Workshops

The Columbia University International Politics Seminars (CUIPS) provides an essential forum for faculty and graduate students to meet and discuss cutting-edge research in international relations. The mission of this seminar series is to bring the country's foremost junior faculty in international relations to present their work at Columbia. The series also creates multiple opportunities for graduate students to meet and discuss their research with invited speakers. CUIPS is sponsored by ISERP, the Department of Political Science, and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.

Below you will find our schedule for the 2019-20 academic year. Please feel free to contact the student co-coordinators, Colleen Larkin and Stephanie Char, with any inquiries. Their email addresses appear at the bottom of the page.

Fall 2019

10/3: Lauren Prather (UCSD) and Sarah Bush (Yale): "From Monitoring to Meddling: How Foreign Actors Shape Local Trust in Elections"

10/10: Kathleen Powers (Dartmouth): "The Puzzle of Coercion Failure: How Psychology Explains Resistance to Threats"

10/17: Julia Gray (Penn): "How International Organizations Survive"

10/24: Barbara Walter (UCSD): "Propaganda and Radicalization in an Internet Age"

11/14: Jeremy Weinstein (Stanford) (co-sponsored with the Comparative Politics Seminar): "Making Sense of Human Rights Diplomacy: Symbolism or Concrete Impact?"

Spring 2020

2/6: Elizabeth Saunders (Georgetown): "The Insiders' Game: Elites, Democracy, and War"

2/20: Eric Arias (William and Mary): "Impartiality and US Influence in International Courts: Evidence from the WTO Appellate Body"

2/27: Michael Bechtel (Washington University in St Louis): "Why Austerity? The Mass Politics of a Contested Policy"

3/5: Thomas Zeitzoff (American University): "The Nasty Style: Why Politicians in the U.S. and Ukraine Use Violent Rhetoric"

4/2: Sonal Pandya (UVA)

4/16: Desha Girod (Georgetown): "Aid in a Time of Terror"

4/23: Rachel Wellhausen (UT Austin)

Faculty Sponsor: 

Allison Carnegie

V. Page Fortna
Harold Brown Professor of U.S. Foreign and Security Policy

Nikhar Gaikwad
Assistant Professor of Political Science

Coordinator: 

Colleen Larkin
Ph.D. Student

Stephanie Char
Ph.D. Student

Join us this semester for the Comparative Politics speakers series lunches. The schedule for this semester appears at the bottom of this email. As in previous years, lunch will be served at 12:15 and the seminar will run from 12:30 until 1:45. Unless otherwise noted, we will meet in the Lindsay Rogers Room (International Affairs Building room 707).

Please contact Jaclyn Davis ([email protected]) or Julian Gerez ([email protected]) with any questions or concerns.

The schedule for the rest of the semester is as follows (an asterisk denotes practice job talks for graduate students):

11-Sep Sarah Lockwood, Columbia University

18-Sep Irina Soboleva*

25-Sep Alicia Cooperman*

2-Oct Micheal Minkenburg, European University Viadrina

9-Oct Jorge Mangonnet*

16-Oct Adria Lawrence, Johns Hopkins

23-Oct Miguel Rueda, Emory

30-Oct Gareth Nellis, UCSD

14-Nov Jeremy Weinstein, Stanford (co-sponsored with CUIPS)

4-Dec Yang-Yang Zhou, UBC

Coordinator: 

Julian Gerez

Jaclyn Davis

Faculty Sponsor: 

Mae Ngai
Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History

his seminar series highlights the work of women in Economics in the Columbia community. Economics has a well-known gender problem: fewer than 30% of economics majors in the USA and the UK are women (Zarghamee, 2017; Mumford, 2014). This gender imbalance is present throughout the profession—according to the American Economic Association, in 2013, only 22% of tenured and tenure track faculty were women.  To help address these issues and facilitate the success of women in Economics, we have begun a working group that allows women from across the NYC/Northeast area to have a space to meet, discuss research, present work in progress, and receive constructive feedback in an environment that allows junior and senior scholars to interact. The group welcomes all women faculty doing research in applied microeconomics topics.  Because it is be a coordinated effort between junior and senior faculty, the seminar provides crucial mentoring to help with the longer-run success of women economists in the Columbia community.  In addition, we are optimistic that it will help us with future efforts to recruit women to our campus.

