A Trip to Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum

Posted on February 9, 2026 by jbk2191

Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (courtesy of the museum’s website)

Last spring, while studying abroad at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, I decided to pay a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum—one of the largest remaining monuments to Britain’s history of violent subjection and extraction of cultural artifacts from imperial territories. The site, named after Augustus Pitt Rivers, an English soldier, aristocrat, ethnologist, and avowed racist, is home to hundreds of thousands of masks, spears, pieces of jewelry, clothes, guns, figurines, works of metallurgy, and until recently, a collection of shrunken heads and other human remains.

Gruesome stuff. But it’s a stunning collection. So much cultural history, packed in a mind-bogglingly dense but entirely intelligible space. My hour-long visit was a fertile mixture of discomfort and reticent awe. 

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Five Tips for Pursuing Humanities Research as an Undergraduate

Posted on February 2, 2026 by sc5184

Portrait of a Young Man, Bronzino, the MET

  1. Choose a topic you’re interested in. People often talk about the importance of choosing a research topic that you’re passionate about. Passion can be helpful, but I think that curiosity is even more important. The first research project I pursued was about Oscar Wilde’s poetry, which wasn’t something that I had always loved—in fact, a key part of my project focused on why Wilde’s poems failed. But I had a research question about these poems that I was very curious about. Neither before, nor during, nor after my project did I feel any real aesthetic or emotional attachment to these poems, but my scholarly interest in them continued to increase the more I learned about them. This curiosity was the driving force of my research, and I think it can be an even stronger motivation than passion.

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Research and Higher Ed in Crisis

Posted on January 26, 2026 by cw2770

The Suzzallo Library of the University of Washington, Seattle (image courtesy of Zoshua Colah from Unsplash)

Somewhere between the libraries, laboratories, classrooms, and faculty offices on campus, something in the university has gone quiet. The buzzing of intellectuals at work and the powerhouse centers of academia tackling their pressing challenges is harder to detect, and if you’re anything like me, you probably have a reasonable guess as to why. The broadening crisis facing universities is putting the funding mechanisms for academic research under strain, threatening to halt the medical, social, and public interest work of higher education. Ever since Columbia became caught up in the middle of this crisis, the swirling questions about how we ended up here have only increased. But I struggle to understand, in many ways, how the looming issues surrounding federal funding and the leveraging of government research contracts were ignored. History has a lot of teach us about the way the government has supported the expansion of university-level research since the turn of the 20th century; the growing dependence on these funds only grew following two world wars and the rise of global, nuclear technology. I want to be quite clear in surfacing the foreseeable nature of the challenges that universities like Columbia are facing at this present moment, not only so that we might understand our circumstances in greater depth, but also so that we might do something to fix the precarity of academic research that seems to weigh on every corner of the nation today.

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“Why Bother?”: An Answer Found in Fieldwork

Posted on January 19, 2026 by cw2770

At the beach in Sisal, Yucatan, after a full day of language documentation work (credit: Sarah Bryden)

“Why do you study Maya?”

This is a familiar question for me, given that the language is not commonly taught in the United States. I have a standard answer: I study linguistics at university, I’m curious about languages that are different from English, and Yucatec Maya is a fun and fascinating case study. Usually this answer is met with nods and smiles, but on this day my interlocutor– a taxi driver in the Maya-speaking region of Yucatan– frowned.

“What I mean is,” he clarified. “Why do you study a dying language? Why bother?”

My profession of curiosity and enthusiasm suddenly felt very hollow. I had been asked variations of this question before (often in the form of inquiries about the “usefulness” of learning Maya), but never so directly. I was in Yucatan that summer as an envoy of US academia, where the importance of studying endangered languages is widely discussed; I had never faced such a point-blank question about the value of my research. A bit shaken, I said something semi-coherent about the link between language and culture, and my hope that language documentation work can prevent language loss. I left the taxi with new self-doubt. Why couldn’t I explain my motivations? If I couldn’t put my motivations into words, was I wasting my time?

