Workshops
Our workshops are followed by social scientists and scholars throughout the New York area’s many universities, as well as by government, nonprofit, and private research and policy organizations. ISERP sponsored workshops are free and open to the public. For further information, have a look at our calendar of events or select from the list below.
Mainstream Western news outlets are currently oversaturated with crises, from the prolonged war in Ukraine and ever-developing conflict and humanitarian disaster in the Middle East, to the U.S. presidential election and geopolitical tensions between the world’s most powerful states. While some stories persistently occupy the front page of major newspapers, other conflicts and crises are either buried from Western audiences or absent from the regular news cycle altogether.
In response to this coverage gap, professors of political science and international affairs at Columbia University, along with researchers at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, are holding a series of workshops during the Spring 2025 and Fall 2025 semesters spotlighting regions of conflict not regularly covered by Western news outlets to better inform the Columbia community and beyond.
Fall 2025
Schedule to be announced
Faculty Sponsor(s)
The Diversification of Criminal Political Economies Working Group examines the role of armed groups in shaping formal economic structures. Participants explore how criminal actors engage in strategic sectors such as mining, oil transportation, and agriculture, as well as the implications of their presence for governance, investment, and economic predictability. The working group also considers how illicit/licit economic spheres interact in contexts of sustained violence, drawing on comparative perspectives from Mexico, Latin America, and beyond.
Fall 2025
Schedule to be announced
Faculty Sponsor(s)
This newly-designed workshop builds on its earlier version (International History Workshop) but aims to expand its scope - geographically, chronologically, and methodologically. A key new feature is the inclusion of a respondent for each guest speaker, fostering deeper engagement with the presented work.
Our goal is to bring together a diverse group of graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty members interested in comparative, transnational, global, and international subjects. The workshop will meet weekly on Wednesdays, from 5:00-6:30pm, in Fayerweather Hall, Room 413 unless otherwise specified, and will serve as a forum for discussing work-in-progress.
February 4th
Presenter: Małgorzata Mazurek (Columbia University)
Topic: “Buffer Zone Socialism: Reckoning with Germany, the Soviet Union, and the World Economic Crisis (1932-1933)”
Respondent: Andrew Sartori (NYU)
February 11th
Presenter: Christian Bailey (Purchase College, NYC)
Topic: “(Sp)ending the Peace Dividend: German and American Climate Diplomacy at Kyoto”
Respondent: Adam Tooze (Columbia University)
February 18th
Presenter: Judith Surkis (Rutgers University)
Topic: “Oil Lines and Blood Lines: Patrimony, Sovereignty, and Natural Resources between France and Algeria, 1961-1971”
Respondent: Anupama Rao (Barnard College)
February 25th
Presenter: Samuel Niu (Columbia University)
Topic: “The World that Emancipation Made: Recruitment to British Guiana in Xiamen, China, 1852-1853” -dissertation chapter
Respondent: Charles Argon (Princeton University)
March 4th
Presenter: Andreas Guidi (INALCO, Paris)
Topic: “Shady Trade in the Imperial Twilight: Changing Borders, Adventure Capitalism, and International Surveillance in the Mid-Twentieth-Century Mediterranean”
Respondent: Johan Mathew (Rutgers University)
March 11th
Presenter: Sonali Dhanpal (Columbia University)
Topic: “The Paper Bureaucracy of Land: Drawing Caste into a ‘Racial’ Regime of Property in Colonial Bangalore”
Respondent: Debashree Mukherjee (Columbia University)
March 18th
Presenter: Durba Mitra (Harvard University)
Topic: "The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism" (Princeton University Press, 2026)
March 25th
Presenter: Jakub Straka (Masaryk University)
Topic: “Behind the Iron Curtain: Art, Cultural Encounters, and State Control in 1960s Czechoslovakia”
Respondent: Patryk Tomaszewski (Fordham University)
April 1st
Presenter: Daniel Quiroga-Villamarín (University of Vienna)
Topic: “Ahead of the Times: Erecting the United Nations Headquarters in New York City’s 'Empire State’ (1939-1952)”
Respondent: Kim Phillips-Fein (Columbia University)
April 8th
Presenter: Paris Papamichos-Chronakis (Royal Holloway, London)
Topic: “Dark Cosmopolitanism: Greek Αntisemitism in Mediterranean Perspective, 1840-1914”
Respondent: Louis Fishman (CUNY)
April 15th
Presenter: Hongyi Yu (Columbia University)
Topic: “The Revival of the Interpersonal Propaganda Against the Backdrop of Cinematic Exchange Between Socialist China and North Korea in the 1960s”
Respondent: Elidor Mëhilli (Hunter College, CUNY)
April 22nd
Presenter: Patrick Cohrs (University of Florence)
Topic: “Transformative Learning: The Remaking of World Order in the Long 20th Century”
Respondent: Adam Tooze (Columbia University)
April 29th
Presenter: Glenda Sluga (European University Institute)
Topic: “What Does International, Global, and Transnational History Really Mean?”
Respondent: Matthew Connelly, Mark Mazower, and Susan Pedersen (Columbia University)
Faculty Sponsor(s)
Coordinator(s)
Elijah Ferrante, PhD Student, History
Dimitrios Mitsopoulos, PhD Student, History
Lélia Roche, PhD Student, History
Audrey Siraud, PhD Student, History
Ziqian Zheng, PhD Student, History
The interaction of international politics and international economics has always been a topic of great interest to scholars (and others). Over the past decade or so, it has risen rapidly to the top of both scholarly attention and the new cycle. Geopolitical relations among nations play a central role in international economic developments; international economic trends have a powerful impact on geopolitics; and domestic politics has fundamentally transformed the structure of the international economic order. This workshop consists of a wide array of presentations on topics related, in one way or another, to the relationship between international economic and political affairs.
Fall 2025
Schedule to be announced
Faculty Sponsor(s)
Computational social science has the potential to address pressing challenges, but interdisciplinary collaboration is crucial. The DSI Computational Social Science Working Group invites researchers to a new meeting series exploring the intersection of data science and the social sciences. Sessions will provide an informal space for sharing work in progress and discussing new methods, collaborations, and shared interests.
To learn more, please visit the Data Science Institute website.
*special discretionary award
Fall 2025
Schedule to be announced