VISIBLY MUSLIM

September 20, Monday, 6:30pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre
Co-sponsored by the Concentration in Fashion Studies, MEMEAC, and the Women’s Studies Certificate Program

While Muslim dress has been at the center of much  international debate, western media almost always fails to consider it on its own terms, from the perspective of the people who design and wear this clothing. Join Emma Tarlo (pictured) for a discussion of her new book on British Muslim fashion, as she explores the impact Islamic fashion has had on the development of transnational cultural formations and multicultural urban spaces. Emma Tarlo is a Reader in the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London. Christa Salamandra, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Lehman College, CUNY, will serve as respondent. Introduced and moderated by Eugenia Paulicelli, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature and co-director of the Fashion Studies Concentration at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

THE WIND FROM THE EAST

September 20, Monday, 6:30pm
The Skylight Room (9100)

Inspired by their perceptions of the Cultural Revolution and motivated by utopian hopes, French students and intellectuals incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life in the 1960’s. But what did democracy have to do with Mao? Join Richard Wolin, Distinguished Professor of History, Comparative Literature, and Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY as he discusses his recent book, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s. Richard Wolin’s books include Heidegger’s Children and The Seduction of Unreason. His articles and reviews have appeared in Dissent, The Nation, and The New Republic.

THE GREAT AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: ITS PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

September 24, Friday, 12:30pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
Co-sponsored by the Higher Education Seminar,  CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences

Over the past 60 years, the United States has come to dominate the ranks of the world’s best universities. Join Jonathan R. Cole, author of The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, and Why It Must Be Protected, as he explores how these universities have become the engines of innovation and economic and social growth in the nation and why and how they are threatened. Jonathan R. Cole is the John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University and was Provost and Dean of Faculties of Columbia University from 1989 to 2003.

RON CHERNOW

The 2010 Leon Levy Biography Lecture

September 28, Tuesday, 7:00pm, Harold M. Proshansky Auditorium

Co-sponsered by the Leon Levy Center for Biography

Each year, the Leon Levy Center for Biography selects a distinguished biographer to give the Inaugural Lecture. In 2010, the prize-winning author Ron Chernow will appear to discuss the art and craft of biography. To date, Mr. Chernow has written The House of Morgan, which won a National Book Award, The Warburgs, which was cited by the American Library Association as one of the year’s ten best books in 1993, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and praised by The Times of London as “one of the great American biographies,” and Alexander Hamilton, which won a George Washington Book Prize for the year’s best book about the founding era. This fall, his Washington: A Life, a rare single volume, full-length portrait of George Washington, will be released by Penguin Press. Reservations required. For further information, please call 212-817-8215 or visit http://www.gc.cuny.edu/events/index.htm and click the e-VENT icon.

FOR BEAUTY IS A SERIES OF HYPOTHESES?

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as Fiber Artist
October 1, Friday, 4:00pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in English

To date, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is best known as the author of a series of quickly paradigmatic texts on queer and affect theory, including Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Epistemology of the Closet, Tendencies, and Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Much less appreciated is the fact that Sedgwick was also a devoted and passionate fiber artist, whose works were shown in exhibitions including Floating Columns/In the Bardo, Bodhisattva Fractal World and Works in Fiber, Paper and Proust. Join Jason Edwards, Reader in Art History at the University of York, as he examines a broad range of Sedgwick’s art works, contextualising them closely in relation to her better-known literary theoretical and other works on paper, as the culminating presentation in a series of seminars on Sedgwick’s art. Jason Edwards is the author of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Alfred Gilbert’s Aestheticism: Gilbert Amongst Whistler, Wilde, Leighton, Pater, and Burne-Jones.

EMOTIONAL POLITICS

October 4, Monday, 6:00pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre

Why have emotions and personal feelings become so prominent in the public sphere? How do ideologies take hold of our psyches? Join noted political scientist Ted Brader and psychologist David Pizarro as they discuss the role of emotions in politics, from opinion polls to elections. Ted Brader is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and author of Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work (Chicago, 2006), and David Pizarro is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, whose recent article “Conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals,” appeared in the journal Cognition and Emotion. Moderated by Peter Liberman, Resident Mellon Fellow at the Center for Humanities and Professor of Political Science at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY.

STAGING ELIZABETH BISHOP’S LETTERS

October 5, Tuesday, 6:00pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Co-sponsored by the Poetics Group

In anticipation of the centenary celebrations of Bishop’s birth in 1911 and in connection with the upcoming publication of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence (forthcoming in 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), editor and poet  Joelle Biele and guest performers will present a staged theatrical performance of Bishop’s letters as a work-in-progress. In this workshop, audience members will be invited to comment on evaluating the translation of the epistolary to the performed, letter writing as performance, and the relationships between writers, editors, and their audience.

