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
Centering on the Asian American Initiative’s philosophy of Data, Narrative, and Action (DNA), this panel discussion will showcase several existing projects that analyze national and local data on Asian Americans, explore directions for future research, and discuss implications for policy and action.
Join Apex for Youth leadership and AAI Acting Director Qin Gao for a conversation on Apex mission and opportunities.
Apex for Youth empowers Asian American youth from low-income and immigrant backgrounds to unlock their potential today and a world of possibility tomorrow. Its mission centers on building a world without limits for all Asian American youth. Throughout its programs, Apex provides mentorship and mental health services tailored to the unique needs of Asian American youth based on their developmental stage.
Edwidge Danticat talks with Brent Hayes Edwards about We’re Alone, her recent book of essays that trace a loose arc from her childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, and include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin. The essays explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience, moving from the personal to the global and back again. Literature and art remain her reliable companions and guides through both tragedies and triumphs. We’re Alone is a book that asks us to think through some of the world’s intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.
Speakers:
Edwidge Danticat is the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. She is the award-winning author of 18 books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist.
Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He is the editor of the journal PMLA. His books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003) and the English translation of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 Phantom Africa (Seagull, 2017).
This event is co-sponsored by the Maison Française, African American and African Diaspora Studies Department, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER).
The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race’s Asian American Diasporic Writers Series presents: Mixed-Race Literature Panel, a panel discussion on the state of mixed-race Asian American literature.
Food provided! No RSVP required for CUID holders; non-CUID holders can contact cser@columbia.edu for campus access.
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Conversant Bio:
Chloé Cooper Jones is a journalist and the author of the memoir Easy Beauty, which was named one of the best books of 2022 by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and TIME Magazine, and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir. She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, and a Howard Foundation Fellow.
Panelist Bios:
Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Book Award in Prose and the author of the bestselling short story collection, Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021); the backwards NYC-based novel, Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), which was a 2022 Foreword Reviews Book of the Day; and the choose-your-own-adventure memoir, Dream Pop Origami (Unsolicited Press, 2022), which was named a 2022 Book of the Year by The Independent Book Review, Mayday Review, and LitReactor. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, Columbia Journal, The Offing, Longreads, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, and Fiction, among others.
Claire Stanford is the author of the novel Happy for You (Viking, 2022), which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and awarded the 2023 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.
Alexandra Kleeman is a novelist and associate professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Kleeman is the author of Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021), a New York Times Notable Book; Intimations (Harper, 2016); and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (Harper Collins, 2015), which won the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She has received support from the American Academy in Rome, American Academy in Berlin, and John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, as well as from MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi, and Bread Loaf. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Paris Review, VOGUE, n+1, and Tin House, among others. She is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine.
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Join our open forum on immigration enforcement in the US and the racialization and criminalization of Latine communities, featuring Dr. David Hernández (Latina/o Studies and Critical Race and Political Economy, Mt. Holyoke) and an NYC-based organizer.
Dr. Hernández will situate the present within the longer history of US immigration detention and deportation. We will then hear from our organizer about how immigration enforcement is unfolding in NYC and what strategies are being developed to counter it.
Brief presentations will be followed by a Q&A, during which attendees can ask questions and voice their concerns. The open forum is co-sponsored by Columbia’s Institute of Latin American Studies and will have English to Spanish translation. This event is part of a year-long program that CSSD has been organizing, Countering the Carceral State, which explores the crises of disciplinary enforcement at home and abroad.
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Participen con nosotros en este foro sobre la inmigracion, la racialización y criminalización de las comunidades latinas en los Estados Unidos con el Dr. David Hernández (Estudios Latinos, Teoría Crítica de la Raza y Economía política de Mt. Holyoke) y también un organizador en NYC.
El Dr. Hernández va a situar el presente contra la larga historia de inmigracion, detención y deportación en los Estados Unidos. También, nos va hablar sobre cómo la aplicación de la ley migratoria se está desarrollando y estrategias para contrarrestarlo en NYC.
Después de las breves presentaciones tendremos un espacio para que los participantes puedan hacer preguntas y expresar sus preocupaciones. Este foro es co-patrocinado por el Instituto de Estudios Latinoamericanos de la Universidad de Columbia. Se les va a facilitar traducción al español. Este evento es parte de un largo programa que CSSD ha estado organizando Contrarrestando el Estado Carcelario – que exploran en nuestro país y en el exterior.
Featuring: Lila Abu-Lughod, Zahra Ali, Sa’ed Atshan, Elizabeth Bernstein, Abigail Boggs, Judith Butler, Tina Campt, Elizabeth Castelli, Lisa Duggan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jack Halberstam, Saidiya Hartman, Janet Jakobsen, Rebecca Jordan-Young, Temma Kaplan, Margot Kotler, Greta LaFleur, Sophie Lewis, Nick Mitchell, Manijeh Moradian, Amber Musser, Premilla Nadasen, Anupama Rao, Catherine Sameh, Evren Savci, C. Riley Snorton, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Catharine R. Stimpson, Neferti Tadiar, Maya Wind, Jacqueline Woodson, and more.
