Farah Jasmine Griffin (Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University) presented her research on jazz, gender, blues and public life on the culture of the Harlem Renaissance in Manhattan.

Robert Gooding-Williams (Professor of Philosophy and a faculty member of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University), Anupama Rao (Associate Professor of History at Barnard College) and Ramesh Kamble (Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Mumbai) shared their work on key transformations associated with historical inequality and social justice in the United States and India.

The evening explored the educational and intellectual spaces, forms of cultural expression, labour movements, and discourses of identity and inequality that were part of the urban milieu in his time.