SLEUTHING THE SLEUTH: YUNTE HUANG ON CHARLIE CHAN

October 14, Thursday, 6:30pm, The New School, 66 West 12th Street, Room 510

Co-sponsered by the Leon Levy Center for Biography

Yunte Huang will discuss his acclaimed new biography of Charlie Chan, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History. “Himself a brilliant sleuth,” says Stephen Greenblatt, “Huang follows a trail of clues that leads to Honolulu and the deeply impressive career of Chang Apana, the Chinese-born detective on whom the character was based . . . Huang writes with rare personal intensity and capacious intelligence.”  Moderated by Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Director/ Distinguished Writer-in-Residence of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and Robert Polito, author of the poetry collection Hollywood and God and Director of the Writing Program at the New School. For more information, go to the leonlevycenterforbiography.

DIANE DI PRIMA: AN EVENING OF READING & CONVERSATION

October 15, Friday, 6:00pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre

Join the iconic poet and activist Diane di Prima for a rare New York City appearance. Graduate Center Professor Ammiel Alcalay will engage her in a conversation about her work and life after her reading. Over the span of her remarkable career, di Prima has published 43 books of poetry and prose and, as per Allen Ginsberg, “broke barriers of race-class identity and delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity.” She is presently the Poet Laureate of San Francisco. A two-volume Lost & Found chapbook selection of her lectures on poets H.D. and Robert Duncan will be available for purchase on the night of the event.

PUBLISHING FRENCH WOMEN AUTHORS: A DIALOGUE

October 18th, Monday, 6:30-8:30, Room 9204/05 (followed by a reception in Room 4202)

Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in French

Martine Reid, Professor of French at Lille III, and Domna C. Stanton (pictured), Distinguished Professor of French at The Graduate Center, CUNY, will talk about their respective experiences in publishing the texts of French women writers, as well as on their own research on women authors. Martine Reid is the editor of the collection Femmes de Lettres (Gallimard). In her most recent book, Des femmes en littérature (Belin, 2010), she re-writes French literary history from the eighteenth-century onwards through the study of a dozen women authors until recently neglected or ostracized. Domna Stanton recently edited and translated in collaboration two volumes for the series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Chicago University Press), one on Gabrielle Suchon, the other on seventeenth-century fairy-tales written by women. She is also the author of Women Writ, Women Writing: Gendered Discourse and Differences in Seventeenth-Century France (Chicago, 2007) and of The Defiant Muse: French Feminist Poems (The Feminist Press, 1986).

MURIEL RUKEYSER: A TRIBUTE

October 20, Wednesday, 6:30pm, The Century Club, 7 West 43rd Street

Poet and biographer Jan Heller Levi, biographer Blanche Cook, and Graduate Center students and Lost & Found Editors Stefania Heim and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein read from the work of poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser and discuss their research and engagement with her opus. Reservations required; please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to attend.

TENDENCIES: POETICS AND PRACTICE

October 20, 7:00pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
This series of talks by and about major contemporary poets, curated by Tim Peterson (Trace) and titled in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, explores the relationship between queer theory, poetic manifesto, poetic practice, and pedagogy. Visit http://tendenciespoetics.com for commentary and sample recordings from past events, as well as news about upcoming events.

POETS FOR LIVING WATERS

October 22, Monday, 6:00pm, The Skylight Room (9100)

Join poets Nicole Cooley and Tonya Foster, poets and editors of the Poets for Living Waters initiative, Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples, and guest readers for an evening of poetry and eco-poetics in the wake of large-scale catastrophes in the Gulf and the surrounding regions. The online poetry forum and activist group Poets for Living Waters features daily poetic responses to the recent oil spill; for more information, visit http://poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/.

TRANSLATING JOB AND ECCLESIASTES

October 26, Tuesday, 6:30pm, The Skylight Room (9100)

Join eminent scholar and translator Robert Alter as he discusses the special challenges of conveying biblical poetry and prose in English, and reads from his new work, an ambitious and impressive new translation, with commentary, of the Wisdom Books, including Job, the work of “the greatest biblical poet,” the Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. Robert Alter is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Berkley and has published many acclaimed works on the Bible, literary modernism, and contemporary Hebrew literature, including several previous translations from the Hebrew Bible.

