At a time when American political and cultural leaders asserted that the nation stood at “the center of world awareness,” thinkers and artists sought to understand and secure principles that lay at the center of things. From the onset of the Cold War in 1948 through 1963, they asked: What defined the essential character of “American culture”? Could permanent moral standards guide human conduct amid the flux and horrors of history? In what ways did a stable self emerge through the life cycle? Cou...
Dec 16, 2020•40 min
In the tradition of women as the unsung keepers of history, Deborah Paredez’s second poetry collection tells her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War. The title refers to the year 1970—the Year of the Metal Dog in the lunar calendar—which was the year of the author’s birth, the year her father prepared to deploy to Vietnam along with many other Mexican-American immigrant soldiers, and a year of tremendous upheaval across the United States. Images from iconic photographs and her father’s...
Dec 09, 2020•29 min
Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals where they explored the relationship between social theory and social change within the project of building a socialist Ethiopia. Ethiopia in Theory examines the literature of this student movement, together with the movement’s afterlife in Ethiopian politics and society in order to ask: what does it mean to write today about the appropriation and ind...
Dec 02, 2020•37 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America examines the dissolution of landscape painting in the late nineteenth-century United States. Maggie M. Cao explores the pictorial practices that challenged, mourned, or revised the conventions of landscape painting, a major cultural project for nineteenth-century Americans. Through rich analysis of artworks ...
Oct 21, 2020•20 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. From a prizewinning economic historian, an eye-opening reinterpretation of the 2008 economic crisis (and its ten-year aftermath) as a global event that directly led to the shockwaves being felt around the world today. In September 2008 President George Bush could still describe the financial crisis as an incident local to Wall Street. In fact it was a dramat...
Oct 14, 2020•29 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. In this landmark theoretical investigation, Wael B. Hallaq reevaluates and deepens the critique of Orientalism in order to deploy it for rethinking the foundations of the modern project. Refusing to isolate or scapegoat Orientalism, Restating Orientalism extends the critique to other fields, from law, philosophy, and scientific inquiry to core ideas of academic tho...
Oct 07, 2020•24 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Walmart is the largest employer in the world. It encompasses nearly 1 percent of the entire American workforce—young adults, parents, formerly incarcerated people, retirees. Walmart also presents one possible future of work—Walmartism—in which the arbitrary authority of managers mixes with a hyperrationalized, centrally controlled bureaucracy in ways that curtail w...
Sep 30, 2020•28 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Claudio Lomnitz's most recent book, Nuestra América, is an essay on the story of his maternal grandparents-- and to some degree the story of his father. It starts with a shipwreck, a story of language loss. A reflection on why he lacks four of the languages that would have been of great use to properly write this book. And it works from that low point toward reunio...
Sep 23, 2020•36 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Calvo and Murillo consider the non-policy benefits that voters consider when deciding their vote. While parties advertise policies, they also deliver non-policy benefits in the form of competent economic management, constituency service, and patronage jobs. Different from much of the existing research, which focuses on the implementation of policy or on the deliver...
Sep 16, 2020•26 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. You can't copyright facts, but is news a category unto itself? Without legal protection for the "ownership" of news, what incentive does a news organization have to invest in producing quality journalism that serves the public good? This book explores the intertwined histories of journalism and copyright law in the United States and Great Britain, revealing how shi...
Sep 09, 2020•41 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Palestinian refugees’ experience of protracted displacement is among the lengthiest in history. In her breathtaking new book, Ilana Feldman explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts to alter their present and future conditions. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic field research...
Sep 02, 2020•24 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Peace is a universal ideal, but its political life is a great paradox: "peace" is the opposite of war, but it also enables war. If peace is the elimination of war, then what does it mean to wage war for the sake of peace? What does peace mean when some say that they are committed to it but that their enemies do not value it? Why is it that associating peace with ot...
Sep 02, 2020•19 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as Brexit, climate change and vaccinations there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a tendency to dismiss their advice. Are ...
Aug 26, 2020•27 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. What is musical time? Where is it manifested? How does it enter into our experience, and how do we capture it in our analyses? A compelling approach among works on temporality, phenomenology, and the ecologies of the new sound worlds, Enacting Musical Time argues that musical time is itself the site of the interaction between musical sounds and a situated, embodied...
Aug 19, 2020•26 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming.The Dispo...
