| Seminars in the Humanities |
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Under the auspices of The Center for the Humanities, the following seminars, organized by faculty and graduate students at The Graduate Center, offer sustained intellectual interaction to scholars across the CUNY community and the city at large. Consistent with The Graduate Center’s emphasis on interdisciplinarity, the seminars explore subjects and themes in the humanities through shared readings and invited speakers from a variety of disciplines. Attendance is by invitation only: co-chairs invite guests they think will contribute to and benefit from the seminar. Each seminar meets no less than three times a year, and will be inaugurated by a public meeting. All seminar events have preliminary readings. For online access to readings, and if you are interested in joining any of these seminars, please e-mail Ana Bozicevic at
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with a short paragraph describing your interest and experience in the seminar topic. For further information and details about inaugural seminar meetings, please see below. |
Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships in the Humanities
For seven consecutive years, The Center for the Humanities has awarded two full-time residencies supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation along with eight course release-time fellowships and two dissertation fellowships to develop interdisciplinary working groups on various themes in the humanities. These groups provide CUNY faculty members and advanced graduate students with much-needed space and time to exchange ideas, share their work in an open setting, and participate in collaborative projects with colleagues whose research and writing is motivated by different perspectives and methodologies. The theme for the 2008-2009 Mellon Fellowships at The Center for the Humanities was "The Sacred and the Secular." The theme for the ongoing 2009-2010 Mellon Fellowships is "Family."
The theme for the 2010-11 Mellon Fellowships is "Emotion." The deadline for applying was Monday, February 1, 2010 and has now passed. Please click here for the theme description.
No current events.
The Affect Seminar
Co-chairs: Allison Pease (English)and John Brenkman (Comparative Literature)
How does the study of affect influence your own work? In the twenty-first century affect has emerged as a productive site of theoretical reflection and political concern. Critics from a variety of disciplines have produced a profound body of work claiming that affect links us to the outside world, destabilizes the boundaries between self and other, and defines the character of late modernity. Through readings and guest lectures, this reading group aims to address methodological concerns raised by affect theory, and to explore the political implications of affect. Fall speakers included Ann Cvetkovich, Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and author of An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, and Patricia Clough, Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College, CUNY, and author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology.
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 will be posted here shortly.
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, Room 8106
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 will be posted here shortly.
The Atlantic Studies Seminar
Co-Chairs: Herman Bennett (History), Ashley Dawson (English), Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (History) and Julie Skurski (Anthropology)
The Atlantic Studies Seminar will explore the hypothesis that the Atlantic is the birthplace of the modern empire, the modern subject, and indeed of modernity itself. By de-centering Anglo-America and focusing on the Atlantic as a site—or sites—of constant movement, cultural encounters and dialogic interactions, linguistic frontiers and finally—and most importantly—disciplinary crossroads, this seminar hopes to transcend the implicit divide between diaspora and Atlantic studies and do so in a manner that bridges the convention of recent practices. Fall speakers included David Kazanjian, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America, and 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, whose current work in progress is Child of Empire: Racializing Subjects in Post WWII Britain.
This spring, in addition to the guest speakers listed below, several seminar participants will present work-in-progress. Suggested readings for all events will be posted here.
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.
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. Precirculated paper and suggested reading will be posted here shortly.
The Digital Media Studies Seminar
Co-chairs: Stephen Brier (ITP Certificate Program)
and Chris Sula (Philosophy)
The Digital Media Studies Seminar brings together CUNY faculty members, researchers, and doctoral students interested in a broad range of intellectual, cultural, economic, legal, and pedagogical issues related to the growing impact of digital media on the ways we read, think, teach, learn and entertain ourselves in the United States and across the globe. Guest speakers and participants will explore new digital media approaches to cultural production and to questions of teaching and learning through presentations of ongoing digital media research work and discussions of traditional and online texts on digital media issues. The fall speakers included 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.
