Christia Mercer Delivers Keynote Address

Christia Mercer, director of the working group Pedagogies of Dignity, delivered the keynote address, "Descartes’ Demons and Debts, or Why We Should Work on Women in the History of Philosophy," at the Dutch Seminar for Early Modern Philosophy at Utrecht University this May.

The Dutch Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy brings together advanced students and established scholars to discuss the latest work in early modern philosophy, broadly conceived.

Videos from the seminar can be viewed here.

Professor Jack Halberstam receives honorary doctorate

Jack Halberstam, Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English at Columbia University, and Director of the CSSD working group Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere, has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Lund University in Sweden for his work on the fluid boundaries of gender in society. Professor Halberstam accepted the honorary doctorate in a ceremony on May 25, 2018. More information available here.

Queer Theory: Here, There, and Everywhere is a CSSD working group to discuss, debate and investigate the politics of sexuality and gender in a global frame.

CSSD Director Marianne Hirsch to speak at Columbia Global Center in Chile

CSSD Director and William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Marianne Hirsch, will be speaking at the Columbia University Global Center in Santiago, Chile on the 31st of May as part of a symposium entitled El Futuro del Pasado (The Future of the Past), in a discussion about school portraits in difficult times.

During Professor Hirsch’s time with CSSD, she has served as co-director of several working groups including, Reframing Gendered Violence, Women Mobilizing Memory and Engendering the Archive.

New Caribbean Syllabus from Unpayable Debt working group

CSSD working group “Unpayable Debt” has just published the first ever digital resource to study debt and the Caribbean, "Caribbean Syllabus: Life and Debt in the Caribbean." Frances Negron-Muntaner and Sarah Muir, co-directors of the Unpayable Debt working group, have contributed to the syllabus, as have many participants in the recent Frontiers of Debt conference organized by the working group.

Pedagogies of Dignity working group director awarded fellowship

Christia Mercer is Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and Project Director of the new CSSD working group, Pedagogies of Dignity. She has been awarded a fellowship at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for her project “Feeling the Way to Truth: Women, Reason, and the Development of Modern Philosophy. ” She will be the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow for 2018-19.

Kellie Jones Receives Honorary Degree from Amherst College

Kellie Jones, member of the working group Engendering the Archive and Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, has been awarded an honorary doctorate from her alma mater Amherst College to recognize her leadership in the field of Art History.  

She has also been awarded the Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award following the publication of her latest book, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s.

Congratulations to CSSD graduate fellows and assistants on defending their dissertations

Congratulations to the following Ph.D. candidates who have defended their dissertations and received their Ph.D.s this year! All of these students have been invaluable members of working groups at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, as graduate fellows or graduate assistants:

From the Women Mobilizing Memory working group:

Nicole Gervasio (English)

Andrew Crow (English)

Alyssa Greene (German)

From the Social Justice After the Welfare State working group:

Anna Halperin (History)

George Aumoithe (History)

From the Pacific Climate Circuits working group:

Patrick Nason (Anthropology)

New working groups at CSSD launching AY2018-19

CSSD launches six new projects for the 2018-19 academic year. The projects will address gender, race, sexuality, and other forms of inequality to foster ethical and progressive social change.

Racial Capitalism: This working group theorizes the connections between exploitation and expropriation in interlinked political geographies. The Racial Capitalism working group will build on and also expand already existing efforts of the Barnard New Directions in American Studies (NDAS) initiative.
Project Directors: Jordan T. Camp, Christina Heatherton, and Manu Vimalassery

On The Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics: The working group On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics seeks to understand the role of nurses as change agents in the prevention, detection and response to pandemic infectious disease outbreaks.
Project Directors: Jennifer Dohrn, Wilmot James, Steve Nicholas, Victoria Rosner

Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City: Geographies of Injustice is a working group of interdisciplinary scholars who are interested in asking how spatial politics intersects with inequality and social difference (race, caste, and ethnicity).
Project Directors: Anupama Rao, Ana Paulina Lee

Menstrual Health and Gender Justice: The Menstrual Health and Gender Justice working group seeks to further the nascent field of menstrual studies. This group puts particular emphasis on critically evaluating the current state of research and how interdisciplinary collaboration might help remedy some of these gaps.
Project Director: Inga Winkler

