The Simon H. Rifkind Center

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The Simon H. Rifkind Center

For over 25 years, The Simon H. Rifkind Center has supported hundreds of cultural endeavors at The C The Simon H. Wagner and Governor Hugh L. Truman.

Rifkind Center for the Humanities & the Arts was established in 1986 through a grant from the Winston Foundation, “in recognition of a revered son of City College, Class of 1922, a man of wit, learning, and humane wisdom, and dedicated to the perpetual renewal of the life of the mind.”

The Honorable Simon H. Rifkind was born in Russia, emigrated to the United States at the age of nine, and was ed

ucated in New York City public schools, at City College (B.A.), and at Columbia University (J.D.). A distinguished Federal Judge and a senior partner of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of New York’s major law firms, Rifkind was a renowned trial lawyer. He argued landmark cases on behalf of notable private citizens, including the defense of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis against paparazzi; offered counsel to political figures such as New York Mayor Robert F. Carey; and was selected by the U.S. Supreme Court to settle disputes by several Western states over water rights to the Colorado River. An early champion of Holocaust survivors, Judge Rifkind served on numerous governmental panels and agencies, and on the boards of medical, religious, and philanthropic institutions–as well as on the New York City Board of Higher Education from 1954-1966. His many awards include the Medal of Freedom, presented to him by President Harry S. The primary goal of the Center is to promote the College’s intellectual and cultural activities in the Humanities and Arts. It does so in a variety of ways, including support for faculty research, the organization and sponsorship of special events, conferences and lectures, interdisciplinary faculty seminars, student outreach programs, and the support of a number of publications associated with the College.

05/05/2026

HAPPENING TODAY: The humanities today are under pressure from across the political spectrum.

Join us in-person for a session where three scholars step back from these external defenses and discuss the core of what humanists do and what they think are the best practices for doing it. This is the first of an ongoing series.

05/04/2026

The humanities today are under pressure from across the political spectrum.

Join us in-person TOMORROW for a session where three scholars step back from these external defenses and discuss the core of what humanists do and what they think are the best practices for doing it. This is the first of an ongoing series.

04/29/2026

Join us TOMORROW in-person or online for an event with Historian Ada Ferrer who will talk about the intersection between family, memoir and history, and her forthcoming book, Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter (Scribner 2026).

For more information visit: https://rifkindcenter.org/rifkind-center-events/2026/4/30/book-talk-keeper-of-my-kin

04/23/2026

Join us in-person or online for an event with Historian Ada Ferrer who will talk about the intersection between family, memoir and history, and her forthcoming book, Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter (Scribner 2026).

For more information visit: https://rifkindcenter.org/rifkind-center-events/2026/4/30/book-talk-keeper-of-my-kin

04/14/2026

Join us in-person this THURSDAY for Harold Aram Veeser, English Professor and 2025-2026 Rifkind Fellow who will read from and discuss his book in progress, a memoir of male anorexia confessions.

While current hospital records show that more males than ever are presenting with eating disorders, few male anorexic memoirs have appeared. In Manorexia, he seeks to correct this record, offering a first-hand account of his sixty-year long pursuit of thinness and muscularity.

For more information visit: https://rifkindcenter.org/rifkind-center-events/2026/4/16/manorexia-how-anorexia-and-bodybuilding-helped-me-navigate-locker-rooms-gyms-jails-and-other-male-spaces

04/09/2026

Join us in-person for an event with Harold Aram Veeser, English Professor and 2025-2026 Rifkind Fellow who will read from and discuss his book in progress, a memoir of male anorexia confessions.

While current hospital records show that more males than ever are presenting with eating disorders, few male anorexic memoirs have appeared. In Manorexia, he seeks to correct this record, offering a first-hand account of his sixty-year long pursuit of thinness and muscularity.

For more information visit: https://rifkindcenter.org/rifkind-center-events/2026/4/16/manorexia-how-anorexia-and-bodybuilding-helped-me-navigate-locker-rooms-gyms-jails-and-other-male-spaces

03/23/2026

Join us this THURSDAY, March 26, for a book talk on Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (forthcoming in April from Princeton UP) that takes readers behind the scenes to show how agents influence what we read. Weaving together archival research, data analysis, and interviews with scores of publishing professionals, it shows the work of agents—eighty percent of whom are in fact women— as advocates, matchmakers, negotiators, and tastemakers, who balance artistic values with the commercial imperatives of publishing conglomerates.

Laura B. McGrath is an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University. Prior to that, she worked as the Associate Director of the Literary Lab at Stanford. She has written on books, publishing history, and data for academic venues as well as for The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

For more information visit: https://rifkindcenter.org/rifkind-center-events/2026/3/26/booktalk-middlemen

03/16/2026

Join us for a book talk on Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (forthcoming in April from Princeton UP) that takes readers behind the scenes to show how agents influence what we read. Weaving together archival research, data analysis, and interviews with scores of publishing professionals, it shows the work of agents—eighty percent of whom are in fact women— as advocates, matchmakers, negotiators, and tastemakers, who balance artistic values with the commercial imperatives of publishing conglomerates.

Laura B. McGrath is an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University. Prior to that, she worked as the Associate Director of the Literary Lab at Stanford. She has written on books, publishing history, and data for academic venues as well as for The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

For more information visit: https://rifkindcenter.org/rifkind-center-events/2026/3/26/booktalk-middlemen

10/15/2025

TOMORROW: Join us for for a talk that provides an introduction to computer vision's origins in military surveillance, an overview of its development under late capitalist regimes of exploitative micro-labor, and an orientation to how computer vision works.

This vision has relied on extracting history, and Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Sonja Drimmer, argues that it is the responsibility of scholars in the humanities to be knowledgeable about the forms this extraction takes.

For more information visit: https://rifkindcenter.org/rifkind-center-events/2025/10/16/stripmining-history-how-the-ai-industry-extracts-the-past

Address

The City College Of New York, 160 Convent Avenue, NAC 6/316
New York, NY
10031

Website

http://rifkindcenter.ccny.cuny.edu/

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