Turnstyle Reading Series

RICHARD SCHOTTER, COLUM MCCANN, and others

May 10th, Monday, 6:30pm, The Skylight Room (9100)

Tendencies: Poetics and Practice

JACK KIMBALL, CA CONRAD, STACY SZYMASZEK

May 6th 2010, Thursday, 6:30pm, The Skylight Room (9100)

Middle Passages: Histories & Poetics

May 6th-7th, 2010

For more details, please see below or download a printable program (PDF).

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

Co-sponsored by IRADAC, Ph.D. Program in History, NYU's Humanities Initiative: Working Group on Slavery & Freedom, and Small Axe

Remembering E.H. Carr and the Case for a New History in South Africa

Zackie Achmat
May 4th 2010, Tuesday, 6:30pm, Room 6402
Zackie Achmat is an Open Society Fellow and a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated AIDS activist who has garnered international acclaim for his leading role in the struggle for access to AIDS treatment in South Africa. After having been active in the anti-apartheid movement, Achmat was a founding member of the Treatment Action Campaign, the most influential social movement focusing on the AIDS epidemic in South Africa. In this lecture, Achmat will examine the work of the critical historian E.H. Carr in re-thinking South Africa’s history and the possibilities for its future. Achmat was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for his leadership role in bringing about an orthodox public health response to the AIDS epidemic in South Africa.

Please RSVP to: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to confirm attendance.

Annual Chapbook Festival

Monday May 3 and Tuesday May 4, 2010

The Festival celebrates the chapbook as a work of art and as a vehicle for alternative and emerging writers and publishers. Now in its second year, the festival features a two-day bookfair with chapbook publishers from around the country, workshops, marathon poetry readings, and a closing-night reading of prize-winning Chapbook Fellows.

Workshops will include: Producing Chapbooks: A Workshop for Poets, Producing Chapbooks: A Workshop for Publishers, Do-It-Yourself Chapbooks: Make and Distribute Your Own, and Chapbooks as Art Objects.

For more information, please click here.

Co-sponsored by The Office of Academic Affairs, The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center and MFA Programs in Creative Writing of the City University of New York, The Center for Book Arts, Poets House, Poetry Society of America, and Poets & Writers

Ida Susser and Jennifer Hirsch

Conversations on the Social Context of Gender and HIV/AIDS
April 29th 2010, Thursday, 6:15pm, Room 9206/7
Ida Susser is Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College, a member of the Doctoral Faculty in Anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and author of, most recently, AIDS, Sex and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa. Jennifer Hirsch is an Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences, and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Methods Core and the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of, among other books, the newly published The Secret: Love, Marriage and HIV.

The suggested reading is available to registered seminar participants here.

Religious Coexistence in the Early Modern World

April 23rd 2010, The Skylight Room (9100)

The warfare and persecution that accompanied early modern European religious reformation and state formation call into question any notion of steady progress toward toleration, and yet recent scholarship has shown complex negotiations among disparate groups at various levels. Join us for a series of panels discussing questions such as: How were religious differences accommodated and/or repressed in Europe and the Ottoman Empire? And what were the consequences of these divisions for religious experience and cultural creation?

2:15-3:00 PM Nabil Matar (Professor of English and History, University of Minnesota), “Christians in the Ottoman Empire: The Early Modern Period"

3:00-3:30 PM Tea Break

3:30-4:30 PM Susan Einbinder (Professor of Hebrew Literature at HUC-JIR/Cincinnati), "When the Ending Comes First: the Death of Meir Alguades"

4:45-5:30 PM Roundtable discussion featuring responses from CUNY faculty members Richard McCoy (English), Steven Kruger (English) and Sarah Covington (History), and questions from the audience

5:30-6:30 PM Reception: English Department Lounge (Room 4406)

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

Gary Wilder

"African Socialism as Political Theology: L.S. Senghor’s Redemptive Vision of Decolonization"

April 23rd 2010, Friday, 12:00pm-2:00pm, Rooms 8400/8402
Gary Wilder is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY and the author of The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the World Wars. With respondent Mamadou Diouf, a professor of Western African history at Columbia University, where he also serves as director of the Institute of African Studies at SIPA. His most recent book is La Construction de l’Etat au Sénégal, and he is currently co-editing Rhythms of the Atlantic World and New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration, Wealth, Power and Femininity.

Suggested reading is now available to registered seminar participants here.

On Translation and Biography

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

April 21st 2010, Wednesday, 7:00pm, Elebash Recital Hall

This discussion will feature such translators, writers, and biographers as Gregory Rabassa (CUNY), Benjamin Moser (books editor at Harper’s and author of the acclaimed Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector), and Frederick Brown (author of award-winning biographies of Cocteau, Zola, Flaubert, whose new book is For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus), on the problems of biography, language, nuance, and interpretation in multiple languages.