Pedagogies of Dignity: Pedagogies of Dignity is an interdisciplinary initiative that brings together formerly incarcerated people, activists, faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates from the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Project Director: Christia Mercer

Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere: Queer Theory: Here, There, and Everywhere is a CSSD working group to discuss, debate and investigate the politics of sexuality and gender in a global frame.
Project Director: Jack Halberstam

Women Creating Change Leadership Council meets for the second time

The Women Creating Change Leadership Council met for the second time in New York on April 12, 2018. Professors Anupama Rao and Ana Paulina Lee presented on their work on the Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City project.  Lila Abu-Lughod presented on her work on the Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence project. Marianne Hirsch discussed new CSSD projects which will launch in 2018 and 2019. Bindu Bansinath, a student in a course inspired by WCC called “Narrating Rape,” spoke about her published essay in the New York times.   

Participants included:

Ann Kaplan
Annette Anthony
Lisa Carnoy
Isobel Coleman
Deborah Jackson
Safwan Masri
Molly Mathews Multedo
Cynthia Moses-Manocherian
Alyson Neel
Philippa Portnoy        
Marianne Hirsch
Meera Ananth
Carolyn Ferguson
Lila Abu-Lughod
Catherine LaSota
Ana Paulina Lee
Anupama Rao
Bindu Bansinath
S. Mona Sinha
Selena Soo
A’lelia Bundles
Esta Stecher
Melissa Fisher                           
Amal Ghandour                        
Jacki Zehner
Davia Temin  

The Women Creating Change Leadership Council is comprised of individuals who are committed to the exploration of issues which affect women and the ways in which women address global gender challenges. The mission of the Council is to promote interdisciplinary collaborative research and to sponsor events that publicize this important work.   

Democracy and The Welfare State: The Two Wests In The Age of Austerity will be presented at the Columbia Global Centers - Paris

Columbia Global Centers - Paris, in partnership with Columbia University Press  and Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po will host a book presentation for Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity, edited by CSSD project director Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna. 

Alice Kessler-Harris is project director for CSSD working group Social Justice After the Welfare State. The research of CSSD working group Social Justice After the Welfare State inspired the creation of this book.

The book presentation will be held at the Columbia Global Centers - Paris
4,Rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris, France.

CSSD project director Inga Winkler receives grant to support her work on menstrual health

Professor Inga Winkler, co-director of the new CSSD project, Menstrual Health and Gender Justice, receives a grant to support her work on menstrual health.

The grant from the UN Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council will support research and advocacy on menstrual health, including the development of a handbook on Critical Menstrual Studies, which Professor Winkler is co-editing. The handbook seeks to compile state of the art research in the burgeoning field of menstrual health and to inform and shape rapidly evolving developments in policy and practice, as well as elevate ongoing national policy developments in countries across the globe to the level of the UN through various advocacy initiatives.

The last several years have brought a tremendous diversity of menstrual­ positive expressions—from the artistic to the practical, the serious to the playful, the provocative to the educational, and the local to the global.

Speaking on the upsurge in interests on menstrual health, Professor Winkler explains: “I see a need – and indeed a responsibility – to engage and ask critical questions."

Professor Saidiya Hartman Awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship

CSSD project director Saidiya Hartman has been awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Professor Hartman will spend the fellowship year completing Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (forthcoming Norton), which examines the social upheaval and radical transformation of everyday life that took place in the emergent black ghetto in the early decades of the 20th century.

Saidiya Hartman is co-director for CSSD projects Gender and the Global Slum and Engendering the Archive. 

Gender and the Global Slum looks at the social hazards of urban informality and its disproportionate effects on women.

Engendering the Archive explores how power determines what is conserved and what is lost, which stories have been committed to collective memory and which ones have been erased.

Professor Anupama Rao comments on the stereotype of South Asians as "good immigrants" on NPR

Gender & the Global Slum project director Anupama Rao spoke with NPR Podcast Code Switch about Caste discrimination in the United States.

Professor Rao, a historian and author of The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, said for years, many of the so-called "model minority" of South Asians, who have earned the status of being "good immigrants" in the U.S., came from upper-caste families.

