Annual Report 2021-2022

As I write, the world already feels immeasurably different from just two years ago. The war in Ukraine faces Europe with its greatest challenge in decades. Airport and beaches were packed last summer as millions looked forward to their holidays after a confinement they never imagined was possible. The pandemic is not over, but it feels as though it is. Other issues dominate the headlines, and the past two years, which have left their imprint on the Institute as everywhere else, are now moving into memory. We will not forget them in a hurry, because they brought us the good along with the bad, a time to reflect and innovate alongside the constant uncertainty, restrictions, and lockdowns.

In the first place, our lives at the Institute were enriched by a new cohort of Fellows and a set of experiences unlikely ever to be replicated. The 2020-21 cohort was, from the start, something special. Working from the assumption that the start of the fellowship cycle would have to be delayed and that the pandemic might be with us, in one way or another, for at least two years, we had decided that January 2021 should be the start of their time with us, and we allowed Fellows to come as it suited them across the eighteen months that followed. This let them surmount the seemingly endless obstacles the pandemic threw in the way of their joining us, and to arrive when circumstances permitted. The cohort was thus never in Paris together at a single moment, and yet it generated from the outset an esprit de corps that was remarkable.

The streets of Montparnasse may have been strangely empty but inside the walls of Reid Hall work was going on. Thanks to the extraordinary commitment of Associate Director Marie d’Origny, Program Officer Eve Grinstead, and Operations and Projects Coordinator James Allen, the Institute was able to open its doors as early as the fall of 2020—at a time when life in most places remained entirely virtual and the Columbia campus back on Morningside Heights resembled a ghost town.

It was in these months of enforced quietude that we were able to experiment and to come up with new initiatives. We gave a warm welcome to Paris-based visitors such as writer Jake Lamar, energy expert Pierre Noël, Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper, and the former UN special rapporteur Agnes Callamard. Unable to hold public events, we moved instead to launch what became Library Chats, a series of filmed conversations that brought together Noël and Kuper in a discussion of climate change, and Jake Lamar and former Fellow Emmanuel Gras on the gilets jaunes.

We also responded to the crisis by expanding the pedagogic role of the Institute. Dozens of Columbia graduate students were stranded in Europe, facing rather more than the usual isolation of young scholars embarking on their first dissertation forays into the archives and libraries. Dodging amid the hail of endlessly shifting travel advisories, we put together a sequence of graduate work-in-progress seminars that brought together some of these students from across Arts & Sciences, faculty commentators, and Institute Fellows in a hybrid format that combined student presentations with responses by faculty and Fellows. Our online programming opened with a much-watched discussion on freedom of speech norms featuring President Lee C. Bollinger and Institute Visitor Agnes Callamard, who departed shortly afterwards to become Secretary-General of Amnesty International.

In the spring our flagship Fellows talks, Les Rendez-Vous de l’Institut: The Fellows’ Series, resumed online and the work of the new Fellows entered the spotlight. The new cohort included writer (and former Columbia philosophy PhD) Anuk Arudpragasam, whose novel A Passage North was shortlisted soon after for the 2021 Booker Prize; a representative of the anonymous Syrian film collective, Abounaddara; Columbia University’s professor of architecture and sustainable development Lynnette Widder, and composer Sky Macklay. Visual artist and filmmaker Karimah Ashadu and Portuguese photographer João Pina joined us as Abigail R. Cohen Fellows. The office of artist Lamia Joreige gradually filled up with painterly meditations on the catastrophic impact of the First World War in the Middle East, while film-maker Mila Turajlić took us into the sunny and longlost internationalism of 1960s non-alignment through the lens of Tito’s personal cameraman.

Creativity thus returned to the hallways of the Institute along with other signs of life: at least two newly-born babies, a pioneering Zoom composition for multiple laptops by Sky Macklay, and a filmed poetic collaboration between novelist and poet Fellow Ersi Sotiropoulos and Lynnette Widder, curated by our own James Allen. Between Abounaddara’s researches into the earliest portrayals of “Arab fanaticism” in Western cinema, and Karimah Ashadu’s poetic ethnographies of west African labor, it was a year in which the possibilities of film-making were under constant discussion. In image and word, João Pina revealed the long-forgotten world of the Tarrafal internment camp, a decaying remnant of Portuguese fascism; Widder found clues to postwar Germany’s escape from history in the built environment. Cahiers, the Fellows creative online gallery, welcomed more and more contributions and the Library Chats were enriched by some remarkable exchanges. Former Fellow Fiona Sze-Lorrain read recent poems to the accompaniment of the zheng harp. Two other former Fellows, the writers Tash Aw and Deborah Levy, were reunited at the Institute in one of the most generous, philosophical, and enjoyable conversations that I have ever heard on the task of the writer and the impact of the pandemic.

Some Fellows left as the summer of 2021 ended and others arrived. Columbia faculty Ana Paulina Lee revealed to us the magical backstreets of urban politics in modern Brazil and comparative literature professor and Abigail R. Fellow Joey Slaughter explored the interconnections between world literatures and human rights. We welcomed Egyptian journalist and novelist Yasmine El Rashidi, and Cambridge literary scholar Clair Wills: it turned out that between the disappointed promise of Egyptian politics and the hidden scandals of family life in post-independence Ireland the distance was not so great and the commonalities emerged—the precarious sense of home in a fast-changing society, the commanding authority of shame, and the different life paths mapped out by gender. As restrictions eased, the garden filled up with conversation, and the Rendez-Vous returned to the Salle de conférence, though room capacity was tightly controlled and masks were in evidence.

During COVID’s suspension of normality, we had begun to think about creating new pathways to the Institute for Columbia faculty unable to spend an extended residence abroad. We thus issued a call to scientists across the university to come on fully-funded short-term visits, to stay with us at the Institute, meet the Fellows over a couple of weeks, and introduce us to their work. These short-term visits kicked off in the autumn of 2021 and opened up a lively and enriching dialogue between the creative arts and research science: we were fortunate enough to hear

disaster preparedness specialist Jeff Schlegelmilch and Climate School co-founding dean, oceanographer Maureen Raymo, provide their differing perspectives on climate change, and thus inaugurate a close relationship between the Institute, Columbia’s new Climate School, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Other visitors included psychology professor Colin Wayne Leach, social psychologist Courtney Cogburn, biologist Darcy Kelley in conversation with the artist Ursula Kwong-Brown, and the geochemist Lex van Geen. New guests for the year 2022-23 have already been selected from across the University and we look forward to their arrival and to continuing our engagement with our former guests as well.

We had launched the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Public Humanities Initiative in 2020 just as the pandemic was shutting down the world. Despite this setback, it has developed and expanded throughout the last two years under its Associate Director Dimitris Antoniou and brought a new and precious dimension to the life of the Institute. Zoom facilitated contact between our seven remarkable awardees, based in Greece, and university faculty and students while Institute Fellows Emlyn Hughes, João Pina, and Bill Sharpe began working as mentors and partners with Greek teachers, curators, and arts activists. We also developed a new partnership with the American Library in Paris and Columbia Global Centers | Paris, curating between us a very popular series of writers’ talks called Entre Nous, which has featured former Fellows like Anuk Arudpragasam, Bob O’Meally, and Dina Nayeri together with well-known writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Kolbert, and II&I Advisory Board member Colm Tóibín.

It is strange to think that the Institute is entering its fifth year of operations: it seems only the other day that the walls were being torn down, the common room was coming into existence, and that our work was beginning. But the most solid and enduring proof of the passing of time is the results: novels, poems and articles, art and films, monographs and compositions by our former Fellows. A round-up of our Fellows’ achievements may be found in this report. A highlight of this year for me was the release of Emmanuel Gras’s epic account of the gilets jaunes, Un Peuple, which was widely acclaimed when it came out in the cinemas in Paris: it is hard, watching it unfold, to imagine a more profound contemplation of that extraordinary movement. Another moment of pride for the Institute came at the world premiere in New York of Zaid Jabri’s opera Southern Crossings. I even found myself reading about us in Deborah Levy’s award-winning Real Estate, the final volume of her living autobiography trilogy.