Faculty Sponsor: 

Sandra Black
Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs

Coordinator: 

Sakshi Gupta
Ph.D. Student, Department of Economics

This workshop aims to bring together climate scientists, historians and other scholars interested in past climate change and its impacts on human societies. Climate change affects all aspects of life and human endeavors – understanding its social, cultural, political and economic implications is essential for successfully preparing for its impacts. From a historical perspective, understanding both how the climate has changed in the past and the different ways communities responded to those changes – whether it intensified or mitigated inequalities, for example – deepens our understanding of the past, which in turn gives us vital insights into the future. But revealing these insights requires building collaborations across multiple fields and ultimately a sincere investment in interdisciplinary scholarship.

Historians and climate scientists have increasingly begun collaborating to better understand both how historical evidence can improve our knowledge of past climate change and how high-resolution (seasonal to annual) paleoclimate data can inform our understanding of the role that climate has played in human history. Despite important progress toward these outcomes, it remains critical to better understand the data each field produces and to more effectively articulate how climate scientists and historians can work together to ask and answer questions that expand our knowledge of past climate and human history.

Collaborative work and other attempts to foster dialog between the fields has focused primarily on Europe and North America, and, to a lesser extent on East Asia. These focus areas are largely a function of their comparatively extensive data availability. From a paleoclimatology perspective, the existence of high-resolution climate proxies and the observational data necessary to calibrate them are often focused in the mid-tohigh latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Easily datable historical evidence tends to come from written archives and for a range of reasons those are also more readily available in these focus areas. Both climate scientists and historians, therefore, have to look beyond our traditional foci in order to reconstruct the deeper past in many parts of Africa, South Asia, Latin America and the Indigenous Americas. In doing so, it is critical to recognize the importance of indigenous forms of knowing and knowledge production.

Faculty Sponsor: 

Rhiannon Stephens
Associate Professor of History

The primary goal of the seminar is to bring some of the brightest and most innovative scholars in the field of political economy to Columbia University, and to expose faculty and students to their work. In addition, the seminar creates a unique opportunity for cross-disciplinary discussion between economists and political scientists. The speakers receive valuable feedback on their work as a result of the seminar. The website for the Political Economy Seminar, with the full schedule and links to papers, can be found here.

Faculty Sponsor: 

Alessandra Casella
ISERP Co-Director
Professor of Economics and Political Science

John Huber
Professor of Political Science

Navin Kartik
Professor of Economics

Michael Ting
Professor of International and Public Affairs and Political Science

Coordinator: 

Giovanna Invernizzi
PhD Student

Over the last few decades, quantitative political methodology has emerged as a valued subfield of political science. Political methodologists develop statistical and computational approaches to analyze political science data. Our role in the discipline is similar to that of econometricians in economics. The main goal is to develop methods that are motivated by substantive political science questions and that build on and contribute to the broader literature of applied statistics.

The Department of Political Science at Columbia is one of the discipline’s leaders in many areas of political methodology, including the use of field experiments, Bayesian data analysis, panel data analysis, and causal inference. The political methodology colloquium serves as a hub for many faculty members and students who are working on political methodology and applied statistics in general. 

Faculty Sponsor: 

Naoki Egami
Assistant Professor of Political Science

Coordinator: 