THE STANLEY BURNSHAW LECTURE: EDWARD HIRSCH

My Pace Provokes My Thoughts’: Poetry and Walking

November 1, Monday, 6:00pm, Elebash Recital Hall
Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in English

Given by distinguished poets and critics in honor of Stanley Burnshaw’s literary career and contributions to New York intellectual life, this lecture is a joint project of The Center for the Humanities and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin, which holds the papers of Stanley Burnshaw. Edward Hirsch will present this year’s lecture, titled “My Pace Provokes My Thoughts’: Poetry and Walking.” Hirsch is a noted poet, president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City, and author of the best-selling How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.

THE TRIUMPH OF POP

November 3, Wednesday, 6:30pm, The Skylight Room (9100)

How and why did Americans and their European counterparts begin taking Pop art seriously? Seen at first as a byproduct of American consumer culture, Pop art eventually came to represent surprising new strategies for dissent, offering new possibilities for irony, citation, and distanciation as readily as it reflected on the media, subculture and kitsch. Join Annie Cohen-Solal (pictured), author of Leo and his Circle, along with Thomas Crow, author of the influential The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, among many other books, Romy Golan (Art History, The Graduate Center) author of Muralnomad: the mural effect in European art 1927-57, and Michael Lobel (Art History, SUNY Purchase) author of James Rosenquist: Pop Art, Politics, and History in the 1960’s, for a conversation about the first Pop age.

EMOTIONAL WARS: RECOVERING FEELING IN PHILOSOPHY

November 4, Thursday, 6:00pm, Rooms C201-202

How have the emotions shaped philosophical reasoning about matters of justice, citizenship, war and peace? How does the philosopher give voice to historical trauma, and how can we responsively read the passionate undercurrents of rational argument? Join noted literary critics David Clark and William Galperin, along with philosopher J. David Velleman for a lively exchange on the vital place of affect in contemporary critical practice.  J. David Velleman is Professor of Philosophy at New York University whose recent books include How We Get Along? and Self to Self.  David Clark is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University and author of Bodies and Pleasures in Late Kant (forthcoming, Stanford).  William Galperin is Professor of English at Rutgers University, author of The Historical Austen and The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism.  Moderated by Nancy Yousef, Resident Mellon Fellow at the Center for Humanities and Associate Professor of English at Baruch College and The Graduate Center.

WORKS IN PROGRESS: FLORA SHAW, WOMAN JOURNALIST FOR THE LONDON TIMES

“BREAKING GENDER BARRIERS; ADVOCATING EMPIRE”
November 8, Monday, 4:00pm, Room 9207
Co-sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Center for the Study of Women and Society, and the PhD Program in English

How was Flora Shaw able to cultivate a reputation as a well-regarded journalist for The London Times during an era when few opportunities, career or otherwise, were available to women? As a correspondent for The London Times, Shaw reported from South Africa, Australia, and Canada in the 1890s and is responsible, even, for the naming of Nigeria. Professor Dorothy O. Helly will analyze Shaw’s background and journalism. Professor Emerita of History and Women’s Studies at Hunter College and The Graduate School, CUNY, Helly’s books include Livingstone’s Legacy: Horace Waller and Victorian Mythmaking (1987) and, as coauthor, Women’s Realities, Women’s Choices: An Introduction to Women’s Studies (1983, 1995). For more information, go to the leonlevycenterforbiography.

THE AUDRE LORDE/ESSEX HEMPHILL MEMORIAL LECTURE: CHERYL CLARKE

November 8, Friday, 6:00pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
Sponsored by the Africana Studies Concentration and co-sponsored by IRADAC and the PhD Program in English and the Black, Gay and Lesbian Archive Project, Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library

Join Cheryl Clarke, the author of four books of poetry, and of, most recently, After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement, for the second annual Lorde/Hemphill lecture. This 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 instrumental in the development of distinctive forms of writing among American poets, particularly people of color and members of the LGBT community. Films featuring Essex Hemphill and his poetry will be shown at Anthology Film Archives on November 9th. For more information, see http://anthologyfilmarchives.org.

TENDENCIES: POETICS AND PRACTICE

November 11, 7:00pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
This series of talks by and about major contemporary poets, curated by Tim Peterson (Trace) and titled in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, explores the relationship between queer theory, poetic manifesto, poetic practice, and pedagogy. Visit http://tendenciespoetics.com for commentary and sample recordings from past events, as well as news about upcoming events.