As we look forward to a new and exciting year ahead, with a full cohort of Fellows, four additional creative artists from Ukraine (supported by the Harriman Institute), a panoply of Visitors and more, I cannot but reflect on how fortunate the Institute has been in its friends and supporters. Paul LeClerc, who has just stepped down as Director of the Columbia Global Center in Paris (now left in the more than capable hands of his successor Brune Biebuyck) has fortunately agreed to remain on the Institute Steering Committee so that we will continue to enjoy the benefit of his wisdom and advice. Let me end by acknowledging the steadfast and extraordinary support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Daniel, Betsy, and Edward Cohen and the Areté Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Victoria Sanger and the EHA Foundation, and our anonymous donors: without them, we could not look forward, as we do, to the years ahead with an anticipation that has only been whetted by everything we have all been through.

The Beehive and the Judas Tree

MARIE D’ORIGNY

A Judas tree once hid the entrance to the Institute. It had sprawled and bloomed for almost two centuries in Reid Hall’s garden. Its largest branch grew into a low-hanging obstacle to our door, making the Fellows duck under upon arrival before heading upstairs to their offices.

In January 2021, when the world squeaked back into action, the Institute welcomed the advance guard of its 2020-21 cohort. Lynnette Widder, an architectural historian specialized in sustainability, was one of them. An architect herself, she is in constant analytic motion. Wherever she looks, she pictures orientation, insulation, elevation, the quality of the soil, the direction of the wind, the humidity factor. She stared at the garden walls outside her Institute window and compared their paint work and the angle of the sun and compiled indices of reflection. She probed the elements of Reid Hall’s garden and devised an environmental survey of our little ecosystem.

In Paris, restaurants were closed, curfews thwarted our social lives, museums, theaters, and cinemas were bolted, travel was more or less grounded, threats of confinements came and went. But inside the gates of Reid Hall, the garden moved through the seasons, impervious to the pandemic’s whims. Upstairs in the Institute’s kitchen, the Fellows began cooking for one another: Portuguese, Greek, Italian, and Middle-Eastern cuisine brought us together around the table. Those present watched each other’s films, read each other’s pages, spent time in each other’s offices. This cohort, which was spread across one and a half years, would never be all together in the same room. With social and cultural life on hold, its only range of freedom beyond home was Reid Hall. In this pandemic year we had nowhere else to go. Yet in captivity we found the true value of this experience: companionship, intellectual support, and a way around our limitations. We were the lucky ones.

Lynnette drew an architectural elevation of the Institute, like a doll’s house where one could peak into the Fellows’ quotidian, office stacked upon office, a patchwork of unrelated elements, unpredictable but structured—an artist’s den, a writer’s retreat, a composer’s studio. She drew the Judas tree in bloom guarding the entrance. She called the drawing “Dates. Places. Things.” On another sheet of paper, she imagined the rings of the tree, tracing its unseen intimations of mortality. She gave this drawing to Brune Biebyuck. The Director of Global Centers | Paris, whose last name means “beehive” in Flemish, Brune is the beekeeper of Reid Hall: under her watch the door remained ajar when everything else was uncertain and most places were shut.

One morning in July 2021, a colleague saw me duck under the heavy branch of the Judas tree on my way to work. “One day, this tree will fall. It will be the end of an era,” she said. I emerged on the other side and answered, “Not today, please! At least not while I’m under it.” The next day, the Judas tree collapsed slowly, peacefully, felled by its own weight (with no one underneath). When the gardeners sawed it down, Brune asked them to save a few discs as keepsakes. She observed the rings carefully. The pattern reminded her of something. She took out Lynnette’s illustration and compared it to the pieces of wood: the architect had illustrated the invisible, now revealed in its dissection.

Today a spry Japanese maple has taken root in the Judas tree’s spot, still demure but no less flamboyant.

Abounaddara

Founded in 2010, Abounaddara is a collective of Syrian filmmakers who work together under conditions of anonymity. Its short films, uploaded on Vimeo, feature nameless people in an aesthetic that blends the codes of documentary cinema, contemporary art, and new media. The works have been screened at numerous film festivals and art biennales and have received several awards.

The Promise of Spring and the History of Images

Abounaddara’s project while at the Institute elucidated images of the Arab Spring and its unfulfilled promise through a re-editing of early cinematic representations of Syria and its people. The Lumière brothers produced a film in 1897 which depicts the assassination of a French general by a “Muslim fanatic.” The Collective put the film back on its editing table in an attempt to understand how the figure of the fanatic was constructed at the dawn of cinema.

Anuk Arudpragasam

Anuk Arudpragasam is a novelist and translator from Colombo, Sri Lanka. His first novel,  The Story of a Brief Marriage, won the 2017 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and was shortlisted for the 2017 Dylan Thomas Prize. His second novel, A Passage North, was shortlisted  for the 2021 Booker Prize and was shortlisted for the 2022 Dylan Thomas Prize. In 2019 he received a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University.

Exile from the Senses

At the Institute Anuk worked on Exile from the Senses, a book-length work of non-fiction that moves across the genres of philosophy, literary essay, anthropology, and memoir.

Karimah Ashadu

Karimah Ashadu is a British-born Nigerian artist living and working between Hamburg and Lagos. Ashadu’s practice is concerned with labor, patriarchy and notions of independence pertaining to the socio-economic and socio-cultural context of Nigeria and West Africa. Ashadu is the recipient of awards such as the ars viva prize (2020). In 2020, Ashadu established her film production company  “Golddust by Ashadu”, specializing in artists’ films on black culture and African themes.

Saltmine

At the Institute, Ashadu developed the script for her first feature film, Saltmine, an experimental docu-fiction about independence, labor, and patriarchy in contemporary Senegal.

Yasmine El Rashidi

Yasmine El Rashidi is the author of The Battle for Egypt, Dispatches from the Revolution, and Chronicle of a Last Summer, A Novel of Egypt. She writes on politics and culture for The New York Review of Books, and is an editor of the Middle East arts and culture journal Bidoun. The Last of The Revolutionaries Bow Down

At the Institute, she worked on Book II of The Last of The Revolutionaries Bow Down, a multi-genre trilogy that probes a pivotal moment in Egypt’s history—its defeat to Israel in the ‘67 war.

Lamia Joreige

Lamia Joreige is a visual artist and filmmaker living and working in Beirut. She uses archival documents and elements of fiction to reflect on history and its narration, and the relationship between individual stories and collective memory.

Uncertain Times

Uncertain Times, the project she worked on at the Institute, investigates through various media a turning point in the history of the Middle East (1913-1920): the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the forcible establishment in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine of the French and British mandates.

Ana Paulina Lee

Ana Paulina Lee is an author and cultural historian. She is associate professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, where she teaches courses on Asian and Latin American cultural and historical connections. She is the author of Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford University Press), winner of the 2019 Antonio Candido Book Prize for Best Book in the Humanities.

Sorcery Archives: Spiritualism, Race, and Aesthetics in Modern Brazil

At the Institute, she worked on her new book Sorcery Archives: Spiritualism, Race, and Aesthetics in Modern Brazil, which examines the legacies of Portuguese colonialism in modern Brazil.

Dust is my Home

In Chinese, dust is hui cheng: grey waste.

In my hometown dialect, dust is nan ni: difficult soil. But dust for me is a child alone. A child walks alone. A school bag on my back, I see myself crossing the fields. I see myself as a plant.

I am a pumpkin shoot. A sweet pea. A pear tree. A dried fig. A broken leaf. A tiny seed. Dust is my home. The wind blows. The grass bends. The peasants labour, the construction workers hammer and drill. Dust is my home.

