Columbia University

When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story about Race in America's Cities and Universities is a longitudinal historical account of what was undoubtedly the most audacious effort in the nation to ride the 1960s wave of black power and transform an Ivy League university's elitist practices on campus and in the surrounding community. Written to appeal to community-engaged faculty, students, and community activists in a variety of fields, the book (1) assesses the triumphs and subsequent unraveling of experiments to achieve racial justice in Columbia University's School of Architecture and in the nearby Harlem/East Harlem community, (2) demonstrates how those triumphs lived on in the lives of the school's ethnic minority recruits and as best practices in university-community relationships, and in the fields of architecture and urban planning, and (3) derives lessons learned about public scholarship and service to marginalized minority communities in todays so-called colorblind society.  Its subject matter lies at the confluence of urban history, higher education, and ethnic studies, its story narrated by a cohort of the school's highly accomplished ethnic minority alumni (the author included), who offer a unique from-below perspective on Columbia's well-documented university-community conflicts of the 1960s

Through different paragraph styles, Edwards brings the readers in the story, in a way that the reader lives through the experience the writer had. As much as a writer would try to explain in words something he experienced, emotions are indescribable. Edwards uses a wonderful of carefully constructing the essay in a way that the readers not only ‘reads’ the story, but also ‘lives’ the story. In that way, the writer tells us his experience, by making us having that same experience.

The essay proposes a critical contextual reading of al-Shidyaq's Leg Over Leg by establishing a fruitful dialogue between the novel and its own cultural and historical context, so that the literary text and the cultural history are both illuminating each other. The method used for such a reading is the metaphor of labyrinth and the essay advances some arguments to support this method, textual evidence that proves the feasibility of this method and concluding critiques of the theory of New Historicism as well as of some scholarly papers about the novel. Although it places the novel in its historical and cultural background, the method of reading proposed here avoids the trap of turning the novel into a "historical document," because this "seems to obscure more than it illuminates," "considering the text's satirical and highly stylized mode of narration" (Johnson, x). It also avoids turning the history into some literary addenda with no other purpose than to support the textual references to the outer world, because it also obscures rather than illuminates, considering the larger social and cultural concerns of the author's time. Therefore, this reading method is a game of revealing and concealing, in which the journey becomes an end in itself. A reading that enriches the knowledge not only of a historical period or of a book, but also of a cultural period known as Nahdah and its ambivalent interpretations, of an intellectual trajectory shaped by travels and translations, of interlaced literary experiments that place Leg over Leg on the same shelf with Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy or James Joyce's Ulysses-such a reading brings forward the metaphor of a labyrinth as the best illustration of this method.

Diciembre 2019: con los exámenes finales encima, una estudiante del Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) se suicida. Las versiones sobre el suceso empiezan a circular rápido, siendo la predominante que la estudiante acaba con su vida por las presiones académicas sufridas en el ITAM. Días después, la madre de la estudiante aclara que la chica no se suicidó, que había muerto en un ataque de epilepsia en su casa, después de haber vivido un episodio de humillación verbal con un profesor en la institución. La alumna estudiaba dos carreras en el ITAM: Relaciones Internacionales y Derecho. En la primera versión, la del suicidio, la responsabilidad del ITAM se limitaría a reestructurarse internamente para evitar en el futuro este tipo de episodios en la medida de lo posible. En la segunda versión, la de la muerte inducida por un episodio de bullying por parte de un profesor, bueno… ¿el profesor y el ITAM podrían tener responsabilidad legal sobre lo sucedido? Además de que, de todas maneras en ambos casos, la institución tendría que llevar a cabo una reestructuración interna para que esto no vuelva a suceder.

La produzione ultima del pittore veneziano, fin dal Vasari , è stata spesso considerata meno brillante rispetto a quella della giovinezza e della maturità. Negli ultimi venticinque anni la pennellata di Tiziano si fa sempre più aperta fino ad arrivare alla "pittura di macchia" (Vasari), disfatta, sciolta. I profili si fanno indistinti. L'atmosfera si fa carica di proiezioni. Questa radicale nuova proposta di stile "stupiva, irritava e persino scandalizzava" chi osservava quelle opere, sentite "non finite". L’artista stesso scrisse a Carlo V che non si riteneva capace di ricreare la finezza e la bellezza dello stile pittorico di un Michelangelo, di un Raffaello o di un Correggio, e anche se ne fosse stato in grado, sarebbe stato giudicato solo in rapporto a quegli artisti, se non addirittura un loro imitatore. Invece l’ambizione lo spingeva a cercare una nuova strada con cui guadagnarsi la fama, così come gli altri si erano procurati la celebrità alla loro maniera. Già nel 1545, nel sontuoso ritratto di Pietro Aretino, la pennellata variabile di Tiziano fu rilevata e messa in discussione. L’apice di questo stile pittorico introdotto nel Martirio si ritrova nell'incompiuta Pietà, ultima opera  dell’artista.