At over three thousand years old, caste hierarchy is one of the oldest forms of social stratification in the world: the community you are born into in places like India, Pakistan and Nepal has designated where you can work, who you can marry, and what your reputation is in life.

A new survey by Equality LABS finds that caste discrimination is playing out in the United States as well.

Gender and the Global Slum project looked at the social hazards of urban informality and its disproportionate effects on women. Professor Rao is also co-director of the new CSSD working group Geographies of Injustice.

Code Switch is a race and culture outlet and a weekly podcast from American public radio network NPR. It began in 2013 with a blog as well as contributing stories to NPR radio programs. The Code Switch podcast launched in 2016.

Lisa Carnoy elected to serve as co-chair of the Columbia University Board of Trustees

Women Creating Change Leadership Council member Lisa Carnoy has been elected to serve as co-chair of the Columbia University Board of Trustees.

Lisa Carnoy is an accomplished leader in global finance and capital markets. She spent 23 years at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, most recently as the Division Executive for the Northeast for U.S. Trust, the private bank within Bank of America, and as NYC Market President for Bank of America. She served on the operating committees for Global Wealth & Investment Management and for Bank of America. Prior to her move to Wealth Management, Carnoy served as head of Global Capital Markets for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and was a member of the Global Corporate and Investment Banking Operating Committee. She led the team raising the largest equity offering in U.S. history, $19 billion, that helped Merrill Lynch and Bank of America in 2009 repay the U.S. Treasury for money received from Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).

Carnoy has been a passionate advocate for diversity – and co-founded several organizations including the Women’s Leadership Council at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and at Columbia, both the Women’s Leadership Council for Athletics and the Dean’s Advisory Circle. She was named among the 25 most influential women for the 25th anniversary of the Columbia-Barnard Athletic Consortium, and Women in Science at Columbia have named a leadership award in Lisa’s honor. She has been named to American Banker’s list of “Most Powerful Women in Finance,” and in 2013, she received the Merit Award from the Women’s Bond Club. She also has received Columbia’s John Jay Award for professional achievement, the College’s Alumna Achievement Award, and the University’s Alumni Medal.

Carnoy (CC’89) will be serving alongside Jonathan Lavine (CC’88) as co-chairs of the University Board of Trustees beginning in September 2018.

Columbia University’s Women Creating Change Leadership Council is comprised of individuals who are committed to the exploration of issues which affect women and the ways in which women address global gender challenges. The mission of the Council is to promote interdisciplinary collaborative research and to sponsor events that publicize this important work.

Diana Taylor elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Diana Taylor, project director of the CSSD working group Women Mobilizing Memory, has been elected as an American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellow. A University Professor at NYU, Taylor is the founding director of NYU’s Hemispheric Institute and a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures and in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts. Taylor, a Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of many award-winning books such as Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (University Press of Kentucky, 1991) and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003), among other publications.

Since its founding in 1780, the American Academy has served the nation as a champion of scholarship, civil dialogue, and useful knowledge. As one of the nation’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers, the Academy convenes leaders from the academic, business, and government sectors to address critical challenges facing our global society.

Professor Taylor joins the Academy’s membership of 4,900 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members, a list that includes many of the most accomplished scholars and practitioners worldwide.

Women Mobilizing Memory explores the politics of memory in the aftermath of the atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in comparative global perspective. The international working group analyzes the strategies by which women artists, scholars and activists have succeeded in mobilizing the memory of gender-based violence to promote redress, social justice, and a democratic future.

Puerto Rico Underwater exhibition featured on NY1

Frances Negron-Muntaner, a project director of the CSSD working group Unpayable Debt, was on NY1 with several of the artists in the Puerto Rico Underwater exhibition that is on display now in connection with the Frontiers of Debt conference.

Puerto Rico Under Water features the work of five Puerto Rican artists, ADÁL, Huáscar Robles, Omar Z. Robles, Sarabel Santos, and Víctor Vazquez, reflecting on the island's debt crisis and its consequences, including mass migration, vulnerable infrastructure, and increased levels of personal insecurity. At the same time, the work serves as site of memory, humor, and hope as Puerto Ricans rebuild not only homes but a collective future.