* I walk to where my mother works. A silk factory. I enter the compound’s yard. Silkworms piled up. All dead. Cocooned and uncocooned. I pass the multitudes of tiny corpses. My mother is not amongst them. I need to find her. Any woman in the factory might be my mother. Every woman wears the same uniform. Thousands of them.

Their heads bow down, their eyes glued to their work on assembly lines.

There are no men here. All men in my town are soldiers. All men are drivers. All men are builders. All men are butchers. All men are killers.

Except for my father. That’s the truth about my hometown. I need to meet my mother by the factory bathhouse.

I must cross a yard full of coal. Black coal. Noisy trucks throb through the mountains of coal. The workers shovel coal from the trucks. Their faces black, like their hands, like their clothes. Like the smoke rising above the bathhouse. All black. All dusty. Dust is my home. My home is dust.

The coal that fills the yard powers the factory: its electricity, its spinning machines, its cooling fans, its dr ying rooms.

It boils the water in which the silkworms lie. It heats the boilers of the bathhouse. Hundreds of naked women wash themselves, and so do I . Scrubbing dust off hair, arms and legs. Dust is our home and our work as well. We eat in the canteen. Three thousand workers all together.

Mountains of noodles and dumplings and buns and rice Suddenly gone into three thousand mouths. The mouths chew and shout. The mouths spit and swallow.

The din merges with the clanging of woks and pans. My mother is here, but I’ve lost sight of her. A sea of uniformed bodies. I call out for her: ‘Ma ma!’

I look for her in every queue. I look for her at every table. I’m lost and she’s lost. She is not in the canteen. I rush to the assembly lines. I search in the compound yard. She’s not there.

*

But I’m used to being motherless.

Dust is my home.

I kick pieces of coal, my shoes are coated in black. I know my way home.

*

I walk alone in the fields.

A school bag on my back. A pair of shoes, black.

I see myself as a plant: a pumpkin shoot, a sweet pea, a pear tree, a dried fig, a broken leaf, a tiny seed.

The wind blows. The grass bends. The peasants labour, the construction workers hammer and drill.

Dust is my home.

I pass through a rapeseed flower field.

I go through bamboo groves.

I walk beside a line of jackfruit trees.

At last I see my house on the hill. My father is brewing his herb medicine in a pot. His lungs are bad.

Black liquid pours from the steaming pot like soup made from coal. Like the factory’s coal.

I ask my father: What is coal made of? Coal is from dead plants. Fossils of dead ferns.

I am surprised. Dead ferns make coal, green turns to black.

Yes, he says: Ancient ferns in ancient forests, decomposing, after millions of years they become coal.

I nod and go to bed.

Dust is my home, my bed is dust.

I fall asleep. I dream.

I dream of an ancient tree fern. My arms are green, stretched out. My crown reaches the sky. I am so tall. I touch the clouds. Then I am the forest itself. Rain comes and the sun goes. I grow tired. I become old. My leaves turn brown, my roots decay. I shrink and wither. I become dust. I descend to the soil. And I become the soil. I am buried underneath everything. There is no more light or life. Black.

Next morning I wake up. My father drinks his herb medicine. Again the same black coal liquid. My mother gets ready for the factory. I’m ready for school, homework in my bag. My mother says: meet me by the coal yard, af ter your school. Off mother goes. Father pushes his bike, and leaves for his office. A child alone, I know my way to school. Out through the backdoor, past the jackfruit trees, I turn by the bamboo groves, I cross the rapeseed flower fields, on the trail that leads to school.

I was a fern, a tree fern of an ancient forest. Stretching, expanding, growing, aging, rotting, decaying, decomposing. I was a fern.

The wind blows. The grass bends. The peasants labour, the construction workers hammer and drill. Dust is my home.

In Chinese, dust is hui cheng: grey waste. In my hometown dialect, dust is nan ni: difficult soil. But dust for me is a child alone. A child walks alone.

A school bag on my back, I see myself crossing the fields. I see myself as a plant.

I am a pumpkin shoot. A sweet pea. A pear tree. A dried fig. A broken leaf. A tiny seed. Dust is my home.

above : Ana Paulina Lee and Xiaolu Guo (2018-19 Fellow) perform the poems they composed for the 2022 Live Literature Around the World Festival. Photographed by Justine Benedeyt in Reid Hall’s Salle de Conférence.

Forest Dust

ANA PAULINA LEE

I blow dust at the forest to shake the trees.

Leaves and petals pirouette to the ground and join the woodchips at the entrance to the fairy kingdom.

Holes made by the pileated woodpecker, will become habitats for the red squirrels who take a bite from all the fallen pears, and dig tunnels in the snow under the apple tree, now bare except for what was stored away during the right time.

I blow dust into a bath for happy chickens.

They shake the sunny sands into their regal feathers, cooing inspiration for aristocratic dresses, choker necklaces, corsets, and cages.

The hen house used to be an ice fishing cabin.

Fish digest sand, ocean dust.

Birds swallow pebbles, forest dust and traveled roads.

I blow dust at the road for traveling souls. It covers my eyes, and fills the trumpets that trill and shake over crowds, dancing to mourn, waiting to heal.

My dusty eyes look for my grandmother’s face— We keep piling things into her room as if filling it would make us forget the emptiness.

I remember a bratty child in her arms who ate all the persimmons and knew that drinking vinegar would dislodge a fishbone from her throat.

Particles of sand and bones become my words as I try to speak to ancestors.

I worship at the altar made of feathers and sticks in the sand, stone and wind, pneumonia and orphans, storms made by war.

I blow dust to shake the trees.

The dust becomes a bird, a fish, a grandmother, a forest, an altar.

Sky Macklay is a composer, oboist, and installation artist and is a member of the composition faculty at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. She received her DMA in musical composition in 2018 from Columbia University. Her music is conceptual yet expressive, exploring extreme contrasts, audible processes, humor, and the physicality of sound, and has been commissioned by The Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, Chamber Music America, The Barlow Endowment, The Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Gaudeamus Muziekweek.

Head Voices

While at the Institute, Sky wrote her process-driven violin solo  Trrhythms, which was premiered by Ilya Gringolts at the Tectonics Festival in Glasgow.  She also wrote a new cello solo, 1323, for the Primavera Project, a collection of new works inspired by painter Charline von Heyl’s contemporary take on Botticelli’s Primavera; this piece was released on the critically-acclaimed album Primavera II: the rabbits by cellist Matt Haimovitz.

Sky also completed a new sextet Dissassemblage, which was premiered by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Several of these new works will culminate in a composer-performer portrait album called Head Voices. While in Paris, Sky also developed an ongoing collaboration with Ensemble 2e2m.

Marie d’Origny and Eve Grinstead during orientation; Lamia Joreige shows her work in progress to other Fellows; Mila Turajlić with Ana Paulina Lee; Ersi Sotiropoulos cooks for the Fellows in the Institute’s kitchen; Sky Macklay, Anuk Arudpragasam, Lamia Joreige, Karima Ashadu, and João Pina in the garden of the Maison de Verre.

clockwise : Joseph Slaughter, Jake Lamar, Anne-Sophie Corbeau, Yasmine El Rashidi, Ana Paulina Lee, Krista Faurie, and Carol Gluck in the lounge; Charif Kiwan, Ana Paulina Lee, Marie d’Origny, Mila Turajlić, Carol Gluck, and Clair Wills on the Ile-Saint-Louis; Emlyn Hughes and Lynnette Widder recording their Library Chat.

A photographer, João Pina explores global socio-political changes and human rights abuse through the language of visual memory. Exhibited internationally, his images have appeared in the New York Times and El País, among others.