The name VHDL is representative of the language itself: it is a two-level acronym that stands for VHSIC Hardware Description Language; VHSIC stands for very high speed integrated circuit. The language is vast, verbose, and was originally designed for modeling digital systems for simulation. As a result, the full definition of the language [1] is much larger than what we are concerned with here because many constructs in the language (e.g., variables, arbitrary events, floating-point types, delays) do not have hardware equivalents and hence not synthesizable.

Im Dezember 2012  wurde durch den Wissenschaftsbeirat der Masaryk-Universität (auf Vorschlag des Wissenschaftsbeirats der Philosophischen Fakultät der Masaryk-Universität hin) beschlossen,  dem em. Prof. der Yale University Peter Demetz im Zusammenhang mit seiner Lehrtätigkeit an der Masaryk-Universität (insb. in den Jahren 2010-2014 am Wissenschaftskolleg Österreich-Bibliothek /wiko.phil.muni.,cz/) und anläßlich seines 90. Geburtstages (21. Oktober 1922), den Ehrentitel des Doktors der Philologie zu verleihen.
Die Ehrenpromotion fand am 26. November 2014 in der Aula der Juristischen Fakultät der Masaryk-Universität statt. Vorangegangen war der Festvortrag Gymnasiast namens Bolzano bittet Libussa um Schutz und Hilfe (1796) von Prof. Demetz in der Aula der Philosophischen Fakultät der Masaryk-Universität am 25. November, dem nicht gebotenen Gedenktag von Katharina von Alexandrien, Schutzpatronin vieler philosophischer Fakultäten und Studenten.  (Der deutsche Text des Vortrags "Libussa auf Latein - Ein Gymnasiast namens Bolzano bittet die sagenhafte Herrscherin um Schutz und Hilfe (1796) und das lat. Libussa-Gedicht Bolzanos samt der deutschen Übersetzung in: Peter Demetz. Auf den Spuren Bernard Bolzanos. Essays. Wuppertal. Arco Verlag, 2013, S. 17-35 u. 36-41.

House Housing è il titolo della mostra allestita dal Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture al secondo piano di Casa Muraro, nei locali di proprietà della Columbia University, durante il mese di giugno 2014, e che coinciderà con l’apertura della Quattordicesima Mostra Internazionale di Architettura di Venezia. Realizza- ta da un gruppo di ricercatori della Columbia, la mostra è allestita in forma di open house e presenta gli inizi di un progetto di lunga durata incentrato sull’analisi critica del coinvolgimento dell’architettura con il mercato immobiliare, in special modo nel campo della progettazione residenziale. La mostra è una risposta—seppur non sollecitata—al tema “Fundamentals,” proposto dal curatore della Biennale, Rem Koolhaas, che definisce “gli elementi fondamentali dell’architettura impiegati da ogni architetto, ovunque e in qualsiasi momento.” House Housing risponde a tale tema con una campionatura multimediale di “fondamentali” economici che mostrano i fatti basilari della modernità in costruzione—dai governi, industrie, istituzioni e culture—a partire dall’inizio del Novecento. Diciannove brevi episodi storici sviluppati dall’esibizione collocano, dal 1910 al 2014, il settore dell’abitazione al centro del regime economico corrente, con gli Stati Uniti d’America quale nodo di influenza in una rete transnazionale.

The New York Public Library was created in 1895, the same year Columbia’s Low Library opened its doors on the new campus in Morningside Heights. From that time on, the two institutions engaged in formal and informal cooperation in collection development and have been viewed as either complementary resources or even one resource. There were also numerous individuals who while being affiliated with one of these institutions were also readers at the other institution or even impacted the other institution through their activities. The present essay is meant to contribute to the description of the interactions between the NYPL and Columbia University in the field of Slavic, East European and Eurasian studies by highlighting some of them.

