Elections to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Congratulations to Professors Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Mabel O. Wilson on joining the Academy.
Congratulations to University Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Associate Professor Mabel O. Wilson on their election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Spivak is University Professor and Founder of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia, and former co-director of CSSD working group The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories.
Wilson is Associate Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia, and a member of former CSSD working groups Engendering the Archive and Reframing Gendered Violence.
Saidiya Hartman Receives PEN America Literary Award
Professor Hartman was announced as one of the 2021 Award Winners for her recent book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals.
Saidiya Hartman Receives PEN America Literary Award
We are pleased to congratulate Saidiya Hartman, former co-director of the Gender & the Global Slum and Engendering the Archive working groups, on receiving a PEN America Literary Award for her recent book. Professor Hartman was a recipient of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction for her book entitled Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals.
Read more about her book and this special distinction here.
Engendering the Archive Working Group Fellow was a guest on The Dean's Table
Mabel O. Wilson spoke with Fredrick Harris, Columbia University Dean of the Division of Social Science.
Mabel O. Wilson, Engendering the Archive Working and Reframing Gendered Violence working group fellow, spoke with Columbia University Dean of Social Science Fredrick Harris on his podcast, The Dean's Table. Professor Wilson spoke about how she decided on becoming an architect, reflected on her work which explores the history of Black exhibitions and museums, and shared insights into scholarship and practices of race, space, and culture.
Mabel O. Wilson interviewed by Washington Post
Engendering the Archive Working Group Fellow spoke to the Post about the Capitol riots and racial injustice in the police responses to protesting.
Mabel O. Wilson, Engendering the Archive Working and Reframing Gendered Violence working group fellow was interviewed by The Washington Post. She spoke about the racial injustice of rioters attacking the US Capitol without consequence, while Black Americans peacefully protesting police violence have been regularly met with outsized force.
Women Mobilizing Memory Working Group Co-Director Interviewed by the European Observatory on Memories (EUROM)
The conversation with Marianne Hirsch appears in the Observing Memories Magazine.
Marianne Hirsch, former Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference and co-director of past working groups including Women Mobilizing Memory, Reframing Gendered Violence, and Engendering the Archive was interviewed by the European Observatory on Memories (EUROM) in their Observing Memories Magazine. In the interview, Professor Hirsch spoke about the transmission of trauma across generations, the role of memory in social movements, and memory’s ability to strengthen democracy.
Engendering the Archive Fellow Has Won the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize
Hazel Carby was awarded for her new book Imperial Intimacies: A Tale Of Two Islands.
Hazel Carby, Engendering the Archive and Women Mobilizing Memory working group fellow, has won the 2020 British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for for Global Cultural Understanding. This prize is awarded to works of non-fiction which contribute towards the cultural understanding of connections and divisions which shape identities across the world. Professor Carby’s book Imperial Intimacies: A Tale Of Two Islands (Verso Books, 2019) tells the story of her family in the context of British Empire.
To learn more about Professor Carby’s award click here.
Jean Howard Receives the 2020 Presidential Teaching Award
The former CSSD director and current CSSD Executive Committee member is honored for outstanding teaching by faculty.
Jean Howard, George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities and former director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) has been selected for the 2020 Presidential Teaching Award for Outstanding Teaching by Faculty. The honor is reflective of a commitment to excellent and innovative teaching as recognized by the entire Columbia community.
To learn more about Jean Howard’s work at CSSD view her past working groups at the Center below:
Reframing Gendered Violence
Engendering the Archive
Women Mobilizing Memory
CSSD Project Directors featured in the Notes on Feminism Series
Jack Halberstam and Saidiya Hartman have contributed essays to the Feminist Art Coalition project.
Queer Aqui co-director Jack Halberstam and Engendering the Archive co-director Saidya Hartman have each contributed essays to the Notes on Feminism series from the Feminist Art Coalition.
“Off Manifesto” by Jack Halberstam can be read here.
“The Plot of Her Undoing” by Saidiya Hartman can be read here.
