A Community of Scholars: Seventy-Five Years of The University Seminars at Columbia
By Thomas Vinciguerra
The Columbia University Seminars, founded in 1945, represent a distinctive experiment in academia. Scholars from different disciplines and institutions, as well as practitioners and other experts, meet once a month through the academic year to study and discuss subjects, sometimes beyond their specialties. Through collegial discussion, participants learn from one another. Today, over ninety seminars are ongoing: some have outlived their founders, while others are just beginning.
A Community of Scholars is a seventy-fifth anniversary celebration of the founding of the University Seminars. It brings together essays by seminar chairs and other leading participants that exemplify the diversity and vibrancy of these proceedings. Their topics are wide-ranging the evolution of the labor movement, urban life, the politics and culture of Brazil, the Enlightenment, the prospects for