Post-Katrina, the need to rebuild has provided the catalyst for architects and planners both to restore and re-envision New Orleans’s urban landscape. Underpinning their efforts is the research and support provided by a growing and increasingly interconnected network of social agencies and philanthropic organizations. Is there visible progress? What initiatives have been successful? Why have some design schemes failed? What short-term solutions hold promise? What is the long-term picture for the preservation, restoration, and rebuilding of New Orleans?

Speakers: Matthew Berman; Andrew Kotchen; Allen Eskew; Carey Shea; Introduced and moderated by James Russell.

Organized by The Architectural League of New York. This program is presented as part of the League's 2007-08 thematic series Reimagining Risk & is free for league members who may RSVP by emailing rsvp@archleague.org.

How is torture still prevalent in democracies? Does it, or can it, provide a response to dealing with terrorism? What are the implications of the use of torture on society, on the interrogative agencies, and particularly, on the individuals involved --- torturers and tortured? How can victims of torture attain justice? And how can they recover from the Cycle of Torture?

A panel of experts from an array of professional backgrounds will answer these questions from both theoretical and practical perspectives.

Malcolm Nance, U.S. Special Operations, Homeland Security and Intelligence agencies
Allen Keller, NYU program on Survivors of Torture
Steven Watt, ACLU
Jinee Lokaneeta, Assistant Professor, Drew University
Hosted by Maya Sabatello, LL.B., PH.D., CGA Adjunct Faculty

Dr. David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center and internationally recognized social theorist, will present the Fifth Annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism. The event, hosted by the CCNY School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, is free and open to the public. Professor Harvey's lecture, titled "The Right to the City," will examine who gets to exercise this precious right and how. Under capitalism, there has been a long-standing conflict between the view of cities as centers for profit making and capital accumulation and that of them as utopian spaces of human interaction. While the former has prevailed, Professor Harvey will ask how the right to the city can be restored to the people - such questions need to be addressed by all who seek a more humane and ecologically sensitive urbanism for the 21st Century.

Since the illumination of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, architectural lighting has completely transformed the way we perceive and navigate our cities. Professor Dietrich Neumann will speak about the history of architectural illumination, and the use of electrical lighting a "new building material." Neumann will present the debates that accompanied this development and discuss historic and contemporary examples including the pivotal Chicago Tribune building, whose architect, Raymond Hood, coined the phrase "architecture of the night." "Architecture of the Night" was also the title and subject of an acclaimed international exhibition Neumann curated for the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, where it was shown until May 2007.

Dr. Dietrich Neumann is a professor of the history of modern architecture at Brown University and the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor at Yale University School of Architecture. He holds degrees in architecture and a Ph.D. in architectural history from the Technical University, Munich. His rich and varied research interests range through the architecture of the last 200 years, the influence of building materials on architectural forms, and the visionary and the ephemeral in architecture.

From the first months of the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962), many French commentators who sought to avoid what they saw as Algeria's "secession" did so by arguing that what was at stake there was not the worldwide problem termed "colonialism," but a set of overlapping domestic problems. France, like other countries - notably the US, the USSR, and Mexico - needed to confront the pressing problem of racism faced by its Muslim Algerian citizens. While Francois Mitterrand urged his compatriots to recognize that France was one of the "great Muslim nations," Jacques Soustelle, newly named Governor General of Algeria, proposed that it was time to build a new "Franco-Muslim nation." After identifying where these arguments came from, and why they seemed both useful and necessary, I will trace how - or rather, if - they had any influence on the experience of Algerians during the war.

Todd Shepard is Associate Professor of Modern French History at Temple University; his scholarship explores imperialism, national identity, the state, as well as the history of sexuality. His first book, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (2006), is a history of the close of the Algerian War and the difficult renegotiation of French state structures and national identity that resulted. It received the AHA's 2006 J. Russell Major Prize and the Council of European Studies 2008 book award.

For more info: maisoncoordinator@columbia.edu

Ellen Schrecker, Professor of History, Yeshiva University, Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center Fellow, "'The Squeaky Wheels Go Round Again: Academic Freedom After 9/11" Reception to Follow!

Continues with conference on April 4.

Conference Program Schedule:

9:00 am - Welcome

John Sexton, President, New York University

9:30 am - Keynote Address

Roger Bowen, Director, Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows Program

10:00 am - Academic Freedom: Theory & Practice
Norman Dorsen, Chair & Comment, Professor of Law, New York University
David Hollinger, Professor of History, University of California at Berkeley
Joan Scott, Institute for Advanced Study
Robert Post, Professor of Law, Yale University

11:30 am Academic Freedom & the Question of Israel & Palestine
Khaled Fahmy, Chair & Comment, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, New York University
Zachary Lockman, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, New York University
Tony Judt, University Professor and Director, The Remarque Institute, New York University
Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies, Director of the Middle East Institute, Columbia University

1:00 pm - Lunch on your own

2:30 pm - Labor & the Corporate University
David Montgomery, Chair & Comment, Professor of History,Emeritus, Yale University
Sheila Slaughter, Professor of Higher Education, University of Georgia
Jennifer Washburn, journalist and author
Barbara Bowen, President, Professional Staff Congress; Professor of English, Queens College, City University of New York

4:00 pm - The High Schools
Mary Nolan, Chair & Comment, New York University; Brooklyn For Peace
Deborah Almontaser, Founding Principal of the Kahlil Gibran International Academy
Joel Westheimer, Professor, University Research Chair in Democracy; Education Director, Democratic Dialogue, University of Ottawa
Gary Anderson, Professor of Education, New York University

5:30 pm - Reception

For more information, please go to: www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/tam/ewen.html.

