“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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On Looking Closely

Posted on December 1, 2025 by cw2770

Cloud Study, John Constable, The Frick

At the beginning of my semester abroad at Oxford, my tutor summoned me and the two other visiting students studying English to his office to give us some advice. We were going to be writing papers much more regularly than we were used to, he told us: during our two terms at Oxford, we would basically write one essay each week on what we had read. My tutor said that reading criticism on the books and writers that we studied could be helpful—he himself would give us a list of recommended criticism each week—but that our most effective tool was not criticism, but close reading. Considering our limited time and fast pace, we would never be able to grasp the scholarship on a writer as thoroughly as a specialist could. This made it difficult for us to try to wade into scholarly debates. But at close reading, he said, we could be as good as anyone else.

I found this to not only be quite helpful for the coming term, but also comforting. Since I first took Literature Humanities, I had often wondered how it could be possible to say something new about these very old books. How many books had been written about these books, and how many of them had I read? My tutor’s answer seemed to be that right now we didn’t have to worry about being original. Instead, it was enough to try to understand the intricacies of the text as thoroughly as we could, and to write about what we noticed. A provocative piece of criticism could kickstart this process, but it wasn’t necessary.

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A Speaking, Bleeding Book: The Relevance of the Core Outside the West

Posted on November 24, 2025 by cw2770

“El Castillo,” the main pyramid at Chichen Itza (credit: Sarah Bryden)

My faith in the value of the Core has wavered on some occasions: during exam periods, while slogging through an exceptionally-dense reading, and in the last half-hour of any seminar discussion on a warm spring afternoon (to name a few instances). More persistently, I’ve often struggled to see the overlap between the Core curriculum and my own academic interests. Much of my research centers on using Indigenous languages, specifically Quechua and Yucatec Maya, to research colonial history in Latin America. Pre-1492, these languages operated in complete separation from the Western canon; as St. Augustine wrote Confessions, the Classic Maya were starting construction on Chichén Itzá. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that I received my strongest proof of the Core’s relevance at a library 45 minutes away from Chichén, in a small Maya-speaking town called Xocén.
I visited the town’s library last summer with a group of fellow Yucatec Maya students. The librarian gave us a thorough tour, but the book that stole the show was actually not on a shelf– instead, it was locked in a safe. To be specific, it was a velvet-wrapped manuscript, which the librarian handled with care and named as a facsimile of the Kuxa’an Áanalte’ (“Living Book”) of Xocén.

He explained the manuscript this way: the original copy was a living, speaking, bleeding document, which contained a history of the world and prophecies about the future. Its provenance is dotted with famous figures, including Jesus and the Maya leaders of the Caste War. But mysteriously, the manuscript disappeared sometime between the Caste War and the 1940s. Although several investigations have been launched, the Living Book’s whereabouts remain unknown. In its place, a handwritten facsimile was drafted by people who had heard, read, and remembered the contents of the original.

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Interdisciplinary Beginnings: Getting Started with Research

Posted on November 17, 2025 by cw2770

Butler Library with tents and risers set up for graduation (photo courtesy of Ishaan Barrett)

In such an interdisciplinary field as urban studies, it can be hard to determine exactly one place or department in which to house or even propose a research project. In fact, the broad disciplinary foundations of the urban studies program—ranging from economics and anthropology to environmental science and sociology—is one of the many reasons I’ve come to love my major. In a field with so much breadth, proposing a research project or jumping off point can be challenging when the multiple academic apartments and fields of study can plausibly come weigh in on the trajectory of your project. The Urban Studies field not the only academic area where this interdisciplinary aspect of research rings true. Even the “clean cut” academic departments at Columbia house overlaps: economics and mathematics, history and sociology, economics and political science, to name a few. With a bit more work, one can find even more complex overlaps between various academic departments and fields when research is concerned. The binary “Venn diagram” of academic overlaps in research can further complexify as the scope and focus of your project shifts or draws on other methods.

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