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From Literature to Philosophy: A Guide for the Perplexed

Posted on January 12, 2026 by cw2770

Mycenae, legendary home of Agamemnon (credit: Joseph Karaganis)

Literature Humanities, the centerpiece of Columbia’s Core Curriculum, opens with Homer’s Iliad—an immediately absorbing epic of grand scope, jam-packed with irresistible characters (Patrokles anyone?) and dozens of pages of gripping interpersonal drama. Sure, some students might have their patience tested during the infamous “Catalogue of Ships,” which interrupts the story’s momentum to shout-out the various tribes who contributed to the Achaean war effort (although as a proud Arcadian and Laconian myself, I was glad to hear that my ancestors could muster up sixty ships each). But the point stands: for most students the Iliad is fun to read—and the same can be said for the rest of LitHum’s syllabus. The Odyssey (especially as filtered through Emily Wilson’s spirited translation) is a breezy trek through the sun-kissed Mediterranean; and while the Aeneid isn’t for everyone, I remember finding its tale of dispossession and national rebirth impossible to put down. It goes without saying that the second semester—bookended by Claudia Rankine, St. Augustine, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison—is no less entertaining than the first. Even if you weren’t required to read these books for class, you would be (or at least should be) doing so anyway.

Contemporary Civilization, the moral and political philosophy course that follows LitHum, is a little different. Without prior training in Classical Greek history or political theory, the first couple of readings can make for a hard slog—Plato’s Republic has its moments (the Allegory of the Cave and Myth of the Metals stand out), but don’t get me started on Aristotle’s Ethics, not to say his Politics. Aristotle was possibly the greatest and certainly the most influential Western philosopher of all time, but his unpolished and only posthumously collected lecture notes do not make a great impression on the average STEM major.

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Dante, the “Neutrals,” and Us

Posted on January 5, 2026 by cw2770

Detail from The Last Judgment, Luca Signorelli, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

For many freshmen, the most difficult Literature Humanities text to connect with personally is Dante’s Inferno. This was certainly the case for me. Many of the other second-semester readings—To the Lighthouse, Pride and Prejudice, Shakespeare—are easy to feel invested in: we all know Mrs. Ramsays and Mrs. Bennets in our lives, and we all want to know what will happen to Othello or Lear. And even the older and denser books, like Homer’s epics or the Confessions, still deal very much with the world of humans: it is hard not to feel moved by Augustine’s pained descriptions of his conflicting desires, or the moment when Hector says goodbye to Andromache for the last time. But the Inferno is different from all these books—its two protagonists are difficult to connect with personally, and it’s easy to feel somewhat confused by the vast array of characters who they meet in Hell, all being tortured in ways that often seem unfair and cruel.

Many people are quick to point out that much of what makes Dante great is the beauty of his poetry, which is lost in translation. This may be true. But there is also a lot to be obtained from the Inferno in translation. And although the book may take place in another world, it is filled with remarkable insights into this human one that still ring true today. One problem, however, is that the speed with which the book is rushed through in Lit Hum can make it difficult to fully appreciate these insights, and the text can end up seeming like a blurry catalog of thirteenth-century people who Dante disliked.

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“Insistent Problems of the Present”

Posted on December 29, 2025 by cw2770

Image of “The Thinker” statue in front of Philosophy Hall and St. Paul’s Chapel during wintertime (image courtesy of Unsplash and Ariel Tang).

For most students, the familiar phrase “the insistent problems of the present” is a common throughline within and beyond classrooms dedicated to the Core Curriculum. It is both a critical tool in positioning the origins of the curriculum itself, and somewhat of a guiding principle to steer the development of the Core today. To give a bit of background though, the notion of “the insistent problems of the present” was rooted in the founding doctrine behind Contemporary Civilizations, the first class that marked the beginning of the Core at Columbia College. The website for the Core argues that this “first college general education program in the United States” came about during a time of “global crisis, social reform, and widespread debates about the aims and methods of higher learning.” Contemporary Civilization was thrust into this world as a “bold experiment” towards John Dewey’s vision of “progressive education.” 

