Aesthetics of Amateurism: Deskilling

Faculty/Student co-chairs: Claire Bishop/Lindsay Caplan

Seminar meets several times a semester on Fridays only. For further information on guest speakers and required reading, please register above.

This seminar will focus on the tension between quality and equality in the arts, the relationship between art and democratized cultural production, and the disciplinary frames that manage these. What are the consequences of claiming that everyone is an artist? How have new technologies served to facilitate this claim, and how progressive are the results? Does the end of elitism necessarily mean the end of quality – or do we need to recalibrate its definition? The readings for each seminar will be brief; more essential is a familiarity with a list of works of art, music, dance and literature that permit a shared field of reference. Invited participants include: Branden Joseph (Art History, Columbia); Kenneth Goldsmith (Poet, Founding Editor, Ubuweb); Randy Martin (Sociology/Art and Public Policy, NYU).

Claire Bishop is Associate Professor of Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate Publishing, 2005) as well as an edited volume, Participation (MIT Press, 2006), and two influential essays—“Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” (October, 2004) and “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents” (Artforum, 2006). Her new book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship is forthcoming with Verso this spring.

Lindsay Caplan is a doctoral student in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

No current events.

Affect Theory

Faculty/Student co-chairs: John Brenkman/Zach Samalin

Seminar meets several times a semester. For further information on guest speakers and required reading, please register above.

In the 21st century, affect has emerged as a productive site of theoretical reflection and political concern. This seminar will focus on some of the classical philosophical and literary-critical texts on the emotions, passions, affect, and feeling. Sessions on Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Heidegger, and Raymond Williams will set the stage for a number of discussions and debates regarding the bearing of aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and political theory on “affect theory.” Invited participants include: Sharon Cameron (English, Johns Hopkins) and Alain Vanier (University of Paris VII, psychoanalyst).

John Brenkman is Distinguished Professor in the Ph.D. Programs of English and Comparative Literature and Chairman of the English Department at Baruch College. His publications include Culture and Domination (Cornell, 1987), Straight Male Modern: A Cultural Critique of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1993), and most recently The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought since September 11 (Princeton University Press, 2007).

Zach Samalin is a doctoral student in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY

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Caribbean Epistemologies

Faculty/Student co-chairs: Herman Bennett, Kelly Baker Josephs/Nicole Burrowes, Ryan Mann-Hamilton

Seminar meets several times a semester, primarily on Fridays. For further information on guest speakers and required reading, please register above.

How in the post-colonial present do we conceptualize the societies in the Caribbean? While explicitly a formulation about meaning in the post-colonial present, this question has a deep history concerning how writers, scholars, and artists conceive of the Caribbean. The Caribbean, of course, is a subjective category for its inhabitants and interlocutors, representing distinct, and at times contested categories of analysis. By bringing these meanings and their genealogies into relief and into conversation with one another, the organizers of the seminar point to a generative opportunity for advancing work on the Caribbean in general but in particular at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Invited participants for the fall include: Stephan Palmie, (Anthropology and of Social Sciences, U of Chicago) and Richard Turits (Latin American and Caribbean studies program, U of Michigan).

Herman Bennett is Professor of History in the Ph.D. Program at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His publications include Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Indiana University Press, 2009) and Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Indiana University Press, 2003).

Kelly Baker Josephs is Assistant Professor of English at York College, CUNY. She is currently working on a book entitled Defining Madnesses: Representations of Insanity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature.

Nicole Burrowes is a doctoral student in history at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Ryan Mann-Hamilton is a doctoral student in anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

No current events.

Digital Studies Seminar

Faculty/Student co-chairs: Stephen Brier/Chris Sula

Seminar meets several times a semester on Fridays only. For further information on guest speakers and required reading, please register above.

The Digital Studies Seminar (formerly the Digital Media Studies Group) brings together CUNY faculty members, researchers, and doctoral students from a number of arts and humanities disciplines 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, communicate and entertain ourselves in the U.S. and across the globe. Invited participants include: Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter (Computer Science and Philosophy, Brooklyn College); Matt Kirschenbaum (Electronic Literature Organization, University of Maryland) and Eben Moglen (Law, Columbia).

Stephen Brier is Senior Academic Technology Officer, Professor of Urban Education, and Coordinator of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy doctoral certificate program at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He also co-founded and co-directs the college’s New Media Lab. Brier was the founding director of CUNY’s American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning and co-created, co-produced and co-wrote the Project’s award-winning Who Built America? multimedia curriculum on U.S. history and co-conceived and co-produced The September 11 Digital Archive.

Chris Sula is a doctoral student in Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

No current events.

Dissections: Sex, Science, and Medicine in the Middle East and North Africa

Faculty/Student co-chairs: Beth Baron/Sara Pursley

Seminar meets several times a semester on Fridays only. For further information on guest speakers and required reading, please register above.

Attempts to understand the variant paths of modernity in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and the relationship of the region to Europe and the United States, have produced a new body of scholarship focusing on the history of sexuality, development, humanitarianism, colonial medicine, the environment, and related subjects. Intersecting with studies on religion and secularism, this seminar will discuss new sources of research, innovative readings of older ones, and useful theoretical approaches to sex, science, and medicine in MENA. Participants include: Marcia Inhorn (Anthropology and International Affairs, Yale); Alan Mikhail (History, Yale) and Judith Surkis (Social Science, Princeton IAS.