Jun 18, 2020•27 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief. Through a trio of dramatic stories, Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. We meet Clara Judd, a Confederate spy whose imprisonment for treason spar...
Jun 12, 2020•27 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. From clandestine images of Jewish children isolated in Nazi ghettos and Japanese American children incarcerated in camps to images of Native children removed to North American boarding schools, classroom photographs of schoolchildren are pervasive even in repressive historical and political contexts. School Photos in Liquid Time offers a closer look at this genre o...
Jun 05, 2020•30 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. In Inventing Tomorrow, Sarah Cole provides a definitive account of Wells’s work and ideas. She contends that Wells casts new light on modernism and its values: on topics from warfare to science to time, his work resonates both thematically and aesthetically with some of the most ambitious modernists. At the same time, unlike many modernists, Wells believed that lit...
May 29, 2020•35 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Shadows of Doubt reveals how deeply stereotypes distort our interactions, shape crime, and deform the criminal justice system. If you’re a robber, how do you choose your victims? As a police officer, how afraid are you of the young man you’re about to arrest? As a judge, do you think the suspect in front of you will show up in court if released from pretrial detent...
May 22, 2020•21 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive dupes. Instead, journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves all compete, passionately and expertly, to sh...
May 15, 2020•23 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. In The Perils of the One, Stathis Gourgouris offers a philosophical anthropology that confronts the legacy of “monarchical thinking”: the desire to subjugate oneself to unitary principles and structures, whether political, moral, theological, or secular. In wide-ranging essays that are at once poetic and polemical, intellectual and passionate, Gourgouris reads acro...
May 08, 2020•28 min
New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. The new science of paternity, with methods such as blood typing, fingerprinting, and facial analysis, would bring clarity to the conundrum of fatherhood—or so it appeared. Suddenly, it would be possible to establish family relationships, expose adulterous affairs, locate errant fathers, unravel baby mix-ups, and discover one’s true race and ethnicity. Tracing the s...
May 01, 2020•43 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. "To teach correct Latin and to explain the poets" were the two standard duties of Roman teachers. Not only was a command of literary Latin a prerequisite for political and social advancement, but a sense of Latin's history and importance contributed to the Romans' understanding of their own cultural identity. Put plainly, philology-the study of language and ...
Sep 04, 2019•50 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Almost fifty years ago, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni published the manifesto “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” helping to set the agenda for a generation of film theory that used cinema as a means of critiquing capitalist ideology. In recent decades, film studies has moved away from politicized theory, abandoning the productive ways in which theory underst...
Sep 04, 2019•39 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. An anonymous book appeared in Venice in 1547 titled L'Alcorano di Macometto, and, according to the title page, it contained "the doctrine, life, customs, and laws [of Mohammed] . . . newly translated from Arabic into the Italian language." Were this true, L'Alcorano di Macometto would have been the first printed direct translation of the Qur'an in a European...
Aug 07, 2019•21 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean investigates the long process of transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states by narrating the biographies of a group of people who were born within empires but came of age surrounded by the emerging vocabulary of nationalism, much of which they themselves created. It is the story of a generatio...
Jul 24, 2019•19 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. The Shahnameh: The Persian Epic as World Literature By: Hamid Dabashi The Shahnameh, an epic poem recounting the foundation of Iran across mythical, heroic, and historical ages, is the beating heart of Persian literature and culture. Composed by Abu al-Qasem Ferdowsi over a thirty-year period and completed in the year 1010, the epic has entertained generatio...
Jul 10, 2019•32 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Shari'a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology By: Brinkley Messick A case study in the textual architecture of the venerable legal and ethical tradition at the center of the Islamic experience, Sharīʿa Scripts is a work of historical anthropology focused on Yemen in the early twentieth century. There—while colonial regimes, late Ottoman reformers, and early nat...
Jun 26, 2019•28 min
In the first episode of "The Trilling Tapes," the scholar Lauren Berlant talks live about her new project: an analysis about the affect of humorlessness in politics. Featuring the scholar Bruce Robbins as a guest interlocutor and host Olivia Rutigliano. The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University is home to the Lionel Trilling Seminars, established in 1976 to honor one of the most prominent cultural critics of the twentieth century and his decades-long care...
Jun 24, 2019•15 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern By: Alan Stewart The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing....
Dec 11, 2018•24 min
