Columbia University in the City of New York

Verdi's Messa Da Requiem - 62895

admin — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:25:13 +0000

The Barnard-Columbia Chorus performs Verdis hauntingly beautiful funeral mass, Messa De Requiem.

Verdis hauntingly beautiful funeral mass, first performed in 1874 in memory of his dear friend, the Italian poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni, comes to life in this rendition by the Barnard-Columbia Chorus. Tickets $5/$3 students and senior Information 212.854.5096

Friday Synthesis Symposium - Neena Chakrabarti - 61276

admin — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:25:13 +0000

Friday Synthesis Symposium Presented by Neena Chakrabarti (Parkin Group)

Friday Synthesis Symposium

Presented by Neena Chakrabarti (Parkin Group)

Friday, April 19, 2013 at 4pm
Room 209 Havemeyer

Sheldon Scheps Talk by Kate Heupel, PhD Candidate, Anthropology Dept., CU - 63881

admin — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:25:13 +0000

Talk Title: TBA

A light lunch will be served prior to the talk from 12:00-12:30 in room 465 Schermerhorn Extension.

Soviet Military Strategy in the Shadow of the Nuclear Revolution - 64788

admin — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:25:13 +0000

Lecture by David Holloway, Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, Stanford University.

Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by David Holloway, Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History at Stanford University. Discussant: Robert Jervis, Adlai E. Stevenson Professor and Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. The first thermonuclear weapons tests (1952-1955) had a profound impact on the political leaders of the three nuclear powers of the time including the Soviet Union, leading them to view a general nuclear war as unacceptable in some profound if ill-defined sense. In this talk I will make use of some newly available materials to examine the development of military strategy in the Soviet Union from 1953 up to the SALT agreements of 1972. What is the appropriate strategy for an unacceptable war? How did Soviet thinking about war change over this time? What shaped the development of Soviet military strategy? This paper draws on a larger project on the international history of nuclear weapons. I will therefore discuss Soviet military strategy in the context of the US-Soviet arms race and explore the impact of American policy and American ideas on Soviet thinking.

Notebooks of a Future Soviet Ballerina, 1930-31 - 64789

admin — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:25:13 +0000

Talk by Christina Ezrahi, independent scholar and historian of Russian culture.

Please join the Harriman Institute for a talk by Christina Ezrahi on Natalya Dudinskaya at Leningrad's former Imperial Theatre School. Natalya Dudinskayas (1912-2003) final years at the former Imperial Theatre School in Leningrad coincided with the Soviet cultural revolution, a period that was especially difficult for classical ballet. Dudinskaya, who was to become on of the most famous and powerful ballerinas of Leningrads Kirov Ballet, had dedicated herself to a profession and institution the former Mariinsky Ballet and its school that had reached its artistic pinnacle during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Its repertoire of classical ballets symbolised the splendour of imperial Russia, but during the cultural revolution, classical ballet was attacked as a suspect remnant of the old regime. How did these budding artists reconcile this conflict between the ballets imperial past, which was a daily artistic reality for them, and the ballets Soviet future, which was yet to be determined? In her final year at school, Dudinskaya used the margins and empty pages of her school notebook for personal notes and her private diary. Starting her class notes from the front of the notebook, she simultaneously began to keep a personal diary from the back of the notebook. The class notes and private thoughts of a spirited schoolgirl create a fascinating image of a school where century old artistic traditions coexisted with new experiments in art and Soviet political indoctrination. Christina Ezrahi is an independent scholar and historian of Russian culture with a special interest in Russian ballet. She was educated at the universities of Princeton and Oxford and obtained her PhD at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. She trained as a classical dancer and has reported on Russian ballet for the London-based magazine Dance Europe. Based on new archival sources, her book Swans of the Kremlin. Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia investigates the collision of art and politics during the volatile first fifty years of Soviet power, revealing the remarkable resilience of artistic creativity at the Kirov and Bolshoi Ballet companies. Christina Ezrahi is based in Tel Aviv and London. This event is free and open to the public. No registration is required.

A book launch with Patrick Weil (CNRS / Panthon-Sorbonne University) on "The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic" - 64790

admin — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:25:12 +0000

A book launch with Patrick Weil (CNRS / Panthon-Sorbonne University). Roger Newman, former Adjunct Faculty at Columbia School of Journalism will act as a discussant.

It is about an unknown story: throughout the 20th century, more than 140,000 naturalized and native-born Americans were deprived of their citizenship. The Sovereign Citizen examines for the first time the mechanism, causes, and the conflicting enforcement of denaturalization. The conflict did not end without a harsh battle in the Supreme Court from 1942 til 1971 detailed in the book. The Court reversed the traditional definition of sovereignty rooted in the language of the Constitution and the 14th Amendment: in America, sovereignty belongs to the citizens themselves, not to the state.