This symposium brings together two sets of scholars studying environmental pollution and health, one from an historical perspective (Gerry Markowitz, Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center and David Rosner, Professor of History and Public Health at Columbia University) and the other from an ethnographic perspective (Javier Auyero, Professor of Sociology, SUNY Stony Brook). Markowitz and Rosner are authors of Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution which examines how lead and chemical industries reacted to information regarding the potential dangers of their products to human health during the last century. Auyero is currently working on an ethnographic study of industrial pollution in the Argentinean Flammable shantytown. His research focuses on how local residents understand their health problems in the context of area pollution and how they mobilize to improve their circumstances.

Professor Meena Alexander will moderate, and there will be readings and a discussion with questions from the audience.

David Goldblatt has been documenting the changing political landscape of South Africa for more than five decades. His retrospective exhibition, David Goldblatt 51 Years, was seen in New York, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Oxford, Brussels, Munich and Johannesburg. His photographic essay, South Africa: the Structure of Things Then, was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1998. He was included in Documenta 11 in 2002 and Documenta 12 in 2007, and in Strangers: the 1st ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, in 2003. He was the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad Award.

Joanna Lehan, former assistant curator at ICP, is an editor at the Aperture Foundation.

Two monologues by much-loved writers from Scandinavia's Modern Breakthrough period. Director/actor Robert Greer will present a mind-boggling sermon by August Strindberg entitled "A Little Catechism for the Lower Class" and acclaimed actor Meg Gibson will recreate the classic feminist short story "From the Dark" by Victoria Benedictsson. The texts were translated into English by Verne Moberg.

For further information: Verne Moberg, vam1@columbia.edu or 212-854-4015.

The Middle East Institute (MEI) and SIPA present the fourth lecture in the spring 2008 series—Three decades of the Islamic Republic of Iran: "Thirty Years of Islamic Revolution."

Asef Bayat (Ph.D. University of Kent, 1984) taught sociology and Middle East studies at the American University in Cairo. He has held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University, New York, and the University of Oxford. His academic interests ranges from Political Sociology, Social Movements, to Urban Space and Politics, International Development, Contemporary Middle East, and Islam and the Modern World. He has conducted ethnographic research in the areas of popular mobilization in the Iranian Revolution; labor movements; politics of the urban poor; development NGOs; everyday cosmopolitanism; comparative Islamism; and Muslim youth cultural politics, primarily in Iran and Egypt. He is the author of Workers and Revolution in Iran (London, Zed Books, 1987), Work, Politics and Power (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1991), Street Politics (New York, Columbia University Press, 1997). His most recent book is Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, 2007).

For further information regarding this event, please contact JoAnn Crawford, jac12@columbia.edu.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist Paul Starr (Princeton) will talk about 'Democratic Theory and the History of Communications' on the basis of his two most recent books.

For further information regarding this event, please contact Rasmus Kleis Nielsen: rkn2103@columbia.edu.

Scientific researchers have discovered the power of what is being called the third branch of science: computer simulation. Frequently, the ability to perform exceedingly complex calculations unlocks the door to a new understanding of nature.

Join Margaret Wertheim, director of the Institute for Figuring, and Kate Holmes, AMNH marine biologist, for a discussion about the plight of coral reefs and the art of "hyperbolic crochet," a fusion of handicraft, mathematics, marine ecology, conservation activism, and collective artistic practice.

Speakers: Jeffrey Koberstein, Columbia University; Ned Thomas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sponsored by Soft Materials, a PS&E program

The Soft Materials Discussion Group regularly convenes investigators in the New York region with an interest in soft materials research and development, and provides a forum for scientists, engineers, and other key stakeholders working in academia, industry, and not-for-profit entities to exchange ideas and discuss advances. To ensure impact globally, the meeting proceedings will be disseminated electronically through the Academy's eBriefings program. The interdisciplinary topics include a range of technologically important materials in colloids, polymers, emulsions, liquid and organic crystals, membranes, proteins, cells, and tissue.

Chilean artists Alfredo Jaar, Eugenio Ditborn and Lotty Rosenfeld will discus their work featured in Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960-2000, and share their impressions on the evolution of performance art in Chile. The program will be moderated by Rocio Aranda Alvarado, Curator, The Jersey City Museum.

CUP is pleased to present an evening on street vending and public space. Margaret Crawford, Professor of Urban Design and Planning Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, will be interviewing Sean Basinski, founder and director of the Street Vendor project. They will discuss the legal frameworks governing street vending, the role of commerce in creating place, and business models of mobile cuisine.

In conversations moderated by Ann Temkin, curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and organizer of the exhibition, artists and scholars explore the ways in which artists use color, whether by chance, through systems, or in the context of everyday life. With David Batchelor, artist and the author of Chromophobia, and Chris McGlinchey, conservation scientist, Department of Conservation, The Museum of Modern Art.