Arnaud Alexandre Maurel
Ph.D. student, Department of Political Science

This workshop aims to bring together scholars and practitioners interested in analyzing the social embeddedness of algorithms and intervening in the processes through which their results are interpreted and used for a variety of social purposes. Complex algorithms are increasingly called upon as a purportedly objective substitute for and/or enhancement of expert judgment in a multitude of tasks ranging from predicting dangerousness of potential parolees, through probabilistic DNA profiling (PDP) used to establish crime scene DNA matches, to determining welfare eligibility and flagging potential fraud. The workshop seeks to explore five dimensions of a nascent sociology of algorithms: 1) critical analysis of how algorithms are leveraged to automate systems of social control and surveillance, and with what consequences for already marginalized communities; 2) inquiries that are calculated to shed light on the hidden work that various social actors do to fit algorithms – by selecting and digitizing their input and repairing their output - within collectives made of humans and machines; 3) exploring the myriad dimensions of data provenance, such as consent, privacy, exploitation, partnership/sharing, as well as data colonialism, the fallibility of proxy variables, etc.; 4) comparative analysis of the jurisdictional struggles provoked by the introduction and increasing reliance on algorithms in multiple fields to perform tasks previously performed by experts; 5) attention to the representational struggles, or “trials of attribution,” around who can speak for the algorithm or in what form is the algorithm made to speak. The workshop seeks to combine approaches informed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the sociology of expertise, with critical approaches that are attuned to the racial, gender and class inequalities and biases built into algorithms and reproduced by their functioning. Finally, a unique aspect of the workshop is bringing together academics with practitioners who are attempting to shape or limit the influence of algorithms in their own field of work (e.g. defense lawyers). We envision the workshop as an incubator for collaborations across the boundary between academia and practitioners “in the wild.”

Faculty Sponsor: 

Gil Eyal
Professor of Sociology

Coordinator: 

Hannah Pullen-Blasnik
Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology
Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow

Ari Brendan Galper
Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology

The Center for the Study of Wealth and Inequality (CWI) Seminar Series is sponsored by Columbia University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research Policy (ISERP) and is devoted to the investigation of social and economic inequality.  The Seminar invites speakers from both within and outside of Columbia to present recent papers covering a wide range of topics pertaining to inequality, such as poverty, labor market behavior, education, and the family.  The research topics and methodologies are at the cutting edge of the interdisciplinary study of wealth and inequality, as the CWI Seminar invites speakers from multiple social science disciplines and fields.  Past speakers include Annette Lareau, Adam Gamoran, Timothy Smeeding, Lisa Kahn, Mario Small, Rob Warren and Florencia Torche, among numerous others.

Learn more here.

To sign up for the CWI email newsletter, please click here. 

Spring 2023 Seminar Schedule

Talks will be held in person in Knox Hall Room 509 in the Columbia Sociology department. All talk attendees will be required to follow Columbia’s COVID-19 campus policies. Final confirmation of each talk format will be sent via email newsletter the Monday before each talk. 

January 31st: Doug Downey, Professor of Sociology, The Ohio State University, “How Does Schooling Affect Inequality in Cognitive Skills? The View from Seasonal Comparison Research”

February 14th: Pilar Gonalons-Pons, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, “The Care Work System. Changes and Continuities in the Provision of Care”

February 21st: Michael Walker, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, “Organizational Patterns of Sleep Hygiene in Jail“

February 28th: Kendra Bischoff, Associate Professor of Sociology, Cornell University, “Title TBA”

April 18th: Natasha Quadlin, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, “Title TBA”

April 25th (Remote): Ellen Berrey, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto and Alex Hanna, Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), “Trends in Higher Education Protest and University and Police Responses in the U.S. and Canada, 2012-2018”

Faculty Sponsor: 

Thomas DiPrete
Giddings Professor of Sociology

Yao Lu
Associate Professor of Sociology

This workshop aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to build a research community at Columbia that is interested in exploring questions of cooperation, justice, and security in the domain of climate change. Our goal is to spark dialogue and new work that investigates how states and other civil society actors (either at the sub-national, national, or international level) seeking to combat climate change can respond to individuals and communities that are poised to be impacted both by climate change and by climate change mitigation policies.

Faculty Sponsor: 

Nikhar Gaikwad
Assistant Professor of Political Science

This Workshop on Political Psychology brings together local political psychologists twice a year to discuss a small number of papers and to talk about political psychology more generally. The workshop provides an opportunity for people with similar intellectual and research interests to present work in progress, talk informally among themselves about developments in the field, discuss common issues of concern, and provide others with potential collaborators.

Themes covered in paper sessions reflect the broad array of interests shared by political psychologists, which include the dynamics of public opinion, the impact of the media on political attitudes, the organization of political beliefs, the role of cognition and affect, political information processing, political socialization, leadership, and international negotiation.

The workshop has been meeting since 1990. The profile of the meeting has grown over the years and now attracts participants and speakers from around the country.

Faculty Sponsor: 

Robert Shapiro
Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government