This spring, in addition to Digital Media Studies Seminar meetings, join us for
Conferences in the Humanities
The Digital University
Power Relations, Publishing, Authority and Community in the Twenty-First Century Academy
April 21st, Wednesday, 9:00am-8:00pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre, Rooms C201, C202, and C197
Click here for more information.
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
The Film Studies Seminar
Co-Chairs: Heather Hendershot (Film, Theater)
and Paula Massood (Film, Theater)
Through select readings, presentations by participants of their own research, and guest lectures by Cinema Journal authors and others, this study group will explore the varied approaches to history, theory, and criticism that characterize the richly interdisciplinary field of Film Studies today. Our explorations will include recent contributions by scholars of television and other media as well. Fall speakers included Noel Carroll, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY and author of The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, and Laurent Jullier, director of research at the Institut de Recherches sur le Cinéma et l’Audiovisuel at the University of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle, professor of film studies at the Institut Européen de Cinéma et d’Audiovisuel at the University of Nancy II, and author of Holywood et la difficulté d’aimer.
Karen Beckman
April 15th 2010, Thursday, 2:00pm, Room C201
Karen Beckman is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of Film Studies in the department of the History of Art, and she is also the director of the program in Cinema Studies. She is currently completing a book about car crashes and film that includes chapters on early cinema, slapstick comedy, educational safety films, Warhol, and contemporary disaster films. She is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism, and the co-editor of two volumes: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma (Duke UP, September 2008) and Picture This! Photography and Literature with Liliane Weissberg (forthcoming). She has published articles on a range of subjects, including feminism and terrorism, death penalty photography, pop art and literature, and the relationship between cinema and contemporary art. She is also one of the editors of the journal Grey Room.
Precirculated paper and suggested reading will be posted here shortly.
The Social Justice, Gender and Health Seminar
Co-chairs: Ida Susser (Anthropology)
and Ted Powers (Anthropology)
The Social Justice, Gender and Health Seminar is an open academic seminar comprised of social science and public health researchers committed to the humanities whose work is based in Southern Africa. The interests of group are diverse, but focus on the intersections between race, gender, sexuality, health, civil society, social inequality and political economy. The group has developed in conjunction with South Africa’s Civil Society Organizations and AIDS Treatment Access, a research project led by Dr. Ida Susser and funded through the National Science Foundation. Fall’s guest speakers included Nicoli Nattrass (Economics, University of Cape Town); Jonny Steinberg (Policy Analyst/Journalist, Open Society Fellow); Elke Zuern (Politics, Sarah Lawrence); and Norman Levy (Government, University of Western Cape). For further details please see http://socialjusticereadinggroup.wordpress.com/.
Gerald M. Oppenheimer
"Shattered Dreams?: An Oral History of the South African AIDS Epidemic"
March 18th 2010, Thursday, 6:15pm, Room C203
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.
Precirculated paper and suggested reading will be posted here shortly.
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.
Precirculated paper and suggested reading will be posted here shortly.
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).
Precirculated paper and suggested reading will be posted here shortly.
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.
Precirculated paper and suggested reading will be posted here shortly.
The Trauma and Testimony Seminar
Co-Chairs: Dennis Klein (Comparative Literature)
and Abraham Rubin (Comparative Literature)
The Trauma and Testimony Seminar seeks to redress regnant interpretations of survivor memoirs and testimonies which focus on resentment and vengeance. By illuminating elements of these narratives—such as incoherence, silence, and especially forgiveness—this group hopes to gain new perspectives on post-traumatic testimony in the “Age of Witness.” Fall speakers included JM Bernstein, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research and author of Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting, and Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and author of Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory.
This spring, in addition to Trauma and Testimony Seminar meetings, join us for
Conferences in the Humanities
The Poetics of Pain: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Representation
February 25th-26th, various locations.
Click here for more information.
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
Nancy K. Miller discusses 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, and author of, most recently, Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death.
Precirculated paper and suggested reading will be posted here shortly.
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.
Precirculated paper and suggested reading will be posted here shortly.