Friday, February 27, 2026, 10am – 7pm
& Saturday, February 28, 2026, 10am – 6:30pm
For half of a century, The Scholar and Feminist Conference has provided a mutually galvanizing space for scholars, activists, and artists to confront the most pressing issues at any given moment. Defining scholarship as for action from the very beginning, the conference has with unflagging regularity “met the moment” with intersectional feminist knowledge to inspire and build a robust response to contemporary crises. In many ways, the conference has grown up alongside academic feminism itself, yet, rather than uncritically mirror this history, it has consistently pushed back against feminism’s institutionalization. The conference highlights provocations, controversies, foundational gaps, and struggles that both cement its field-forming position and trouble a feminist progress narrative.
The conference’s history of meeting the moment with a vigorous feminist response provides a toolkit for understanding the present. This year, it asks: what are feminist responses to the global rise of authoritarianism and fascism, white Christian nationalism, ethnic cleansing and colonial violence, attacks on higher education and academic freedom, and assaults on queer and trans rights? Which practices of solidarity and feminist arts of transformation can mobilize resistance, provide sustenance, and produce social change? What can we learn from moments in our past, and how do they serve as a springboard for action today?
The Intercultural Resource House and Center under Multicultural Affairs at Columbia invites you to their upcoming “Food not ICE” event. The event will include a discussion about conditions in a New Jersey ICE detention facility alongside letter writing, a donation drive, and a fundraiser featuring student art prints.
Interested in the study of ethnicity and race? Join us for CSER’s Spring 2026 Open House to learn about pursing a major or minor in Ethnicity and Race Studies!
CSER is Columbia’s main interdisciplinary space for the study of ethnicity and race and their implications for thinking about culture, power, hierarchy, social identities, and political communities. Majors and minors engage with topics ranging from critical race theory and performance theory to histories of community activism.
The Institute for Research in African American Studies and the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies presents: The Annual Zora Neale Hurston Lecture honors the intellectual fierceness and talents of the singular anthropologist, novelist, and essayist Sister Zora — therefore also honoring our long Black intellectual tradition and its connection to Columbia, and Harlem. A complex figure, Hurston began her career as a Columbia University doctoral student in anthropology at Columbia University.
Her inimitable ‘spyglass’ and sensibilities have forever shifted the literary and anthropological landscapes: demonstrated by her novels “Jonah’s Gourd Vine” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” for example; ethnographic and folkloric works, “Mules and Men,” and “Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica;” her extraordinary autoethnographic work, “Dust Tracks on a Road;” short story collections, including “Spunk;” plays, and essays, like “Pet Negro System.”
Jamaica Kincaid is the 2026 Mellon Arts Project Artist-in-Residence in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. The globally acclaimed author of numerous widely taught and translated novels and essays— including “Annie John,” “Lucy,” “A Small Place,” “The Autobiography of My Mother,” and “See Now Then” — the Antiguan-American novelist’s profound intellectual and cultural influence extends far beyond literature, into art, cultural studies, and political thought. She is a professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Edwidge Danticat is the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Her most recent essay collection, “We’re Alone,” published in 2025, joins her previous acclaimed works: including “Create Dangerously;” “Breath, Eyes, Memory,” an Oprah Book Club selection; “Krik? Krak,” a National Book Award finalist; “Claire of the Sea Light;” “Brother, I’m Dying,” a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; as well as seven books for children and young adults; and a travel narrative, “After the Dance.”
The symposium brings together scholars working across and beyond Middle East and North Africa studies to explore how discursive fields are constituted, and to ask what becomes possible when we read across and against established disciplinary and regional boundaries. Rather than simply juxtaposing area studies frameworks (e.g., Syria or Palestine), we aim to theorize “the regional” anew. This conversation began as an exchange around Syro-Palestine, reflecting on how regional fields—particularly those of Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria—have been positioned in relation to the Question of Palestine. This positioning has tended to circumscribe the terrain of inquiry, foreclosing other narratives, epistemologies, and questions. Our symposium aims to explore a conceptual vocabulary that resists colonial inheritances and disciplinary segmentation, and that reimagines scholarly methods through forms of relation not yet captured by dominant frameworks.
The two-day program includes a Thursday evening keynote panel featuring four speakers, open to the public and the Columbia community, followed by three closed-door sessions on Friday with a cohort of invited scholars.
SYMPOSIUM CO-ORGANIZERS:
- Aamer Ibraheem, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.
- Adrien Zakar, Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and the History of Science and Technology, University of Toronto
- Esmat Elhalaby, Assistant Professor in History, University of Toronto
- Iheb Guermazi, The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University
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.