Tarrafal

During his fellowship at the Institute Pina worked on his project about Tarrafal, a former concentration camp in Cape Verde where political dissidents were sent during the Portuguese fascist dictatorship and where his own grandfather was incarcerated. The book and an accompanying exhibition aim to provide a deeply personal visual record of the colonial and political history of his native Portugal.

this page : A group of young Cap Verdeans on a boat between Sal and São Vicente during the summer holidays.

next page left : Cape Verde, was a Portuguese colony until 1974. This defense wall was built by Portuguese political prisoners incarcerated in the Tarrafal concentration camp, on the island of Santiago.

next page right : João Divo Macedo, a Cape Verdean former political prisoner from Tarrafal.

Joseph R. Slaughter

Joseph R. Slaughter teaches postcolonial literature and theory, human rights, and literary approaches to international law in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has published numerous articles on African and Latin American literature, human rights, and intellectual property. He is the recipient of a number of prestigious prizes, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009).

The Conscience of Humankind

During his fellowship at the Institute, he worked on The Conscience of Humankind and Hijacking Human Rights, two books on literature, law, and human rights.

Ersi Sotiropoulos

Ersi Sotiropoulos is a poet and novelist who lives in Athens, Greece. Her work has been translated into many languages, and she has been awarded the Greek National Book Prize twice, the Book Critics’ Award, and the Athens Academy Prize, among other distinctions.

June

June, the novel she worked on at the Institute, takes place in a single hour–sixty minutes within the mind of a Greek diplomat in Paris undergoing a brain MRI. Following an imaginary line of human greatness and folly, hope and disillusionment, the book examines the somehow mystified intersection between money, migration, politics, and personal responsibility.

Mila Turajlic

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Mila Turajlic is documentary filmmaker born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Her documentary The Other Side of Everything won thirty-two awards, including the prestigious IDFA Award for Best Documentary Film. It was nominated for the European Parliament’s LUX Prize. Mila’s previous film, Cinema Komunisto, premiered at Tribeca, and won sixteen awards including the FOCAL Award for Creative Use of Archival Footage. In 2018, she was commissioned by MoMA to create archive-based video installations for their landmark exhibition on Yugoslav architecture.

In 2020, Mila was a Chicken&Egg Award grantee, and was invited to join the AMPAS Documentary Branch. Mila was named a TED Fellow in 2021.

Non-Aligned Newsreels

At the Institute, she worked on Non-Aligned Newsreels,  a multimedia research project including an interactive book, video installations, and live performances investigating the cinematic links between Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned countries during the 1960s and 1970s. The project takes audiences on a journey through the vast film and sound archives of Stevan Labudović, cameraman to Yugoslav President Tito, opening the door into a dramatic moment in history in which Yugoslavia found itself at the heart of a project of decolonization and the birth of the Third World.

Lynnette Widder

Lynnette Widder is Professor of Practice in Columbia University’s Masters of Sustainability Management program. She is a practicing architect and holds a doctoral degree in architectural history from the Eidegnössiche Technische Hochschule in Zurich, Switzerland.

Year Zero to Economic Miracle

The research she pursued at the Institute concerned the transformation of architectural thinking, symbolic representation, and construction in post-war West Germany, from 1949-59. The book, Year Zero to Economic Miracle:  Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture, was published by the gta Verlag in 2022.

Microclimate

Climate is patterned and predictable; weather is variable and chimerical. The distinction between climate and weather is broadly drawn, though, and the difference in scale that separates predictable from chimerical has no absolute definition. Some discrepancies in weather that are common across or within cities more closely resemble climate, which may explain the term applied to them: “microclimate.”

Two stone walls, one black and one white

Imagine two stone walls, meant to keep fire from spreading across adjacent buildings. Instead of abutting the house next door, though, the walls now face a courtyard and garden to the south. One wall is made of dark stone, the other has been whitewashed. The sun strikes them more or less equally over the course of the day. By around noon, however, the dark wall is nearly five degrees warmer than the whitewashed wall. Albedo is the measure of capacity to reflect or absorb shortwave heat radiation. It scales between zero and one, both theoretical absolutes. Radiant heat, whether from the sun or from warmed walls, is neglected by the standard metric of air temperature. This means: spend your cool spring afternoons by the dark wall, but in high summer, seek out a place near the lighter wall.

NASA satellite image of surface temperatures in Paris during a heat wave, June 27 and 28th, 2019.

Two offices on the second floor

Why, we wondered throughout February, did we look as though we had dressed for different climates when we met in the corridor, one of us in a sleeveless t-shirt and the other, with a patterned wool shawl wrapped over a sweater? Was it internal – metabolism, cold-tolerance, habituation – or external? If external, why? Different thermostat set points? The walls of our offices were the same, the windows equally sized and structured, the adjacent offices equally heated and occupied. What we discovered: the difference was measurable in temperature fluctuation. As the workday began, both offices were the same temperature. By mid-afternoon, the larger office was almost five degrees Fahrenheit cooler while in the smaller office, mid-day sun offset the heat loss just enough. As for the corner office: two walls to the exterior mean, inevitably, that there is twice as much surface through which to lose heat.

A front garden with a blooming magnolia tree

The magnolias bloomed early in 2022, during an unusually warm March. Nearly two weeks ahead of the trees in the meticulous Jardin du Luxembourg, the magnolia that fills a small walled courtyard on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs was already vibrant. The courtyard faces west and although afternoon sun strikes the upper stories of the building above it, the courtyard level is not particularly sunlit. Yet while the trees in the park enjoy unobstructed light, the tree on the side street bested them. Sheltered from wind, enclosed by masonry walls that absorb and reradiate the warmth they gain, benefitting from heating that escapes the building around it, the tree and its early pink flowers inhabit a climate subtly different from the one that exists on the street it fronts. Only when the hot pink petals appeared did the tree reveal its secret.

Three street corners at place de l’Odéon

opposite page : Chart by Lynnette Widder correlating various low and high-tech tools for tracking local environmental conditions, from the scale of an individual to the scale of global weather.

The place de l’Odéon is the apex of five radiating streets. In a city structure determined by monuments, hills, the Seine, and a whole set of other historic trajectories, it is anomalously oriented true north/south. The building facades that front the square and the equal spacing of the streets imply that they are all the same; but they are not. Some streets are truncated, running only a short block; others stretch far deeper into the city fabric. Its regularity is illusory. At the scale of the street or square, air flow changes in response to volume, alignment, geometry, surface texture, and dimension. Prevailing wind, like air temperature, is an abstraction, measured high above the city. Wind speed varies at each of the intersections between street and square. Buffeted against building fronts, wind direction is swirling and irregular. Soap bubbles blown by a man taller than six feet seem to tail differently than soap bubbles blown at the same time by a woman more than half a foot smaller than he is. Crazy.

Clair Wills is a cultural historian who writes about lived experience in 20th century Britain and Ireland.  Her most recent book, Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, won the Irish Times International Non-Fiction Prize in 2017. She is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her current research is on life stories told across the boundaries of carceral institutions, including Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland, and post-war British psychiatric institutions.

Half-Lives: Life Stories in the Total Institution

At the Institute, she worked on Half-Lives: Life Stories in the Total Institution, a book of creative non-fiction that interrogates the role of memoir and storytelling in recovering the experience of those “buried alive” in British and Irish post-war institutions of containment.

opposite page clockwise : Anuk Arudpragasam and Colm Toíbín; view from the kitchen; SNFPHI summer grantee Cat Lambert preparing a zine for her project

“Ex Libris: A Classics Zine Initiative.”; Mark Mazower and Paul LeClerc.

clockwise : Karimah Ashadu taking part in the film directed by Ersi Sotiropoulos; President Bollinger and Yasmine El Rashidi; João Pina’s grandfather in Tarrafal, an image found in the family archive; Carol Gluck and Xiaolu Guo in conversation at Reid Hall.

D’ORIGNY

opposite page : A xenopus frog.

right : Kathy Ewing (2019-20 Fellow) experiencing Courtney Cogburn’s “1000 Cut Journey” virtual reality project in the Institute’s library.

