfiction Spring Book Preview. Tourmaline is an award-winning artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist who has spent two decades studying, preserving, and celebrating Johnson’s life.

This event is part of a series, “We Will Not Be Erased: Queer Archives, Trans Histories,” that will continue with a conversation between Tourmaline and Steven Watson—creator of Artifacts, a platform dedicated to preserving rare archival footage of queer and trans cultural pioneers—on November 19.

This event is free and open to the public with live ASL interpretation provided by Brandon Kazen-Maddox of Body Language Productions and DB-TIP (DeafBlind Training, Interpreting and Professional Development). Registration is required. BCRW will provide free copies of MARSHA to the first 140 students who register.

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.