Saidiya Hartman Receives PEN America Literary Award

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.

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.

CSSD project Gender & The Global Slum featured at the inaugural “She Opened The Door” Conference

CSSD executive committee members Anupama Rao and Ana Paulina Lee presented research from the CSSD working group Gender and the Global Slum at the inaugural She Opened the Door: Columbia University Women's Conference.

On February 9-11, 2018, more than 1,000 alumni and students convened at She Opened the Door for a weekend of celebrating, learning from, and expanding horizons with fellow Columbia alumnae who are making a difference in our world.

Rao and Lee were among a distinguished group of faculty from Columbia and Barnard to present fascinating, new research in TED-type talks and describe how their findings can impact women in various key ways. Their talk discussed how women in international urban slums address the urgent problems of poverty and social exclusion.

Notable Columbia alumnae speakers at the conference included Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59LAW, Poppy Harlow ‘05CC, Abigail Disney ’87, ‘94GSAS, A’Lelia Bundles ’76JRN, Claire Shipman ‘86CC, ‘94SIPA, and more.

“She Opened the Door” is a tribute to Winifred Edgerton Merrill. She was the first woman to receive a degree from Columbia University, opening the door for women to gain admission to Columbia's graduate and professional Schools at a time when co-education for women was under heavy debate.

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

Click here to watch the conversation with Justice Ginsburg.

Anupama Rao and Ana Paulina Lee at the conference

Anupama Rao publishes Gender, Caste and the Imagination of Equality

CSSD project co-director Anupama Rao has published the edited volume Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality. This volume, published by Women Unlimited, features essays that examine the relationship between gender, caste, class, and political agency in the context of ongoing, rapid social transformation in contemporary India.

Anupama Rao is a current member of the Center for the Study of Social Difference Executive Committee, as well as co-director of CSSD projects Reframing Gendered Violence and Gender & the Global Slum. Rao is associate professor of History at Barnard College, and Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.    

Anupama Rao publishes in New York Times on Indian Supreme Court Ruling

Anupama Rao publishes in New York Times on Indian Supreme Court Ruling

Anupama Rao, Associate Professor of History, Barnard College, and director of the recently completed CSSD project on Gender and the Global Slum, published an opinion piece in the New York Times on an Indian Supreme Court ruling that bans political appeals to identity.

"In India today, we are seeing the overturning of an order predicated on the protection of social minorities in favor of majority rights," wrote Rao. "Given current politics, will Hindu majoritarian claims be allowed, while minorities are banned from making claims to discriminated identity, or social suffering?" she wrote.

Read the full piece here.