Mahmood Mamdani receives Lenfest Award

Eight faculty members received this year's Distinguished Columbia Faculty Awards at a dinner at Casa Italiana on Feb. 8. The awards, established by University Trustee Gerry Lenfest (LAW'58, HON'09) in 2005, are given annually to faculty of unusual merit, across a range of activities including scholarship, University citizenship and professional involvement with a primary emphasis on the instruction and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students. This year's winning faculty members come from disciplines ranging from medieval art to earth science and will receive a stipend of $25,000 per year for three consecutive years.

Events In Tunisia: Taoufik Ben Amor on PBS

-Current Affairs: Taoufik Ben Amor discusses recent historic events in Tunisia with Charlie Rose. Link to the clip below: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11416
1/17/2011: Malika Zeghal of Harvard University and Taoufik Ben Amor of Columbia University speak about the recent upheaval, the Tunisian mindset, international response, and the political credibility of the new government in detail.

-Interview on Brian Lehrer Live, 1/20/2011: A look at the revolution in Tunisia with Informed Comment blogger Juan Cole, speaker and columnist on Arab and Muslim issues Mona Eltahaway and Columbia Professor of Arabic Studies Taoufik Ben-Amor. http://vimeo.com/19009555

Dan Miron wins National Jewish Book Award

Professor Dan Miron has been awarded the 2010 National Jewish Book Award in the category of scholarship. The award is granted by the Jewish Book Council. The book was chosen as "the best written, most comprehensive, and most engaging book in its category." Dan Miron, widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on modern Jewish literatures, begins this study by surveying and critiquing previous attempts to define a common denominator unifying the various modern Jewish literatures. He argues that these prior efforts have all been trapped by the need to see these literatures as a continuum. Miron seeks to break through this impasse by acknowledging discontinuity as the staple characteristic of modern Jewish writing. These literatures instead form a complex of independent, yet touching, components related through contiguity. From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward A New Jewish Literary Thinking offers original insights into modern Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish literatures, including a new interpretation of Franz Kafka's place within them and discussions of Sholem Aleichem, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Akhad ha'am, M. Y. Berditshevsky, Kh. N. Bialik, and Y. L. Peretz

Prof. Muhsin Al-Musawi's "Islam on the Street" has been designated as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2010

In every January issue, "Choice" publishes its list of *Outstanding Academic Titles* that were reviewed during the previous calendar year. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by "Choice" and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community.

The list is quite selective: it contains approximately ten percent of some 7,000 works reviewed in "Choice" each year. "Choice" editors base their selections on the reviewer's evaluation of the work, the editor's knowledge of the field, and the reviewer's record.

Columbia University Press publishes essays by Sudipta Kaviraj

For decades Sudipta Kaviraj has worked with and improved upon Marxist and subaltern studies, capturing India's social and political life through its diverse history and culture. While this technique has been widely celebrated in his home country, Kaviraj's essays have remained largely scattered abroad. This collection finally presents his work in one convenient volume and, in doing so, reasserts the brilliance of his approach.

New Collections of Essays by Hamid Dabashi Published

A Hamid Dabashi Reader,The World is My Home, edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi of Vassar College, was published in June 2010. This book brings together some of Dabashi's most important writings, especially those which offer new ways of understanding Islam, Iran, Islamist ideology, global art, and the condition of global modernity more generally. The book shows the underlying conceptual themes that unify Dabashi's wide-ranging corpus. Dabashi combines his knowledge of the subject matter and sociological, hermeneutical, and cultural interpretive skills to produce novel and alternative insights. These essays reflect historical and geographical worlds that are best viewed when Hamid Dabashi's work is read as a whole, which this one volume work makes possible for the first time.