All of this might be true. It is hard to position oneself squarely in the mindset of Columbia scholars and teachers from 1919 when the Core was founded, but I think it is reasonable to grasp the general mission behind the Core. However, a lot has changed in the 106 years since the start of the Contemporary Civilizations. Of course, I’m talking about the sweeping global and national changes that have occurred since, but also the way that higher education itself appears to be in the crosshairs of current political scrutiny. The “insistent problems of the present” that were imagined more than a century ago are decidedly different, and it begs the question: what should the Core do for us today? What work—internal to the classroom or beyond it—can (or should) it accomplish right now? I argue that the Core and the larger project of liberal arts education is charged with confronting its own limitations and using that self-critique rethink higher education. Not radically per-se, but the Core must now contemplate more than it ever has before the way knowledge is produced, shared, and applied in a world far more divisive—and unequal—than the one it was born into.

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Finding Mentorship at Columbia: Advice from a Professor

Posted on December 22, 2025 by cw2770

The author, Sarah, with Professor Landman (credit: Eliana Steele)

The benefits of mentorship from a professor are very clear, but the steps to finding a mentor are not always so obvious; Columbia is a large school in an even larger city, and it’s easy to feel lost in the crowd. Compounding this is the fact that Columbia’s professors are experts in their fields with amazing accomplishments– this is both exciting and intimidating, from the student perspective. Even so, I’ve been lucky to find several mentors during my time here, both professors and non-professors: my upperclassman TA showed me the path through “Introduction to Linguistics” as a freshman, my graduate student history TAs have dramatically improved my writing skills, and my faculty mentors in research programs like Laidlaw have given me a rare glimpse at human expertise. 

For this blog post, I spoke with one of my own professors and mentors, Meredith Landman, in order to share the “professor perspective” on mentorship at Columbia. Meredith is a linguistics professor, and I’ve been taking her classes since my sophomore year. For myself and many of my peers, Meredith is an invaluable source of guidance on graduate school, career options, summer research, and anything linguistics-related. Most recently, we’ve been working together on the Linguistics Program’s blog, and on documenting the Kalmyk language in our Field Methods class. Here is an abridged version of our conversation:

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To The Lighthouse and Back Again

Posted on December 15, 2025 by cw2770

To The Lighthouse book cover (credit: Powell’s Books)

Freshman year is the gift that keeps on giving. Untoward anxiety about your future, LinkedIn connections, friends you spend sixteen hours out of the day with, and most importantly, a hefty collection of Literature Humanities books. Many of us know that trying walk back from Book Culture, with your $100 box of books for the entire year in your hands, or the painstaking process of visiting CLIO to try and get the last Library Reserves copy of the book you were supposed to read a week ago.

Although freshman year gave me the distinct and unforgettable (try as I must) memory of walking into LitHum with a cardboard box full of books, I didn’t know what was buried deep inside. Fast forward seven months, I cracked open To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf in April 2023. The lawns were busy, the weather was getting nicer, and I was almost done with my first year at Columbia University. Little did I know, the best was yet to come in LitHum. 

For those of you who haven’t taken it yet (or were too busy with spring festivities first-year), I’ll try and explain. Beyond the foggy sight of a lighthouse lighting up the night sky lays the hazy world of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Set at the precipice of World War I, it paints a fragmented picture of the Ramsay family’s annual vacations to their summer house off the coast of Scotland. The novel, characterized by Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing style, lacks plot, dialogue, or action. Instead, Woolf uses the characters’ thoughts and observations to engross the readers in her mystery of time and reality. Although her novel is technically true to reality, she bends the rules of time and subverts our conceptualizations of her narrative world. One moment can take up ten pages, and ten years can take up one page.

