February 2023

To filter, choose a category in the above drop-down, then click "Apply."
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
29
30
31
1
2
3
4
 
 
 
 
Celebrating Recent Work by James Stafford

Celebrating Recent Work by James Stafford

February 02, 2023
6:15PM - 7:30PM ET

Location: 

The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, Columbia University

Event Type: 

New Books in the Arts and Sciences Presents:

 

Celebrating Recent Work by James Stafford

The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire, and the European Order

February 2, 2023, 6.15PM ET

Heyman Center Common Room / Hybrid Virtual

Register here for this event. This event will be in person at the Heyman Center and live-streamed online. Please register for both in-person and virtual attendance via the link.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.


The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have long been seen as a foundational period for modern Irish political traditions such as nationalism, republicanism, and unionism. The Case of Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2022) offers a fresh account of Ireland's neglected role in European debates about commerce and empire in what was a global era of war and revolution. Drawing on a broad range of writings from merchants, agrarian improvers, philosophers, politicians, and revolutionaries across Europe, this book shows how Ireland became a field of conflict and projection between rival visions of politics in commercial society associated with the warring empires of Britain and France. It offers a new perspective on the crisis and transformation of the British Empire at the end of the eighteenth century and restores Ireland to its rightful place at the center of European intellectual history.

About the Author

James Stafford is faculty in the Department of History at Columbia University. He specializes in the political and intellectual history of Ireland, Britain and Western Europe since 1750, with a particular interest in questions of political economy and international order. The Case of Ireland, his first book, offers a fresh account of Ireland’s place in European debates about commerce and empire during a global era of war and revolution. Drawing on a broad range of writings from merchants, agrarian improvers, philosophers, politicians and revolutionaries across Europe, the book shows how Ireland became a field of conflict and projection between rival systems of political economy associated with the warring empires of Britain and France.

About the Speakers

Isaac Nakhimovsky is Associate Professor of History and Humanities at Yale University. His first book, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton University Press, 2011), shows how, in the context of the French Revolution, the German philosopher J.G. Fichte came to theorize economic independence as an ideal, and developed a systematic political theory of what John Maynard Keynes later termed “national self-sufficiency.” His next book, The Holy Alliance: The Liberal Idea of a Federal Europe after 1815, is under contract for Princeton University Press.

Susan Pedersen, Gouverneur Morris Professor of History and department chair at Columbia University, specializes in British history, the British empire, comparative European history, and international history. Her book about the League of Nations and its impact on the imperial order, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire, appeared from Oxford University Press in the summer of 2015.

Pablo Piccato is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931, published by Duke University Press, and a co-editor of True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico. His research and teaching focus on modern Mexico, particularly on crime, politics, and culture. He has taught as visiting faculty in universities in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and France.

Nadia Urbinati, Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University, is a political theorist who specializes in modern and contemporary political thought and the democratic and anti-democratic traditions. She co-chaired the Columbia University Faculty Seminar on Political and Social Thought and was a co-editor with Andrew Arato of the academic journal Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Foundation Reset Dialogues on Civilization and the Feltrinelli Foundation (Milan).

 

6:15PM - 7:30PM ET
 
 
 
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
 
 
 
 
 
Celebrating Recent Work by Rhiannon Stephens

Celebrating Recent Work by Rhiannon Stephens

February 17, 2023
12:00PM - 1:15PM ET

Location: 

The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, Columbia University

Event Type: 

New Books in the Arts and Sciences Presents:

Celebrating Recent Work by Rhiannon Stephens

Poverty and Wealth in East Africa

February 17, 2023, 12:00PM-1:15PM ET

Heyman Center Common Room / Hybrid Virtual

Register here for this event. This event will be in person at the Heyman Center and live-streamed online. Please register for both in-person and virtual attendance via the link.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.


In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa, Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.

About the Author

Rhiannon Stephens is an Associate Professor of History at Columbia Unviersity and specializes in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the late first millennium CE through the twentieth century. She is the author of Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History (Duke University Press, 2022), an interdisciplinary history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. Her first monograph, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), traced the history of motherhood as a social institution and an ideology across over a millennium of Ugandan political, economic and social change.

About the Speakers

Laura Fair is a historian of twentieth-century urban East Africa and the author of several award-winning books. She teaches in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. Her scholarship focuses on gendered social and economic change, and urban popular culture in Swahili-speaking communities. Her first book, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Ohio University Press, 2001), illustrates how former slaves used the social and cultural tools at their command to demonstrate their freedom from slavery and articulate alternative visions of justice under colonialism.

Raevin Jimenez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. Her work examines the gender history of Nguni-speakers in southern Africa between the 9th-20th century. Over a millennium, Nguni-speakers innovated and reconfigured masculine propriety and male relationships. Changing ideas of gender allowed Nguni-speakers to congregate young men into vast networks, define male identity, establish obligations of men as sons and husbands, and orient junior men towards political and economic opportunities.

Pablo Piccato is a Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author of City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931, published by Duke University Press, and a co-editor of True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico. His research and teaching focus on modern Mexico, particularly on crime, politics, and culture, and he is currently working on an overview of crime in Mexico during the twentieth century. He has taught in universities in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and France.

