The City and the University: A Symposium
The University in/and Crisis Working Group invites you to attend a symposium featuring research and activism by students at Barnard College, Teachers College, and Columbia University. Students will present work that adopts methods drawn from the field of “critical university studies,” and that draws on archives and repositories held on campus and across the Harlem neighborhood to investigate the enduring effects of social difference and spatial segregation in shaping histories of democratic education and mass intellectuality. The evening will culminate with a celebration with music and snacks.
Spearheaded by Professors Anupama Rao (Barnard College) and C. Riley Snorton (Columbia University), the University in/and Crisis Working Group probes, through reading meetings and public programs, the state of the university today and aims to contextualize it within longer histories of its entanglement with wider socioeconomic and political structures. The working group is an initiative of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study at Teachers College.
Accessibility
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
About the Speakers
Anupama Rao is Professor of History at Barnard, Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia, and was Senior Editor of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (2012-2019). Rao is completing the monograph Ambedkar in America and the volume The Cambridge Companion to Ambedkar. She has edited Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R. B. More (2019) and the reader Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality (2018), a sequel to the well-known volume, Gender and Caste (2006). Rao is the author of The Caste Question (2009), which received critical acclaim for transforming understandings of the relationship between caste and democracy. She directs the Ambedkar Initiative, which approaches B. R. Ambedkar as among the twentieth century’s most important democratic thinkers, and resuscitates links between democracies through institutional and disciplinary histories of Ambedkar’s alma mater, Columbia University, in engaged pedagogy and public outreach.
C. Riley Snorton is professor of English and Comparative Literature and jointly appointed with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University. He is the author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017) and Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (2010). Snorton is also the co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (2020) and The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers (2024).