Updates

Columbia University Libraries has announced that two acclaimed works will be awarded the 2021 Bancroft Prizes in American History and Diplomacy: Katrina: A History, 1915-2015 by Andy Horowitz (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Unworthy Republic, The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt (W.W. Norton & Company, 2020). >>

This article tells the story of the oil and gas origins of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the Earth is a homeostatic system. It shows how Gaia’s key assumption—that the climate is a fundamentally stable system, able to withstand perturbations—emerged as a result of a collaboration between the theory’s progenitor, James Lovelock, and Royal Dutch Shell in response to Shell’s concerns about the effects of its products on the climate. The article explains how Lovelock elaborated the Gaia hypothesis and gave it evidential depth through a series of Royal Dutch Shell-funded research projects meant to identify organisms whose biological activities might double as climate-regulating mechanisms. The article goes on to show how this research subsequently laid the foundation for a distinct genre of climate change denialism, in which corporations sowed doubt not by denying the phenomenon of global warming but by naturalizing it. >>

Current fellow Joelle Abi-Rached is the recipient of the 2019 Pressman Award "for outstanding work in twentieth-century history of medicine or medical biomedical sciences," which is awarded by the American Association for the History of Medicine. More information about the awards can be found at http://www.histmed.org/announcements/news/congratulations-to-the-2019-aahm-award-winners-2553. >>

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced $14.8 million in grants to support 253 humanities projects in 44 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. An additional $47.5 million was awarded to fund 55 state humanities council partners. 3 professors from Columbia, Katharina Volk, Thomas Graham, and Giuseppe Gerbino, were awarded grants and the SoF/Heyman congratulates them!  >>

The award-winning documentary Out of State (79 min.) explores the intersections between the US imperial project and prison industrial complex, through the stories of David and Hale—two Native Hawaiian men incarcerated in a private prison in the Arizona desert, thousands of miles away from home. “The themes that this powerful, poetic film explores are specifically grounded in a uniquely Hawaiian experience—exploring the struggles of contemporary Hawaiians through an intimate, honest, and empathetic lens,” the Hawai‘i International Film Festival Jury proclaimed.  >>