Past Events

Speaker: Ann Tashi Slater, author Moderator: Lauran Hartley, Director, Modern Tibetan Studies Program, WEAI, Columbia University; Adjunct Assistant Professor, EALAC Ann Tashi Slater contributes to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, Tin House, Guernica, AGNI, Granta, and many others. Her work has been featured in Lit Hub and included in The Best American Essays. In her Darjeeling Journal column for Catapult, she explores her Tibetan family history and bardo, and she blogged for HuffPost about similar topics. She presents and teaches workshops at Princeton, Columbia, Oxford, Asia Society,…

Speaker: Wei-Ting Yen, Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan Moderator: Qin Gao, Maurice V. Russell Professor of Social Policy and Social Work Practice, Associate Dean for Doctoral Education, Director of China Center for Social Policy, Columbia School of Social Work Wei-Ting Yen examines how South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, three developmental states, adopted distinct medical resource strategies during the early phase of COVID-19. She argues that differences in pre-crisis industrial coordination capacity shaped whether and how states prioritized test kits, masks,…

Speaker: Tristan Brown, Associate Professor of History and the S.C. Fang Chinese Language and Culture Career Development Chair, MIT Moderator: Eugenia Lean, Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures; Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, Columbia University Tristan Brown discusses his forthcoming project, “Crossing the Frozen Frontier: Ice, Climate, and Warfare on the Ming and Qing Norther Frontiers.” This article intervenes in both environmental and military history by examining how the seasonal freezing of rivers and terrain across the Ming and Qing dynasties’ northern…

Join the Qalam Pakistan Initiative and the Department of History for a book talk by Shayan Rajani (Michigan State University) featuring discussant Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University). Leaving Legacies is a fresh account of the individual in early modern South Asia. A gendered practice carried out by men, leaving legacies involved assembling three kinds of material traces: monuments, books, and sons. This book shows that a concern for the individual self was not an exclusively western phenomenon. Rather, the practice of leaving…

Speakers: Yang Shuang-zi, author Lin King, writer and translator Moderator:  Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, Columbia University Yang Shuang-zi’s novel Taiwan Travelogue, translated by Lin King, received the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024 and the Baifang Schell Book Prize for Translated Literature from the Asia Society in 2025. The story follows two young women, one Japanese and one Taiwanese, in 1930s Japan-ruled Taiwan. Presented as a lighthearted look at…

We invite current Columbia graduate students with questions about maintaining an inclusive teaching environment and all other aspects of pedagogy to drop by office hours on Fridays from 2:00–4:00 pm. We also welcome conversations about CTL fellowships, programs, services, job market preparation, and making progress in the Teaching Development Program (tdp.ctl.columbia.edu). No appointment is necessary; you can join us in-person in 212 Butler Library, or via Zoom. To join office hours via Zoom, email CTLgrads@columbia.edu to obtain the link. Learn more about what you can expect in…

Are you interested in studying abroad in Taiwan? Join this virtual information session on Monday, September 22nd at 4:00 PM ET hosted by CET Academic Programs to learn more about study abroad in Taiwan. During this session, you will hear directly from recent program alums about their experience! Immerse yourself in the Chinese language, take English-taught electives that fit your major, and live with local peers! All language levels (including elementary!) are offered, so all are welcome. Even if you are unable to attend,…

Practice developing class activities that align with your learning objectives for students and incentivize all students to participate. Join the CTL for this workshop for graduate students focused on giving you strategies to better engage students in their own learning. In this workshop, we will discuss the evidence and efficacy of a variety of active learning strategies, and consider how these approaches can make our classrooms more inclusive. Prior to this session, participants are expected to have completed a 20-minute…