Thursday Lecture Series are open to Columbia faculty, students, and guests. Special Events are open to the public, unless otherwise noted.
Professor Reiss argued in this talk that Henry David Thoreau is one of the great critical modern sleepers, someone who both diagnosed and resisted the commodification and regulation of the sleep-wake cycle. >>
In this discussion, Professor Tomlinson examined how the deep, extraordinary history of musicking offers several heuristic opportunities of extra-musical reach. >>
Prof. Radin examined three episodes in the International Biological Program's project to collect and freeze blood from members of human populations depicted as primitive and endangered. >>
Professor Downie presented several imperial Greek texts that reflect upon the value of the tumuli of Troy as places of memory and argued that Philostratus, in particular, saw the burial landscape of the Troad as offering a way to articulate contemporary Greeks’ relationship to the past. >>
Although widespread in Taiwan and China, god statues have received little attention from anthropologists. By examining god statues, Professor Lin attempted to answer several important questions in Chinese religion. >>
Against a history of animation from Windsor McCay to contemporary fine art, Professor Grim’s paper focused on both the psychological facts and the philosophical questions regarding our dynamic visual processing. >>
Professor Miller’s talk considered the imagination of counterfactual self-understanding in literature and film, with special attention to the film Another Year (director Mike Leigh, 2010). >>
Professor Raffle’s talk was drawn from an ongoing book project that explores the lives of stone. >>
Professor Papapetros described how turn-of-the-century art history projected ethnographic theories of animistic practices on Renaissance and modern artworks while endowing inert images with the semblance of liveliness (Lebendigkeit) and animation (Belebung). >>