A LITTLE HISTORY, ISLANDERS, CIRCLES AND BOUNDARIES

A Book Celebration
November 12, Friday, 4:00pm, English Lounge (Room 4406)
Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in English

Join Ammiel Alcalay, founder of the Lost and Found series, writer, translator, and Graduate Center Professor,  for a book celebration in honor of his long-awaited chronicle of the political context of the New American poetry,  A Little History (Fred Dewey Books) as well as his novel Islanders (City Lights), alongside the writer and choreographer Kate Tarlow Morgan, celebrating the reclamation project of her work, Circles and Boundaries: Writings from the Field (Factory School), dating from the 1970s to the 1990s. They will be joined by their publishers, Fred Dewey of Fred Dewey Books, and Queensborough Professor Bill Marsh of Factory School.

TRANSLATING A PAST THAT HAUNTS THE PRESENT

November 17th, Wednesday, 3:00pm, The Skylight Room (9100)

Acclaimed authors Jenny Erpenbeck (pictured) and Philippe Claudel join their American translators, Susan Bernofsky and John Cullen, to discuss the delicate art of fictionalizing the fraught history of Germany and France during WWII in their novels Visitation and Brodeck and the translation of this history into English. The audience will be invited to try its hand at selected translation problems as well. Moderated by Susan Bernofsky, MFA Program in Writing and Translation, Queens College. This program is part of the 2010 New Literature from Europe festival (a joint event organized by eight European cultural institutes in New York, including the Goethe-Institut New York and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, co-sponsors of this event).

THE 15TH ANNUAL IRVING HOWE MEMORIAL LECTURE: ANTHONY APPIAH

The Life and Death of Honor
November 17, Wednesday, 6:00pm, Elebash Recital Hall
Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in English

Established to honor the American literary critic and political writer Irving Howe, this endowed lecture addresses subjects that were of special interest to him, including political and social ideas, immigrant history, Jewish writing and culture, and the modern literary imagination. This year, Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor Of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University will speak on “The Life and Death of Honor.” His numerous books include a memoir, In My Father’s House, as well as Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), and his most recent work, Experiments in Ethics (2008).

RACE, SEXUALITY AND POWER

November 19, Friday, 4:00pm, Room C198

How has the relationship between race and sexuality changed over time? Join three distinguished scholars as they discuss the evolution of these issues, moving from 10th Century Haiti to the 20th century art market. Participants include Doris Garraway (French, Northwestern University), Arlene Keizer (pictured), (English, University of California, Irvine), and Jennifer Morgan (social and Cultural Analysis, NYU). Moderated by Carroll Smith Rosenberg (History, The Graduate Center).

THE VISUAL WORLD OF FRENCH THEORY

November 23, Tuesday, 6:30pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in French and the PhD Program in Art History

Join Sarah Wilson as she speaks about her revelatory work on prominent French philosophers of the 1960s and 1970s—including Sartre, Deleuze, Bourdieu, and Foucault—and their encounters with the artists of their times, most particularly the protagonists of the Narrative Figuration movement. Wilson brings to life the intense and radical thinking of the period through this unique dialogue between the artists and writers of the time—in critical texts and catalogue prefaces—that illuminates not only the work of the artists but also  the production of the philosopher-writer concerned.

THE KITCHEN AND THE QUILL

December 1, Wednesday, 6:30pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre

Victoire, the maternal grandmother of celebrated author Maryse Condé, could neither speak nor write in French. In her lifetime, she was termed an illiterate woman and treated with a certain measure of contempt. However, she was a wonderful cook; she never traveled but was able to invent elaborate dishes with her personal creativity, totally different from traditional Creole cuisine. Maryse Condé believes she was an artist in her own right. She compares the gift of cooking with the gift of writing and claims her literary legacy from her grandmother in this conversation with Melissa Clark, food critic with The New York Times.

TENDENCIES: POETICS AND PRACTICE

December 9, 7:00pm, The Skylight Room (9100)
This series of talks by and about major contemporary poets, curated by Tim Peterson (Trace) and titled in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, explores the relationship between queer theory, poetic manifesto, poetic practice, and pedagogy. Visit http://tendenciespoetics.com for commentary and sample recordings from past events, as well as news about upcoming events.

THE LAST QUEEN OF EGYPT: STACY SCHIFF ON CLEOPATRA

December 10, Friday, 7:00pm, Elebash Recital Hill

Co-sponsered by the Leon Levy Center for Biography

Join the Leon Levy Center for Biography for a night of discovery and insight with Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Stacy Schiff, who will discuss her new biography, Cleopatra: A Life. “Cleopatra is buried under centuries of lies, and Stacy Schiff calls on her considerable powers to bring her back to life for us,” says Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy Kidder. Stacy Schiff is the author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography, and Saint-Exupéry: A Biography, a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. For more information, go to the leonlevycenterforbiography.