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The W. Averell Harriman Lectures were inaugurated in 1989 to honor the memory of our principal benefactor by making a special intellectual contribution to the University community and to our field. We do this by inviting a preeminent scholar, political figure, or cultural luminary related in some way to our area of study to deliver a major address for the entire University community and many other guests.
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Ismail Kadare: Literature and Tyranny
Monday, 17 April 2006, 4:00pm
Low Memorial Library, Columbia University
Ismail Kadare, Albania's best-known poet and novelist, and winner of the 2005 Man Booker International Prize for literature, will give the Annual Harriman Lecture on Monday, April 17th, at 4pm in the Rotunda of Low Library. The title of Mr. Kadare's lecture is "Literature and Tyranny."
In awarding the Booker Prize to Mr. Kadare, the chairman of the prize, Mr. John Carey, said that "Kadare is a writer who maps a whole culture--its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters. He is a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer."
The Harriman Lecture is organized by Columbia University's Harriman Institute, a multi-disciplinary teaching institute dedicated to the study of Russia, the post-Soviet states, East-Central Europe and the Balkans, is the oldest and largest institute of its kind in the United States. Former Harriman Lecturers have included statesmen such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Schmidt, and Vojislav Kostunica, scholars such as Barrington Moore, Jr., Ernest Gellner, and Katherine Verdery, and intellectuals and writers such as Andrei Sinyavsky and Imre Kertesz. The Harriman Lecture is made possible through the generosity of the family of W. Averell Harriman and the Mary W. Harriman Foundation.
Attendance at the lecture is open to the public; however, reservations are required. To reserve a seat, please call 212.854.6213, or email non2002@columbia.edu.
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Imre Kertesz: A Dialogue with Ivan Sanders
Thursday, 21 October 2004
The Swedish Academy awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature to Imre Kertesz “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” The Harriman Lecture was presented in the form of a dialogue with Professor Ivan Sanders (Columbia University), well-known scholar of Hungarian literature.
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Vojislav Kostunica: The Quest for the Rule of Law: The Yugoslav Case
Friday, 13 September 2002
On September 13th, 2002, Dr. Vojislav Kostunica, President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), gave the 11th Harriman Lecture. The title of President Kostunica’s talk was “The Quest for the Rule of Law: The Yugoslav Case.” During his talk, Kostunica argued that the most important part of the transition process form a totalitarian to a democratic system, and from socialism to a market-based economy, was establishing judicial independence and the rule of law, without which, according to Kostunica, all other efforts were doomed to fail. Kostunica also expressed his optimism that current efforts to reform the Yugoslav federation would succeed, and made a plea for the international community to continue to support efforts to rebuild the FRY and all of Southeastern Europe.
After his lecture, President Kostunica presented Columbia University with a personal gift of a bust of Mihailo (“Michael”) Pupin, a famous Serbian immigrant who was educated at Columbia, and taught here for thirty years. Pupin’s 1924 autobiography, From Immigrant to Inventor, won a Pulitzer Prize. The most prestigious award bestowed by Columbia’s Engineering School is the Pupin Medal for Service to the Nation.
Link to website
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Mikhail Gorbachev: Russia: Today and the Future
Monday, 11 March 2002
President Mikhail Gorbachev, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, delivered the Tenth Harriman Lecture before a standing-room-only crowd in Low Library Rotunda. Gorbachev traced the history of the Soviet Union from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the present day. Impatient with critics of the state of democracy in Russia, Gorbachev opined, “Remember, America’s democracy has evolved over 200 years. We need time to succeed."
Link to website
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Moshe Lewin: The USSR: Three Historical Probes
Thursday, 19 October 2000
The USSR: Three Historical Probes
I. The 1930s: A System and a Psyche
II. The USSR's 1960s: In Quest of Modernization
III. Russia's 20th Century: The Burdens of History
Link to website
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Helmut Schmidt: The 21st Century in Europe: Risks, Opportunities, and Probabilities
Monday, 22 November 1999
As Chancellor of Germany from 1974 to 1982, Helmut Schmidt stressed the goal of the political unification of Europe. As that goal moves closer to reality, Schmidt discussed some of the pitfalls that may arise in a major address Monday, Nov. 22. One of the founders of the Economic Summits of the major Western powers begun in 1975, Schmidt spoke on "The 21st Century in Europe: Risks, Opportunities, and Probabilities," at 5:30 P.M. in the Rotunda of Low Memorial Library.
