This cluster will look backward from present debates to discussions of the African Diaspora as they occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. These discussions usually took place in the context of the articulation of ideas of Pan Africanism. Thus the title of series of the sessions for next year is Pan Africanism and the African Diaspora: Some Connections, Some Departures. The idea will be to read some of the original thought of Pan Aficanists such as Martin Delany, E.W. Blyden, W.E.B.

This research cluster is devoted to investigating the interactions between urban values, urban systems and spaces, and inhabitants of the city by focusing on the cultural dimensions of urban planning, urban systems, and the experiences of urban life. This cluster will meet monthly to discuss a common theme: Identity and Environment in the Modern City. This theme is both narrow enough to encourage a more focused set of readings but broad enough to be welcoming to new participants.

This research cluster seeks to bring together scholars of migration from across the university to engage in discussion and presentation of research with the goal of developing a more transdisciplinary analysis of the human experience in migration. This cluster focuses on two themes that sometimes exist in tension: migration, or geographic movement often motivated by economic or relational considerations; and the idea of belonging--what poet and writer Luis Francia describes as the idea of home--that is often expressed as intangible desire.

Languages change for two reasons, language external and language internal. External reasons involve social and political changes that affect language use and internal changes are determined by the internal mechanisms of our cognitive capacities. In this research cluster, we will study the connection between internal and external factors and provide descriptions of certain cycles of change. Linguistic cycles are a perfect instance where external and internal reasons come together.

Note: This cluster was also the first to receive the Jenny Norton award for a research project that focuses on women.

This cluster examines the role of Comparative Literature in the 21st century to respond to the ever-more urgent need for cross-cultural understanding under globalization. Discussions will focus on intersections among language, visual culture, literary production, and gender as potential categories of analysis for comparative studies across national cultures.

This cluster will facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion using theories and practices from several disciplines (Anthropological Linguistics, Art History, Geography, and Geology) to explore the relationships between physical and cultural landscapes, and how these are encoded in language, material culture, and social units. In doing so, participants will create a new transdisciplinary understanding of the connections among landscapes and territories, the language and discourses used to talk about them, social units such as clans or moieties, and their representations in material culture.

Participants in this cluster will be engaged in the investigation of the relationship between women, religion, and social effect. For the academic year 2008-09, meetings will be held the last Friday of every month.

The idea for this Research Cluster emerged from a workshop with Dr. J. Paul Martin, co-founder and former executive director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University and current director of human rights studies at Barnard College. His talk drew a large number of faculty and graduate students from across the university. Following Dr.

Comparative Literature has undergone radical transformation over the past decade, moving well past its initial formulations in the work of European émigrés in the aftermath of WWII. The foundational commitment to working with multiple languages and across national boundaries has brought in influential theorists from fields such as psychoanalysis, translation studies, and anthropology, providing a location for the rise and flourishing of “theory” in the 1970s and 1980s. Comparative Literature likewise anticipated and favored the development of post-colonial and global studies in the 1990s.