Victorian-Literature

Until quite recently, I had never really been anywhere. New York is a cluttered place where everything I could ever need is in the palm of my hand.

Saidiya Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature, has been appointed to University Professor. Only 17 other faculty members hold the distinction—Columbia’s highest academic honor—that allows them to set their own instruction schedules and teach across schools and departments.

I vividly remember June 2016, the summer before my first year at Barnard. I was compulsively refreshing the registration page, worried about securing my spots in my classes. During my course selection process, I decided I would take “Legacy of the Mediterranean,” one of three variants of the first-year writing course all Barnard first-year students must take.

Her words reverberated throughout the classical dome of Low Library’s rotunda, evoking the ancient Greek literature to which she alludes in her plays. She began with her first of a million suggestions: “Entertain all your far-out ideas.” She paused, looking up at the expansive ceiling and out at the sea of faces before her in Low Library’s rotunda. “It sounds good in here.”

Starting fall 2020, students entering the School of General Studies with under 30 credits will be required to take Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization if they have not already fulfilled their literature/humanities and social science requirements. According to administrators, the effort comes as part of a broader move to slowly integrate General Studies students into the Core Curriculum.

For Aaron Stout, GS ’21 and a veteran, Columbia offered a unique opportunity through the School of General Studies to integrate and interact with the larger undergraduate student body both socially and academically, something other universities often do not offer for students in continuing education programs.

Appointed to the Supreme Court in 2015, Justice David Smuts has been a leading human rights lawyer in Namibia since before the country’s independence from South Africa in 1990.

“Whatever you’re told not to do, it’s worth exploring,” Guggenheim Fellowship-winning author Lynne Tillman said at a talk on creative writing at Dodge Hall on Wednesday night.

When I ask professor Edward Mendelson, a veteran English literature professor and longtime Literature Humanities instructor, what he hopes his students take away from his Lit Hum class, he pauses mid-thought. A moment later, he reaches over to the overflowing bookshelf along one wall of his office. His eyes quickly bounce from left to right, scanning through the titles until—The English Auden, an early 20th century collection of writings by W.H. Auden. Instinctually, he flips to page 371 and reads the words of Auden: “I’m quite certain [the arts] makes us more difficult to deceive.”

The newly unfurled Butler Banner will hang on the façade of Butler Library for the rest of the semester, exhibiting the names of eight female-identifying authors. The project’s mission doesn’t stop at simply showing students these names as they pass by or walk into the library; it aims to get students talking about the authors and their legacies.