Revised version of “The ‘Dark Ages’ of Medieval Iran: Medieval Studies, Islam, and the Digital Version of the Encyclopaedia Iranica,” a paper presented in June 2010 at the 3rd International MARGOT Conference.

In December 2010, this version was submitted for peer review to be included into the Selected Conference Proceedings.  The guidelines for submissions were limited to matters of style (author-year format, neither endnotes nor footnotes) and a clear instruction regarding length (2000-6000 words including bibliography).  In August 2011, this version was rejected, without the option of "revise and resubmit."  While my request for the reviewer's marked-up copy was ignored, the editors shared with me the evaluation of the single anonymous reviewer:

My recommendation is that the article is not publishable in its current state. While I believe the subject could be interesting, the author's approach is awkward and often confusing. Paragraph topic sentences go astray, never leading to any kind of solid synthesis. There is an ongoing mismatch of information regarding print encyclopedias and digital research sources (including but certainly not defined by the concept of an encyclopedia) - this is made more (and unnecessarily) complex by the author's presumptions about how such digital resources are (or are not) appreciated by the academy. I could never quite understand whether the author was defending the resources and the people who make them, or the academic structure which (the author seems to believe) undermines them. Curiously, and without preamble, the author uses Wikipedia as the bar by which an academic encyclopedia should be judged. Soon thereafter, the author implies that universities are dismantling their IT infrastructures and outsourcing software development to Google and Wikipedia - a statement that as articulated seems unsupportable.For an essay that purports to be a case study, in my opinion, there needs to be a better balance between the state of the field and specifics of the project at hand (EIr). There should also be a balance between the frustrations inherent in such a task and the benefits in undertaking and sustaining it. Rather than general inferences to challenges faced in the early days of digitizing the project, I would like to read more about what makes the digital realm helpful for a specialized project such as this. Have the contributors discovered a beneficial digital solution to the multilingual nature of their research? Have they been able to maximize the potential of metadata in a way that strengthens the project? Does the nature of a de-centralized digital project (physically housed at Columbia but available to contributing scholars all over the world) enhance the perspectives inherent in the encyclopedia entries - or perhaps allow for dynamic interaction and meaningful amendment among scholars collaborating on entries? Several times the author refers to the marginalized nature of scholars of Iranian studies within multidisciplinary medieval studies. Does the author find that the digital platform assists in overcoming that marginalization (the author may be attempting to discuss this, but veers off whenever coming close to a conclusion).It should also be pointed out that there are several significant grammatical and stylistic errors and oversights in the essay. For example, Ehsan Yarshater is first referred to as "her" (p. 5) and later as "he/him". I assume the "her" was a typographical error, but is confusing. There are also missing URL's (marked only by a "?") and other confusing errors."

La communication traitera de l'influence d'Aline Mayrisch sur Henri Michaux pour illustrer les représentations du vide dans la création littéraire et artistique de ce dernier. Épouse du patron d'une grande entreprise sidérurgique, Aline Mayrisch, femme de lettres, fut critique littéraire et artistique. Comme l’abbaye de Pontigny, son château de Colpach au Luxembourg était un véritable lieu d'accueil pour les écrivains, les intellectuels et les artistes. Michaux et Aline partageaient la curiosité pour l’Orient. Elle se sentait particulièrement attirée par la doctrine Zen, où une élite japonaise trouve le secret du recueillement et de la paix intérieure. Elle a découvert des points communs entre le mysticisme asiatique et celui du Moyen Âge européen. Sans Aline, Michaux n’aurait jamais fait de poèmes et produit de peintures sur le thème du vide.

Digital Humanities is currently undergoing a reconfiguration at McGill. The Digital Humanities Initiative is bringing together digital humanists from across a number of faculties for the first time. Yet it is not clear what Digital Humanities actual are: this central problem arises from the vast potential the digital age presents for humanities scholarship. Key to the dilemma is whether Digital Humanities itself is something distinct from analog humanities, or whether it is merely the reconfiguration of humanities itself using digital technologies and media. At the same time, for many Digital Humanities also offers important opportunities for reconsidering the place of the humanities within society itself. Not only are digital technologies, media, and social models reconfiguring public life, they are also offering new avenues for intellectual engagement and the ways in which humanistic studies as well as artistic creation enters into, and becomes active in, the public realm. Moving ...

