CSER | Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race

Spring 2024 CSER Research Symposium

Congrats to CSER’s Senior Honor students on presenting on their ongoing research this past Friday, April 5th at the 16th Annual Senior Research Symposium.

Click here for the zoom link to view the presentations!

Book Talk - The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran

The Columbia University Department of History and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race present a Book Talk and Q&A on, “The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran” with Beeta Baghoolizadeh. She is a historian and Associate Research Scholar at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies. Her first book The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran (Duke University Press, March 2024) examines questions concerning race, gender, historiography, and visuality through the lens of enslavement and abolition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Color Black has won the Scholars of Color First Book Award at Duke University Press.Baghoolizadeh’s work has been published in the American Historical Review (AHR), Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME), and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Prior to joining Princeton, Beeta was an Assistant Professor of History and Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and she has also been a Research Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center and a Regional Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center.

Thursday, April 18, 2024, 12-2pm
420 Hamilton Hall, CSER Seminar Room

Refreshments will be provided!

Asian America(n): Explorations through Creative Media

We are pleased to invite you to attend Asian America(n): Explorations through Creative Media. This event draws on the perspectives of storytellers of different approaches and media to examine central questions of: What is Asia America, and how can we tell stories that engage with the depth, complexity, and diversity of what it means to be Asian American? How do those who claim this identity make sense of its contradictions? How do the stories we tell, and how we tell them, give meaning to the identity and shape the category?

This event will take place on Wednesday, April 24, 2024, in the Lehman Suite of Columbia University’s Morningside Campus (International Affairs Building Room 406, at 420 West 118th Street). The event will run from 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm. You can read more about the speakers and register for the event using this link or the QR code in the attached flyer. All registered guests are invited to join the speakers for a reception from 6:00 pm – 6:30 pm. This event is in-person only.

Corky Lee's Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice

Known throughout his lifetime as the “undisputed, unofficial Asian American photographer laureate,” the late photojournalist Corky Lee documented Asian American and Pacific Islander communities for fifty years, breaking the stereotype of Asian Americans as docile, passive, and, above all, foreign to this country. Corky Lee’s Asian America is a stunning retrospective of his life’s work—a selection of the best photographs from his vast collection, from his start in New York’s Chinatown in the 1970s to his coverage of diverse Asian American communities across the country until his untimely passing in 2021.

Join Hua Hsu, David Henry Hwang, Akemi Kochiyama, and Mae Ngai for this event, moderated by Chris Kwok and cohosted with Asian American Bar Association of NY.

Thursday, April 18 at 6:30 PM

Asia Society 725 Park Ave

Chinatown Book Launch Party: Corky Lee's Asian America

Join us for the groundbreaking book launch of “Corky Lee’s Asian America.” In honor of 2024 AAPI Heritage Month, “Corky Lee’s Asian America” offers a profound reflection on Asian American history and activism. Featuring never-before-seen photographs alongside Corky’s most renowned images, the book encapsulates his lifelong commitment to documenting moments of inclusion, resistance, and ethnic pride.

Saturday, May 4 2024

4 – 6 PM

Manny Cantor Center: 197 East Broadway, New York, NY

Karl Jacoby Receives 2024 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award

Karl Jacoby, Allan Nevins Professor of American History – Department of History, was named as a recipient of the 2024 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award for his deep commitment to teaching and mentoring, his curricular advancements in areas such as the history of the borderlands, Indigenous peoples, ethnicity and racialization, and the environment, and his role in strengthening the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race as its co-director.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee Published in New York Times and Bomb Magazine

Writer in Residence at CSER, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, was recently published in both the New York Times and Bomb Magazine.

Dr. Sandler Published in The Baffler

Matt Sandler, Program Director for MA in American Studies, published an essay in The Baffler about the novelist, screenwriter, critic, and folklorist Cecil Brown. “Stand Up and Spout” focuses on his hard-fought and quixotic attempt to revive, using artificial intelligence technology, the enslaved poet George Moses Horton.

Follow CSER's New Instagram Account!

Follow The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race on our new Instagram page @columbiascser2023 to learn about upcoming events within our Center and other events in related Departments!

Join us for CSER's SAB Student Lounge!

Come hang out with fellow CSER students and catch up on work every Monday!

All are welcome – drinks and snacks are provided!

Time/Location: 12-2 PM at Hamilton 420

Present Memory and Resilient Territories: Ñuu Savi Efforts to Reclaim Cultural Heritage

Join us in a conversation with the Ñuu Savi (Mixtec) scholars Omar Aguilar and Izaira López Sánchez whose projects focus on the efforts of Indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, to reclaim cultural heritage. Specifically, the efforts by Ñuu Savi communities to revitalize language and reintegrate cultural memory into contemporary practices.

Please register with this link.

Time/Location: April 26th, 2024, 10 AM – 1 PM, Columbia University 116th and Broadway

Nahuatl Today Event Series

Please join us for a three-part series on Nahuatl with Eduardo de la Cruz. De la Cruz is the director of the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, a nonprofit organization for the teaching and research of Nahuatl language and culture. He holds a master’s in humanistic research from Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, where he wrote his thesis in Nahuatl. He has taught Nahuatl at Brown, Stanford, UCLA, Yale, among others. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw.

The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) is Columbia’s main interdisciplinary space for the study of ethnicity, race and indigeneity and their implications for thinking about culture, power, hierarchy, social identities, and political communities, in the U.S. and around the world.

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