IRCPL News
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
Graduate students: apply by February 5, 2020. The fellowship provides each student a maximum of $4,000 to cover expenses directly related to their research, including travel, lodging, and materials during the Summer of 2020.
Undergraduate students: apply by March 25, 2020. The fellowship provides a maximum of $2,500 to support research or an internship that focuses on any aspect of religion or secularism. Please note that graduating seniors are not eligible for this fellowship.
Faculty: apply by February 20, 2020. Joint Projects will provide up to $15,000 for research projects, seminars, conferences, working groups, and other programs that bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars.
Email Marianna at mp3699@columbia.edu with any questions.
Read MoreWe invite scholars from any discipline to submit paper proposals for a two-day workshop, “Panjab at the Limits of Indian History,” to be held at Columbia University in New York City on April 24-25, 2020. This workshop is a partnership between IRCPL, Alliance Program and Sciences Po - Centre de recherches internationales. The workshop seeks to explore “Panjab” and “Panjabi” amid the assumptions, contradictions and elisions of the conventional study of South Asia. We are interested in papers that examine how various beliefs, practices and traditions emerging from Panjab call into question categories such as “nation,” “religion,” “language,” “capitalism,” “borders” and even “history,” and thereby offer potentially new ways to conceptualize the past and present.
Interested participants should submit a 300-word abstract and two-page Curriculum Vitae to Marianna Pecoraro at mp3699@columbia.edu by January 10, 2020.
Read MoreJoin 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
Graduate students: apply by February 5, 2020. The fellowship provides each student a maximum of $4,000 to cover expenses directly related to their research, including travel, lodging, and materials during the Summer of 2020.
Undergraduate students: apply by March 25, 2020. The fellowship provides a maximum of $2,500 to support research or an internship that focuses on any aspect of religion or secularism. Please note that graduating seniors are not eligible for this fellowship.
Email Marianna at mp3699@columbia.edu with any questions.
Read MoreIsabel 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
IRCPL is hosting three info sessions on the graduate seminar “Punjab and Religion,” taught by Dr. Rajbir Judge:
* Tuesday, October 22
* Monday, October 28
* Thursday, November 7
During Spring Break, students will travel to various sites in East Punjab to consider the contradictory and disputed nature of Punjab’s religious traditions while remaining attentive to the many intricate historical legacies that saturate the Punjab landscape. Travel expenses will be covered by IRCPL.
Attendance to one info session is required to enroll in the class. Register here.
Read MoreAnya 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?
Read MoreThe Claremont Prize is dedicated to the publication of first books by early career scholars working on any aspect of the study of religion, in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences. Prize-winners will be invited to IRCPL to participate in a workshop and the books will appear in IRCPL’s series, “Religion, Culture, and Public Life,” published by Columbia University Press.
Email your application to mp3699@columbia.edu by October 1, 2019.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreJoin 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.
Read MoreEcologies 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).
The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University is seeking submissions to its new Claremont Prize for the Study of Religion. The prize is dedicated to the publication of first books by early career scholars working in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences. Submissions can be on any aspect of the study of religion, including the study of secularism. Prize-winners will be invited to IRCPL to participate in a workshop and the books will appear in IRCPL’s series, “Religion, Culture, and Public Life,” published by Columbia University Press.
Deadline: October 1, 2019.
Read More