In Narrating Practice with Children and Adolescents, social workers, sociologists, researchers, and helping professionals share engaging and evocative stories of practice that aim to center the young client’s story. Drawing on work with a variety of disadvantaged populations in New York City and around the world, they seek to raise awareness of the diversity of the individual experiences of youth. They make use of a variety of narrative approaches to offer new perspectives on a range of critical health care, mental health, and social issues that shape the lives of children and adolescents. The book considers the narratives we tell about the lives and experiences of children and adolescents and proposes counternarratives that challenge dominant ideas about childhood. Contributors examine the environments and structures that shape the lives of children and youth from an ecological lens. From their stories emerge questions about how those working with young clients might respond to a c...

Focuses on restaurants as one of the key spaces in contemporary global food culture that have recently acquired media visibility in the practices imaginary of educated consumers, allowing them to convey their identities in terms of cultural capital, connoisseurship, and cosmopolitanism. Restaurants appear as places where chefs express their skills and creativity, in constant negotiations with their customers’ preferences, media pressure, and business priorities. Big Night (Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott, 1996) and other movies that focus on restaurants and chefs, like Dinner Rush (Giraldi, 2000), Waiting (McKittrick, 2005), Today’s Special (Kaplan, 2009), Hundred-Food Journey (Lasse Hallström, 2014), and Chef (Jon Favreau, 2014), assume a critical point of view vis-à-vis mainstream U.S. food culture, revealing the tensions, contradictions, and inequalities in food business. However, their distribution and self-representation through marketing reiterate the stereotypes the films ap...

In 1968, Black and white college students took over one of America's most prestigious institutions, capturing the attention of local and state elected officials, national organizations, community dwellers and prominent activists. In Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s, historian Stefan Bradley of St. Louis University documents the collision of Black student power against Columbia University's plans to build a large, private gymnasium in the park situated between the Ivy League institution and the Harlem community. The book is structured into two parts with eight well-researched chapters. The first part attempts to highlight the important factors leading up to the student occupation of five buildings on Columbia's Morningside campus; it particularly focuses on landownership and spatial control. The second part addresses the role students played in changing Columbia University, focusing on the activism of the Students' Afro-American Society (SAS) and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

The New York Public Library was created in 1895, the same year Columbia’s Low Library opened its doors on the new campus in Morningside Heights. From that time on, the two institutions engaged in formal and informal cooperation in collection development and have been viewed as either complementary resources or even one resource. There were numerous individuals who, while being affiliated with one of these institutions, were also readers at the other institution or even impacted the other institution through their activities. The present essay highlights foundational interactions between the NYPL and Columbia University that had an enduring impact in the field of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies.

According to Iranian political theorist Reza Parchizadeh, “The academic milieu in the West in general and the US in particular favors the Islamic Republic in one way or another. That is probably due to the liberal/leftist tendencies in the academy that mistake Iran’s anti-imperialist rhetoric for a truly anti-imperialist stance. As a result of what I mentioned above, the academy generally tends to overlook the fact that the Islamic Republic is nowadays one of the most nefarious imperialist forces in the world. So far, they have brought Syria, Iraq, and Yemen under different forms of colonization. Just look at the massacres in Syria.”

The conference explored the history of Islamic Studies in North America in general, and at Columbia University in particular.  Its starting point was the observation that Islamic Studies slipped into the graduate curriculum when in 1886 Richard Gottheil (1862-1936) and A. V. Williams Jackson (1862-1937) were first hired to teach Semitic and Indo-Iranian languages, respectively.  The conference’s historical occasion was provided by the 150th anniversary of the birth of Gottheil and Jackson in 2012.

The conference began with opening remarks, followed by a panel of the history of Oriental Studies at Columbia between 1886 and 1969.  Four presenters discussed the Columbia professors Edith Porada (1912-1994), Arthur Jeffrey (1892-1959), and Joseph Schacht (1908-1969), as well as Gottheil and Jackson.  In the afternoon, a second panel explored how after 1945 the emphasis on Social Studies transformed Near Eastern Studies.  A survey of the development of Area Studies was followed by papers about the study of Islam in the African-American community and in Persianate societies, respectively.  The panel concluded with a presentation juxtaposing the self-understanding of Jewish and Islamic Studies.  The conference ended with a round table on Islamic and Global Studies in the twenty-first century, offering presenters and audience the chance to explore future approaches to the study of Islam in North America.

