EVENTS
PAST EVENTS (Hiding empty months)
december 2020
8dec12:00 pm- 1:30 pmHamid Dabashi on Edward SaidRemembrance of Things Past

Event Details
Join Hamid Dabashi and Ahdaf Soueif as they discuss Dabashi's new book, On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past. On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things
more
Event Details
On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past is an intimate intellectual, political and personal portrait of Edward Said, one of the 20th centuries’ leading public intellectuals. This is an online event and information and registration can be found here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/
Time
(Tuesday) 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
november 2020
18nov5:00 pmFeminist Media(tions)Exploring the work of Nigerian poet Wana Udobang

Event Details
The Eventbrite to RSVP is live, and may be accessed here: https://feministmediationsnov18.eventbrite.com.
more
Event Details
The Eventbrite to RSVP is live, and may be accessed here: https://
Time
(Wednesday) 5:00 pm

Event Details
Advanced registration required to attend the event - Follow this link. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email
more
Event Details
Advanced registration required to attend the event – Follow this link. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
William Elison is Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. An ethnographer and historian, he works in the areas of South Asian Religions, Religion and Media, and Visual Culture. Much of his work has focused on the problem of mediation of subject positions by visual forms such as sacred icons and popular cinema. His most recent publication is The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai (2018), which was part of the South Asia Across the Disciplines Series, a joint venture of the university presses at Berkeley, Chicago, and Columbia.
Neepa Majumdar is an Associate Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include star studies, film sound, South Asian early cinema, documentary film, and questions of film history and historiography. Her book Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s to 1950s (2009) won an Honorable Mention in the 2010 Best First Book Award of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her essays have appeared in The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, and Post Script, and various anthologies on sound in film and film analysis.
Debashree Mukherjee is Assistant Professor, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. She is affiliated with Center for Comparative Media; Film & Media Program, School of the Arts; Institute for Research on Women, Gender, & Sexuality (IRWGS). Prof. Mukherjee is a film historian and media theorist working across the fields of production studies, new materialisms, feminist film historiography, postcolonial studies, and South Asian studies. Her new book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020), presents a practice-oriented history of the consolidation of the Bombay film industry in the 1930s. The book investigates the material relations between cinema’s bodies, machines, aesthetics, and environments as they intersect with practices of modernity and freedom in late colonial India.
Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Princeton University. His general field of research and teaching interests concerns urban modernity, the colonial genealogies of modernity, and problems of postcolonial thought and politics. Until the dissolution of the Subaltern Studies group in 2008, he was a member of its editorial collective, actively involved in the publication and other intellectual activities of this group of scholars. His most recent publication is Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (2019)
Time
(Friday) 10:00 am
10nov2:00 pmCelebrating Recent Work by Elleni Centime ZelekeEthiopia in Theory

Event Details
Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number
more
Event Details
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 indigenization of Marxist and mainstream social science ideas in an Ethiopian and African context; and, importantly, what does the archive of revolutionary thought in Africa teach us about the practice of critical theory more generally.
For more information and to register for event, see here.
Time
(Tuesday) 2:00 pm
Location
Heyman Center
6nov12:30 pm"Race, Caste and Democracy" with Nico Slate
Event Details
You will find more details on the web
more
Event Details

Time
(Friday) 12:30 pm
october 2020
30oct11:30 amOf Sky, Water and SkinA lecture by Pamila Gupta (University of the Witwatersrand)
Event Details
For this paper, I propose to take up the concept and physical space of a photographic ‘darkroom’ located in Stone Town, Zanzibar
more
Event Details
For this paper, I propose to take up the concept and physical space of a photographic ‘darkroom’ located in Stone Town, Zanzibar to explore a set of images from the Capital Art Studio (1930-present) collection produced by Ranchhod Oza (1907-1993), and inherited by his son Rohit Oza (1950-). I employ a concept of darkness to read this visual archive differently and propose multiple ‘other lives’ for a set of images. First, by bringing this African photography collection to light, I am taking it out of the ‘dark rooms’ of history in one sense (Hayes 2017) and exposing it for interpretation. Second, I focus my lens on the Oza physical darkroom located in the back of the studio on Kenyatta Road in Stone Town, where photographs of a range of Zanzibari persons were both developed and printed and that open up the darkroom as a place of photographic complexity and sensorium, and not just mechanical reproduction (Jansen 2018). Third, I develop darkness as a form of beauty in certain images of sky, water and skin from this archive that showcase Zanzibar’s position as an Indian Ocean island and port city whilst under rule by the Omani Sultanate (1698-1964) and British Protectorate (1890-1963). Fourth, I conceptualize the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 as a time of visual darkness, which temporarily restricted photographic practices operating in Stone Town under the new Afro-Shirazi political party. Throughout my analysis, I use a framing of ‘darkness’ to interrogate photography as an aesthetic practice deeply immersed in materialities and metaphors of dark and light, black and white, and as integral to Zanzibar’s oceanic islandness.
This lecture is part of the year-long project Oceanic Imaginations, led by Mana Kia and Debashree Mukherjee (MESAAS) and sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life. Please register at ircpl.columbia.edu/
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/of-sky-water-and-skin-photographs-from-a-zanzibari-darkroom-tickets-120575403277
Time
(Friday) 11:30 am
23oct12:00 pm- 2:00 pmBombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City