Co-sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography

The Digital University

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

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

A full schedule is available at http://digitaluniversity.gc.cuny.edu/

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

Gerald M. Oppenheimer

"Shattered Dreams?: An Oral History of the South African AIDS Epidemic"
April 15th 2010, Thursday, 6:15pm, Center for Place, Culture and Politics (Room 6107)
Gerald M. Oppenheimer is the author, with Ronald Bayer, of Shattered Dreams?: An Oral History of the South African AIDS Epidemic. He is the Broeklundian Professor of Public Health at Brooklyn University and has written extensively on the history of public health and medicine and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The suggested reading is available to registered seminar participants here.

Karen Beckman

"Documation: Images of the World as It Was, Is and Might Yet Be"
April 15th 2010, Thursday, 2:00pm, Room C201
Karen Beckman explores questions that emerge from the intersection of documentary and animated forms of filmmaking. In addition to thinking about the history of this relationship, her paper will compare personal and socio-political mobilizations of this hybrid form. She is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of Film Studies in the department of the History of Art, and the director of the program in Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also one of the editors of the journal Grey Room.

Third Annual Conference on "Rightist" Movements

Threats and Enemies: How the Law Produces "Eco-Terrorism" and "Illegals"

April 15th-16th, 2010

For more details, please download the Program (PDF).

The Social Context of Immigration Law
Thursday, April 15th 2010, 6 p.m.
The Skylight Room (9100)

The Green Scare: Targeting Environmental & Animal Rights Activism
Friday, April 16th 2010, 4:15 p.m.
Room 9204/9205

Co-Sponsored by The Center for Place, Culture & Politics, Ph.D. Program in Anthropology, and the Doctoral Students Council at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Catering courtesy of VegFund.

Nonfiction under Oath

Tuesday, April 13 2010, 6:30pm, Martin E Segal Theatre

Why is nonfiction defined in the negative and how might it be revalued for its own sake? Join three pioneering nonfiction writers as they read from new work and discuss the challenges and rewards of working in prose. John D'Agata teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa; his new book, About a Mountain, is a book-length essay on nuclear waste and suicide in Las Vegas, Nevada. David Shields, who teaches English at the University of Washington and Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College, is most recently the author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, an ars poetica of writing "truthiness" in an unbearably artificial world. Brenda Wineapple is the Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, CUNY and the author, most recently, of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Her anthology, 19th Century American Writers on Writing (series editor Edward Hirsch) will be published next fall, and she's currently writing a book about America, 1848-1877. Moderated by Wayne Koestenbaum, poet, novelist, and professor of English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, who is currently working on a nonfiction book about Harpo Marx.

Co-sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography

Dominick LaCapra

"Fascism and the Sacred: Sites of Inquiry after (or along with) Trauma"
April 13th 2010, Tuesday, 2:00pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
Dominick LaCapra is the Bryce & Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies at Cornell University’s History Department. He also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature and is a member of the graduate field of Romance Studies and the program in Jewish Studies. He served for ten years as director of Cornell’s Society for the Humanities and for four years as Associate Director and for eight years as director of the School of Criticism and Theory. He is the author of many books of critical theory, most recently History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence.

Suggested reading is available by e-mail to registered seminar participants only: please e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Byzantine Archaeology: New Approaches, New Discoveries

April 13th 2010, Tuesday, 1:30pm, Room 9205

Christopher Sherwin Lightfoot, Associate Curator of Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will speak on "Boom or Bust? Evidence for the Byzantine Economy in Anatolia from the Excavations at Amorium."

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.

Works in Progress: Using the Evidence, Changing the Story

April 12th 2010, Monday, 4:00pm, English Lounge (Room 4406)

Kathy Chamberlain, chair of the Women Writing Women’s Lives seminar, discusses the process of extricating Jane Welsh Carlyle from Victorian myths about her and her husband Thomas Carlyle that persist into the present.

Co-sponsored by the Women’s Studies Certificate Program, the Center for the Study of Women and Society, the PhD Program in English, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography

Tendencies: Poetics and Practice

DODIE BELLAMY, EILEEN MYLES, KEVIN KILLIAN

April 9th 2010, Friday, 6:30pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre

Robert Bernasconi

"Carolina in My Mind: John Locke and the Defense of New World Slavery"
April 9th 2010, Friday, 2:00pm, Rooms C203-205
This public seminar with Robert Bernasconi investigates the controversy occasioned by the apparent contradiction between Locke’s personal involvement with the Atlantic slave trade in various guises and his rejection of hereditary slavery, while exploring the debate on slavery in the seventeenth century which established the essential context for any assessment of his contribution. Robert Bernasconi is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of, most recently, How to Read Sartre (2007), has authored two books on Heidegger, and edited numerous books on Levinas, Derrida, and the concept of race.

Registered seminar participants are welcome to join Professor Bernasconi and Kyoo Lee, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College and Resident Mellon Fellow at the Center for the Humanities, at 4:00pm for a discussion of the suggested reading.

Zine Magubane

"Race, Class, Gender and the Transnational Circulation of Sociological Knowledge"
April 8th 2010, Thursday, 6:15pm, Room 9206/7
Zine Magubane is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Boston College. She is the author of Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa; Postmodernism, Postcoloniality, and African Studies; and the co-editor of Hear Our Voices (Imagined South Africa).

