EVENTS

Upcoming Events
April 2026
April 30, 12:15 pm –     

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

May 2026
May 6, 2:00 pm –  3:30 pm    

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.

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