Entre Nous, a conversation series
A collaboration between three cultural and educational institutions in Paris, The American Library in Paris, Columbia Global Centers | Paris, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, are excited to announce Entre Nous, an interdisciplinary series featuring dialogues between scholars, journalists, and artists from around the world.
Throughout this year-long series, taking place from September 2021 to Spring 2022, guest speakers will join us virtually and in-person to explore the world we live in today through conversation. Speakers include Andrew Revkin, Lauren Elkin, Alice Barbe, Dina Nayeri, Colm Tóibín, and Anuk Arudpragasam, just to name a few.
See below for the Autumn 2021 line-up and event descriptions, and make sure to check this page regularly for series updates.
Autumn 2021
Andrew Revkin in Conversation with Kate Raworth and Roman Krznaric
Monday, September 20th | 19h30 Paris | 1:30pm New York | Online event
What decisions can we make today as individuals and societies to create a better tomorrow?
Join Columbia Climate School’s Andrew Revkin, economist Kate Raworth, and philosopher Roman Krznaric for a conversation on how reinventing economics and incorporating long-term thinking into our current policies can help us meet the challenges of climate breakdown and global inequality, and transform our world for future generations.
Register here.
Speakers:
Roman Krznaric is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. His latest book is The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short Term World. His previous international bestsellers, including Empathy, The Wonderbox and Carpe Diem Regained, have been published in more than 20 languages.
Kate Raworth is a renegade economist focused on making economics fit for 21st-century realities. She is the creator of the Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries, and co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab. Her internationally best-selling book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist has been translated into over 20 languages and has been widely influential with diverse audiences, from the UN General Assembly to Pope Francis to Extinction Rebellion.
Andrew Revkin has written on climate change and other environmental challenges for nearly 40 years, mostly for The New York Times and now at revkin.bulletin.com. He founded the Columbia Climate School's Initiative on Communication and Sustainability in 2019 and runs a popular webcast series, Sustain What, clarifying paths to progress on urgent challenges where complexity and consequence collide. He has won most of the top awards in science journalism as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Alice Barbe and Dina Nayeri in conversation
Tuesday, October 5th | 19h30 Paris | 1:30pm New York | In-person event
Join a conversation between writers Alice Barbe and Dina Nayeri, the inaugural in-person event of our new #EntreNousSeries.
Speakers:
Alice Barbe is the co-founder of the international organization Singa and a former Fellow of the Barack Obama Foundation. Barbe works on topics related to migration, engagement, and citizen mobilization, and collaborates regularly with Columbia World Projects, Thinkers & Doers and the Institut Montaigne. She is the author of the recently-published On ne naît pas engagé, on le devient, published by Éditions de l'Observatoire.
Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels and a book of creative nonfiction, The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), winner of the Geschwister Scholl Preis and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other distinctions. Her work has been published in over twenty countries and has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, theWashington Post, the New Yorker, Granta, and many other publications. Dina Nayeri was a 2019-2020 Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination at Reid Hall.
***IMPORTANT*** ON-SITE INFORMATION REGARDING COVID-19
In compliance with French regulations, in order to enter Reid Hall, all guests must provide a pass sanitaire with proof of either full vaccination or a negative Covid test taken within the previous 72 hours. Thank you for your understanding.
Seating is limited.
Joyce Carol Oates and Joyce Maynard in conversation
Wednesday, October 20th | 19h30 Paris | 1:30pm New York | Online event
Join acclaimed writers Joyce Carol Oates and Joyce Maynard - in public conversation for the first time - to mark the publication of their latest books in French by Éditions Philippe Rey. They will discuss the evolution of literary trends and politics over the years and what it means to be a woman writer now.
In memory of translator and editor Christiane Besse.
Robert G. O’Meally and Anto NeoSoul in conversation
Monday, November 15th | 19h30 Paris | 1:30pm New York | Online event
Join Kenyan musician and media personality Anto Neosoul and Professor Robert G. O’Meally, director of Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies, for a conversation on music, social activism, and transcending borders.