The suggested reading is available to registered seminar participants here.

Who Protects Antiquity?

JAMES CUNO, LAWRENCE ROTHFIELD, LAWRENCE COBEN
April 7th 2010, Wednesday, 6:30pm, Proshansky Auditorium

While archaeological sites from China to Peru are being destroyed by looters in search of saleable antiquities, those charged with custodianship of the past are locked in fierce debate. Archaeologists, leaders of cultural heritage organizations, and ministers of culture, dealers, collectors, curators, and museum directors cannot come to terms. Who is responsible for preserving cultural heritage? Participants include James Cuno, Director, The Art Institute of Chicago and author of Who Owns Antiquity?: Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage; Lawrence Rothfield, author of Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum and Associate Professor of English at The University of Chicago; Lawrence Coben, Director of the Sustainable Preservation Initiative, and faculty affiliate in the department of archeology, University of Pennsylvania. Moderated by Joel Allen, Professor of Classics and History at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Byzantine Archaeology: New Approaches, New Discoveries

April 6th 2010, Tuesday, 4:00pm, Room 9205

Alessandra Ricci, Professor in the Department of Archaeology and History of Art, Koç University, Istanbul, will speak on "Metropolitan Legends: Excavation and ArchaeoPark at the Byzantine Monastery of Satyros (Küçükyalı) at Istanbul."

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.

Sean Jacobs

"Afrikaner Identity, Globalization and the Post-Apartheid Public"
March 25th 2010, Thursday, 6:15pm, Room 9206/7
Sean Jacobs is a professor in The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs, Media & Culture Concentration. Among other books, he has co-edited Thabo Mbeki's World: The Politics and Ideology of the South African President, and is working on a book on the intersection of mass media, globalization,and liberal democracy in postapartheid South Africa.

Suggested reading is available here to registered seminar participants.

All in the Family?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Byzantine Archaeology: New Approaches, New Discoveries

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

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.

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.

End of Biography: Purpose, Promise, Prospects

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

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

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

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

Co-sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography

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.

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.

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

Tendencies: Poetics and Practice

ERICA KAUFMAN, DOUGLAS A. MARTIN, MINA PAM DICK
March 9th 2010, Tuesday, 6:30pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre

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

CUNY Lost and Found: a publication party

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

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?

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

The American Prospect: Politics in a New Key?

POSTPONED - NEW DATE TBD

LEON WIESELTIER and RICHARD WOLIN in conversation
Wednesday November 11th, 2009 6:30 pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
What does it mean to treat to 2008 election and the resultant Obama administration as a political watershed? Join two preeminent critics as they explore these and other related issues. For over 25 years, Leon Wieseltier has been the literary editor of The New Republic where he has established himself as one of the most important an erudite critics at work today. Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in History

Crude World: The Politics of Oil

Rockpile on the Road: Collaboration and the Troubadour Tradition in the 21st Century

The Praxis of Feminist Pedagogy: Third Annual Feminist Pedagogy Conference

Romanticism in the City

The Audre Lorde/Essex Hemphill Memorial Lecture

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

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

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'

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

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

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

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

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

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?

The Importance of Being Iceland

Secularism and Liberty of Conscience

The 2009 Leon Levy Biography Lecture

Celebrating Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Public Feelings

• 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

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

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

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:

The Interpretation of Habeas Corpus

Zachary Leader

Activist Culture and the State of Radical Art

Writing the Contemporary: Art History and Art Criticism

The Role of Religion: The Secular, the Sacred, and the State

After ’68: French Film, History, and Politics in the 1970’s

Ian Buruma and Richard Wolin: Europe and the Challenge of Islam

Undoing Jews: The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice

Frank Rich and Alan Brinkley: The Decline and Fall of Truth

Marijane Meaker and Leslie Feinberg: Pioneering Lesbian Literature

David Nasaw

Taner Akçam

The Irving Howe Memorial Lecture with Robert Alter

Reckoning with Hart Crane

Does Diversity Matter: Race, Class and Higher Education

Why Arendt Matters

War Reporting: Two Generations of Journalism Under Siege

Joan Didion and W.S. Merwin: The Writing Life

Jan Gross

Greil Marcus and Kim Gordon

Elaine Scarry and Vincent Crapanzano

The Iraq War and the Politics of Memoir

Tony Judt

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.

E.L. Doctorow and Victor Navasky

Tzvetan Todorov

Robert Lowell & Ted Hughes: Giants Across the Divide

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.

Attacking Academic Freedom in America: A series of events exploring the contemporary crisis

Ben Katchor and Joshua Brown

FINAL COUNT of the Collision between Us and Them: Hip Hop, Prison, and the New Democracy

Diane Middlebrook and Nancy K. Miller

The U.S. Commitment to the United Nations

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).

Richard Foreman, Wallace Shawn, and Alisa Solomon

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.