A central objective of the Institute is to bring together a great variety of disciplines. Yet as applications poured in from Columbia faculty over the first couple of years of the fellowship, it quickly became clear that many scientists would not be able to leave their laboratories for a semester or a year. Fellows like Emlyn Hughes (2019-20), a particle physician and the founder and director of the K=1 Project Center for Nuclear Studies, would remain the exception. His presence and contributions during his fellowship reaffirmed the necessity of bringing scientists into the conversation. For this reason, in 2021-22, we invited scientists (including social scientists) to apply for short-term visitorships to Paris. Visitors would be guests at the Institute for one to three weeks, take part in the daily life at Reid Hall, and blend into the group of Fellows. We welcomed half a dozen Science Visitors: Jeff Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Earth Institute; Maureen Raymo, a marine geologist and the Co-Founding Dean of the Climate School; Stuart Firestein, a biologist; Colin Wayne Leach, a social and personality psychologist and Professor of Psychology and Africana Studies at Barnard; Courtney Cogburn, associate professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work and member of the Columbia Population Research Center and Data Science Institute; Lex van Geen, a geochemist and a research professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; and Darcy Kelley, Harold Weintraub Professor of Biological Science at Columbia University and the founding and current co-director of the Neurobiology and Behavior Graduate Program, who came with her former student, Ursula Kwong-Brown, a composer who explores the intersection of neural feedback and electronic music.

These visitors brought to Reid Hall important and unusual discussions that could not have happened anywhere else. Jeff had conversations about the importance of community for efficient disaster preparedness. As she builds the new Climate School, Mo underlined the necessity for arts and sciences to speak to each other. Stuart argued that without ignorance, failure, and optimism there can be no scientific advancement. Colin demonstrated how he collects data to measure and interpret the social media responses to Black Live Matters. Lex spoke in favor of “citizen science,” an effort to involve communities in measuring the impact of pollution on a micro-level through the distribution of tool kits. He also brought together colleagues and scientists from around the world in a hybrid and productive seminar on lead poisoning, from lead-based paint to the fire that destroyed the roof of Notre-Dame. Through a virtual reality program that she developed, Courtney gave us a chance to wear a VR headset for an immersive virtual reality experience of racism designed to question attitudes, social perception, and engagement. Darcy and Ursula analyzed the mating songs of xenopus frogs and produced music through brainwaves.

This pilot project allowed us to expand our reach throughout the university and create lasting bonds that translate into projects and collaborations. Its success has led CGC|Paris and the Institute to pursue it in the future as a joint program that will be called Reid Hall Faculty Visitors.

clockwise : Darcy Kelley; Courtney Cogburn; Jeff Schlegelmilch.

clockwise:

Ursula Kwong-Brown; Lamia Joreige and Stuart Firestein; Colin Wayne Leach; Mo Raymo’s presentation included a rendering of the melting ice-cap; Lex van Geen studies the lead pollution provoked by the Notre-Dame fire.

The SNF Public Humanities Initiative: Building Publics in a Pandemic World

—— DIMITRIS ANTONIOU

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI) supports public-facing humanities endeavors in Greece and collaborates with other Columbia programs to connect the field of Hellenic Studies with a broad public audience. It operates in partnership with the Institute for Ideas and Imagination with the exclusive support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Mark Mazower (Director) and Dimitris Antoniou (Associate Director) are responsible for SNFPHI’s overall direction and planning and Ioanna MessiniSkordas (Program Coordinator) provides administrative support.

As SNFPHI continued to grow amid the pandemic, it reached out to new audiences through innovative seminars and workshops that were attended online, livestreamed on social media, and broadcasted on Greek radio, forged new partnerships with programs and initiatives at Columbia (including the Movement Lab and the

Zine Library at Barnard, Butler Library’s Digital Scholarship, and the School of the Arts) to create new educational programs, and connected Greek grassroot organizations and awardees with Institute Fellows.

SNFPHI’s public programming for 2021-22, titled “Exploding the Canon,” aimed to challenge the idea of a canon in Hellenic studies and to expand the methods and media of public humanities through a series of online events. These events shed light on rarely discussed moments and figures in Greek history and explored creative work, popular concepts, and intimate spaces that often evade public, academic, and institutional attention. They covered topics such as the inclusion of zines in the archives of museums, galleries, and educational institutions, Demosthenes Papamarkos’s recent graphic novel Naked Bones, the assessment of public opinion through social media, the work of painter Takis Giannousas, the colonial dimensions of the Greek campaign in Asia Minor, the postmortem journeys of the remains of Greek revolutionaries, Greek poetry of climate change (the outcome of a joint call for poems launched by literary magazine Thraka and SNFPHI), the restoration of Gregory Markopoulos’s films (including a rare screening of a digitized segment from his film Eniaios), and the electronic music of pioneer Lena Platonos.

below : Spiros Verginis’s former blacksmith shop in Lefkada, photographed by students participating in the SNFPHIsupported project “Memoriam”.

SNFPHI’s educational endeavors included developing two new courses in public humanities and Hellenic studies. As 2021 marked the bicentenary of the Greek uprising against the Ottoman Empire, SNFPHI designed a course that brought together faculty from Hellenic Studies, History, Italian, and English as well as guest speakers to consider the uprising and its various legacies and to introduce students to research across disciplines. In collaboration with the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement, SNFPHI also launched “Columbia Summer Practicum in Public Humanities and Hellenic Studies,” a course that invites students to explore public humanities,

gain hands-on experience with its objectives, methods, and outcomes, and pursue their own independent projects that connect research on Greece with a broad public audience. Tuition for the course is covered by SNFPHI. In addition to these undergraduate opportunities, SNFPHI established a new summer grant scheme for Columbia graduate students and recent degree recipients supporting remote work for public-facing projects in the humanities and collaboration with Greek partners.

Parallel to its public programming, course development, and grant schemes, SNFPHI worked closely with its first cohort of Greek

above : Artwork by awardee Spyros Agelopoulos for the shadow theater play “Karagiozis in Asia Minor.”

awardees to help them accomplish their projects’ objectives and make their outcomes publicly available. The seven projects were completed in summer 2021 and their outcomes include a collaborative zine documenting the pandemic from the perspective of an alien present, videos presenting the history of objects brought by Asia Minor refugees in the aftermath of the Greek Turkish war, rap songs drawing on the oral history of Victoria Square in Athens, an interactive sonic wall supplementing an exhibition of weather date turned into “meteo tapestries,” an open-air walking museum, and multiple how-to guides and toolkits. The creative work of our awardees and its appeal at a local, national, and international level was extensively covered by the Greek press and also led to numerous off-shoot projects and collaborations with Fellows at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, including the development of a new residency program and curatorial project, planning for a new Columbia program combining archaeology and scuba diving in Messinia, and workshops for students on sound design, archives, and visual storytelling.

In November 2021 SNFPHI launched its second call for public humanities projects in Greece and received almost 350 applications. The seven selected projects cover a range of innovative initiatives that bring the visions and the ideals of the humanities to the public in both virtual and physical spaces. ASKI (the Contemporary Social History Archives) in Athens will create the conceptual and physical space for a dynamic archive focused on the Albanian migrant experience. The volunteers of the organization Caravan Project will collaborate

with people incarcerated at the prison of Corfu and attending the second chance school to create a digital and printed newspaper. Ohi Pezoume/UrbanDigProject will design and conduct a series of educational workshops and a large-scale urban game for students in the high schools around the ancient underground aqueduct in Athens. Artist Spyros Agelopoulos will combine video art and shadow theater to create a new play that challenges established narratives about the 1919-1922 GreekTurkish War. Aristotle University’s Laboratory of Narrative Research in collaboration with students from the Department of English Literature will create a podcast and an online exhibition presenting the industrial history of the “silk town” of Soufli through the perspective of women who used to work at the local factories. The radio club of the Experimental High School of Music in Pallini will produce a new podcast exploring the contemporary relevance of folk music as well as an online repository featuring the school’s musical productions and radio shows. Finally the interdisciplinary artist duo Latent Community (Sotiris Tsiganos and Ionian Bisai) will produce a multimedia platform exploring the history and identity of Avato, a village in northern Greece that is home to a long-standing Black community.