In an early section of the book, an old friend of the patriarch of the Ramsay family, Mr. Bankes, reflects on their friendship. Woolf writes, “They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity” (20). Mr. Bankes continues his rumination, thinking about how “Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas Bankes was childless and a widower,” until claiming “their friendship had petered out on a Westmorland road … their paths lying different ways” (21).

Woolf uses a shared memory to lure the reader into a false warmth, yanking it away and replacing it with truths about the passage of time. We can all feel the depth of their friendship through a moment shared in silence. Woolf moves their relationship, like the Greek Moirai,  binding them through space and time before yanking them apart.

What a gut punch my first year of college. It was spring, and I thought I was about to see the light on the other side! But Virginia Woolf (and by proxy, my LitHum professor) yanked that away from me too. In To The Lighthouse, there is no other side. In fact, there are no sides at all. Time has no construct. She paints a world of art and love and relationships and memory, but no time. All the deadlines, the stress, the imagined futures weren’t as fixed as I thought. They could stretch, bend, collapse, or vanish, just like Woolf’s pages. Yes, I still had to submit my final LitHum paper and take my Latin final. 

However, there was no straight line towards clarity. There was barely even a straight line back home to Maryland at the end of the semester. And returning home that summer wasn’t all quite I had hoped. I wasn’t suddenly on a different path, my familial relationships and home friendships turning left on Westmorland road, where I turned right. Perhaps it was a ripple. A stone skidding across the lake towards my own proverbial lighthouse. And Woolf refuses to let her characters, and refused to let me, escape that illusion. 

Two years after that, my trip to the lighthouse still echoes. The sound of laughter late into the night echoes through my townhouse, even when everyone has left. When I turn on the lamp I bought at University Hardware in 2022, I’m back in my freshman year double again. But then the room lights up, and suddenly I’m not. In ten, twenty, or fifty years, I’m sure I’ll find these memories fragmented in my mind. Maybe I’ll find that some of my college friendships have been twisted by the relentless road. 

Or maybe I’ll still have that same lamp, turn it on, and it will be April 2023 all over again, and I’m about to start To the Lighthouse for the first time. 

Julia Sherman, CC’26

Work Cited:

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Mariner Books, 1981.

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Canonization in the End Times

Posted on December 8, 2025 by cw2770

Zollverein, a former industrial complex and center of Germany’s Ruhr Valley, now a UNESCO world heritage site (credit: Joseph Karaganis)

Since it was first taught in the years following World War I, Contemporary Civilization has navigated the tension between debates of the past and challenges of the present. Students read Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Machiavelli before tackling Martin Luther King, Franz Fanon, and Simone De Beauvoir, authors whose central concerns—American racial inequality, the psychology of post-colonial violence, and the existential-cultural morass of gender difference—are as relevant today as they were in the mid-20th century. But CC’s continuum of moral and social thought extends to our own time. No present challenge is as urgent and world-historical as climate change, which will leave our planet a more unstable and unlivable place if it does not destroy it altogether. New additions to the CC syllabus have sought to introduce students to the humanistic discourse that has emerged—and which, in the darkest of times, has even flourished—in response to the crisis of global warming. But this discourse is rapidly evolving and has not yet settled into teachable fault-lines, like Plato against Aristotle, Augustine against Aquinas, or Hobbes against Locke against Rousseau, which students encounter in CC’s first semester. 

There is no established climate change canon. And there won’t be one anytime soon. Canonization is a drawn-out process and an unstable one. The fluctuations of the present are a filter through which we understand our collective past. New texts emerge from the ash heap of history and old ones die out. Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote in the late 18th-century, wasn’t widely read until her work was rediscovered by second-wave feminists in the 1960s and 70s. Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, which form the bulk of students’ engagement with Marx in CC, were not easily available in English and French until the mid-1950s—four decades after the October Revolution and well past the peak of communist popularity in the West.

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