Calendar

The Department’s colloquium series typically meets on Thursdays in the Seminar Room at Gateway Bldg, 106 Somerset Street, 5th Floor at 3:00 p.m. Please see the Department Calendar or scheduled speakers and more details.

Fall 2017

• 10/19/17 Break It Down For Me Lecture Series: Alex Guerrero
• 10/30/17 Inaugural Rutgers Lecture: Sir Richard Sorabji, Alexander Library Teleconference Lecture Hall, Room 403, CAC 3:00-8:00pm
• 11/2/17 Inaugural Rutgers Lecture: Sir Richard Sorabji, Alexander Library Teleconference Lecture Hall, 3:00-8:00 pm
• 11/3/17 Inaugural Rutgers Lecture: Sir Richard Sorabji, 3:00-5:00pm
• 11/6/17 Dr. Daniel DeHaan (https://www.divinity.cam.ac.uk/directory/dehaan) – “Souls and Contemporary Neuroscience: the Possibility of Reconciliation,” 7:30pm
• 11/9/17 Break It Down For Me Lecture Series: Jeff King
• 11/16/17 Prof. Jenann Ismael (University of Arizona), 3:00-5:00 pm
• 11/30/17 Dr. Eleonore Stump (https://sites.google.com/site/stumpep/) – “Aquinas on the Atonement”, 7:30 pm
• 12/15-12/16/17 Parfit Memorial Conference, Theological Seminary, Hageman Hall, 9:30 am-5:00 pm

In the ruins of a medieval palace in Delhi, a unique phenomenon occurs: Indians of all castes and creeds meet to socialize and ask the spirits for help. The spirits they entreat are Islamic jinns, and they write out requests as if petitioning the state. At a time when a Hindu right wing government in India is committed to normalizing a view of the past that paints Muslims as oppressors, Anand Vivek Taneja’s Jinnealogy provides a fresh vision of religion, identity, and sacrality that runs counter to state-sanctioned history.

The ruin, Firoz Shah Kotla, is an unusually democratic religious space, characterized by freewheeling theological conversations, DIY rituals, and the sanctification of animals. Taneja observes the visitors, who come mainly from the Muslim and Dalit neighborhoods of Delhi, and uses their conversations and letters to the jinns as an archive of voices so often silenced. He finds that their veneration of the jinns recalls pre-modern religious traditions in which spiritual experience was inextricably tied to ecological surroundings. In this enchanted space, Taneja encounters a form of popular Islam that is not a relic of bygone days, but a vibrant form of resistance to state repression and post-colonial visions of India.

Anand Vivek Taneja is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University.

Debashree Mukherjeeis an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University.  Her research and teaching centers on the history of modern South Asian visual cultures and industries, with a focus on late colonial Bombay cinema. Her current book project, “Parallel Action: Bombay Cinema and the Practice of Modernity,” presents a material history of early Bombay cinema (1920s-1940s) that privileges practice, circuits of work, and technologies of production, and draws inspiration from her own experience of working in Mumbai’s film and television industries in the early 2000s. Select publications include “Creating Cinema’s Reading Publics: The Emergence of Film Journalism in Bombay,” in No Limits: Media Studies from India (2013), “Scandalous Evidence: Looking for the Bombay Film Actress in an Absent Archive”, in Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinema’s Past and Future (2015), and “Tracking Utopias: Technology, Labor, and Secularism in Bombay Cinema,” in Media/Utopia (2016). Debashree is an Editor with the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.

The Center for International History is housed within the Department of History at Columbia University. It provides a forum for discussion and to foster historical perspectives on international issues of contemporary intellectual concern. It draws upon the collective intellectual resources, not only of the faculty and graduate students of the Department of History, but also of scholars from anthropology, political science, sociology, law and other adjacent fields as well as policy-makers, journalists and other practitioners. Its aim is to feature speakers and events that transcend or transform the public/academic divide and which critically engage with the production and consumption of historical knowledge across divisions of class, race and gender in our global communities.

Apology constitutes an essential part of the hard work of being an imperfect moral agent, over time and amongst others.  Apology is one component of our “reparative responsibilities” (Bell 2012), of responding well to one’s past wrongdoing, and is more broadly part of the ongoing effort to come to terms with what one’s deeds will mean for one’s life (Williams 69).  So how is this work achieved?   In this paper I argue that the basic structure of apology is more puzzling, because more paradoxical, than has been recognized.  I argue that in apologizing one must at once identify with one’s wrong action, in order to take moral responsibility for it, and at the same time dis-identify with it, in order to morally reject it.  That is, I must at once own and disown what I did.  While the paradox of forgiveness has been widely discussed, the paradoxicality of apology has been almost entirely overlooked. I end the paper by proposing that the paradox need not undermine the practice; rather, there is, I suggest, an internal connection between apology’s very instability and the possibility of moral change.

PhD student Mariam Matar will respond.

Presented by the NYC Wittgenstein Workshop

Please join the NY German Idealism Workshop for its next event on Thursday, April 6th, from 4:30 to 6:30pm at 6 East 16th St, room D1009. Terry Pinkard will present a paper entitled “Forms of Life, Forms of Thought: Hegel and Wittgenstein,” and New School’s Jay Bernstein will respond.

For anyone interested in reading the paper ahead of time, please send an e-mail to nygermanidealism@gmail.com

Upcoming and Past Events at The Center for Global Ethics and Politics

*all events open to the public and held at The Graduate Center, CUNY (365 Fifth Avenue at 34th St.)*  |  for video of past events please see here)

Spring 2018

• Linda Bosniak, Rutgers University, “‘Here To Stay’ and The Contested Ethics of Presence” Monday, February 5 @ 6:30 pm, room 9204-05.
  • Co-sponsored by the Social and Political Theory Student Association
• Daniele Archibugi, Birkbeck University of London, “Do we Need a Global Criminal Justice?”, Monday April 9 @ 6.30 pm, room 9204.
• Seyla Benhabib, Yale University, “Isaiah Berlin. A Judaism between Decisionism and Pluralism,” Monday, April 23 @ 6.30 pm, room 9204.