Past Events |
The Weight of Photography: a symposium
March 18th 2010, Thursday, Noon-4:30pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Has photography become weightless? In the midst of an increasingly global and digital culture, can we still talk about photography as a distinct entity? Should museum departments, exhibitions, schools and academic classes continue to be devoted to photography alone? Join us for a half-day symposium exploring philosophical and historical questions regarding the nature of photographic representation. Featuring presentations by scholars such as Willem Elias, Johan Swinnen, Luc Deneulin, and Tamara Berghmans of the Free University of Brussels, alongside curators, such as Chris Phillips, from International Center for Photography as well as scholars from the US, this symposium offers a distinctively international perspective on photography’s identity just as it has become particularly uncertain. Moderated by Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY.
A full schedule will be posted here shortly.
Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in Art History
Mashups, Memes, and HOWTOs: New Forms of Online Video
March 17th 2010, Wednesday, 7:30pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
Online video has rapidly developed genres, conventions, and topics based around a quest for video views and internet fame. These attempts often revolve around themes and tactics as diverse as political humor, cute animals, the lulz, appropriation, instructional videos, and the ambiguous amalgam of the confessional documentary that turns out to, in fact, be short form fiction. This panel will bring together three scholar-practitioners to present and discuss specific examples of this work: Patrick Davison, Eyebeam, a not-for-profit art and technology center; Michael Mandiberg, Assistant Professor of Media Culture, College of Staten Island; and Marisa Olson, Assistant Professor of New Media, SUNY-Purchase.
Co-sponsored by the Digital Media Studies Group and the ITP doctoral certificate program
Only a God Can Save Us: Martin Heidegger and the Third Reich
Film Screening and Discussion
March 17th 2010, Wednesday, 6:00pm, Proshansky Auditorium
Join us for the American premiere of the documentary Only A God Can Save Us, a critical examination of Martin Heidegger’s thought and actions during the Third Reich. Fifteen years in the making, the film reveals how essential elements of Heidegger’s philosophy led him to become an enthusiastic supporter of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist revolution. The film also addresses his long post-war silence about the Holocaust and his reluctance to make a public apology. Following the screening we will host a discussion with filmmaker Jeffery Van Davis and Richard Wolin, Distinguished Professor of History, the Graduate Center.
Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in History
Multiformalisms: Postmodern Poetics of Form
March 16th 2010, Tuesday, 6:30pm, Rooms 9206-9207
Join poet and editor Annie Finch, along with contributors to the anthology Multiformalisms: Postmodern Poetics of Form, for a lively discussion of how contemporary poets use and understand forms. The conversation, like the book, will juxtapose traditional formalism and Flarf, the American long poem and native Hawaiian poetry, rhyme in Paul Muldoon and textual variability in New Media poetry, Susan Howe and Lucinda Roy, jazz and Asian American poetics, and much more. Featuring Marilyn Hacker, Patricia Smith, Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Tyler Hoffman, and Stefania deKenessey. Moderated by Corey Frost.
Co-sponsored by the Poetics Group
Beats and Beyond: Documenting the Poets of the 60’s
March 15th 2010, Monday, 6:30pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
Join Cecilia Vicuña, Melanie La Rosa, and Henry Ferrini for a conversation about films that bring into cinematic focus the untold histories of a radical literary era. The poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña, editor of The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry and a contributor to El Corno Emplumado, will comment on “El Corno Emplumado - A Story From the Sixties,” which follows its filmmakers on a journey across the United States to Mexico and into the memories of the poets who 40 years earlier had been involved in the bilingual poetry magazine El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn. Melanie La Rosa will discuss “This Bird Flies Backward,” her work-in-progress about the life and work of poet Diane di Prima; and Henry Ferrini will talk about his “Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place.” Excerpts of films will be screened.
Co-sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages and the Doctoral Students Council
Jonathan Flatley
"Finally Got the News: Newspapers and Collective Affect from Lenin to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers"
March 12th 2010, Friday, 12:00-2:00pm, President’s Large Conference Room (8201)
Jonathan Flatley is Editor of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, and Associate Professor in the English Department at Wayne State University. His book Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, was published by Harvard University Press in 2008. He is currently working on two other book projects, one on Andy Warhol, likeness and affect and the other on post-socialist collectivity.
Suggested reading is available here to registered seminar participants.
Fashion + Film: 1960’s revisited
March 12th 2010, Friday, 10:00am-7:00pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
For a full schedule and venues, please download the Program (PDF).
On the fiftieth anniversary of ground-breaking films such as La Dolce Vita, Breathless, and L’Avventura this conference brings together a group of international scholars to revisit this revolutionary cinematic era through the lens of fashion and design. Speakers will include Adriana Berselli, the costume designer who worked with Michelangelo Antonioni on L’Avventura; Stella Bruzzi, Professor of Film and Television Studies, Warwick University; Paola Colaiacomo, Professor of English, University of Rome, La Sapienza; Marcia Landy, Distinguished Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh; Pat Kirkham, Professor, Center for the Study of Decorative Arts, Design and Culture, Bard College; Sam Rohdie, Professor of Film, University of Central Florida; Marilyn Cohen, Assistant Professor of Design, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum; Vincenzo Maggitti, Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian, Stockholm University; Sonya Topolnisky, PhD candidate, Center for Decorative Arts, Design and Culture, Bard College; Astrid Soderbergh Widding, Associate Professor in Film Studies at Stockholm University; Louise Wallenberg, Director, Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University; Emily Braun, Distinguished Professor of Art History; and Eugenia Paulicelli, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, The Graduate Center.
Co-sponsored by Center for Fashion Studies at the University of Stockholm, and Concentration in Fashion Studies, the Italian Specialization, Women’s Studies, Film Studies, Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York
Nancy K. Miller
An introduction to “Rites of Return” and “I Found my Family in a Drawer”
March 11th 2010, Thursday, 6:30pm, Room 8106
Join Nancy K. Miller for a discussion of her recent work on the poetics and politics of rites of return alongside her own work on her family history. She is Distinguished Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY, co-author (with Marianne Hirsch of Columbia University) of Rites of Return, and author of, most recently, But Enough About Me and Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death.
Suggested reading is available here to registered seminar participants.
Turnstyle Reading Series
RICK PEARSE, EMILY RABOTEAU, and others
March 10th 2010, Wednesday, 6:30pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Writers and graduating students from the four MFA Programs in Creative Writing (City College, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and Queens College) come together for readings of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction at the Graduate Center. Join Rick Pearse, Emily Raboteau, and others for an evening of cross-campus, cross-genre readings.
Co-sponsored by the CUNY MFA in Creative Writing Affiliation Group and the Office of Academic Affairs
Tendencies: Poetics and Practice
ERICA KAUFMAN, DOUGLAS A. MARTIN, MINA PAM DICK
March 9th 2010, Tuesday, 6:30pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
This series of talks by major poets, curated by Tim Peterson and titled in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, explores the relationship between contemporary poetic manifesto, practice, queer theory and pedagogy.
Visit http://tendenciespoetics.blogspot.com for commentary and sample recordings from past events, as well as news about upcoming events.
Co-sponsored by Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, Ph.D. Program in English, and Poetics Group
Joseph Roach
"The Return of the Last Pequots: Disappearance as Performance"
March 5th 2010, Friday, 4:00pm, English Lounge (Room 4406)
Joseph Roach is the Sterling Professor of Theater and English, Chair of the Theater Studies Advisory Committee and Director of Theater at Yale University. His most recent book is It (Michigan, 2007), a study of charismatic celebrity. His other books and articles include Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (Columbia, 1996), which won the James Russell Lowell Prize from MLA and the Calloway Prize from NYU, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Michigan, 1993), which won the Barnard Hewitt Award in Theatre History, and essays in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, The Drama Review, Theatre History Studies, Discourse, Theater, Text and Performance Quarterly, and others.
