Neighbors, Veterans, and War Stories: CVTI's Summer Seminar Series
By David Keefe
Each summer, Columbia University's Center for Veteran Transition and Integration (CVTI) opens its doors to the question: how do we make sense of war, and our relationship with both the military and the many veteran communities around us? Its Summer Seminar Series seeks to answer that question through literature and four weeks of poems, essays, novels, plays, and memoirs read thoroughly and discussed openly, in a room that welcomes the Columbia veteran community, and neighbors alike.
The series has grown into a distinct annual tradition. It began with War Stories: How Do We Talk About War? (2023), which traced the war story from Homer's Odyssey to Tim O'Brien and Sophocles, asking what makes a good war story and who gets to tell it. Reading NYC at War (2024) turned to the city itself, following how conflict has shaped the Five Boroughs through Walt Whitman's Civil War, the Harlem Hellfighters, W.H. Auden, and literature around 9/11. Literature of and after the Vietnam War: 50 Years of Peace and Conflict (2025) marked a half-century since the Vietnam War's end, reading Viet Thanh Nguyen and Tobias Wolff while drawing pointed connections between Columbia's own history of campus protest. This year, America and the Armed Forces: 250 Years of Service, Conflict, and Transition (2026) steps back to survey the nation's evolving relationship with its military, from the Founders' anxieties about standing armies to the role of the National Guard today.
Every seminar is led by Professor Nicholas Utzig, an English scholar at West Point and a former U.S. Army aviation officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Utzig's own research on the return from war gives the readings a throughline: not only battlefield experience, but homecoming, memory, and the long aftermath that shapes veterans and the communities around them.
What makes the series more than a reading group is its deliberate openness. The seminars are free, informal, and open to the public, Columbia affiliates and their neighbors, sitting together in CVTI’s community space in Kent Hall. There is nothing to buy and no pressure to finish every page; participants are invited to read a little beforehand, then spend most of each session in guided conversation. Refreshments are served and sessions can be attended individually. In a neighborhood where the university and the surrounding community do not always meet as equals, these evenings create a shared table.
Creating an accessible platform to connect is the point. Veteran and military-connected experiences can feel remote to those who haven't lived them, and isolating to those who have. Literature offers a common language, a way for a veteran, an undergraduate, a faculty member, and a lifelong Morningside Heights resident to explore the same difficult questions without expertise or credentials needed. By reading war stories across centuries and cultures, the series helps participants understand not only distant conflicts but the veterans among them, and perhaps their own places in a society continually shaped by war and the U.S. military.