Patrick Weil is a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center at the Panthon-Sorbonne University. Professor Weil's work focuses on comparative immigration, citizenship, and Church States law and policy. Among his most recent publications are How to be French? Nationality in the Making since 1789 (Duke University Press, 2008), "Why the French Lacit is Liberal," Cardozo Law Review, June 2009, Vol. 30, Number 6, 2699-2714, and (with Son-Thierry Ly) "The Anti-racist Origins of the American Immigration Quota System," Social Research, Volume 77, Number 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 45-79.

Roger Newman taught Journalism, Law, and Society in the past. He is the author of "Hugo Black: A Biography" (1994; sec. edition, 1997), co-author of "Banned Films: Movies, Censors and the First Amendment" (1982) and editor-in-chief of "The Constitution and Its Amendments" (1999, 4 volumes), as well as editor of the "Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law" (2009). He has taught at Columbia University Journalism School, New York University and Hofstra Law School, and was Research Scholar at NYU Law School from 1985 to 2001.

Co-sponsored by Alliance Program and the Columbia Law School.

Living from the Nerves: Deportability, Fear, and Thrill in Migrant Moscow - 64785

admin — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:25:12 +0000

Talk by Madeline Reeves, University of Manchester.

The condition of deportability has elicited considerable interest as a legal predicament facing migrant workers and an outcome of flexible labor regimes. Less attention has been given to the lived experience of vulnerability to forced removal, or to the way in which this condition of temporal uncertainty shapes migrants' encounters with state agents. This paper draws on ethnography in Moscow among undocumented and fictively documented migrant workers from Kyrgyzstan to inquire about the affective resonance of state law (zakon) in a condition of formal illegality. Kyrgyzstani migrant workers are typically in an ambiguous legal predicament, reliant upon intermediary institutions to obtain fictive residence registrations and vulnerable to arbitrary dismissal from work that is un-contracted and undocumented. In this situation of documentary uncertainty, legal residence often depends upon successfully enacting a right to the city and the cultivation of friendly relations with the officers responsible for policing a particular sub-district. My paper is concerned with the affective intensities that arise in such encounters. The condition of deportability is often shot through with fear, exasperation, mutual suspicion and anger. But the particular dynamics of deportability and return that characterise the contemporary Russian migration regimeand the personalization of stately encounters mean that it is also often characterized by a sense of abandon and of the performativity of law itself. This paper explores living from the nerves as an ethnographic reality for Kyrgyzstani migrant workers and as an analytic for developing a more variegated account of state power and its absences in contemporary Russia. Madeleine Reeves is a University Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She has previously taught at the American University Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests lie in the anthropology of the state, space and mobility, with a particular interest in transformations in citizenship and migration in Central Asia. She has published in Slavic Review, Europe-Asia Studies, and Society and Space. Her monograph, Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. She is the co-editor of Movement Power and Place in Central Asia: Contested Trajectories (Routledge 2012) and, with Johan Rasanayagam and Judith Beyer, of Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics (forthcoming with Indiana University Press). Sponsored by the Harriman Institute (Columbia University) and the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies (NYU).

Narrative Medicine Rounds: Colm Toibin, Author and Teacher - 61902

admin — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:25:12 +0000

Narrative Medicine Rounds are lectures, readings, and performances presented by scholars, clinicians, academics, writers, and artists engaged in work at the interface between narrative and health care. Rounds are held on the first Wednesday of each month (September to May) from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm in the Columbia University Medical Center Faculty Club, followed by a reception. Rounds are free and open to the public. Students, staff, faculty, patients, friends, and interested others are warmly welcome to join us.

Statecraft and New Media: Assessing the Internet Freedom Agenda - 64801

admin — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:05:14 +0000

A panel discussion on diplomacy and the Internet Freedom Agenda.

Panelists:

Richard Boly, Director of the eDiplomacy Program, U.S. Department of State; Taylor Owen, Research Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia School of Journalism; Ivan Sigal, Executive Director, Global Voices. Moderated by Anya Schiffrin, Director of the International Media, Advocacy and Communications Specialization at SIPA

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea - 64793

admin — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:05:14 +0000

Please join the Blinken European Institute for a talk by Mark Blyth, Professor of International Political Economy at Brown University, on the history of austerity. Introduction by Emmannuelle Saada, Associate Professor of French and Romance Philology and of Sociology. Comments by Victoria de Grazia, Moore Collegiate Professor of History and Director of the Blinken European Institute.

Introduction: Emmanuelle Saada, Associate Professor, Department of French and Romance Philology and Department of Sociology

Keynote speaker: Mark Blyth, Professor of International Political Economy, Brown University

Discussant: Victoria de Grazia, Moore Collegiate Professor of History and Director, Blinken European Institute

The subject of austerity is central to debates about the economy in Europe and the U.S. Professor Mark Blyth argues that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we recognize austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.