Join Pauline Peretz for a talk on her new book, A Black Army: Segregation and the U.S. Military at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, 1941-1945. Peretz is a professor of American history at Université Paris 8, senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France, and coordinator of the Franco-Brazilian project “Uses of the Past and Politics of Time.” No RSVP required.
Brian Kwoba (University of Memphis) in conversation with Brent Hayes Edwards (Columbia University)
Brian Kwoba (University of Memphis) will be discussing his biography of Hubert H. Harrison, a long-forgotten founder of Black radical thought. The conversation will be moderated by Brent Hayes Edwards.
The significance of Hubert Henry Harrison (1883–1927)—as a journalist, activist, and educator—lies in his innovation of radical solutions to radical injustices. Many students in the Columbia and Slavery and Columbia ’68 seminars have used the Hubert Harrison papers in the RBML. As an early advocate for socialism and Black-led political power, he did far more than cultivate the rich, dark soil in which the so-called “Harlem Renaissance” would take root. Harrison also played a pivotal role in the rise of Marcus Garvey and the emergence of the largest international organization of African people in modern history. Because of his fearless radicalism, however, he has been erased from popular memory.
Co-hosted by the Herbert Lehman Center for American History and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies.
“Brian Kwoba has written a beautiful, intellectual biography as radical and original as its subject. He excavates Hubert H. Harrison—brilliant Marxist, Black nationalist, internationalist, and gender rebel—revealing dimensions even his most scrupulous chroniclers missed.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
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.
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?
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.
We’re Alone: Edwidge Danticat, in conversation with Brent Hayes Edwards
“Reading Edwidge Danticat’s We’re Alone is like sitting down to listen to an old friend …With clear, concise prose that delves into harsh topics without losing its sense of humor, Danticat once again proves that she is one of contemporary literature’s strongest, most graceful voices.” – NPR Book Reviews
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.
We’re Alone has garnered high critical praise and was a Finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle for Nonfiction, and named by NPR.org, Publishers Weekly, and Electric Literature Best Book of 2024.
Contact Information Maison Francaise 2128544482 fng2108@columbia.edu
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; contact cser@columbia.edu with any questions.
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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.
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 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