Former CSSD Director receives 2020 Faculty Mentoring Award
Marianne Hirsch is honored for exceptional commitment to faculty mentoring.
Marianne Hirsch, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature and former Center for the Study of Social Difference Director, is a recipient of the 2020 Faculty Mentoring Award, which recognizes senior faculty who have demonstrated an exceptional commitment to faculty mentoring.
To learn more about the award and other recipients click here.
To learn more about Marianne Hirsch’s work at CSSD check out her past working group pages below:
Former CSSD Director Marianne Hirsch’s New Book Featured in Columbia News
School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference was co-authored by Leo Spitzer.
Former CSSD Director and project director of Women Mobilizing Memory, Marianne Hirsch, is interviewed about her new book, School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference, by Columbia News. She discusses the idea behind the book, her personal connection to the subject matter, the revealing nature of photographs, and her research on memory, amongst other things.
To read the whole interview, click here.
CSSD Collaboration with Columbia Global Center in Istanbul 2018-2019
CSSD projects and affiliates were featured in the Center’s most recent Annual Report.
The Columbia Global Center in Istanbul’s 2018-2019 Annual Report features project and affiliates of the Center for the Study of Social Difference. The Reframing Gendered Violence working group held four workshops in 2018 as a part of their workshop series hosted by the Istanbul Global Center. These workshops aimed to open up a critical global conversation among scholars and practicioners in order to reframe the issue of violence against women as it is currently discussed in a wide range of fields, both academic and policy-oriented. This series included “Beyond Prevalence: The Next Genderation of Campus Sexual Assault” on February 9th, “Institutionaled Violence and Gender: Innocence-Disposability-Resilience” on March 9th, “Interrogating Culture-Based Explanantions for Violence Against Women” on March 23rd, and “Turkish Students Present on Reframing Gendered Violence” on June 7th.
On September 25th, Women Mobilizing Memory (WMM) fellow and speaker at CSSD’s 10th Anniversary Symposium, Ayşe Gül Altınay, CSSD Executive Committee member and WMM co-director, Jean Howard, and director of the Queer Theory working group, Jack Halberstam, gave a talk entitled “Bridging Academia and Activism Thorugh Gender Studes.” The talk presented a critical reflection of the possibilities of doing feminism and gender studies in contemporary Turkey, with specific examples from the experiences of Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence.
Former CSSD director and co-director of the WMM working group, Marianne Hirsch, delivered a talk entitled “Women Carrying Memory: Stateless Figures,” along with Women Mobilizing Memory co-editor Ayşe Gül Altınay and Aylin Vartanyan. This talk looked at two recent memorial projects by feminist diasporic artists Mirta Kupferminc and Wangechi Muthu, which explored the vicissitudes and vulnerabilities of exile and statelessness, and suggested that stateless memory can open up the possibility of imagining alternative relationships between contemporary subjects and citizenship, national belonging, and home, as well as alternate temporalities of becoming.
The annual report also features a photo from a WMM Memory Walk conducted in Turkey. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, joined WWM fellow, Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, and Global Center Director and CSSD Women Creating Change Leadership Council member, Safwan Masri, for this insightful tour of Istanbul.
To view the entire 2018-2019 Annual Report from Columbia’s Global Center in Istanbul click here.
Jean Howard and Ana Paulina Lee to be Featured on Panel “A Celebration of Soft Power”
The discussion will revolve around American democracy, race, performance, and US-China relations.
CSSD Executive Committee member and former Women Mobilizing Memory co-director, Jean Howard, and co-director of the Geographies of Injustice working group, Ana Paulina Lee will be featured on the upcoming panel “A Celebration of Soft Power.” Fellow panelists will include David Henry Hwang and Denise Cruz and will address American democracy, race, performance, and US-China relations, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. The event will take place on December 3rd from 4 pm to 6 pm in Kent Hall and is free of charge.
To read more about the event, click here.
Saidiya Hartman Receives MacArthur “Genius Grant”
Former co-director of Engendering the Archive one of 26 fellows for 2019.