As we look ahead to 2023, we are working to further develop the collaboration between SNFPHI and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination by launching a new travel grant for former and current Institute Fellows to visit Greece and work with SNFPHI awardees, creating a new program that will allow former Fellows to design and co-teach innovative courses with a

public humanities component at Columbia. We hope that these new programs further establish SNFPHI as a locus for the exchange of novel ideas between non-academic and academic communities and for experimentation with new methodologies in public humanities and classroom pedagogy.

right : Poster created by Victoria Square Project for their project “An Album from our Square.”

above left : Candlelit dinner in Reid Hall’s garden during President Bollinger’s visit to Paris.

above right : ”Studio visit” with Fellows in João Pina’s office.

bottom : Emeka Ogboh (2018-19 Fellow) presents “Lagos Soundscapes” to President Macron in the Élysée courtyard. The president is leaning on a danfo, a taxi-bus from Lagos turned into a sound installation by the artist.

clockwise : The library; Jake Lamar in conversation with Emmanuel Gras (2019-20 Fellow) after the screening of Gras’s Un Peuple at the Arlequin cinema; João Pina, Yasmine El Rashidi, and Carol Gluck; Joseph Slaughter.

Les Rendez-Vous de l’Institut: the Fellows’ Series

2021 February

Lynnette Widder Post War Architecture in West Germany through its Ephemera March

Sky Macklay

The Drama of Inevitable Unfurling: Process Music as a Metaphor for Biological Processes

April

Karimah Ashadu, Abigail R. Cohen Fellow Yielding to Resilience: A Visual Inquiry into Practices of Independence

Anuk Arudpragasam A Passage North: Reflections on Absence

May Abounaddara Fanaticism on Screen: The Fanatical Figure at the Dawn of Cinema

September

João Pina, Abigail R. Cohen Fellow Tarrafal: Topography of a Concentration Camp

November Mila Turajlić The Labudović Reels: Cinematic Solidarity Across the Non-Aligned World

Lamia Joreige Uncertain Times

2022 March

Joseph R. Slaughter

Smokescreens: Human Rights, (Third) World Literature, and the Struggle against Neoliberalism

Clair Wills Telling Tales: An Irish Family and Unmarried Motherhood

Ana Paulina Lee Urban Sorcery and Segregation in 20th Century Brazil

Yasmine El Rashidi Laugther in the Dark: Egypt after Revolution

Other Programming: Concerts, Conferences, and More

2020 September

From Mao to Mozart: Celebrating Isaac Stern with his son David. Organized by the Arts Arena. Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the Institute.

October

The Debating the Future of Europe series presented twelve online programs from October to March on key questions facing Europe today. The events featured a mix of leading scholars from Columbia and prominent intellectuals, scholars, and journalists from Europe. Organized by Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the European Institute, and the Alliance Program. Co-sponsored by Columbia’s Alumni Association, the European Legal Studies Center, the Maison Française, Columbia University Libraries, and the Institute.

Five years after the Paris accords: are we keeping the promises?

A Library Chat with Institute visitors Simon Kuper and Pierre Noël. Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the Columbia | SIPA Center on Global Energy Policy.

November

“The System is Rotten:” France’s Yellow Vest Protest Movement.

A Library Chat with Emmanuel Gras and Institute visitor Jake Lamar. Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the Alliance Program.

December

Nueva America with Eduardo Halfon and Claudio Lomnitz. Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the Columbia Institute of Latin American Studies.

Third Kind. Online screening of the sci-fi film Third Kind (Yorgos Zois, 2018). Co-organized with SNFPHI and the University of Thessaly’s Greek Future Archive of Socialities Under Quarantine research project and Anthrobombing platform.

Free Speech Norms in the 21st Century: Regardless of Frontiers or Guarded by Borders. Discussion between Agnes Callamard and Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger, moderated by Mark Mazower and Safwan Masri. Presented in partnership with Columbia Global Centers | Paris. Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers, Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, and Columbia University Press.

2021 February

The Useful Photographer. João Pina in conversation with Fred Ritchin. Presented in partnership with the Arts Arena. Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

Paper Trails: Memorials in an Age of Anxiety. With Nora Philippe (2019-20 Fellow) and Sarah Gensburger. Co-organized with the Alliance Program. Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the Columbia Maison Française.

Performing the Index, with Lynnette Widder, Karimah Ashadu, Ersi Sotiropoulos, Elpida Karaba, Despina Zefkili, Yota Ioannidou, and Vangelis Vlahos. Co-organized with SNFPHI.

Real Strong Men: A Conversation about Fascism, Authoritarianism, and Coups with Ruth Ben Ghiat and Mark Mazower. Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

March

The Women Who Built Reid Hall: Artists, Radicals, and Visionaries, with Brune Biebuyck and Meredith Levin. In partnership with Columbia Global Centers | Paris, Columbia Alumni Association | France, and Columbia Undergraduate Programs in Paris.

April

Répare, Reprise. Exhibition at the Cité internationale des Arts curated by Nora Philippe from April 1stJuly 10th, 2021. Organized by the Cité internationale des Arts and Portes ouvertes sur l’art, with the participation of the Institute.

May Spies, Lies, and Exile: British Espionage, Double Agents, and the Case of George Blake, with Institute visitor Simon Kuper and Simon Winder. Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

A conversation between Deborah Levy and Tash Aw: a Library Chat. Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

June

Arab Uprisings: The Evolution of Arab Society, with Yasmine El Rashidi. Organized by the International Panel on Exiting Violence, in partnership with Columbia Global Centers | Amman. Co-sponsored by the Institute.

Pride Month 2021: Tash Aw and Abdellah Taïa in Conversation. Co-organized by Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

Rain in Plural . . . and Beyond: A Library Chat with Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

September

Andrew Revkin, Kate Raworth, and Roman Krznaric in conversation. Entre Nous series, co-organized by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the American Library in Paris.

October

Alice Barbe and Dina Nayeri in Conversation. Entre Nous series, co-organized by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the American Library in Paris.

État des lieux: avec des lectures par Deborah Levy et Céline Leroy. Co-organized by Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

Mauvais Genres: French Cinema takes on Gender. Film festival curated by Nora Philippe and organized by the Columbia Maison Française from October 7th to November 11th. Additional support from Cultural Services of the French Embassy, the Knapp Family Foundation, the Paul LeClerc Centennial Fund, the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the Institute.

COVID-19 and Beyond: Rethinking Readiness in the face of 21st Century Disasters. Science Visitors Series with Jeff Schlegelmilch.

Joyce Carol Oates and Joyce Maynard in Conversation. Entre Nous series, co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the American Library in Paris.

Climate Change and Sea Level: Past is Prologue. Science Visitors Series with Maureen Raymo.

Cyborg Classics: A Conversation with Demosthenes Papamarkos. SNFPHI Event. Organized by the SNFPHI and the University Seminar in Modern Greek and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

November

Bob O’Meally and Anto Neosoul in Conversation. Entre Nous series, co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the American Library in Paris.

Lauren Elkin and Lauren Collins in Conversation. Entre Nous series, co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the American Library in Paris.

Performances of Race and Historical Representation: Ana Paulina Lee in conversation with Ladee Hubbard.

Going Viral: Public Opinion in Social Media. SNFPHI Event. Organized by the SNFPHI, with Efimeridha ton Sindakton.

December

Feeling Black Lives Matter: The Psycho-Social Dynamics of Sentiment. Science Visitors Series with Colin Wayne Leach.

Ian Goldin on Covid-19 and a Brighter Future. Entre Nous series, co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the American Library in Paris.