Trans/Formations of Arabic Literary Theory: Prospects and Limits
Columbia University
December 14 – 17, 2021

Hosted by Columbia University’s Arabic Studies Seminar, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Sheikh Zayed Book Award, and Brill Academic Publishers

In Memory of Jaroslav Stetkevych

Program and registration links: https://icls.columbia.edu/news/program-foundations-and-transformations-of-arabic-literary-theory/

Raises the central issues of the book by using Derrida’s speech at the 1998 Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française as a means to lay out Derrida’s relation to Levinas, focusing particularly on the role or irony for each and how it intervenes in their respective relations to philosophy, religion and literature.

In this paper, I use the program for a concert of electroacoustic music as a point of departure for discussing issues related to teaching electroacoustic music in the musicology or music theory classroom. Specifically, I examine the implied pedagogical framework of the Masterpieces of 20th Century Multi-channel Tape Music concert (hosted by Columbia University in the summer of 2000 as part of the Lincoln Center 2000 Festival) as it presented six works to a general, non-academic audience. In conclusion I suggest educators resist the urge to establish new canons of electroacoustic works,  and instead employ pedagogical approaches that encourage critical engagement with contemporary musical works from a variety of perspectives.

Professor Ehsan Yarshater passed on Sunday, 2 September 2018,  at the age of 98.  On 4 September 2018, the Ehsan Yarshater Center for Iranian Studies of Columbia University in the City of New York, the Persian Heritage Foundation, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation published this joined statement on the Encyclopaedia Iranica website at http://www.iranicaonline.org/pages/prof-yarshater-joint-stmnt

Le programme du colloque à Cerisy-la-Salle, organisé par Pierre Taminiaux (Georgetown University) et Jérôme Duwa (IMEC). Ce colloque explorera les diverses représentations du vide dans la création littéraire (fiction, poésie, théâtre, essai) et artistique (peinture, dessin, sculpture, installation, livre-objet) des XXe et XXIe siècles, en particulier dans les avant-gardes. Le vide reflète avant tout un parti pris esthétique de dépouillement et d’épure des formes. Mais il débouche aussi dans de nombreux cas sur l’expression d’une crise, sinon d’une "fin de l’art" dans la culture occidentale, comme l’a suggéré le mouvement "Fluxus" dans les années 1960/1970 et comme le montre encore l’art contemporain aujourd’hui. Au-delà de ces principes formels et de ces tensions philosophiques, le vide renvoie également à des sensibilités extra-occidentales, venues en particulier d’Asie. Dès lors il implique un processus conscient de rapprochement des cultures qui met en valeur la qualité méditative et spirituelle de l’art, en particulier dans son rapport au bouddhisme zen. Ce colloque, à la fois interdisciplinaire et interculturel, s'adresse prioritairement à un public d'étudiants et d'enseignants-chercheurs qui travaillent dans le domaine de la critique littéraire (française ou comparée) et de l'histoire de l'art des XXe et XXIe siècles. Il devrait intéresser en particulier ceux d'entre eux qui se consacrent à l'étude des avant-gardes.

"Polish Language at Columbia: History and Functionality”

Friday, April 10, 2015, 1-6PM

Columbia University
International Affairs Building 1512
420 W. 118th Street
New York, NY 10027

Please register here:
https://calendar.columbia.edu/sundial/webapi/register.php?eventID=77661&REGISTER_SESSION_NAME=f3d563ee50bfbac528154b2e413bebcd&state=init

Explores unusual – and often culturally problematic – models of masculinity and their relationship to food, taking into consideration male characters as nurturers and caretakers both in the private and the public sphere. The analysis considers how these films operate in seeming opposition to films that tend to use food unobtrusively to reinforce dominant models of masculinity. Under closer examination, movies such as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (Lasse Hallström, 1993), Heavy (James Mangold, 1995), Eat Your Heart Out (Percy Adlon, 1997), and later Spanglish (James L. Brooks, 2004) and Sideways (Alexander Payne 2004), reveal that these seemingly different and innovative images reiterate mainstream forms of manhood and thus reinforce gender hierarchies. Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994) provide the necessary background to the discussion about the relationship among men, cooking, and masculinity.