Last month, the MacArthur Foundation announced its 2019 MacArthur Fellows (the fellowship is known colloquially as a “genius grant”). Among the recipients is Saidiya Hartman, former co-director of the Engendering the Archive working group. Professor Hartman was also a speaker at the CSSD 10 year anniversary symposium What We CAN Do When There's Nothing to Be Done.
The MacArthur Fellowship is “a $625,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.” The MacArthur foundation calls Professor Hartman’s work “meticulous” and “inventive,” noting that she “has influenced an entire generation of scholars.”
Read their description of her work here.
CalArts MA Aesthetics and Politics Program Announces Saidiya Hartman as 2021 Theorist in Residence
The position includes private workshops and public lectures.
Earlier this year, the California Institute of the Arts announced their Theorist in Residence for 2021: Saidiya Hartman, former co-director Engendering the Archive. The initiative invites “theorists focusing on media, urban or global studies to spend up to two weeks at CalArts to teach workshops, faculty seminars and give a public lecture.” Previous Theorists in Residence include N. Katherine Hayles, Judith Butler, and Lauren Berlant. Saidiya Hartman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Women's and Gender Studies at Columbia University.
Susan Meiselas’s Photography Reviewed by The New York Review of books
Famed photographic works from former Engendering the Archive and Women Mobilizing Memory working group fellow are revisited.
A recent article in The New York Review of Books highlights the work of photographer Susan Meiselas. The piece specifically chronicles photographs from Nicaragua during the 1970’s. Meiselas is a former fellow of both the Engendering the Archive and Women Mobilizing Memory working groups.
To read the complete article click here.
Susan Meiselas wins 2019 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize
Former Engendering the Archive and Women Mobilizing Memory working group fellow has been awarded for her socially engaged photography.
Susan Meiselas, photographer and fellow of former CSSD working groups Engendering the Archive and Women Mobilizing Memory was awarded the 2019 Deutsche Borse photography prize. Susan’s work spans five decades and covers subjects from the scattered communities of the Kurdish diaspora to the women in her Carnival Strippers series. Her engagement with the people in her photos lends her work a celebrated sense of humanity.
For more read the full feature in The Guardian here.
The New Yorker Publishes Book Excerpt from Professor Saidiya Hartman
The forthcoming Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by former co-director of CSSD working group Engendering the Archive is set to be published February 19, 2019.
Saidiya Hartman, former co-director of CSSD working group Engendering the Archive, published in The New Yorker’s February 9, 2019 issue. The piece, “An Unnamed Girl, A Speculative History,” is an essay taken from her soon to be published book. The forthcoming Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval is set to be released February 19, 2019.
To read The New Yorker essay click here.
For more on Saidiya Hartman’s work at CSSD, see selections on our blog, YouTube channel and the Engendering the Archive project page.
Kellie Jones Receives Honorary Degree from Amherst College
Kellie Jones, member of CSSD working group Engendering the Archive, has been awarded an honorary doctorate in the field of Art History.
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.
Professor Saidiya Hartman Awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship
CSSD project director Saidiya Hartman has been 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.
Jean Howard Delivers the Dean Family Lecture at Wake Forest University
CSSD project director Jean Howard gave the Dean Family Lecture at Wake Forest University on "Edward Bond's Bingo: Shakespeare Revisited."
CSSD project director Jean Howard gave the Dean Family Lecture at Wake Forest University on "Edward Bond's Bingo: Shakespeare Revisited."
Professor Howard also led a seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America in Los Angeles on "Shakespeare and Marx Now."
Jean Howard is a renowned Shakespeare scholar and has written many books and essays on early modern literature, Shakespeare, feminist studies, and theater history. She is a co-director for the CSSD projects Engendering the Archive, Women Mobilizing Memory, and Reframing Gendered Violence.
The Dean Family Speaker Series is hosted by The Department of English at Wake Forest University and brings nationally and internationally-recognized scholars to campus. It encourages critical conversations and dialogue related to the study of English.