An Evening with Leon Wieseltier
NEW DATE March 4th 2010, Thursday, 6:30pm, Elebash Recital Hall
For over 25 years, Leon Wieseltier has been the literary editor of The New Republic. In that capacity, he has worked with some of the leading writers of our time. He regularly pens TNR’s Washington Diary column and has established himself as one of the most important and erudite critics at work today. He is also the author of the widely acclaimed Jewish theological rumination Kaddish. Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in History
Re-Orientale: Reading Orientalism with Gayatri Spivak and Kyoo Lee
March 2nd 2010, Tuesday, 6:30pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
This public seminar with Gayatri Spivak sets out to explore the heart of Occidentalism from the outside in by using Edward Said’s field-defining modern classic as the starting point. Gayatri Spivak is University Professor and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University. Kyoo Lee is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, John Jay College, and Resident Mellon Fellow at the Center for the Humanities, the Graduate Center.
Byzantine Archaeology: New Approaches, New Discoveries
March 1st 2010, Monday, 4:00pm, Room 9206
John F. Haldon, Professor of Byzantine History, Princeton University, will speak on "Aspects of Byzantine Urbanism after the 6th Century: The Case of Euchaita."
This lecture series aims to introduce some of the most important projects currently underway in Byzantine archaeology, a rapidly developing field of interdisciplinary studies dedicated to the interpretation of the material remains of the former Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire (c. 330-1453 CE). By combining traditional textual interpretations with archaeological analyses of artifacts, human and organic remains, architecture, and settlements, Byzantine archaeology has ultimately revealed entire landscapes. The speakers are paired with respondents from the CUNY faculty from a variety of disciplines. All events will be moderated by Eric Ivison, Professor of History at the Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, CUNY.
The Poetics of Pain: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Representation
February 25th-26th, 2010
For a full schedule and venues, please download the Program (PDF)
While communicating suffering is imperative personally, socially, and politically, pain, by its very nature, resists expression. This conference brings together junior and senior scholars who have taken a variety of approaches to pain and suffering. Keynote speakers will be Peter Brooks, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar at Princeton University, and author of Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature, and J.M. Bernstein, University Distinguished Professor at The New School’s Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts and the author of Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting.
Co-sponsored by the Phd Program in Comparative Literature, The Writers' Institute, and The Doctoral Student Council
Poetry and Spanking
February 25th-26th, 2010
For a full schedule and venues, please visit the link below.
This two-day conference seeks to extend the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick by bringing together junior and senior scholars to examine her critical, literary, and artistic work. Jonathan Goldberg, her literary executor, and Michael Moon of Emory University will be presenting the keynote address, “On the Eve of the Future.” Professor Goldberg will be discussing her unpublished work and Professor Moon will speak about her continuing influence.
General information about the conference can be found on the blog http://sedgwickconference.wordpress.com/, which will be updated with a schedule and further information as the conference approaches.
Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in English
Tendencies: Poetics and Practice
AKILAH OLIVER, KATE EICHHORN, CHARLES BERNSTEIN
February 24th 2010, Wednesday, 6:30pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
This series of talks by major poets, curated by Tim Peterson and titled in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, explores the relationship between contemporary poetic manifesto, practice, queer theory and pedagogy.
Visit http://tendenciespoetics.blogspot.com for commentary and sample recordings from past events, as well as news about upcoming events.
Co-sponsored by Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, Ph.D. Program in English, and Poetics Group
Chanticleer and the Legacies of the Black Arts Movement
February 23rd 2010, Tuesday, 6:30pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Join photographer Nikki Johnson, filmmaker and artist Camille Billops, and professors James Hatch (CUNY) and C. Daniel Dawson (NYU and Columbia) to discuss legacies of the Black Arts Movement, starting with the case of the late Raven Chanticleer, who founded and made the sculptures for his Harlem African-American Wax and History Museum. Moderated by David Henderson, poet, author and one of the founders of the Umbra Arts Movement.
Climate Justice: Politics, Culture, Economics
CANCELED February 22nd 2010, Monday, 6:30pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
What is the relationship between global warming and poverty? In light of the Copenhagen summit and the widening gap between industrialized nations, developing nations, and the rest of the global South, this event will examine the political, economic, and cultural impacts of climate change. Michael Dorsey, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Dartmouth University, and a prominent analyst of the political economy of biodiversity and environment justice, will speak with Ashley Dawson, Associate Professor of English, the Graduate Center, CUNY, along with other scholars and writers.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics
The Empty City: American Film and the Imagination of Disaster
MARIANNA TORGOVNICK
February 19th 2010, Friday, 4:00pm, Room 4406 (English Lounge)
Marianna Torgovnick is Professor of English at Duke University and Director of the Duke in New York Arts and Media Program each Fall and Summer. Torgovnick is the author of six books, including the acclaimed Gone Primitive, its sequel, Primitive Passions, and an award-winning memoir called Crossing Ocean Parkway. Her most recent book The War Complex explores the memory of World War II and the imagination of destruction at the heart of modernity.
Kelly Josephs
“Claims to Social Identity: Madness and Subject Formation in Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home”
February 19th 2010, Friday, 12:00-2:00pm, Room 9206
Kelly Baker Josephs is an Assistant Professor of English at York College, CUNY. This semester's first Atlantic Studies Seminar workshop will include a discussion of her work-in-progress. Part of a larger project on representations of madness in Caribbean literature, it focuses on Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. In this text, the explicit Jamaican distrust of an over-emphasis on academics and studying blends with an implicit skepticism about the Eurocentric curriculum, and is articulated in the protagonist’s spiraling accounts of her formal education and social interactions. Josephs examines not only the commonly recognized difficulty of describing madness with “the language of reason” and within generic literary boundaries, but also the difficulty of writing madness in the first-person. Chair: Ashley Dawson (English Department, The Graduate Center, CUNY).
Precirculated paper is available here to registered seminar participants.
The Changing Contours of American Religiosity
COURTNEY BENDER and CLAUDE FISCHER in Conversation
February 18th 2010, Thursday, 6:30pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Join two prominent analysts of American culture for a conversation about the changing American religious landscape, particularly the growth in the population of those who understand themselves as “non-affiliated” and “spiritual but not religious”. Courtney Bender is Associate Professor of Religion at Columbia University and the author of Heaven’s Kitchen: Practicing Religion at God’s Love We Deliver. Claude Fischer is Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. His books include Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character. Moderated by John Torpey, Professor of Sociology, the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Jesse Prinz
“Emotions and Aesthetic Value”
February 18th 2010, Thursday, 12:00-2:00pm, Room 9204
Jesse Prinz is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He has most recently taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Conscious Brain (in progress), Beyond Human Nature (in progress), The Emotional Construction of Morals (2007), and numerous other books and articles on emotion, moral psychology, aesthetics, and consciousness.
Precirculated paper and suggested reading are available here to registered seminar participants.
Turnstyle Reading Series
JAN HELLER LEVI, JOHN WEIR, and others
February 9th 2010, Tuesday, 6:30pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Writers and graduating students from the four MFA Programs in Creative Writing (City College, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and Queens College) come together for readings of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction at the Graduate Center. Join Jan Heller Levi, John Weir, and others for an evening of cross-campus, cross-genre readings.