Link to website
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Katherine Verdery: The Political Lives of Dead Bodies
Monday, 01 December 1997
Controversies over the corpses, burials and gravesites of national heroes in post-socialist Eastern Europe and Russia -- and what this means politically -- were examined by the noted social scientist Katherine Verdery in three lectures the week of December 1, 1997, at Columbia University.
"Post-Socialist Necrophilia, or the Political Lives of Dead Bodies," was the general title of the lecture series, which was comprised of the following: "Corpses on the Move," "The Restless Bones of Inochentie Micu" and "Resignifying the Dust." The series was co-sponsored by the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America and Columbia University Press.
Verdery, one of the preeminent social scientists studying Eastern Europe today, examined "the great frequency with which dead bodies have been manipulated in the post-Soviet bloc since 1989 and the politics underlying these manipulations." These "manipulations," she said, include flying the body of composer Bela Bartok back to Hungary from New York, and pianist and statesman Ignacy Jan Paderewski to Warsaw from Arlington National Cemetery; digging up the body of Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy, turning him over and reburying him; arguments between Poland and Russia concerning the Polish officers massacred in Katyn forest during World War II, and arguments about the fate of Lenin's body -- should it be removed from the mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square and sent to St. Petersburg?
Professor Verdery's pioneering studies of ethno-national identity, Transylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries of Political, Economic and Ethnic Change (1983) and National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu's Romania (1991), are highly regarded in the field. She is currently Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate Center.
Link to website
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Andrei Sinyavsky: Russian Intelligentsia
Tuesday, 13 February 1996
Andrei Sinyavsky (1925-97), one of the great writers in Russian literature of the last half of the twentieth century, was arrested and tried together with Yuly Daniel for publishing “anti-Soviet” works abroad. The trial became a milestone in the Russian dissident movement. Sinyavsky and his family moved to Paris in 1973, where he lectured at the Sorbonne until his retirement in 1974. Sinyavsky, a controversial figure in the Russian emigration in Paris as well as back home in Russia, delivered a series of three lectures, which were published by Columbia University Press as The Russian Intelligentsia.
Link to website
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Ernest Gellner: The Meaning of the Century
Tuesday, 25 October 1994
Ernest Gellner, the sociologist, philosopher and social anthropologist, give the fifth annual W. Averell Harriman Lecture on Tues., Oct. 25, at 5:00 P.M. in Low Rotunda. His topic: "The Meaning of the Century."
Gellner has written extensively on the anthropology of the Islamic world, nationalism and the politics of Eastern Europe.
Born in Paris in 1925, he was educated both in Prague and in England. He began his career at the London School of Economics, where he became full professor of philosophy in 1962.
In 1984 he was appointed the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge.
Since 1993 he has been research professor at the Central European University in Prague, and director of its Center for the Study of Nationalism. He is also a professional fellow at King's College, Cambridge.
His many publications include Words and Things (1959), Saints of the Atlas (1969), Contemporary Thought and Politics (1974), The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974), Spectacles and Predicaments (1979), Nations and Nationalism (1983), The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985), Culture, Identity and Politics (1987), and Postmodernism Reason and Religion (1992).
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Alec Nove: The Soviet System in Retrospect: An Obituary Notice
Wednesday, 17 February 1993
The Fourth Harriman Lecture was delivered by Alec Nove, Professor Emeritus and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, and Fellow of the Royal Societ of Edinburgh and of the British Academy. Professor Nove used the occasion to look back on the Soviet system and on the legacy it has granted the world.
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Alexander Yakovlev: Social Alternatives in the Twentieth Century
Friday, 15 November 1991
Alexander Yakovlev, “the architect” of Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost, delivered the Third Harriman Lecture.
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Dmitrii Likhachev: The National Nature of Russian History
Tuesday, 13 November 1990
Academician Dmitrii Likhachev, well-known and beloved scholar of Russian literature, particularly of the early period, and prominent figure in the events surrounding Gorbachev’s reforms, delivered the Second Harriman Lecture.
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Barrington Moore: Liberal Prospects Under Soviet Socialism
Wednesday, 15 November 1989
Barrington Moore, author of Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), initiated the Harriman Lectures in 1989.
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