What's new

Join us on Thursday, January 28 at 5:30PM for a panel with Julie Byrne (Hofstra University), Jonathan Calvillo (Boston University), and Mary Anne Case (University of Chicago), moderated by Katherine Franke (Columbia Law).

Six out of nine judges on the Supreme Court identify as Catholic, and as long ago as 2008 the political scientist Barbara Perry referred to the Supreme Court as “the Catholic Court.” What might this mean? How—if at all—can we trace the influences of Catholicism on judicial reasoning?

Register here to receive the webinar link.

IRCPL has a full calendar of events also this semester! For the safety of our speakers and our community, all events will take place on Zoom. Open this article to see the full list, or visit ircpl.columbia.edu/events.

Please join us for a conversation on life in proximity to death - we will discuss questions of design, dignity, and care. As an architect, Karla Rothstein has been at the forefront of efforts to transform the ways in which we commemorate and place the dead, especially given constraints of space in urban cemeteries and environmental costs of cremation. Through his work as a filmmaker, John Bruce documents the power of human connections with the dying, who are all too often marginalized from the wider currents of everyday social life.

Wednesday, March 11 @6:30PM
Avery Hall, room 114

Arvind Rajagopal will offer a broad outline of popular politics’ successive phases in modern times with a reinterpretation threaded through the question of technology. He will discuss the emergence of contemporary technopolitics in India, culminating in "Hindu populism," and revisit the international context of secular nation-building, and as well, early postcolonial/decolonial responses to the problems and challenges of mass mediation.

Tuesday, February 4 at 4:15PM
Heyman Center Common Room

Icons and Images: Objects of Commemoration and Presence

German artist Heide Hatry, who creates portraits out of cremated remains of her subjects, will discuss issues of presence, our relationship to the dead, and the place of art in the process of grieving. She will be in conversation with celebrated historian Caroline Walker Bynum, University Professor emerita at Columbia University.

Tuesday, January 28, 2020
5:30 PM
Deutsches Haus, 420 W 116th Street

Join us for “Synaesthetics: Making senses of the afterlife (#3),” a reading/performative lecture by artist and anthropologist Abou Farman (The New School). How can we make sense of the afterlife beyond the limits of a secular frame? And how can the afterlife help us make senses - literally, as in cultivate new modalities of sensing? We will explore these questions through a notion of synaesthetics reformulated from Susan Buck Morss by way of MRIs, smells, sounds, and blindfolds.

Thursday, December 5th
6 PM
Schermerhorn Ext., room 465

RSVP here.

Isabel Hofmeyr, from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), will present a paper on the role of Customs on the colonial maritime boundary. The paper places the Custom House in the context of the ecology of the littoral and the port city, showing how these helped shaped the protocols and procedures of Customs officials and hence the way in which they formulated their hermeneutic strategies.

Tuesday, November 12th at 4:10 PM
Hamilton Hall, room 303

Anya Bernstein will discuss her new book The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia with Anton Vidokle (e-flux) and Adam Leeds (Slavic Languages, Columbia).

Wednesday, October 23rd at 6PM
International Affairs Building, room 1219

The book explores the contemporary Russian communities of visionaries and utopians who are pressing at the very limits of the human: from the owners of a small cryonics outfit to scientists inaugurating the field of biogerontology, from grassroots neurotech enthusiasts to believers in the Cosmist ideas of the Russian Orthodox thinker Nikolai Fedorov. Could immortality be the foundation of a truly liberated utopian society extending beyond the confines of the earth—something that Russians, historically, have pondered more than most? If life without end requires radical genetic modification or separating consciousness from our biological selves, how does that affect what it means to be human?

The acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur (UC Berkeley) will join us for two events on September 24th and 25th. The Aura of the Dead in a Disenchanted World, on 9/24, will explore the ways in which the aura of mortal remains function to create sacrality in the absence of God and other worlds beyond our own.

Jail for the Dead: How NYC Buries the Unclaimed, the following day, will be a conversation with Melinda Hunt (president of The Hart Island Project) about the history of the potter’s field, as well as the work of the Project to document the dead, and win visitation rights for families.

Join us as we discuss the recent measles outbreak in NYC and responses by the Jewish community. What does vaccine hesitancy, and, more broadly, anti-vaxx activism signal? Is it a rightful exercise of freedom of religion? Or suspicion of the state? And how does this outbreak speak to the longer history of the relationship between minority communities and the institutional infrastructure of public health?

We will hear from public health specialists, community activists, and anthropologists: Zackary Berger (Johns Hopkins University), Alyssa Masor (NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene), Blima Marcus (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Cente), and Michael Yudell (Drexel University). Ayala Fader (Fordham University) will moderate the panel.

Ecologies of Remembrance: The Material Afterlives of Unidentified Death along the Central Mediterranean Migration Route

Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 3:15 PM – 8:30 PM &
Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 9 AM – 5 PM
Sulzberger Parlor, Barnard College

See more information and register here.

With:
Osman Balkan (Swathmore College), Naor Ben-Yehoyada (Anthropology, Columbia), Brian Boyd (Anthropology, Columbia), Marc Brightman (University of Bologna), Agnès S. Callamard (Columbia, UN-OHCHR), Zoë Crossland (Anthropology, Columbia), Matthew Engelke (Religion, Columbia), Vanessa Grotti (European University Institute), Yannis Hamilakis (Anthropology, Brown), Lorena Luciano (Director, It Will Be Chaos), Filippo Piscopo (Director, It Will Be Chaos), J.C. Salyer (Anthropology and Human Rights, Barnard), Sarah Wagner (Anthropology, George Washington University), Valentina Zagaria (London School of Economics), and Leah Zamore (Center for International Cooperation, NYU).