Between Words & Worlds: Xiaolu Guo in Conversation with Carol Gluck.

A Psychogeography of Bones with Alexis Fidetzis. SNFPHI Event. Organized by the SNFPHI and Atopos.

2022 January

The Anthropocene with Elizabeth Kolbert. Entre Nous series, co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the American Library in Paris.

Coal Fired: The Greek Poetry of Climate Change. SNFPHI Event. Co-organized by the SNFPHI and Thraca Magazine.

February

Maboula Soumahoro and Kaiama L. Glover in Conversation. Entre Nous series, co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the American Library in Paris.

Literature Live Around the World with Xiaolu Guo, Ana Paulina Lee, and Marc Marder. Organized in collaboration with Literature Live Around the World.

Screening of Restituer?, by Nora Philippe. Co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris and Lost in Frenchlation at the Arlequin Cinema in Paris.

Finding Space for Flying Rams: Imagining the Museum of Takis Giannousas. SNFPHI Event. Co-organized by the SNFPHI, with Morfotikos Silloghos Velvendou.

March

Charisme et pouvoir à l’âge des révolutions | Autour de l’ouvrage de David Bell, Le Culte des Chefs. A round table moderated by Sylvain Bourmeau, Thomas Dodman, and Arnaud Orain. Organized by the EHESS, co-sponsored with Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

Screening of H24: 24 heures dans la vie d’une femme by Justine Henochsberg and Julie Guesnon Amarante. One episode written by Ersi Sotiropoulos. Co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris and Lost in Frenchlation, at the Arlequin Cinema in Paris.

A Civilizing Hellas? Debating the Colonial Dimensions of the Asia Minor Campaign. SNFPHI Event. Co-sponsored by the Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies and Columbia Global Centers | Istanbul.

April

Shakespeare Speaks to the Present with Stephen Greenblatt and James Shapiro. Entre Nous series, co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the American Library in Paris.

Citizen Science: Detecting Local Pollution around the World. Science Visitors Series with Lex van Geen.

Kill the Camera: Victims, Viewers, and the Politics of Conflict Coverage, with Charif Kiwan and Joseph Slaughter. Co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

Alternative Narratives with Helen Lewis and Christia Mercer. Entre Nous series, co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the American Library in Paris.

Screening of Un Peuple, by Emmanuel Gras, followed by a conversation with Jake Lamar. Co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris and Lost in Frenchlation, at the Arlequin Cinema in Paris.

Racism, Culture, and Health: Conceptual and Methodological Innovations. Science Visitors Series with Courtney Cogburn.

The Future of the Humanities with Roosevelt Montás and Andrew Delbanco. Entre Nous series, co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the American Library in Paris.

May

A tale of two cities: The decline in child exposure to lead in Paris and New York. Hosted by Lex van Geen, researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Institute Science Visitor, and Brian Mailloux, Barnard College. Co-sponsored by Columbia World Projects.

Colm Tóibín and Anuk Arudpragasam in Conversation. Entre Nous series, co-organized with Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the American Library in Paris.

June Breath and Body: Mind and Emotion. Science Visitors Series with Darcy Kelley and Ursula Kwong-Brown.

News from our Fellows

The Abounaddara Collective participated in the La Preuve par le pixel seminar at the Jeu de Paume.

Anuk Arudpragasam was shortlisted for several prizes for A Passage North, including the Man Booker Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the George Orwell Prize in Political Fiction. After his residency at the Institute, he moved to Berlin for a DAAD Fellowship.

Karimah Ashadu’s film Plateau was shown at Secession (Vienna) during the summer of 2021, the 59th Venice Biennale, the Fondazione In Between Art Film, the Tate, and the South London Gallery in 2022. Ashadu also received a ZEIT Foundation Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius artist prize, as well as the 48th Kunstpreis der Böttcherstraße from Kunsthalle, Bremen.

Tash Aw published a revised and augmented edition of Strangers on a Pier and translated Édouard Louis’s Combats et métamorphoses d’une femme into English. Both Aw and Louis were nominated for the Prix Les Inrockuptibles 2021.

Tina Campt moved to Princeton University where she is now the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities.

Amit Chaudhuri’s Finding the Raga, won the James Tait Black Prize in the United Kingdom. His latest novel, Sojourn, appeared recently in the United Kingdom, the United States, and India. Gourmandises, the French translation of his book of poems Sweet Shop, was published in November 2021 in France by Éditions Globe.

Zosha Di Castri won a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship for Music Composition, along with Sky Macklay. Her new song cycle In the Half-light, with a libretto written by Tash Aw, premiered with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and soprano Barbara Hannigan. Di Castri also started a podcast series, The Dream Feed, featuring conversations between performers on their experiences navigating the worlds of professional music and motherhood. For her second episode, she interviewed Pauchi Sasaki

Elsa Dorlin was awarded a fellowship in the Core Program at the Camargo Foundation in 2020-2021, and joined the Philosophy Department at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès. She published a new edition of Sexe, genre et sexualités : introduction à la théorie féministe and edited Feu ! Abécédaire des féminismes presents.

Kaiama Glover spent 2021-22 at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. She received support from the Mellon Foundation to pursue her Digital Humanities project and an NEH fellowship for her intellectual biography, For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of the Cold War.

Emmanuel Gras’s documentary film Un Peuple, was released in theaters and was dubbed “one of the most important films of the moment” by the magazine Marianne. Gras’s short film Amo premiered at the 61e Semaine de la Critique at the

Cannes Film Festival in 2022. Nora Philippe and Mila Turajlić joined Gras at the 2022 CPH: DOX film festival.

Xiaolu Guo was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in Britain in 2022. A station was named after her on International Women’s Day in 2022 by City of Women for its London Tube map project honoring great women. Guo collaborated with Trinh Minh-ha on the feature film What about China?, which was featured at the 2022 Whitney Biennial.

Eduardo Halfon was nominated for a Jan Michalski Prize in 2021. In 2022, he was in conversation at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain with the photographer Graciela Iturbide for a Soirée nomade around Iturbide’s retrospective, Heliotropo 37

Roni Henig was awarded the Salo Wittmayer Baron Dissertation Award and is now on the faculty of NYU.

Emlyn Hughes took his students to the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia to track the long-run impact of nuclear weapons testing.

Zaid Jabri’s chamber opera Southern Crossings, which he composed at the Institute, received its premiere in New York in June 2022.

Lamia Joreige received support from the Fondation des Artists for Uncertain Times, the project she worked on at the Institute. Her short film The River was included in a series on contemporary Lebanese cinema at the Centre Pompidou in

2022. In 2021 and 2022 her work was also shown at Marfa’s Project in Beirut, FIAC, and the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.

Bouchra Khalili’s work was featured in Walk! at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Witch Hunt, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Stories Within Stories at the Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden. She was also granted the Terry Riley Humanitarian Award at the My Hero Gala.

Ana Paulina Lee was promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. In 2022 she launched her “Music and Migration” podcast on Rio’s favelas, created with the Geographies of Injustice group at the Columbia Center for Studies of Social Difference.

Deborah Levy published Real Estate, the final volume of her “living biography” trilogy. The book won the Christopher Isherwood Prize from the Los Angeles Times for Autobiographical Prose and was voted the Hay-on-Wye Festival Book of the Year.

Édouard Louis published Combats et métamorphoses d’une femme, translated into English by Tash Aw, and Changer : Méthode. He was nominated for prizes from the Jan Michalski Foundation and Les Inrockuptibles

Sky Macklay joined the Peabody Institute’s composition faculty at Johns Hopkins University and won a 2021-22 Guggenheim Fellowship. Disassemblage, a piece she composed at the Institute, was

premiered by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra; Harmonifriends, for Ghost Ensemble and hand-made harmonica-playing inflatable sculptures, was performed in New York; the Kronos Quartet played Macklay’s latest string quartet at Mass MOCA.

