Acclaimed actor and screenwriter Dan Futterman CC ’89, known for his screenplay of the award-winning film Capote (2005), will deliver the keynote address at the 2014 Columbia College Class Day ceremony. The annual event, which honors graduating seniors, will take place at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, on the South Lawn of Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus.
Katie Bentivoglio CC ’13 has received a prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Junior Fellowship. The highly-competitive fellowship, at the think tank’s offices in Washington D.C., is offered to between 10 and 12 seniors and recent graduates each year from nearly 400 participating colleges, each of which may only nominate two candidates per year.
History Professors Elizabeth Blackmar and Christine Philliou CC ’94, Political Science Professor Virginia Page Fortna, English and Comparative Literature Professor Erik Gray, Earth and Environmental Sciences Professor Peter Kelemen, Art History and Archaeology Professor Ioannis Mylonopoulos, Psychology Professor Valerie Purdie-Vaughns CC ’93, French and Romance Philology Professor Joanna Stalnaker and Biological Sciences Professors Brent Stockwell and Rafael Yuste, will be honored this spring with Lenfest Distinguished Teaching Awards.
Samuel Zeng CC ’15 and Kun Leng CC ’15 have been awarded honors thorugh The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program. The Goldwater Scholarship, a federally-endowed program honoring former U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater, is the premier undergraduate award for students interested in pursuing careers in mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering.
Abbee Cox CC ’14, a psychology major, has been named a 2014 Humanity in Action Fellow. The Humanity in Action Fellowship brings together college students and recent graduates from around the world to explore different national histories of discrimination and resistance to injustice, as well as contemporary issues affecting minority groups.
Robert L. Belknap SIPA ’57, GSAS ’59, professor emeritus of Russian in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, longtime Literature Humanities instructor and former acting College dean, passed away on March 17. “Bob was a magisterial teacher of literature in true Columbia tradition, a guiding intellect and scholar in the field of Russian literature and a committed educator who devoted his energy and vision to making Columbia an institution to be proud of,” said Liza Knapp GSAS ’85, department chair and associate professor of Slavic. “From start to finish he was a man of integrity, wit, wisdom and goodwill.”
The Teagle Foundation has awarded Columbia, along with Yale University and the University of Chicago, a $280,000 grant for a three-year collaborative research project to study the significance, impact and role of core curriculum programs housed within research universities, strengthen the three institutions’ core text-based programs and engage others in similar work.
“Retranslating Literary Classics: A Panel of Cervantes, Montaigne, and Dostoevsky,” this spring’s Literature Humanities Course-wide event, was held on March 7 in Miller Theatre and moderated by Susan Bernofsky, director of literary translation at Columbia.
Five accomplished alumni were presented with 2014 John Jay Awarsd for distinguished professional achievement at the annual John Jay Awards Dinner on March 5. This year marked the 36th annual dinner; 195 honorees and 11 decades of alumni have been honored. The dinner raised $1.1 million for the John Jay National Scholars Program, which provides financial aid and special programming to enhance the academic and extracurricular experiences of outstanding students.
On Wednesday, February 26, the Kenneth Cole Community Engagement Program is thrilled to present its 2014 Spring Forum featuring distinguished guest speaker Chelsea Clinton, Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation.