End of Biography: Purpose, Promise, Prospects

The Annual Conference
March 19th 2010, Friday, 10:30am-6:00pm, Elebash Recital Hall

Why read biography?  For information?  Aesthetic pleasure?  What can biography contribute to a compassionate knowledge of our world, what understanding of ourselves or of the past? What is its relation to the said and the not-said?  Mull over these questions at the Second Annual Conference of Leon Levy Center for Biography, with distinguished guests including keynote speaker Arnold Rampersad (Stanford, and author of acclaimed biographies of Langston Hughes, Jackie Robinson, and Ralph Ellison).  

Other participants include Catherine Clinton (Queens University Belfast, Mrs. Lincoln: A Life), Gary Giddins (CUNY, Jazz), Molly Haskell (film critic, Frankly, My Dear), Langdon Hammer (Yale, Hart Crane and Allen Tate), Richard Howard (Columbia, Pulitzer prize winning poet, translator, essayist), Caryn James (film critic, What Catherine Knew), D.T. Max (New Yorker), Jed Perl (art critic, The New Republic; Antoine’s Alphabet), Andrew Sarris (prize-winning film critic, The American Cinema), Eric Salzman (composer, The New Music Theater), Ileene Smith (editor-at-large, Yale University Press), Amanda Vaill (Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins), Steve Wasserman (literary agent, former editor of the LA Times Book Review), and Brenda Wineapple (Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson).

Check leonlevycenterforbiography.org for updates, schedule, and a list of other participants. Or contact the Leon Levy Center for Biography at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , 212-817-2008.

Co-sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography

All in the Family?

An Interdisciplinary Conference on Kinship and Community
March 25th-26th, 2010

For a full schedule and venues, please download the Program (PDF).

Have alternative forms of collectivity eclipsed the normative family? What are the problems and promises of new family formations? What is the business of families? How have technologies altered notions of reproduction, and in what ways is natality tied to forms of non/human association? Can househusbands be unhappy? What is responsible parenting? How does death reunite or reform kinship, personally or politically? Join us for this provocative symposia with renowned scholars from a variety of fields: Carlos Ball (Law, Rutgers School of Law), Herman Bennett (History, the Graduate Center, CUNY), Kimiko Hahn (Creative Writing, Queens College), Lynne Huffer (Women’s Studies, Emory), Kathleen Gerson (Sociology, NYU), Cindi Katz (Environmental Psychology and Geography, the Graduate Center, CUNY), Nancy K. Miller (English, the Graduate Center, CUNY), Jennifer Morgan (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU), Kelly Oliver (Philosophy, Vanderbilt), Gabriele Schwab (Comparative Literature, UC Irvine), and many others.

Organized by the 2010-2011 Resident Mellon Fellows, Alyson M. Cole, Associate Professor of Political Science, Queens College and the Graduate Center, and Kyoo Lee, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College. Co-sponsored by philoSOPHIA: A Feminist Society and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Digital University

Power Relations, Publishing, Authority and Community in the Twenty-First Century Academy
April 21st 2010, Wednesday, 9:00am-8:00pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre, Rooms C201, C202, and C197
Digital technologies have helped re-shape longstanding assumptions about the structure and functioning of the academy. What impact do digital technologies have on the creation and distribution of knowledge? How have such technologies complicated traditional academic processes such as tenure and peer-review?  What influence should social-networking media have on pedagogy? Through workshops and panels, this conference will begin an exploration of these and other questions with the hope of understanding the radical potential of digital media to transform the contemporary university.  Participants and invited guests, drawn from all areas of the academic life, as well as from publishing and media production, will consider and contest these issues.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, Associate Professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia, will deliver an evening keynote address at the conclusion of the conference. Vaidhyanathan is the author of Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System, and Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity.

A full schedule will be posted here shortly.

Co-sponsored by the Digital Media Studies Group and the ITP doctoral certificate program

Religious Coexistence in the Early Modern World

April 23rd 2010, The Skylight Room (9100)

The warfare and persecution that accompanied early modern European religious reformation and state formation call into question any notion of steady progress toward toleration, and yet recent scholarship has shown complex negotiations among disparate groups at various levels. How were religious differences accommodated and/or repressed in Europe and the Ottoman Empire? And what were the consequences of these divisions for religious experience and cultural creation? Speakers include Elisheva Carlebach (Columbia University) on “Early Modern European Jewry,” Nabil Matar (University of Minnesota) on “Religious Toleration in the Ottoman Empire,” and Jeffrey Knapp (UC-Berkeley) on “Shakespeare and Civil Religion.”

A full schedule will be posted here shortly.

Co-sponsored by the Renaissance Studies Certificate Program, the Office of the Provost, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the English Department, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Middle Passages: Histories & Poetics

May 6th-7th, 2010
The Middle Passage has long been a trope for unspeakable terror.  But a recent generation of scholars has been keen on discerning how the Middle Passage as social experience defined lives, histories and contemporary social selves.  Middle Passages: Histories & Poetics brings together some of the most prominent writers on the subject to present papers and participate in discussion. Keynote speakers will be Eve Trout-Powell (University of Pennsylvania) and Saidiya Hartman (Columbia University). Participants include: Vincent Brown (Harvard University), Alexander Byrd (Rice University), Stephanie Smallwood (University of Washington), James Sweet (University of Wisconsin), and Eddie Wong (Rutgers University).

A full schedule will be posted here shortly.