Co-sponsored by the CUNY MFA in Creative Writing Affiliation Group and the Office of Academic Affairs
The Media and Domestic Terrorism Trials
February 2nd 2010, Tuesday, 6:30pm, Elebash Recital Hall
What is the role of the media in framing popular discourse around terrorism, terrorism trials, and civil liberties? Join an interdisciplinary group of writers, journalists, academics, and activists to consider the case of Brooklyn College graduate Syed Hashmi, currently on trial for aiding Al Qaeda. Participants include Petra Bartosiewicz, frequent contributor to The Nation, Harper’s, and other publications and author of a forthcoming book about the Justice Department’s post-9/11 terrorism trials; Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy; and Shane Kadidal, senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Moderated by Jeanne Theoharis, Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics
Archives: Keeping the Goods
February 2nd 2010, Tuesday, 3:00pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Who keeps the papers safe? How are they kept? And does it make any difference where? For without the collected debris of a life, without the voice of a sister or a wife on the tape or digital recording device, what can a biographer know? The answer of course may be a great deal, but let’s talk to those people who take it as their art to keep safely whatever is in their care. Moderated by Nancy Milford, Founding Director Emerita of the Biography Center, and featuring William L. Joyce, the Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair at Pennsylvania State University; Stephen Enniss, Eric Weinmann Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington; and Allan Goodrich, the Direction of Archives and Head of the Audio/Visual Division at the JFK Presidential Library, Boston.
Co-sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography
Escaping Bush's State of Exception: Torture and Truth, Obama and Us
MARK DANNER
The 14th Annual Irving Howe Memorial Lecture
Wednesday December 16th, 2009 6:30 pm, Proshansky Auditorium
Mark Danner is Professor of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the Humanities at Bard College. His numerous books include The Secret Way to War; Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror; and the recently published Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War. In 2009 the New York Review of Books published his highly acclaimed essay about a secret Red Cross investigation that exposed then-secret findings of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.
Pornography in the City
December 15th 2009, Tuesday, 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm, The Graduate Center's James Gallery
Pornography in the City takes up the questions posed by Peeps, the James Gallery’s Spring 2009 exhibition on New York peep show arcades in the 1960s and 70s. What can the peep arcades of the 1960’s tell us about now?
In an afternoon of discussion, we revisit the modes of spectatorship and social networks the peep arcades inadvertently spawned. Invited scholars, critics and artists evoke histories of non-normative sexualities and regulation in urban spaces, and consider current relationships between public sex and private experiences.
Divided into two panels, the first session, Pornography, Peep Shows and Public Space, questions the public/private nexus in historically-located urban, commercial situations. The second, Pornography and Its Representation, rethinks categories of viewing and voyeurism, art and porn, experience and consumption.
Participants include Douglas Crimp, Jeff Escoffier, Dagmar Herzog, William Kornblum, Bjarne Melgaard, Melissa Ragona, and Amy Herzog, CUNY Media Studies professor & curator of “Peeps.” Download the full program here.
Co-sponsored by the James Gallery
Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World
JEFFREY HERF
Friday December 11th, 2009, 4:00pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Jeffrey Herf, Professor of History at the University of Maryland, will discuss his recently published book, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale UP 2009). Herf's other books include Divided Memory: The Nazi Past and the Two Germanys (Harvard UP 1997) and The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II (Harvard UP 2006). Richard Wolin, Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, will serve as respondent.
Co-sponsored by the PhD Programs in History and Political Science, and MEMEAC
Challenges of Co- Operative Governance
NORMAN LEVYThursday, December 10th, 2009 6:15pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
Norman Levy was born in Johannesburg in 1929 and was a teacher in the early portion of his career. However, after having helped establish cultural clubs for African children, Levy was expelled from Bantu Education Schools and was suspended by the Education Department under the direction of apartheid architect Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd. A member of the Communist Party of South Africa, Levy was arrested in 1956 and jailed for 5 years as part of the famous Rivonia Treason Trials under the Suppression of Communism Act. In exile Levy continued to be involved in anti-apartheid activities, and conducted research on the history of the South African labor system. Levy returned to South Africa after the fall of apartheid and played a major role in the development of the post-apartheid state. In addition to serving as Professor in the School of Government at the University of the Western Cape, Levy was deputy chairperson on the Presidential Review Commission on the Reform and Transformation of the Public Service in South Africa (1998) and was a committee member of the Classification and Declassification Review Committee (2003-4). Although now retired, Levy continues to publish political commentary on contemporary events in South Africa.
CUNY Lost and Found: a publication party
Tuesday December 8th, 2009 6:30 pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
Join us to celebrate the publication of
- The Amiri Baraka/Edward Dorn Correspondence;
- The Kenneth Koch/Frank O’Hara Letters: Selections;
- Muriel Rukeyser: Darwin & the Writers;
- Philip Whalen’s Journals: Selections;
- Robert Creeley: Contexts of Poetry, with selections from Daphne Marlatt’s Journals,
the inaugural chapbook series in Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.
Introduction by Ammiel Alcalay. Readings and presentations by Stefania Heim, Claudia Moreno Pisano, Josh Schneiderman, Brian Unger, special guests David Henderson, Bill Berkson, and others.
Lost & Found is a publication project emerging from archival and textual scholarship done by students at The Graduate Center, with the primary focus on writers falling under the rubric of the New American Poetry. Since accessibility to archival material proposes alternative, divergent and enriched versions of literary and cultural history, the Lost & Found initiative takes the New American rubric writ large, including the affiliated and unaffiliated, precursors and followers.
Co-sponsored by the Poetics Group
Forgiveness, Emotion, and Memory
JEFFREY BLUSTEIN
Thursday December 3, 2009 7:00pm, Room 4116 (Comparative Literature Student Lounge)
In this semester's final meeting of The Trauma and Testimony Seminar, Jeffrey Blustein will discuss the relationships between forgiveness, emotion, and memory. Jeffrey Blustein, Ph.D. is Zitrin Professor of Bioethics and Professor of Philosophy at City College of the City University of New York, and a member of the philosophy faculty of the Graduate Center. His chief research interests are in the areas of bioethics and memory studies. In 2008, Cambridge University Press published his monograph, The Moral Demands of Memory, which has been selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2008. He has also published two other monographs, Parents and Children: The Ethics of the Family and Care and Commitment: Taking the Personal Point of View, both by Oxford University Press. He is currently working on several papers dealing with the role of memory in forgiveness and the practice of restorative justice, as well as the meaning and moral significance of symbolic value.
Reading:
Jeffrey Blustein, "Forgiveness, Emotion, and Memory" (paper draft)
Click here to access available readings (you must be registered to view them).
JAMES FISHER, STEVE ROSSWURM, JOSHUA FREEMAN
Thursday December 3rd, 2009 6:30 pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
Join two preeminent scholars of American social and cultural history, James T. Fisher, Professor of Theology, Fordham University, and Steven Rosswurm, Professor of History, Lake Forest College, as they shed light on several underexplored precincts of the nation’s Irish Catholic population. Fisher’s most recent book is On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York, a simultaneous history of Elia Kazan’s masterpiece and the rough waterfront world from which the movie was drawn. Rosswurm’s most recent book is The FBI and the Catholic Church, 1935-1962, a deft analysis of the interplay between two of the most influential institutions of the 20 century. Moderated by Joshua Freeman, Professor of History, The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in History
Provost's Inaugural Symposium on Disciplinarity
HAZEL CARBY
December 1st 2009, Tuesday, 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
The Provost’s Annual Symposium on Disciplinarity brings together scholars in the humanities who examine disciplinary boundaries, canonical divides, and methodological limitations and anxieties to introduce fresh and innovative thinking in the academy and beyond. By featuring a keynote address followed by respondents from various disciplines, it is our hope that these annual symposia will create new dialogue and further innovations out of particular disciplinary locations and across the academic and public spectrum. Our inaugural featured speaker is Hazel Carby, the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Director of the Initiative on Race, Gender and Globalization at Yale University. Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood, Race Men,and Cultures in Babylon. Her current work in progress is Child of Empire: Racializing Subjects in Post WWII Britain. Respondents include Gayatri Gopinath, Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies at NYU, and Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Affect, Bodies and Biopolitics
PATRICIA CLOUGH
Friday November 20, 2009 1:00 pm, Room 8402 (off cafeteria)
For the second meeting of The Affect Seminar, Patricia Ticineto Clough, professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York will explore corporal and political aspects of affect. She is author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000); Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse (1994) and The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007) and with Craig Willse, editor of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (forthcoming, 2010). Clough’s work has drawn on theoretical traditions concerned with technology, affect, unconscious processes, timespace and political economy.
Reading:
1. Patricia T. Clough, "The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies." Theory, Culture & Society 2008 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 25(1): 1–2.
2. Patricia T. Clough, "Reflections on sessions early in an analysis: Trauma, affect and ‘‘enactive witnessing’’." Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Vol. 19, No. 2, July 2009, 149–159.
3. Ann Pellegrini and Jasbir Puar, "Affect." Social Text 27(3 100): 35-38 (2009).
Click here to access available readings (you must be registered to view them).
Jazz Legacies
MANFRED EICHER, GARY GIDDINSThursday November 19th, 2009 6:30 pm, Proshansky Auditorium
In this second Jazz Legends and Legacies conversation, Gary Giddins speaks with Manfred Eicher about his distinguished work for ECM records, the state of the recording industry, and the future of jazz. Manfred Eicher founded ECM records 40 years ago, and has subsequently fostered such artists as Steve Reich, Chick Corea, Meredith Monk, and Jack DeJonette.
Tendencies: Poetics and Practice
AMY KING, WAYNE KOESTENBAUM, R. ERICA DOYLE
November 17th, Tuesday, 6:30pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
A new series of talks by major poets, curated by Tim Peterson and titled in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, will explore the intersection of contemporary poetic manifesto, practice, queer theory, and pedagogy. Featuring Amy King, Wayne Koestenbaum, R. Erica Doyle, followed by a discussion and Q&A session.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, the PhD Program in English and the Poetics Group
Code is Speech
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 6:30pm, President’s Large Conference Room (8201.01)
Following up on Gabriella Coleman’s lecture, the Digital Media Seminar will convene to discuss her presentation and to engage further with the readings Professor Coleman suggested for her presentation.
Reading:
Coleman, Gabriella CODE IS SPEECH: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers in Cultural Anthropology, Volume 24, Issue 3, August 2009, pp 420-454
Click here to access available readings (you must be registered to view them).
Who Cares About Family?
PATRICIA HILL COLLINS, JOAN WILLIAMS, RHACEL SALAZAR PARRENASMonday November 16th, 2009 6:30 pm, Proshansky Auditorium
Despite radical changes in family formations, domestic labor still remains raced, gendered, and otherwise devalued. This panel brings together experts from various fields to examine not only who cares about the family, but who does not, who should, and why. Our distinguished speakers will include Patricia Hill Collins (University of Maryland), author of Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment; Joan Williams (University of California at Hastings), author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It; and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (Brown), author of The Force of Domesticity. Alyson Cole, Resident Mellon Fellow at the Center for the Humanities and author of The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror, will moderate the conversation.
Contentious Democracy: The Practice of Political and Economic Rights in Post-Apartheid South Africa
ELKE ZUERN
Monday, November 16th, 2009 6:15pm, Room C198
Elke Zuern is currently an assistant professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College. Zuern earned her doctorate at Columbia University, where her dissertation research focused on the decline of participatory democracy in South Africa’s negotiated transition to democracy. More recently, Zuern’s research has focused on how globalization and social inequality relate to social movements in post-apartheid South Africa. Some of her research interests include the role of social movements in new democracies, institutional and extra- institutional mechanisms of protest, popular responses to poverty and inequality, state-civil society alliances, and the role of violence in processes of democratization. Zuern was the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Amherst College and was selected for a Lowenstein fellowship.
Memory Studies and Human Rights Discourse
ANDREAS HUYSSEN
Thursday, November 12th, 2009 7:00pm, Room 4116
Reading:
Introduction and chapter 1 from A. Huyssen's "Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory."
Click here to access available readings (you must be registered to view them).
The Second Annual US Intellectual History Conference
Thursday November 12th, 2009 - Friday November 13th, 2009, The Graduate Center
This two-day conference brings together a group of internationally recognized historians to explore the current state of American intellectual history. Beginning with an opening plenary featuring James Livingston, Rutgers University, highlights include a panel on the work and legacy of the Graduate Center’s John Patrick Diggins and a discussion of the legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference. Participants include Thomas Bender, New York University; David Hall, Harvard Divinity School; David Hollinger, University of California –Berkeley; Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University; and many others.
Click here to download the full program. Registration required: for more information, please click here.
Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in History
Crude World: The Politics of Oil
PETER MAASS and GEORGE CAFFENTZIS in ConversationTuesday November 10th, 2009 6:30 pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
The environmental devastation wrought by the world’s reliance on petroleum can no longer be denied, but the insidious cultural effects of oil extraction, production, and exportation still receive scant attention. Join Peter Maass, contributing editor at The New York Times Magazine and the author of the recently published Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, and George Caffentzis, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine, as they discuss big oil’s cultural and political violence. Moderated by Ashley Dawson, Associate Professor of English, The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Rockpile on the Road: Collaboration and the Troubadour Tradition in the 21st Century
DAVID MELTZER & MICHAEL ROTHENBERGMonday November 9th, 2009 12:00 pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Beat generation dissident poet/musician David Meltzer and poet/songwriter and editor of Bigbridge.org Michael Rothenberg talk about the evolution of song and poetry throughout history, censorship and activism, and the role of poetry and song as an instrument of change. With poet David Henderson, one of the founding members of the Umbra Poets Workshop.
Co-sponsored by the Poetics Group
The Praxis of Feminist Pedagogy: Third Annual Feminist Pedagogy Conference
Friday November 6th, 2009, The Graduate CenterThe Feminist Pedagogy Conference is a venue for conversation between scholars, students and activists across disciplines around the present state of feminist pedagogy and work on gender, both within and beyond the academy. This year's conference includes panels and papers on a wide array of issues, ranging from teaching for social justice to feminist pedagogy in the museum setting, to teaching survivors of war trauma. Michelle Fine will give the keynote address entitled, "Slanted practices of inquiry and pedagogy." Through the conference we aim to create a space were people can discuss the politics, problems, and transformative potential of feminist pedagogical practices in classrooms and community settings. Registration required. See web.gc.cuny.edu/womenstudies/wgp/index.html for a complete schedule and registration information, or contact at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Romanticism in the City
Thursday November 5th, 2009 - Sunday November 8th, 2009, The Graduate Center and City CollegeOrganized at the Graduate Center and City College by the International Conference on Romanticism, this interdisciplinary conference will address a wide range of topics, from “Romanticism and Urban Gothic” to “Urban Planning in the Romantic Era” to “Sex and City.” Speakers include Michael Moon (Emory) on “Idiocies Urban and Rural,” Marjorie Levinson (Michigan) on “Clouds and Crowds, Solitude and Society: Revisiting Romantic Lyric” and Alexander Gelley (UC – Irvine) on “Utopian Cities.” Complete conference schedule is available at www.ccny.cuny.edu/icrnyc/index.htm.
Michael Moon’s talk will coincide with the opening of The Metropolis Between One’s Ears (November 5th – December 6th), an installation in the James Gallery featuring Charles Sheeler’s and Paul Strand’s 1921 urban homage, “Manhatta,” and two new projects that respond to the symposium’s topic by American filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh, and British Sculptor Andrew Lord. For more information about the exhibit, visit www.gc.cuny.edu/events/art_gallery.htm.
Co-sponsored by The City College, CUNY and the Office of the President, The Graduate Center, CUNY. Exhibit co-sponsored by the James Gallery.
The Audre Lorde/Essex Hemphill Memorial Lecture
HORTENSE SPILLERSWednesday November 4th, 2009 7:00 pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
Inaugurated by Hortense Spillers, the Lorde/Hemphill lecture is meant to commemorate the lives of the American poets, Audre Lorde (1934 -1992) and Essex Hemphill (1957 -1995), as well as to encourage exciting scholarship and literary production within the communities to whom their poetry and prose spoke. Both Lorde and Hemphill were particularly important for the development of distinctive forms of writing among American poets, particularly people of color and members of the LGBT community. Hortense Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor in English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of, most recently, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture.
Sponsored by the Africana Studies Concentration and co-sponsored by IRADAC and the Phd Program in English
TECHNOLOGIES: A celebration of feminist writing on technologies
Tuesday November 3rd, 2009 4:00-6:00 p.m, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Featuring authors from WSQ (Women’s Studies Quarterly):
Jamie Skye Bianco, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, on digital media and social networking.
Jillian Ciaccia, short story writer and artist, reading a selection from Technologies called “StockingS”.
Kara Swanson, Associate Professor at Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law, on the technologies of human breast milk.
Karen Throsby, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick (U.K.), on obesity surgery and the technologisation of weight loss.
Moderated by Talia Schaffer and Victoria Pitts-Taylor, co-Editors of WSQ.
Co-sponsored by Women’s Studies Certificate Program, Center for the Study of Women and Society, and The Feminist Press
Jazz Legacies
GARY GIDDINS and WILLIAM P. KELLY in conversationMonday November 2nd, 2009 6:30 pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
To celebrate the publication of Jazz by Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux, we reverse the Center’s usual jazz conversation format by putting Gary Giddins in the spotlight in conversation with William P. Kelly, the President of the Graduate Center, about his remarkable book and the state of jazz, past and present. The program will be followed by a party, co-hosted by W. W. Norton, to launch the book.
Black Men and Colored Pills: Race, Masculinity and Antiretroviral Treatment in South Africa
JONNY STEINBERG
Monday, November 2nd, 2009 6:15pm, Room C198
Jonny Steinberg is a South African writer, journalist, and policy analyst who is currently in New York as an Open Society Fellow. After having been selected as a Rhodes Scholar and received a doctorate in political theory from Oxford (1998), Steinberg has gone on to write several books about everyday life following South Africa’s negotiated transition to democracy. Two of Steinberg’s books have won South Africa’s premier nonfiction literary award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize: Midlands (2002), and The Number (2004). His latest book, Sizwe’s Test (2008), is an ethnography that chronicles a young man’s personal journey with the difficult realities of the AIDS pandemic in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. Embracing the social and cultural complexities of the epidemic, Sizwe’s Test is the definitive ethnographic exploration of AIDS in post-apartheid South Africa. Steinberg is currently writing a book about a Liberian diaspora community in a Staten Island housing project and the ways in which its members have carried memories of civil war with them to New York. The book explores whether truth and reconciliation proceedings can help heal the wounds that postwar diasporas bear.
French Contemporary Cinema and the Music Video Effect
LAURENT JULLIER
Monday November 2, 2009 2:00 pm, Room C198
For the second meeting of The Film Studies Seminar, Laurent Jullier will analyze some excerpts of Le grand bleu, Nikita, Jeanne d'Arc (Luc Besson), Mauvais sang (Léos Carax), Sombre (Philippe Grandrieux), Love Me (Lætitia Masson) and J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster (Samuel Benchetrit), keeping an eye an on the music and linking the postmodern to “post-Nouvelle Vague.”
Laurent Jullier is director of research at the Institut de Recherches sur le Cinéma et l’Audiovisuel (IRCAV) at the University of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle and professor of film studies at the Institut Européen de Cinéma et d’Audiovisuel (IECA) at the University of Nancy II. He worked in several professions before receiving his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1994. He has written several articles for Esprit and for the Encyclopædia Universalis, as well as a dozen books, among which several have been translated (into Spanish, Portugese, Italian, German, Chinese and Korean). Holywood et la difficulté d’aimer, published by Stock in 2004, won the Union of French Cinema Critics's prize for best book.
Reading:
1. Essays (in French) on "Le grand bleu" and "Son multipistes" and an interview on "Star Wars" (in English) at http://perso.numericable.fr/laurent.jullier/LJ/TEL.html
2. Kaplan, E.A. (1985). "The Postmodern Play of the Signifier? Advertising, Pastiche and Schizophrenia in Music Television," in P. Drummond and R. Patterson (eds.), Television in Transition. London: British Film Institute, 1985.
3. Entry on David Bordwell's blog, "Anatomy of the Action Picture", January 2007, http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/anatomy.php
Click here to access available readings (you must be registered to view them).
The Brink of Freedom
DAVID KAZANJIANFriday October 30th, 2009 4:00 pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
David Kazanjian is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he specializes in transnational American literary and historical studies through the nineteenth century. His is the author of The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America, and the co-editor of Loss: The Politics of Mourning and The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries. He is currently completing work on The Brink of Freedom, a study of social movements at the edges of the early U.S. empire.
Reading:
1. David Kazanjian, from The colonizing trick: national culture and imperial citizenship in early America. University of Minnesota Press (2004).
2. Susan Buck-Morss, from Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.
3. Fred Moten, "Knowledge of Freedom," CR. The New Continental Review 4.2 (Fall, 2004), 269-310.
Click here to access available readings (you must be registered to view them).
How Soccer Explains Soviet Life: Spartak, Moscow, and the 'People's Team'
ROBERT EDELMAN, JONATHAN SANDERSFriday October 30th, 2009 2:00 pm, The History Lounge (5114)
Robert Edelman, Professor of Russian History, University of California, San Diego, discusses his recently published, Spartak Moscow: A History of the People's Team in a Workers' State, a history of the USSR’s most popular football team. Edelman’s other books include Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR, Proletarian Peasants: The Revolution of 1905 in Russia’s Southwest, and Gentry Politics on the Eve of the Russian Revolution: The Nationalist Party, 1905-1917. Jonathan Sanders is Professor of Russian History at Fordham University, and a former Moscow correspondent for CBS News.
Co-Sponsored by Program in History
Tendencies: Poetics and Practice
TRISH SALAH, ROBERT GLUCK, RACHEL ZOLF
Thursday October 29th, 2009 6:30 pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
A new series of talks by major poets, curated by Tim Peterson and titled in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, will explore the intersection of contemporary poetic manifesto, practice, queer theory, and pedagogy. Featuring Trish Salah, Robert Glück, and Rachel Zolf, followed by a discussion and Q&A session.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, the PhD Program in English and the Poetics Group
Jazz Legacies
GEORGE WEIN & GARY GIDDINS IN CONVERSATIONWednesday October 28th, 2009 6:30 pm, Elebash Recital Hall
George Wein, founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and others, is arguably the most influential non-artist in jazz history. Join Wein and the critic Gary Giddins as they discuss his legendary career as a jazz impresario. Gary Giddins is the author of 10 books, including Visions of Jazz: The First Century, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
Third Annual Symposium on Primo Levi
Sunday October 25th, 2009 - Tuesday October 27th, 2009, Centro Primo Levi, Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimo, New York University, and The Graduate Center
On the 90th anniversary of Levi’s birth, this three-day symposium will explore the translation and potential impact of Primo Levi’s powerful work across the globe, in multiple media and in many languages. The Center for the Humanities and the Graduate Center are pleased to host the third and final day of the symposium, which, with recent translation of If This is a Man into Arabic and Farsi, will focus on the controversial reception of Levi’s work in both Germany and in the Arab world. Participants include scholars such as Susan Stewart-Steinberg (Brown University) and Ammiel Alcalay and Talal Asad (The Graduate Center, CUNY) as well as writers, artists and cultural directors such as Abraham Radkin, the director of the Aladdin Project, an initiative that aims to promote an intercultural dialogue based on rejection of Holocaust denial and racism.
Complete schedule is available at www.primolevicenter.org. The conference is free and open to the public.
Co-sponsored by the Centro Primo Levi, Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò and the Center for Dialogues – Islamic World – U.S. – the West of the New York University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Europa Editions, RAI Corporation, and the Center for Jewish Studies and Ph. D. Programs in English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY
Witness to War: Afghan Poetry and Narratives
Friday October 23rd 2009, 6:30 pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
Join us for an evening of readings from Afghan American writers. These pieces are by survivors, those who escaped, those who returned, those haunted, those who have suffered loss. Their work is published in the first Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press, forthcoming). Featuring Naheed Elyasi, Masood Kamandy, Zohra Saed, Sahar Muradi, and Afifa Yusufi.
Naheed Elyasi fled Afghanistan in 1982, three years after the Soviet invasion. Her family walked across the mountains into Pakistan, where they lived for one year before being accepted as refugees to the U.S. She is a contributing writer for Zeba Magazine. Masood Kamandy is an image maker and an aspiring sufi who splits his time between Brooklyn and Khorasan. His work is on wordsbecomeimages.com. Zohra Saed received her MFA at Brooklyn College. Her poetry and essays have been Gallerie International Journal: Afghanistan Ed. Bina Sarkar (India: 2009); The Crab Orchard Review (Summer/Fall 2009); and in Speaking for Herself: Asian Women’s Writings (Penguin India Books: 2009). Sahar Muradi was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. Her writing has been featured in literary magazines, newspapers, as well as read on public radio. In 2003, Sahar returned to her native Kabul to work for two years. Afifa Yusufi is currently working as a strategic consultant for senior government officials in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq. She was born in Kandahar and fled the Russian invasion of Afghanistan with her family when she was two. She returned in 2003 to assist U.S. Medical and Civil Affairs unites on behalf of destitute Afghans.
Co-sponsored by The Center for Place, Culture and Politics
On Quentin Skinner, from Method to Politics
October 23rd 2009, Friday, 3:00 pm - 6:00 pm, The Graduate Center's Martin E. Segal Theatre2009 marks the 40th anniversary of Quentin Skinner’s pathbreaking essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” This afternoon conference will celebrate and critically evaluate Skinner’s work. Participants include Quentin Skinner, University of London; Bryan Garsten, Yale University; Melissa Lane, Cambridge University; Philip Pettit, Princeton University; and Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University. Moderated by Helena Rosenblatt, The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Cultural Obstacles to the Rollout of Antiretrovirals: Language, Region and the Backlash against AIDS
NICOLI NATTRASS
Thursday October 22nd, 2009 6:15pm, Room C204/5
Although officially listed as a professor of economics, Nicoli Nattrass also holds master’s degrees in development studies and development economics. In the early part of her career, Nattrass’s research focused on topics related to South Africa’s social and economic development such as rural development in the former Bantustans, post-apartheid macroeconomic policy and the relationship between social equality and South Africa’s labor market. However from 2002 onwards, Nattrass’s work took a decisive turn towards applied research on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In addition to co-authoring research that undermined the argument that South Africa could not afford life-saving antiretroviral treatment for its HIV positive citizens (2005), Nattrass has published two books on the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, The Moral Economy of AIDS in South Africa (2004), and Mortal Kombat: AIDS Denialism and the Struggle for Antiretrovirals in South Africa (2007). In addition to these books and numerous articles on HIV/AIDS, Nattrass currently serves as the director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit at the University of Cape Town and is a member of AIDStruth.com, an organization that advocates for an end to AIDS denialism in South Africa.
Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
LINDA GORDONWednesday October 21st, 2009 7:00 pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
Join us for the launch event for the highly anticipated biography of a complex figure in the American cultural and political landscape. Widely regarded as the most influential American female photographer of the twentieth century, Dorothea Lange is known for her iconic documentary photographs of the Depression generation. Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University. She won the Bancroft Prize for The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction in 2000. For more information about this event, please visit leonlevycenterforbiography.org.
Co-sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography
Taking It Big
A conference in honor of the 50th anniversary of C. Wright Mills' "The Sociological Imagination"
Friday October 16th, 2009 - Saturday October 17th, 2009, The Graduate Center
Held in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills’ manifesto for both the social sciences and for the vanishing breed of political intellectuals, this two-day conference seeks to update Mill’s vision of “taking it big” in the social sciences by focusing on the role of intellectuals, questions of power, the middle class, culture and political theory as well as the political nature of scholarship. Speakers include Stanley Aronowitz, Craig Calhoun, Tom Hayden, Russell Jacoby, Adolph Reed, Marshall Berman, Lynn Chancer and Stephen Bronner.
Registration required. Contact 212-817-2001 or email
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
for more details.
Sponsored by The Center for the Study of Culture,Technology and Work at the Graduate Center, CUNY and the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU
On Being Tortured
J.M. BERNSTEIN
Thursday October 15th, 2009 7:00 pm, Room 4116 (Comparative Literature Student Lounge)
For the second meeting of The Trauma and Testimony Seminar, J. M. Bernstein offers a reconstruction of Jean Amery's account of his torture by the Nazis. J. M. Bernstein is a University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. Some of his recent publications are Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford, 2006), Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge UP, 2003), Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge UP, 2001)
Reading:
J. M. Bernstein, " On Being Tortured."
Click here to access available readings (you must be registered to view them).
The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi
FIONA JEFFRIES, CHRISTIAN PARENTI, IAN OLDS, SAADIA TOORWednesday October 14th, 2009 6:30 pm, Proshansky Auditorium
Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi (2009), a feature-length documentary, follows the relationship between an Afghani interpreter and his American client, journalist Christian Parenti until Ajmal is kidnapped and executed. Join director Ian Olds, recipient of the Tribeca Film Festival’s 2009 Best New Documentary Filmmaker, and Christian Parenti, correspondent for The Nation, and author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq, for a discussion about the social and cultural politics of producing journalism from the heart of the 21st century’s killing fields. Moderated by Saadia Toor, Professor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island, and Fiona Jeffries, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and the Ralph Bunche Institute
Unplanned Community: The Struggle for the South African City
ANNE-MARIA MAKHULU
Friday October 9th, 2009 4:15 pm, Room C415A
For the inaugural meeting of this year's Social Justice, Gender and Health Seminar, Anne-Maria Makhulu will speak about the ways in which the South African black metropolitan poor under apartheid and immediately after the transition to democracy sought to make strategic claims on the apartheid state. She is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University, a contributor to Politics, Publics, Personhood: New Ethnographies at the Limits of Neoliberalism (forthcoming 2009) and a co-editor of Hard Work, Hard Times: Ethnographies of Volatility and African-Being-in-the-World (forthcoming 2009).
Reading: to come
Click here to access available readings (you must be registered to view them).
Co-sponsored by The Center for Place, Culture and Politics
Preliminary meeting of The Atlantic Studies Seminar
Friday October 9th, 2009 12:00 pm (noon), Room 8400 (off cafeteria)
Please come to the preliminary meeting of The Atlantic Studies Seminar to meet the co-chairs and to discuss the direction (readings, speakers, “the implicit divide between Diaspora and Atlantic Studies...”) of the group.
All are welcome.
Reading: Suggested (but not required) reading for this meeting is the first chapter of David Kazanjian’s “The colonizing trick: national culture and imperial citizenship in early America,” University of Minnesota Press (2004).
Click here to access available readings (you must be registered to view them).
Old and New Net Wars over Free Speech, Freedom and Secrecy
GABRIELLA COLEMAN
Thursday October 8th, 2009 6:30 pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Join Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor of Media Culture and Communication at New York University and author of the forthcoming Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software, as she speaks on her current research work on the free and open source software movement and the hacker culture out of which it emerged.
Reading:
Coleman, Gabriella CODE IS SPEECH: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers in Cultural Anthropology, Volume 24, Issue 3, August 2009, pp 420-454
Click here to access available readings (you must be registered to view them).
Nationalism, Liberalism, and Zionism
A Discussion Commemorating the Centennial Year of the Birth of Sir Isaiah BerlinWednesday October 7th, 2009 6:00 pm, Elebash Recital Hall
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Sir Isaiah Berlin, a group of scholars will gather to explore Berlin's ideas concerning nationalism, liberalism, and Zionism and their relevance for the challenges of our time and the future. Participants include Ian Buruma of Bard College, Helena Rosenblatt of the CUNY Graduate Center, Mark Lilla of Columbia University, and Robert Cottrell, journalist, writer, director and producer of the Isaiah Berlin Centenary Celebration in Riga, Latvia. Moderated by Joel Rosenthal, President of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Policy, with opening comments by The Graduate Center's Provost, Chase Robinson.
Co-sponsored by The Center for Jewish Studies
EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts
Tuesday October 6th, 2009 6:00 pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Launch of Issue 5, with Emily Beall, Julian Brolaski, Thomas Fink, Paolo Javier, Vincent Katz, Dorothea Lasky, Sueyen Juliette Lee, Kimberly Lyons, Uche Nduka, and Anne Tardos, as well as CUNY Graduate Center students Kate Broad, Louis Bury, John Harkey, Stefania Heim, Benjamin Miller, and Emily Moore. Hosted by Tim Peterson, Editor. Click here to find out more about EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts.
Co-sponsored by the Poetics Group, EOAGH, and Chax Press
What's Sex Got to Do with Family?
LISA DUGGAN, ELIZABETH GROSZ, GAYLE SALAMONMonday October 5th, 2009 6:30 pm, Proshansky Auditorium
Sex is both at the core and the edge of the family life. In an era when the conceptual and political transformation of the family is most palpable on a global scale, often generating impassioned debates among those wedded or even indifferent to “the family values,” this panel seeks to explore family formations through their deepest open secrets: sex, sexuality and sexual practices. Panelists include Lisa Duggan, (NYU) author of The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy; Elizabeth Grosz, (Rutgers) author of Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism; and Gayle Salamon, (Princeton) whose forthcoming book is titled Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. Kyoo Lee, Resident Mellon Fellow at the Center for the Humanities, will moderate the conversation.
The Importance of Being Iceland
EILEEN MYLESFriday October 2nd, 2009 6:30 pm, Room 4406 (English Lounge)
Eileen Myles, author of more than 20 volumes of poetry, fiction, articles, plays and libretti, gives a reading/talk on her new book The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art and will then be joined by Corey Frost and Erica Kaufman for a discussion of her work. Corey Frost is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center and the author of My Own Devices, a collection of travel stories from around the world. Erica Kaufman is the author of Censory Impulse and is currently a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Co-sponsored by the Poetics Group
Secularism and Liberty of Conscience
ABDULLAH AHMED AN-NA'IM & PATRICK WEIL in conversationThursday October 1st, 2009 6:30 pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Scholars have recently revived and reiterated strong arguments that legitimate Islamic faith requires religious freedom. Join two prominent scholars and policymakers as they begin with this presumption before moving on to a discussion about the viability of secularism as a barrier against religious coercion. Participants include Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Charles Howard Chandler Professor of Law at Emory, and author of Islam and the Secular State, and Patrick Weil, Visiting Professor of Law and Robina Foundation International Fellow at Yale Law School and Director of the Center for the Study of Immigration, Integration, and Citizenship Policies at the University of Paris, Pantheon-Sorbonne. Weil has worked extensively with the French government including participation in a 2003 French Presidential Commission on secularism. Moderated by John Torpey, Professor of Sociology, the Graduate Center, CUNY.
The 2009 Leon Levy Biography Lecture
ROBERT CAROTuesday September 29th, 2009 7:00 pm, Elebash Recital Hall
Robert A. Caro, the lauded biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Baines Johnson, will give the 2009 Leon Levy Biography Lecture. Mr. Caro will give a unique talk on the process of researching and writing a biography, with a focus on his fourth and final volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, an examination of Johnson’s years in the White House. For more information about this event, please visit leonlevycenterforbiography.org.
Co-sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography
Celebrating Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
September 26th 2009, Saturday, 12:00 pm - 4:00 pm, Elebash Recital HallPlease join us to honor the extraordinary life and work of Eve Sedgwick, a beloved member of the CUNY faculty, whose groundbreaking work includes Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1986); Epistemology of the Closet (1991); Tendencies (1993) and Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003), as well as Dialogue on Love (1999) and her book of poems, Fat Art Thin Art (1994).
Public Feelings
ANN CVETKOVICHFriday September 25th, 2009 2:00 pm, Room 4406 (English Lounge)
Ann Cvetkovich is Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Cvetkovich works primarily in the fields of gay and lesbian studies, public feelings, and trauma studies. Her most recent publications are Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures.
Reading:
1. Cvetkovich, Ann "Public Feelings" in South Atlantic Quarterly 106(3): 459-468 (2007)
2. Sedgwick, Eve "Teaching/Depression" from A Dialogue on Love, Beacon Press (2000)
Available online in The Scholar and Feminist Online 4:2.
3. Introduction to Muñoz, José Esteban 'From surface to depth, between psychoanalysis and affect' in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Volume 19, Issue 2, July 2009 pp 123-129.
4. Berlant, Lauren http://supervalentthought.com/ (a blog)
5. Stewart, Katie from Ordinary Affects , Duke University Press (2007); earlier version available in the Public Sentiments issue of Feminist and Scholar online (www.barnard.edu/sfonline).
- Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke UP, 2003.
- Jill Dolan, "Performance, Utopia, and the 'Utopian Performative'" Theatre Journal (2001)
- Avery Gordon, "Something More Powerful than Skepticism" from Keeping Good Time. Paradigm, 2003.
- Heather Love, from Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of History. Harvard UP 2007.
Click here to access available readings (you must be registered to view them).
Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism: A Gathering
Thursday September 24th, 2009 - Friday September 25th, 2009, The Graduate CenterBelladonna* celebrates ten years of publishing and supporting the feminist avant-garde with a two-day conference on feminist poetics and activism. The conference launches on Thursday, September 24, with panels focusing on radical language processes and political thought, culminating in keynote performances by Kathleen Fraser, Erica Hunt, and Eileen Myles. On Friday, September 25, we will continue the conversation with a broad spectrum of panels focusing on a variety of topics including: the body as discourse, ecopoetics, multilingualism, exile and language, and writing from marginalized positions. The conference will conclude with a performance/collaboration between Carla Harryman, Catriona Strang & Christine Stewart, Sally Silvers, Lila Zemborain & Cecilia Torino. Other panelists and presenters include: Caroline Bergvall, Dodie Bellamy, Latasha N. Nevada Diggs, Zhang Er, Jeanne Heuving, Ann Lauterbach, Joan Retallack, Anne Waldman, Renaldo Wilson, and many others.
On-site registration required. See http://belladonnaconference.blogspot.com for a complete schedule and registration information, or contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Co-sponsored by Belladonna*, Center for the Study of Women and Society, Ph. D. Program in English, and the Poetics Group
Speaking for the Middle East
HAIFA ZANGANA & HAMID DABASHI in Conversation
CANCELLED
Tuesday September 22nd, 2009 7:00 pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Who speaks for Iraqi women? Who speaks for the Middle East? Hamid Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, joins Haifa Zangana, writer, activist and political prisoner in Iraq in the 1970’s, to discuss their parallel experiences growing up in Iran and Iraq in the same era on different sides of the border, and the complexities of speaking for and about their troubled homelands. Haifa Zangana’s memoir, Dreaming of Baghdad has just been published by the Feminist Press. Moderated by Sara Pursley, Managing Editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies.
Co-Sponsored by MEMEAC, The Feminist Press, and Arte East
Making Sense of Hard Times: Culture and Crisis in the Great Depression
PETER CONN, MORRIS DICKSTEIN, GARY GIDDINS, MOLLY HASKELL, ALICE KESSLER-HARRISMonday September 21st, 2009 6:30 pm, Elebash Recital Hall
In today’s economic climate, easy comparisons to the Great Depression abound. But what is the legacy of the Great Depression? While scholars regularly examine the economic and social history of the 1930s, the rich cultural production of the period is often neglected. Join a panel of distinguished scholars and critics for a timely discussion about the great writers, artists, and filmmakers who documented and interpreted the period. Participants include Morris Dickstein, author of the recently published Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression; Peter Conn, author of The American 1930s: A Literary History; Molly Haskell, author of From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies; and Alice Kessler-Harris, author of In Pursuit of Equity: How Gender Shaped American Economic Citizenship. Moderated by Gary Giddins, author of Visions of Jazz: The First Century.
Violence of Origins: Origins of Violence
ELISABETH BRONFEN
Thursday September 17th, 2009 6:30 pm, Room 4116 (Comparative Literature Student Lounge)
Elisabeth Bronfen, Professor of English at the University of Zurich, and Global Distinguished Professor at N.Y.U. speaks about Hollywood's engagement with the American Civil War. Her most recent books are Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema, and a cultural history of the night, Tiefer als der Tag Gedacht (to be published with Columbia 2010). She is currently completing a book entitled Sounds of War on Hollywood and American Culture of Conflict (co-authored with Isabel Capeloa Gil).
Reading:
A chapter from Elisabeth Bronfen's unpublished manuscript of “Violence of Origins.”
Click here to access available readings (you must be registered to view them).
Philosophical Insight, Emotion, and Popular Fiction: The Case of Sunset Boulevard
NOEL CARROLLTuesday September 15th, 2009 4:00 pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Noel Carroll will speak following a 1:30 pm screening of Sunset Boulevard. Noel Carroll is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he teaches courses in aesthetics, the philosophies of film, literature, and visual arts, and ethics, among other subjects. He has published six books, including Beyond Aesthetics, A Philosophy of Mass Art, and Interpreting the Moving Image.
Co-sponsored by the Film Studies Group
Gayatri Spivak and Peter Hitchcock
February 7, 2008
Gayatri Spivak and Peter Hitchcock discuss an ethics of reading and writing Asia in the age of globalization and transnationalism. Gayatri Spivak is University Professor and the Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Her most recent book is Other Asias. Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at The Graduate Center and a 2007-08 Mellon Fellow at The Center for the Humanities. His books include Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism.
Audio Archive:
Picturing Atrocity
December 9, 2005
An unprecedented collaboration between museums and universities, the conference brought together world-renowned photojournalists, artists, writers, and curators, including Susan Meiselas, Alfredo Jaar, Samantha Powers, and Philip Gourevitch, to explore the increasingly urgent questions provoked by photographs of atrocity in contemporary visual culture. Participants explored questions of response and responsibility toward the ubiquity of such images. The event was accompanied by an exhibition on atrocity photographs in the media prepared by students at The Graduate Center. It was held in support and with the presence of Amnesty International, and was co-sponsored by The Humanities Research Institute; The University of Leeds, UK; The Graduate Center, CUNY; The British Academy; and Amnesty International.
Translation, the History of Political Thought, and the History of Concepts: An Interdisciplinary Con
September 29-October 1, 2005
While few would deny that the disciplines of translation, political thought, and the history of concepts are connected, the interrelationships have seldom been systematically considered. This conference brought together theorists, historians, and practitioners of these subjects to discuss their interaction and to consider how interdisciplinary work may most profitably be conducted. It was co-sponsored by The History of Political and Social Concepts Group, The German Historical Institute, The Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, and The Historical Society.
Re-Imagining the Welfare State
March 1, 2004
An all-day event co-sponsored by The Center for Urban Research and the Ph.D. Program in Political Science, Re-Imagining the Welfare State featured panels on the philosophical and moral foundations as well as the politics of the welfare state. Speakers included Senator Edward Kennedy and academics from across the United States and Europe, including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Robin Blackburn (University of Essex), Elizabeth Warren (Harvard University), Frances Fox Piven (CUNY Graduate Center), and Leith Mullings (CUNY Graduate Center).
Writing Lives: The Past and Future of Biography
April 10, 2003
Biography has been a popular way of thinking about the past from antiquity to the present, but it has not always been pretty. For every Agricola by Tacitus, Life of Johnson by Boswell, and Jefferson by Ken Burns, there are the tawdry stories of Suetonius, the hagiographies of dictators, and gossipy “investigations” on television. Biography is the quintessential interdisciplinary field. Focusing on three figures – Charles Darwin, Sappho, and Louis Armstrong – this conference explored the phenomenon of life-writing, the nature of its audience, and the commonalities and differences across disciplines. Speakers included James Atlas, Publisher, Atlas Books; Michael Cogswell, Directer of the Louis Armstrong House and Archive at Queens College; Ralph Colp, Jr., author of To Be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin; Susan Daitch, Hunter College, author of The Colorist, Gary Giddins, author of Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong, David Grubin, Peabody and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, Harry S. Truman and Kofi Annan: Center of the Storm; Eva Stehle, University of Maryland, author of Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece; Rebecca Stott, Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge, author of Darwin and the Barnacle.
Sidney Hook Reconsidered: A Centennial Celebration
October 25-26, 2002
Participants included: Casey Blake, Columbia University, Gary Bullert, Washington State University, Leonard Bushkoff, Oakland University, Steven Cahn, The Graduate Center, John Patrick Diggins, The Graduate Center, Joseph Dorman, Filmmaker of Arguing the World, Michael Eldridge, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, Barbara Forrest, Southeastern Louisiana University, Nathan Glazer, Harvard University, James Livingston, Rutgers University, Marvin Kohl, SUNY Fredonia, Paul Kurtz, Prometheus Books, Tibor Machan, Hoover Institution, Timothy Madigan, University of Rochester Press, Christopher Phelps, Ohio State University, Alan Ryan, Oxford University, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Graduate Center, Edward Shapiro, Seton Hall University, Robert Talisse, Vanderbilt University, Cornel West, Princeton University, Robert Westbrook, Cornell University, and Bruce Wilshire, Rutgers University.