Caterina Pizzigoni is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. She specializes in the colonial history of Latin America. Her interests include indigenous populations and the study of sources in Nahuatl (indigenous language of central Mexico), social history, household and material culture, religion and gender. Her current research focuses on household saints in colonial Mexico.

 

12:00PM - 1:15PM ET
 
 
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
 
 
 
Conference on the Credibility of Government Policy in Honor of Guillermo Calvo

Conference on the Credibility of Government Policy in Honor of Guillermo Calvo

February 22, 2023 to February 24, 2023

Event Type: 

In 1978 Guillermo Calvo published the paper “On the Time Consistency of Optimal Policy in a Monetary Economy”. This paper shows how a conflict between the interests of the current government with those of a future government, both of which share the same objective of maximizing social welfare, gives rise to a credibility problem. This seminal paper kickstarted a broad research agenda, which includes, for example, the problem of inflation stabilization, the unintended consequences of non-credible policies, balance of payments crises, sovereign debt crises, and the design of sustainable public debt management strategies. This conference will celebrate the “time consistency” paper´s 45th anniversary by gathering state-of-the-art research on the topic and bringing together academic researchers and policymakers who have to make decisions in environments without commitment.

Organizers. Andy Neumeyer (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella) and Martín Uribe (Columbia University)

The program and registration form can be found here.

 
 
 
 
 
26
27
28
1
2
3
4
 
Celebrating Recent Work by Sarah Zukerman Daly

Celebrating Recent Work by Sarah Zukerman Daly

February 27, 2023
5:00PM-6:15PM ET

Location: 

The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, Columbia University

Event Type: 

New Books in the Arts and Sciences Presents:

Celebrating Recent Work by Sarah Zukerman Daly

Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections

February 27, 2023, 5:00PM - 6:15PM ET

Heyman Center Common Room / Hybrid Virtual

Register here for this event. This event will be in person at the Heyman Center and live-streamed online. Please register for both in-person and virtual attendance via the link.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.


One of the great puzzles of electoral politics is how parties that commit mass atrocities in war often win the support of victimized populations to establish the postwar political order. Violent Victors traces how parties derived from violent, wartime belligerents successfully campaign as the best providers of future societal peace, attracting votes not just from their core supporters but oftentimes also from the very people they targeted in war.

Drawing on more than two years of groundbreaking fieldwork, Sarah Daly combines case studies of victim voters in Latin America with experimental survey evidence and new data on postwar elections around the world. She argues that, contrary to oft-cited fears, postconflict elections do not necessarily give rise to renewed instability or political violence. Daly demonstrates how war-scarred citizens reward belligerent parties for promising peace and security instead of blaming them for war. Yet, in so casting their ballots, voters sacrifice justice, liberal democracy, and social welfare.

Proposing actionable interventions that can help to moderate these trade-offs, Violent Victors links war outcomes with democratic outcomes to shed essential new light on political life after war and offers global perspectives on important questions about electoral behavior in the wake of mass violence.

About the Author

Sarah Zukerman Daly is an associate professor of political science at Columbia University. She has been a visiting associate research scholar in Latin American Studies at Princeton University, a pre-doctoral fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, and a post-doctoral fellow in the Political Science Department and at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Her book, Organized Violence after Civil War: The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America, was published by Cambridge University Press in its Comparative Politics series in 2016.

About the Speakers

Lisa Anderson is a Special Lecturer and James T. Shotwell Professor Emerita of International Relations at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Dr. Anderson’s scholarly research has included work on state formation in the Middle East and North Africa; on regime change and democratization in developing countries; and on social science, academic research and public policy both in the United States and around the world. Among her books are The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980 (1986) and Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century (2003).

Michael Gilligan is a Professor of Politics and Director of Undergraduate Studies at New York University. His research explores the effects of various types of international interventions (peacekeeping, post-conflict reconstruction aid, and ex-combatant reintegration programs) on the societies in which those interventions are undertaken. He continues to have ongoing research interest in using formal models to understand international cooperation.

Justin Phillips is a Professor of and the chair of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. He studies American state and urban politics and public opinion. He has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization. His current research projects include analyzing the effects of public opinion on sub-national policymaking and evaluating the power of state governors in negotiations with legislatures.

Andreas Wimmer is a Swiss sociologist who is the Lieber Professor of Sociology and Political Philosophy at Columbia University. His research brings a long-term historical and globally comparative perspective to the questions of how states are built and nations formed, how racial and ethnic hierarchies form or dissolve in the process, and when this will result in conflict and war. Most recently, he is trying to understand how ideas and institutions travel across the world and with what consequences.

5:00PM-6:15PM ET
 
 
 
 
 
 

Newsletter

Don't want to miss our interesting news and updates! Make sure to join our newsletter list.

* indicates required

Contact us

For general questions about ISERP programs, services, and events.

Working Papers Bulletin Sign-up

Sign up here to receive our Working Papers Bulletin, featuring work from researchers across all of the social science departments. To submit your own working paper for our next bulletin, please upload it here, or send it to iserp-communication@columbia.edu.
* indicates required