Year in Review: Columbia Faculty in Paris
In the past year, Columbia Faculty have visited Reid Hall in Paris for research and teaching, but have also engaged in public events and intimate discussions with the Louvre museum and Nobel Prize–winning authors. These encounters highlight the global reach and intellectual vitality of Columbia University’s initiatives in Paris, setting the stage for another year of innovative research and exchange.
Thought Leadership on a Public Stage
In collaboration with the Louvre Museum, the Columbia Undergraduate Programs in Paris launched a series of Masterclasses on the theme of Universalism, featuring Columbia Professor Souleymane Bachir Diagne, as he held this year’s Chaire at the Louvre, a prestigious public lecture series. Diagne invited students to reconsider how museums can serve as spaces for dialogue across diverse cultural contexts, through a decentralized and inclusive approach to understanding cultures and their histories.
Learn more about the partnership
As part of the Reid Hall 60th Anniversary celebrations, Professor Diagne spoke at a public event with the director of the Louvre, Laurence des Cars, about the future of museums.
French author Annie Ernaux, recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, visited Reid Hall in June for a conversation with Columbia Professor Thomas Dodman, who recently taught a course on Ernaux’s work. He engaged her in a wide-ranging discussion that touched on both her literary contributions and her political commitments.
In a unique collaboration between the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and the Paris-based ensemble l’Itinéraire, Columbia Professor George Lewis presented an event celebrating a new generation of Afrodiasporic composers from around the world.
Later that year, Professors George Lewis and Robert G. O’Meally presented a new concert and conference, “The Afrodiaspora in Paris: Sounds, Images, Histories.”
Watch a recording of the conference, and of the concert
The third edition of Conversations on Consciousness, hosted by Columbia University Professor Alfredo Spagna, explored the neural architecture of conscious awareness, how attention shapes experience, and what brain research can teach us about the mind.
Introduced and moderated by Professor Mae Ngai, a select panel of distinguished international scholars, who contributed to the recent publication Anxiety Culture, discussed the forces that increase anxiety as a cultural phenomenon that goes beyond the solely individual experiences of clinical anxiety to pervade global culture.
Professor Hiba Bou Akar guided a conversation exploring how cities and communities navigate the aftermath of violence, focusing on the intersections between memory, space, and recovery. Participating artists, including Reid Hall artist-in-residence Maha Al-Daya, shared works that delve into identity, spatial justice, and the resilience of communities affected by conflict.
Intimate Discussions in Podcast and Video
On the Columbia Global Paris Center’s podcast, Atelier, Columbia faculty guests explored a wide range of subjects—from human rights and free speech to climate change, queer history, narrative medicine, and the politics of sports. Listen to the episodes:
- Human Rights for Pragmatists with Jack Snyder, Spotify | Apple Podcasts
- How Universities Are Responding to Climate Change with Alex Halliday, Spotify | Apple Podcasts
- When Scholars and Artists Collaborate for a Year with Mark Mazower and Marie d’Origny, Spotify | Apple Podcasts
- Marco Tedesco is Measuring Polar Ice Caps: They’re Melting Faster, Spotify | Apple Podcasts
- Greek Folk Poetry and Queer History with Nikolas Kakkoufa, Spotify | Apple Podcasts
- Threats to Free Speech with Lee C. Bollinger, Spotify | Apple Podcasts
- Listening to Trees with Marguerite Holloway, Spotify | Apple Podcasts
- Wandering Scholars: From 20th-century Travelers to Study Abroad with Tamara Walker, Spotify | Apple Podcasts
- Play, Protest, and Politics in American Stadiums with Frank Guridy, Spotify | Apple Podcasts
- Merging Healthcare and Personal Narrative with Delphine Taylor and Nellie Hermann, Spotify | Apple Podcasts
Many of these faculty visited Paris as participants in the Reid Hall faculty visitorship program, but also as distinguished speakers, such as Lee Bollinger who gave the 2025 Sidney N. Zubrow Memorial Lecture, or as faculty in the undergraduate programs or M.A. in History and Literature at Reid Hall.
Watch Lee Bollinger’s lecture, "Reflections on the State of the Modern University"
Library Chats
The Institute for Ideas and Imagination’s Library Chats series brings together Fellows, Visitors and guests in discussion of their work. Ranging from global warming to the art of filming street protest, from poetry to human rights, the Chats traverse a terrain of ideas both contemporary and reflective.
Filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong (Faculty Visitor) and historian Mae Ngai (Fellow) discuss the politics of memory, state violence, and historical erasure in Thailand through the lens of cinema. They explore how Anocha’s films provoke reflection rather than present facts, focusing on how ordinary people remember—or forget—traumatic events like the 2010 crackdown and 1970s massacres. Watch
Neuroscientist and composer David Sulzer (Faculty Visitor) and translator Daniel Levin Becker (Fellow) reflected on the intersections of art, science, and identity, exploring how labels like “fine art” or “classical music” can obscure deeper creative truths. Watch
Writer Will Harris (Fellow) and Paris "AJ" Adkins-Jackson (Faculty Visitor) discussed the latter’s latest endeavor: creating a musical to translate her epidemiological research on the adverse aging effects of structural racism. Watch
Filmmaker Debashree Mukherjee (Faculty Visitor), spoke to Keithley Woolward (Director, M.A. HiLi) about the representation of tropical landscapes in film, unexplored archives, and Paul et Virginie, a novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and the current focus of Debashree's research. Watch
Literature scholar Lauren Robertson (Fellow), along with artist Kate Daudy (Fellow), explored how bees have symbolized social order, creativity, and spiritual connection throughout history. Their conversation reflects on how these ideas inform both artistic practice and personal engagement with the world—ultimately likening the Institute itself to a harmonious beehive. Watch
Scholars Roni Henig (Fellow) and Gil Hochberg (Faculty Visitor) delved into Henig’s new book, On Revival: Hebrew Literature Between Life and Death—examining its central themes: revival, return, and the political life of memory. Henig is a former Fellow of the Institute, and Hochberg was a Faculty Visitor. Watch
Looking Forward to Next Year
The 2025–2026 Faculty Visitors at Reid Hall will engage in a wide range of research and collaborations, spanning colonial and environmental history, art and LGBTQ+ studies, racial justice, and pediatric healthcare. Over the course of one- to three-week stays in Paris, they will work with archives and museums such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Musée du Quai Branly.
Learn more about next year’s Visitors
Each year, half of the Fellows of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination are Columbia faculty, who spend a year with some of the world’s most exciting young film-makers, sound artists, writers and poets, photographers, and composers. Working on a range of topics from Roman slaves making books and 17th century musical improvisation to women’s struggles in revolutionary Iran, from family feuds in the Antarctic to the scattered remnants of life in Chernobyl, Institute Fellows will present their work throughout the year in the SNF Rendez-Vous lecture series.