History of the Society of Fellows
TIMELINE
The Society of Fellows (SOF) is established as a Presidential Center with endowment support from the William R. Kenan Jr. Trust and the Mellon Foundation. In a six-page letter to Mellon President John Sawyer, Columbia President William McGill articulates a vision for the program: to establish a high-profile postdoctoral fellowship…
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On November 9, 1976, Jacques Barzun, Professor of History at Columbia University, delivered “The Life and Death of Modernism” at the first Lionel Trilling Seminar. Established in honor of Lionel Trilling (1905-1975), one of the most celebrated Columbia professors and cultural critics of the 20th century, the series is offered…
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A $100,000 grant from the New York Foundation enables the creation of the David Heyman Fellowship in Urban Studies, the first of what will become a series of occasional fellowships in “specially designated fields.” A separate $100,000 gift funds the SOF’s Beekman Fellowship in Philosophy. Read the full annual report…
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Construction of The Heyman Center for the Humanities, made possible by an initial $700,000 gift from Columbia alumnus David M. Heyman, is completed on the University’s East Campus (between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive, 116th and 118th Streets) as part of its East Campus residential complex. Designed by Gwathmey Siegel…
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Established to provide teaching opportunities, research funding, and office space to retired academics from Columbia and other institutions of higher learning, the “Society of Senior Scholars at the Heyman Center” is supported by an endowment created by grants from the Mellon Foundation, matching grants from the University, and gifts from…
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Originally scheduled on Tuesdays and known as “brown-bag lunch seminars,” where Fellows and Board members gathered weekly to give talks on work-in-progress or to discuss common readings, these meetings are moved to Thursdays to avoid scheduling conflicts with departmental meetings and are rebranded as the Thursday Lecture Series. In the…
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The SOF debuts its website. It contains information about the Society, its Fellows, alumni, and activities, and allows prospective applicants to download application forms.
The Provost and Executive Vice President of Arts and Sciences jointly appoint a “Committee on the Establishment of a Columbia Humanities Center,” which recommends making fundraising for a new humanities center a University priority. The following year, an Academic Review Committee (ARC) report on the Heyman Center echoes this call…
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With funding from the Provost, the SOF Governing Board, and Columbia University Seminars, the Heyman Center, under Akeel Bilgrami’s direction, begins to produce “Heyman Center events”—lectures, conferences, workshops, artistic performances—that attract a growing and diverse audience within and beyond Columbia. Over the next five years, the Center receives major funding…
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The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture honors the literary theorist and cultural critic Edward W. Said (1935-2003), Professor of English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia from 1963 until 2003 and one of the most influential and politically-engaged intellectuals of his time. The Said Memorial Lecture pays tribute to his…
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In consultation with the Directors, the Fellows take on the responsibility of organizing the Spring Thursday Lecture Series, collectively choosing a different theme each year capacious enough to attract speakers from as wide a range of scholarly interests and disciplines as those of the Fellows themselves.
At the invitation of the New York Council for the Humanities (now Humanities New York), directors of humanities centers at Columbia, Cornell, NYU, SUNY Buffalo, and Syracuse joined representatives of the Council and the Mellon Foundation to discuss ways to collaborate on their public engagement work. This meeting led to the…
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The SOF launches a fully redesigned website featuring dedicated Fellows’ pages with biographies, publications, and video interviews, a news section, and a searchable database of all publications by current and alumni Fellows.
Building on its participation in a Mellon-funded project (2013-2016) sponsored by the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), the SOF and HCH, in collaboration with ICLS, the Center for Science and Society, and other Columbia partners, begin programming events that consider health and illness from the perspectives of…
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In recognition that complex social challenges demand that academics work ever more closely with partners outside the university in addressing them, the SOF formally launched the Public Humanities Initiative—the mission of which is to bring the intellectual resources, values, and perspectives of the humanities to projects that advance the public…
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The Heyman Center is awarded a three-year, $1M grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the Justice-in-Education Initiative, a partnership between the Heyman Center and the Center for Justice to provide educational opportunities to individuals who are currently or formerly incarcerated and to integrate the study of justice more fully…
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The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Deans of Humanities and Social Science and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), inaugurates a series of panel discussions to celebrate recent work by Columbia and Barnard faculty. New Books in the Arts &…
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Adapting the panel format of “New Books in the Arts and Sciences,” introduced the previous year, Society of Fellows launches “New Books in the Society of Fellows” to celebrate recent work by SOF alumni.
The SOF/Heyman joins with the Trinity College Dublin’s Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute (TLRH) to create a scholarly exchange program that welcomes applications from Columbia University, Barnard College, and Trinity College faculty for “Heyman–Hub Visiting Fellowships,” usually 4-6 weeks in length.
The amalgamation of the Heyman Center for the Humanities (HCH) with the Society of Fellows (SOF) marked a significant milestone in the growth of the Society and its role as a hub for humanistic thinking across campus. Internally, this institutional change formally acknowledged the financial and personnel support that the…
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The SOF/Heyman formalizes its public humanities work under the rubric Humanities in Practice. In addition to funding projects designed by graduate students in collaboration with community partners that benefit those communities, Humanities in Practice promotes conversations on how to put scholarship into practice and supports workshops on developing methods to…
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As the world grappled with the fallout from COVID-19, the SOF/Heyman partnered with the Trinity Long Room Hub to produce a five-part series of online discussions about the impact of the pandemic on democratic institutions worldwide. This series was seen by hundreds of viewers in real time and has been…
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Responding to a call for proposals, several Fellows and Board members participating in the SOF/Heyman Humanities in Practice Initiative received a grant to form a Public Humanities Workshop under the sponsorship of University Seminars. Bringing together scholars and practitioners from over fifteen institutions across the Eastern US, the workshop aimed…
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SOF Fellow Leah Aronowsky, working with Board member Joerg M. Schaefer, launches “Climate Futures/Climate Justice,” an “interdisciplinary series exploring the relationship between climate justice, carbon tech, and climate futures.” This collaboration inaugurated our Climate Programming, a capacious category of ongoing events and collaborations that joins other SOF/Heyman initiatives that bring…
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The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture inaugurates the Buell Fellow Center Research and Teaching Fellowship, open to early-career scholars of the built environment. Buell Fellows join Fellows in residence at the SOF/Heyman and participate fully in the activities of the community, increasing the average cohort…
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In Spring 2026, the SOF/Heyman hosts a conference, SOF@50: Humanities in the World, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Society. In partnership with University Seminars, this three-day event welcomes scholars from across the generations to think together about topics and questions that are of particular urgency for humanities scholar-citizens…
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