About Us

The newly reconfigured Heyman Center is Columbia University's central site for the Humanities.

It brings together the interests not only of the various departments in the Humanities but also the broad conceptual, methodological and value-laden issues that are of interest to the natural sciences and the professional schools of Law, Medicine, Journalism, Arts, and International Affairs.

The Heyman Center presents several events on various themes in the Humanities throughout the Fall and Spring semesters each year, which are open not only to all at Columbia but to everyone in New York City and beyond. A list of our conferences, lectures, discussions, poetry-readings and other performances can be found under "Events" on this website.

It also has eight post-doctoral fellows at any given time, each holding a two-year Mellon fellowship in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities. It plans to have various other levels of fellowship over the next few years for junior and senior faculty both at Columbia and from other universities, as well as some 'New York City Fellows' who are distinguished artists, writers, musicians, and journalists living in the city. Every week of each semester it has a lunch for a group of Columbia faculty fellows who present their work to each other for discussion.

The Heyman Center also houses Columbia's Center for Comparative Literature and Society, the Human Rights Center, a group of Columbia's emeritus faculty known as the "Society of Senior Scholars," who teach in the Core Curriculum, and The Friends of the Heyman Center, all of which host seminars and colloquia of their own throughout the year. The Lionel Trilling Seminar (once a semester) and the Edward Said Memorial Lecture (once a year) are also based at the Heyman Center. Notices for these can be found in our Events section of the website.


Akeel Bilgrami
Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy
and Director, Heyman Center for the Humanities