The exhibition is on display at the same time as the Frontiers of Debt in the Caribbean and Afro America conference presented by CSSD working group Unpayable Debt. This two day conference brings together scholars, journalists, activists, and artists from across these two regions in order to interrogate their contemporary re-emergence as sites of new forms of capital extraction and opposition to debt regimes.

Unpayable Debt is a comparative research and public engagement project about the emergence and impact of massive debt on vulnerable polities and populations.

CSSD Project Co-Director Lydia Liu Collaborates on Global Justice for Indigenous Languages Symposium

Professor Lydia H. Liu, co-director of the CSSD project Bandung Humanisms, recently collaborated on the Global Justice for Indigenous Languages Symposium, working alongside Professor Elsa Stamatopolou of the Columbia Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. The symposium will take place on Saturday, April 21st in the Jerome Greene Annex at Columbia University.

Presented as part of the Sawyer Seminar on Global Language Justice, a two-year seminar initiated by Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Global Justice for Indigenous Languages Symposium seeks to “bring to the forefront the critical work done by researchers, educators, institutions, organizations, and communities; work that is necessary to make meaningful headway in actualizing language justice.” In addition to collaborating on the symposium, Professor Liu will moderate a panel during the event entitled “Indigenous Languages: Strengthening and Revitalization”.

Along with serving as a project co-director and member of the Executive Board for CSSD, Liu is currently Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

Farah Griffin interviewed for NPR's The Record about Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer Prize win

CSSD project director Farah Griffin was interviewed for NPR's The Record about Kendrick Lamar's unprecedented Pulitzer Prize win for "DAMN." and her experience on the judging committee.

According to The Record, Lamar's Pulitzer win may constitute the first time a high-minded institution has seen fit to place an insurgent and equally popular rap artist, in the prime of his career, within America's canon of heralded music composers.

Farah Griffin was one of five jurors who whittled down the Pulitzer Prize's music nominees from about 100 to three who received recognition. She discussed the importance of this award, both for hip-hop and the Pulitzer Prizes as an institution, as well as the feeling of optimism that follows the decision to embrace a larger swathe of American music.

Click here to read the interview. 

Farah Griffin is a co-director for CSSD project Toward An Intellectual History of Black Women.
This research project was dedicated to recovering the history of black women as active intellectual subjects and to moving the study of black thought, culture, and leadership beyond the "Great Men" paradigm that characterizes most accounts of black intellectual activity, thus challenging the traditionally male dominated accounts of intellectual work.

CSSD project director Paige West discussed the UN Sustainable Development goals at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York

Paige West, project director of the CSSD working group Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics discussed the UN Sustainable Development goals at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York.

West’s presentation was titled “Bridging the Goal Gap: How We Integrate Climate Action, Life on Land and Gender Equality.”

She was joined by Ambassador Ruben Escalante Hasbun, the permanent representative of El Salvador, Torbors Sogluman, the director of Taiwan World Vision, and Angel Munoz, a Lamont climate scientist, to discussed the UN Sustainable Development goals and the intersections between goal 15 (life on land), goal 14 (life below water) goal 13 (climate action) and goal 5 (gender equality).

The event, a seminar on “Indigenous Peoples and the Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” was presented by the Academic Council on the United Nations System and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York.

Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics applies lenses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and inequality to the current analyses of climate change in the Pacific Region, this project seeks to reframe the conversation about climate change and Pacific Islanders.

Photo caption: Paige West, pictured alongside Ambassador Ruben Escalante Hasbun, Torbors Sogluman and Angel Munoz.

CSSD Project Co-Director Farah Griffin Lectures at Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series

Professor Farah Griffin, co-director of the CSSD Project Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, recently spoke as part of the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series at Rutgers University, Newark.

Professor Griffin’s lecture examined the role of music in African-American social life, with a particular focus on Griffin’s childhood experiences in Philadelphia. The lecture further explored the intertwined relationships between music, food, and political activism in mid-twentieth century African American life. Professor Griffin’s lecture received news coverage in the Germantown Courier.

In addition to serving as project co-director, Professor Griffin is a member of the CSSD Executive Committee. At Columbia, she is Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, and William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies