The Center for the Humanities

Welcome to The Center for the Humanities

The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY, was founded in 1993 as a public forum for people who take ideas seriously inside and outside the academy. By bringing together CUNY students and faculty with prominent journalists, artists, and civic leaders, the Center seeks to promote the humanities and humanistic perspectives in the social sciences. In the tradition of CUNY and The Graduate Center’s commitment to ensuring access to the highest levels of educational opportunity for all New Yorkers, all events are free and open to the public.

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A Selection of Upcoming Events

View our full Spring 2010 Program Schedule!

 

End of Biography: Purpose, Promise, Prospects

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

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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



A Workshop with Kyoo Lee

Foundational Texts in Enlightenment Political Theory

March 19th 2010, Friday, 12:00pm-2:00pm, Room 8400

Join us for a discussion of Atlantic Studies Seminar readings with Kyoo Lee, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College and Resident Mellon Fellow at the Center for the Humanities.

 

Suggested reading is available here to registered seminar participants.



Byzantine Archaeology: New Approaches, New Discoveries

March 22 2010, Monday, 4:00pm, Room 9205

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Joachim Henning, Professor at Institut für Archäologische Wissenschaften, Abteilung Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, will speak on "Excavations at Pliska, Capital of the First Bulgarian Empire."

 

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.



New Visions, New Activism, New American Poetry: Margaret Randall in Conversation

March 22nd 2010, Monday, 6:30pm, The Skylight Room (9100)

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The poet, political activist and publisher Margaret Randall helped shift the frame of New American Poetry beyond the US with her own political activism and by publishing El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn (1962-1969), a forum for innovative writing from all parts of the Americas featuring the work of major poets from the United States, Canada and Latin America in English, Spanish and Portuguese. Join her and the Graduate Center’s Ammiel Alcalay, Professor of English and Comparative Literature in a conversation about her work and El Corno Emplumado, then on the cutting edge of independent publishing and now an archival treasure.

 

Co-sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages and the Doctoral Students Council

 

 

 

 

 

 




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).

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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.








Conference Highlights