Lionel Trilling Seminars
The Lionel Trilling Seminars are a series of three seminars delivered each academic year on areas of study ranging from literature and society, art and politics, psychoanalysis and culture, to education. Each seminar features a prominent scholar in a given field delivering a talk and two respondents.
The seminars were established in 1976 in memory of Professor Lionel Trilling, and are on areas of study in which he was active.
The seminars have been sponsored at various times by Columbia College, the Heyman Center, and supported by gifts from Prof. William Theodore de Bary and his wife, Daniel and Joanna Rose, and William H. and Weslie R. Janeway.
| Year | Speaker | Discussants | Speech |
| 2005 - 2006 | Michael Fried (Johns Hopkins) | Diarmuid Costello (Oxford Brookes); Gregg Horowitz (Vanderbilt) | Wall and Wittgenstein: Photography and the Everyday |
| Gordon Wood (Brown) | Harry Harootunian (NYU); Robert Ferguson (Columbia) | Does History Teach Any Lessons? | |
| Orlando Patterson (Harvard) | Eric Foner (Columbia); Saidiya Hartman (Vanderbilt) | The Perils of Freedom in America (Canceled) | |
| 2004 - 2005 | Wai Chee Dimock (Yale) | Gayatri Spivak (Columbia); Mary Louise Pratt (NYU) | Epic and Novel on Four Continents |
| 2003 - 2004 | Stephen Greenblatt | Svetlana Alpers; Leonard Barkan | |
| 2001 - 2002 | Brian Stock (U. of Toronto) | Robert Darnton (Princeton); Thomas Flanagan (UC Berkeley) | [1] |
| 1998 - 1999 | Ian Buruma | Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia); Sean Wilentz (Princeton) | |
| Quentin Skinner (Cambridge) | Ted Cohen; Phillip Pettit | ||
| 1997 - 1998 | Richard Taruskin | Lydia Goehr, Walter Frisch | |
| Hans Belting | Richard Brilliant, Arthur Danto | ||
| 1996 – 1997 | Abba Eban | Adam Michnik; Jack Snyder | |
| Stephen Holmes | Mark Lilla (Columbia); Ira Katznelson (Columbia) | ||
| Michael Scammell | Maria Todorova; Mark Von Hagen | ||
| 1995 - 1996 | Louis Menand | Alan Brinkley; Andreas Huyssen | |
| Daniel P. Moynihan | Richard Epstein (Chicago); Brian Urquhart (United Nations) | [2][3] | |
| Randall Kennedy | George Fletcher; Manning Marable (Columbia) | ||
| 1994 - 1995 | Andrew Gurr | John Orrell; Michael Warren | |
| Bernard Bailyn (Harvard) | Eric Foner (Columbia); Dorothy Ross (Johns Hopkins) | Context in History [4] | |
| Thomas Nagel (NYU) | Susan Haack (Miami); Richard Shweder (Chicago) | Relativism and Reason [5] |