Dina Nayeri joined the School of English at the University of Saint Andrews. Her children’s book, The Waiting Place: When Home Is Lost and a New One Not Yet Found, won a 2022 Boston Globe Horn Book Award. She was a Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris and her first play, Yellow Teeth, was shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Playwriting.

Emeka Ogboh installed a Nigerian danfo minibus in the courtyard of the Élysée Palace for the closing ceremonies of the French Africa 2020 season. His Song of the Union could be heard at the Edinburgh Art Festival. In Berlin he installed Ámà: The Gathering Place at the Gropius Bau atrium and The Cosmos – Things Fall Apart at the Humboldt Forum In 2022, his first album, 6°30’33.372”N 3°22’0.66”E, was released by Danfotronics.

Bob O’Meally completed Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture.

Nora Philippe’s documentary Restituer? aired on Arte and was screened at the Assemblée nationale. Her project Girls of Tomorrow, 2015-2040, which she worked on at the Institute, was included in the Fabrique des Films series at the Centre Pompidou.

João Pina will be a Visiting II&I Professor at Columbia in 2022-23.

Pauchi Sasaki’s multi-platform opera, ARTEMIS, premiered in Italy in the fall of 2021. Sasaki also released Yaquilla, an album including twenty new songs.

Hiie Sauma participated in “Tropisms 1-3” both as dancer and choreographer. The show was presented at the Wiesbaden Tanzt Festival and the Poesie im Park Festival in Germany and at the Biennale européenne des Blancs Manteaux in Paris.

William Sharpe published “Anchoring: What’s Going on Down There?” in The Sailing Mind, edited by Roberto Casati (Springer Nature, 2022).

Joseph Slaughter was appointed Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University.

Ersi Sotiropoulos was the 2022 Sidney Harman Writer-In-Residence at Baruch College in New York City. She also contributed to Arte’s short-film series H24 on violence against women. She wrote “Retour à Bassae” for the anthology Le Grand Tour: Autoportrait de l’Europe par ses écrivains, and “Une complicité élective” for La Cosmopolite: 100 ans de littérature étrangère.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain translated Green Mountain: Poems by Yang Jian in 2020 and Yu Xiuhua’s Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm in 2021. Rain in Plural: Poems, which she worked on at the Institute, was shortlisted for the 2021 Derek Walcott Poetry Prize.

Mila Turajlić was selected in 2021 as a TED Fellow. She won the SCAM Grand Prix du documentaire and was invited to show work from her project on the Labudović reels at the Berlin Biennale and the CPH: DOX festival. The completed film, Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudović Reels, premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival.

Karen Van Dyck’s translations of The Light that Burns Us (Jazra Khaleed) and Hers (Maria Laina) were both listed in the Small Press Distribution’s poetry bestsellers page. Van Dyck was awarded an honorary doctorate from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

Lynnette Widder finished the book she was working on at the Institute and will return to construct a rammed earth dwelling in the Reid Hall garden.

Fellows

Barry Bergdoll Abigail R. Cohen Fellow Architectural History Columbia University Out of Site in Plain View: A History of Exhibiting Architecture since 1750

Alessandra Ciucci Ethnomusicology Columbia University Nass el Ghiwane: The Sound of Protest in Morocco (1970s-1990s)

William Dougherty Composer Columbia University (Re)soundings Renewed

Isabella Hammad Writer United Kingdom Some Third Element: A Novel

Yala Kisukidi Philosopher France Laetitia africana

Brian Larkin Anthropology Columbia University Secular MAchines, MEda and the Materiality of Islamic Revival

Melina León

Abigail R. Cohen Fellow Filmmaker Peru San Blas

Sabelo Mlangeni Abigail R. Cohen Fellow Photographer South Africa Uniting “open landscapes” (Ngiyobona Phambili)

John Duong Phan Vietnamese Studies Columbia University Vulgar Experiments

Katharina Pistor Comparative Law Columbia University Coded Power

Hannah Reyes Morales Photographer Philippines In the Shadow of False Light

Pauchi Sasaki Composer Peru

ARTEMIS Yasmine Seale Translator United Kingdom Love’s Grammar

Ersi Sotiropoulos Writer Greece June

Eliza Zingesser

Medieval French and Occitan Columbia University Lovebirds: Avian Erotic Circuits in Medieval French and Occitan Literature

Clair Wills looking at a rainbow from the Institute’s kitchen

© Ferrante Ferranti : cover, pp. 2, 6-7, 10, 30 (top right, center), 31 (top and bottom right), 48 (top three photos), 49 (all color images), 52 (bottom), 53 (top and bottom right), 58 (top left), 59 (bottom right), and all Fellows’ portraits.

© Institute staff: pp. 26, 29, 30 (top left, bottom left, bottom right), 31 (bottom left), 43, 51, 52 (top left and right), 53 (top left), 58 (top right), 59 (top left, top right, and bottom left), 68.

© Lynnette Widder, p. 19.

© Anuk Arudpragasam, p. 15.

© Karimah Ashadu, p. 17.

© Yasmine El Rashidi, p. 19.

© Lamia Joreige, p. 21.

© João Pina, pp. 33-35.

© Ersi Sotiropoulos, p. 39.

© Non-Aligned Newsreels powered x Filmske novosti, p. 41.

© NASA/JPL-Caltech, p. 45.

© Clair Wills, personal collection, p. 47.

© “Ex Libris: A Classics Zine Initiative” project, SNFPHI, p. 48.

© João Pina’s family archive, p. 49 (center, black and white).

© Oleg Tovkach/Alamy p. 50.

© National Snow and Ice Data Center/NASA Earth Observatory, p. 53 (bottom left).

© Godefroy Paris/Wikimedia Commons Public Domain Images, p. 53 (center left).

© Memoriam Project, Lefkada. SNFPHI, p. 54.

© Sypros Agelopoulos, p. 55.

© Victoria Square Project, SNFPHI, p. 57.

© Ludovic Marin/AFP, p. 58 (bottom). graphic design : Beltza

Chiqui Garcia chiqui@beltza.be

:

Abounaddara, p 13: Photograms of L’Assassinat de Kléber, directed Georges Hatot for the Lumière Brothers, 1897. Catalogue Lumière.

Anuk Arudpragasam, p. 15 : Jaffna Railway Station, 2022, by the author.

Karimah Ashadu, p. 17: “Steadfast” and “Burna,” two film stills from Ashadu’s film “Plateau”, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film. Yasmine El Rashidi, p. 19: Woman in the window in Cairo, by the author.

Lamia Joreige, p. 21: “Uncertain Times: Locusts,” 120 x 68 cm, and “Uncertain Times: Fayçal,” mixed media on paper, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

Ana Paulina Lee, p. 23: Black Sorcerer, circa 1839, Jean-Baptiste Debret, watercolor. Biblioteca Nacional de Rio de Janeiro.

Sky Macklay, p. 29: Macklay conducting the Fellows during the recording of the Laptop Ensemble musical piece. Photograph by Marie d’Origny.

João Pina, pp. 33-35: Photographs taken in Cape Verde in the summer of 2021 for the Tarrafal book project. Courtesy of the photographer.

Joseph Slaughter, p. 37: Detail from Fantomas: La Amenaza Elegante #201 (1975), illustrated by Victor Cruz.

Ersi Sotiropoulos, p. 39: Visual Poetry, by the author.

Mila Turajlić, p. 41: film stills from outtakes of the Labudović newsreels, Non-Aligned Newsreels powered x Filmske Novosti.

Lynnette Widder, p. 9: Dates. Places. Things. 23 April 2021 Pencil and watercolor on paper. p. 43: Widder working on a project with Ersi Sotiropoulos, Reid Hall, 2021. Photograph by James Allen.

Clair Wills, p.47: Family portrait from Clair Wills’s personal photo collection.