Elena Ferrante Casa Italiana hosts this book club that meets once a month to discuss contemporary Italian books in Italian. The Club is open to anyone and its purpose is to offer the possibility to practice the Italian language. Everybody is encouraged to speak. The group suggests the books, usually by contemporary Italian authors, that reflect the changes that have…
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival (BHFF) for a screening of the 2017 film Men Don't Cry (Muskarci ne plaču). The screening will be followed by a discussion with the film's director Alen Drljević, film scholar Dijana Jelača, and Columbia professor Tanya Domi. Bosnian language with English subtitles. Film runtime: 98 minutes. Twenty years after the conclusion of the Bosnian War, a…
Born to a Jewish family in Kiev, raised in Baku, and converted to Islam in Berlin, Essad Bey’s orientalist writings reached a huge audience in the Weimar Republic. Although his novels and essays depicting life in locales such as Azerbaijan and the Caucasus helped shape notions of a mysterious and romantic East in the German public imagination, the Muslim community…
Venice, England, and the Reformation A lecture by Diego Pirillo, University of California, Berkeley The establishment of permanent embassies in fifteenth-century Italy has traditionally been regarded as the moment of transition between medieval and modern diplomacy. This talk proposes an alternative history of early modern diplomacy, centered not on states and their official representatives but around the figure of "the…
Presented by RTVI in collaboration with the Russian American Foundation and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, this roundtable discussion will bring together Russian and American journalists, scholars, political scientists, historians and independent authors who will jointly explore the claims of propagandistic media influence, disinformation and foreign interference in the context of modern broadcasting, and address the disruptive intervention on new…
In this talk Professor Ainsley Morse will present a paper which argues for collecting—meaning collecting variously ephemeral “things” (words, poems, books, writers, traditions, ways of life), but also “collecting” as a mode of writing—as both a pathology and a creative mode typical of unofficial literature and art of the late Soviet period. She will focus on two late-Soviet writers: the…
How and Why Immigrant Muslim Communities Are Losing Women: Nearly half of Muslim Americans never attend the mosque and have very few Muslim friends. How and why does “unmosquing” happen and to whom? Eman Abdelhadi traces second-generation immigrants’ engagement with Muslim communities using life history interviews and presents four trajectories that emerge from these data. Abdelhadi finds that while most Muslim…
Please join the Harriman Institute and Novyi Zhurnal (The New Review) for a reception celebrating the opening of the exhibit Kirill Radchenko: War and Peace, featuring the photographs by the late journalist, cinematographer, and photographer Kirill Radchenko. The exhibit is organized in cooperation with PEN Moscow and its director Nadezhda Azhgikhina. Exhibit runs March 23 – May 15, 2020. Exhibit hours are Monday–Friday, 9:30AM – 5:00PM excluding university holidays. Radchenko…
The history and culture of Sephardic Jewry can be found in the rich repertoire of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) folksongs. These folksongs reflect on Jewish traditions and stories as well as universal human themes such as love, death, and despair. In the 20th and 21st century Western classical composers such as Alberto Hemsi, Yehezkel Braun, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Joaquin Rodrigo, Wolf Simoni (Louis…
Please join the Ukrainian Film Club at Columbia University for a screening of the little-known Ukrainian film classic The Lost Petition (1972), directed by Borys Ivchenko. The film is in Ukrainian with English subtitles. Professor Yuri Shevchuk will introduce the film and moderate the discussion. Inspired by a Mykola Hohol (a.k.a. Nikolai Gogol) short story, this heroic comedy takes place in 18th…