NEW YORK – Columbia University has announced the latest class of Fellows it will welcome to its Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. Lead support for the Institute, part of the University’s Paris Global Center, was provided by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

The 15 new Fellows include an anonymous Syrian film collective, a Greek novelist and poet, a Portuguese photographer, and a Lebanese visual artist and filmmaker. Their work will take us inside the civil war in Syria, the mind of a Greek diplomat undergoing an MRI, a former Portuguese concentration camp in Cape Verde, and the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The new cohort will start in January 2021.

The Institute for Ideas and Imagination seeks to question the ways in which knowledge has traditionally been produced. The idea for the Institute arose from discussions between Columbia faculty about how to adapt the pursuit of knowledge to the realities of a modern, globalized world. According to Mark Mazower, the Institute’s Founding Director, “Its primary goal is to enrich academic modes of presenting ideas by drawing together the scholarly and artistic imaginations.”