Register for the live conversation.
This conversation is co-organized by Columbia Global Centers | Nairobi.
SPEAKERS
Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for thirty years. Director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, O’Meally is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, The Jazz Singers, and Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, The Romare Bearden Reader and Antagonistic Cooperation: Collage, Jazz, and American Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2021. His edited volumes include The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Essays on Jazz, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, History and Memory in African American Culture), among others. For his production of a Smithsonian CD set called The Jazz Singers, he was nominated for a Grammy Award. The curator of exhibitions at Jazz at Lincoln Center (2006-2012), O’Meally also has co-curated exhibitions for the High Museum in Atlanta and for the Smithsonian Institution. He has held Guggenheim and Cullman Fellowships, among others. According to his sons, Mr. O’Meally plays the soprano saxophone “for his own amazement.”
Anto Neosoul is a musician, television host, and radio presenter who was named as one of 100 most influential Kenyans by Avance Media. A socially engaged artist and mentor, he has participated in a number of international workshops and conferences such as: the Mashariki Creative Economy Impact Investment Conference, Copyright X at Harvard Law School, and the GoDown Arts Centre Connect for Culture 2020. His debut album Starborn was released in 2014 and his sophomore album Welcome to My Soul will be out in 2022.
Lauren Elkin and Lauren Collins in conversation
Wednesday, November 17th | 19h30 Paris | 1:30pm New York | Hybrid event
A public transport vigil, an observation of the world through the screen of her phone and from the height of her bus seat, a study of the counterpoint between the everyday and the Event, No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus follows Elkin on her daily commutes from her apartment in the 5th Arrondissement to her teaching job in the 7th. The book, a love letter to Paris that unfolds over the course of the 2014-15 academic year, is also a meditation on how the city has changed in two decades, evolving from the twentieth century into the twenty-first, from analog to digital.
*The discussion will be available both online and in-person. While the conversation will happen in-person (Elkin and Collins will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Click here to register for the in-person event
Click here to register for the online event
SPEAKERS
Lauren Elkin’s writing on books, art, and culture have appeared in a variety of international publications including the London Review of Books, the New York Times, and Le Monde, among many others. A scholar of literature, Elkin has taught at New York University, the American University of Paris, the University of Liverpool, and the Université de Paris-Denis Diderot. Elkin’s last book, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a Radio 4 Book of the Week.
Lauren Collins began contributing to the New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008. She is the author of When in French: Love in a Second Language, which the Times named as one of its 100 Notable Books of 2016. She is working on a second book, about a coup d’état perpetrated by white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, and its effects on the city during the past 120 years.
Important: on-site information regarding COVID-19
In compliance with French regulations, a pass sanitaire is required for all visitors ages 12+. Visitors ages 6+, staff, and volunteers are required to wear masks on the premises.
Ian Goldin on Covid-19 and a Brighter Future
Monday, December 6th | 19h30 Paris | 1:30pm New York | Virtual event
Described by Arianna Huffington as “essential reading” and by Gordon Brown as “a fresh and penetrating insight...into what’s gone wrong with our world and what needs to be put right,” Rescue: From Global Crisis to a Better World calls for an optimistic future and one we all have the power to create.
Published in the shadow of a pandemic that swept (and continues to sweep) across the world, Goldin argues that we are at a crossroads, that Covid-19 has destroyed global norms, and that many think (wrongly) that after the devastation there will be a bounce back. But it is business as usual, Goldin writes, that led to the pandemic; and it is business as usual that will lead to a dystopian future.
In his book, Goldin tackles the challenges and opportunities posed by the pandemic, ranging from globalisation to the future of jobs, income inequality and geopolitics, the climate crisis and the future of cities. Ultimately, Rescue provides an urgently needed roadmap that reveals how the pandemic could lead to a better world.