Event Details
Panel Discussion of Debashree Mukherjee's new book (Columbia University Press, 2020). Debashree is Assistant Professor of film and media at the Department of
more
Event Details

Time
(Friday) 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
2oct1:00 pmCelebrating Recent Work by Mana Kia
Event Details
Mana Kia sketches the contours of a larger Persianate world, historicizing place, origin, and selfhood through its tradition of proper form: adab. In
more
Event Details
Mana Kia sketches the contours of a larger Persianate world, historicizing place, origin, and selfhood through its tradition of proper form: adab. In this shared culture, proximities and similarities constituted a logic that distinguished between people while simultaneously accommodating plurality. Adab was the basis of cohesion for self and community over the turbulent eighteenth century, as populations dispersed and centers of power shifted, disrupting the circulations that linked Persianate regions. Challenging the bases of protonationalist community, Persianate Selves seeks to make sense of an earlier transregional Persianate culture outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalisms.
For more information and to register for event, see here.
Time
(Friday) 1:00 pm
Location
Heyman Center
september 2020
august 2020
28aug11:00 am- 12:00 pmColumbia Language Fair
Event Details
See here for more information and links to specific languages.
Time
(Friday) 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
march 2020
Event Details
This conference intervenes in and connects the fields of Urban and Indian Ocean Studies by studying Bombay comparatively with other Indian Ocean cities. Our conference takes the nodal centrality of
more
Event Details
This conference intervenes in and connects the fields of Urban and Indian Ocean Studies by studying Bombay comparatively with other Indian Ocean cities. Our conference takes the nodal centrality of Bombay as a place from which to explore the specificity, stakes, and consequences of what might be termed “Indian Ocean urbanisms.” Thus, we ask: how did Indian Ocean cities constitute each other? What ocean-wide mental and material structures allowed urban forms and practices to move between port cities, and how did they persist and change with colonial and post-colonial governance? How does this shared past continue to shape contemporary urbanism and the new Asian regional economy?
Click on image below for more information:
Time
(Friday) 5:00 pm
Location
Heyman Center
7mar10:00 am- 5:30 pmRethinking Caste IntersectionalityGender, Sexuality, and Race

Event Details
Join South Asian Feminism(s) Alliance (SAFA), The Ambedkar Initiative, and the Alliance of Progressive
more
Event Details
Join South Asian Feminism(s) Alliance (SAFA), The Ambedkar Initiative, and the Alliance of Progressive South Asian Graduate Students for day of panels and events with Dalit activists, writers, and artists! We will have conversations on the Dalit public sphere, writing and art as activism, and building solidarity across movements. We hope to provide a space for reflection, critique, learning, and community building. Lunch will be provided!
Please bring a valid ID (school ID, government-issued ID, etc.) and make sure to register.
Time
(Saturday) 10:00 am - 5:30 pm
Location
Jerome Green Hall
435 West 116th Street
february 2020
24feb6:15 pmCelebrating Recent Work by Jennifer Wenzel

Event Details
New Books in the Arts & Sciences: Celebrating Recent Work by Jennifer Wenzel The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature By: Jennifer
more
Event Details
New Books in the Arts & Sciences:
Celebrating Recent Work by Jennifer Wenzel
The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature
By: Jennifer Wenzel
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 Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale.
Impressive in its disciplinary breadth, Wenzel’s book fuses insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, while drawing on active debates between postcolonial theory and world literature, as well as scholarship on the Anthropocene and the material turn. In doing so, the book shows the importance of the literary to environmental thought and practice, elaborating how a supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures.
Time
(Monday) 6:15 pm
Location
Heyman Center
Event Details
Harry Harootunian The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and its Unaccounted Lives
Event Details
Harry Harootunian
The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and its Unaccounted Lives
Time
(Thursday) 7:15 pm
Location
Weatherhead Institute
420 West 118th Street
13feb4:10 pmMestizaje in Arab Amairka, a lecture by Sarah Gualtieri

Event Details
Sarah M.A. Gualtieri presents a portion of her new book Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California (Stanford University Press, 2019). Her talk draws on the discourse of mestizaje, or mixture
more
Event Details
Sarah M.A. Gualtieri presents a portion of her new book Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California (Stanford University Press, 2019). Her talk draws on the discourse of mestizaje, or mixture and cultural hybridity, in order to revisit central themes in the history of Arab America. It uses the example of Hajj Ali, or “Hi Jolly,” an Ottoman camel-handler in the U.S. military expedition toward California in 1857, to discuss migration and mobility in the early Middle Eastern American diaspora. Rather than reproduce a reading of Hajj Ali as “an early Arab American,” a patriotic Muslim, and one of the “first” Syrians in the United States, Gualtieri explores his marriage to a Mexican American woman in Arizona as a way to rethink idealized notions of family and community in Arab American historiography. She proposes mestizaje as a useful interpretive framework for focusing on the overlooked histories of inter-ethnic contact and Latino/a-Arab interchanges in the US-Mexico borderlands.
Time
(Thursday) 4:10 pm
Location
208 Knox Hall