Beth Baron is Professor of History at City College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and the author of Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (University of California Press, 2005) and The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (Yale University Press, 1994), and co-edited Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (Yale University Press, 1991) and Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie (Mazda, 2000).

Sara Pursley is a doctoral student in Middle Eastern History at The Graduate Center, CUNY and the managing editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

No current events.

“Humanity,” International Law, and Third World Sovereignty

Faculty/Student co-chairs: Gary Wilder/Ahilan Kadirgamar, Amiel Melnick

Seminar meets several times a semester on Fridays only. For further information on guest speakers and required reading, please register above.

This seminar will explore the contested category of universal humanity and its tense relationship with ‘Third World’ sovereignty. We’re particularly interested in the politics of humanity in the context of international law: the seminar will take up the suggestion that both international law and conceptions of humanity were shaped in colonial encounters and continue to be bound up in imperial relationships. We will also consider the recent emergence of interventionist discourses like “responsibility to protect” and “failed states” alongside development discourses that continue to shape the meanings of ‘humanity,’ ‘humanitarian,’ and ‘humane.’ Invited participants include: Susan Buck-Morss (Pol Sci, Graduate Center, CUNY); Laurent Dubois (History & Romance Studies, Duke); Martti Koskenniemi (International Law, U of Helsinki); and Joseph Slaughter (Comp Lit, Columbia).

Gary Wilder is Professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005). His current research project, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, Utopia, examines post-World War II initiatives by African and Caribbean legislators to reconstitute France as a postcolonial federal democracy.

Ahilan Kadirgamar is a doctoral student in Anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Amiel Melnick is a doctoral student in Anthropology at Columbia University.

No current events.

NeuroCulture

Faculty/Student co-chairs: Victoria Pitts-Taylor/Rachel Liebert

Seminar meets several times a semester on Wednesdays only. For further information on guest speakers and required reading, please register above.

This seminar will bring non-scientists into critical engagement with neuroscientific knowledge in order to build interdisciplinary conversations about the brain, mind, body, and culture. Readings for the seminar will draw from philosophy, feminist theory, sociology, legal studies, political science, the arts, memoir and fiction as well as more traditionally brain-focused disciplines. Alongside the seminar, which will meet every three weeks, a NeuroCulture Lecture Series organized in conjunction with the Center for the Study of Women and Society will offer monthly lectures open to the public that echo the Seminar’s key themes. Speakers include: Siri Hustveldt (writer); Emily Martin (Anthropology, NYU); Elizabeth Wilson (Psychology, Emory University).

Victoria Pitts-Taylor is Professor of Sociology at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is also the Director and Coordinator of Women’s Studies at The Graduate Center. She is author of In the Flesh: the Cultural Politics of Body Modification (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2007), and Editor of The Cultural Encyclopedia of the Body (Greenwood Press, 2008). Among other articles, she recently published “The Plastic Brain: Neoliberalism and the Neuronal Self” in the journal Health. She is co-Editor of the journal Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ).

Rachel Liebert is a doctoral student in Social- Personality Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

No current events.

Possible Worlds, Alternative Futures: Utopianism in Theory and Practice

Faculty/Student co-chairs: Carrie Hintz/Kate Broad

Seminar meets several times a semester on Thursdays and Fridays. For further information on guest speakers and required reading, please register above.

This seminar will explore approaches to the ideal society in literature, film, art, politics, architecture, and history. Combining classic utopian theory, such as Bloch and Jameson, with recent writing which seeks to expand and test the boundaries of utopian studies, including digital utopianism, performative utopias, and attempts to modify the analysis of class through attention to race, gender, and sexuality, the seminar will explore key questions in a variety of disciplines and contexts about the limits of utopianism in a today’s world. Invited participants include: David Harvey (Anthropology, GC); Jose Esteban Munoz (Performance Studies, NYU); Jennifer Wagner–Lawlor (Women’s Studies and English, Penn State).

Carrie Hintz is Associate Professor of English at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of An Audience of One: Dorothy Osborne’s Letters to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 (University of Toronto Press, 2005) and the co-editor (with Elaine Ostry) of Utopian Writing for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2003). She is the current President of the Society for Utopian Studies.

Kate Broad is a doctoral student in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

No current events.

Re-orientale: Re-thinking Orientalism and Other Global Oddities

Faculty/Student co-chairs: Kyoo Lee/Fiona Lee and Jordan Pascoe

Seminar meets several times a semester on Fridays only. For further information on guest speakers and required reading, please register above.

Today, what do global cultures and philosophies look like from “other” points of view? What is post-Occidentalism, or what is Orientalism in this age of trans-national techno-capitalism? Focusing on the geo-cultural binary, “East/West” or “Orient/Occident,” which still stagnates most of socio-politically “deconstructive” or “re-territorialized” discourses such as post-colonialism, post-Anglo-Euro-centrism, post-democracy, post-racism, neo-conservatism, neo-Sino-centrism, etc., this seminar aims to foster cutting-edge cross-disciplinary dialogues that re-read and re-create the stories and theories about a world that consists of not only great walls but open gates. Invited participants include: Hamid Dabashi (Iranian Studies and Comp Lit, Columbia) and Gayatri Spivak (English and Comp Lit, Columbia).

Kyoo Lee is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, where she is also affiliated faculty for the Gender Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Justice Studies Programs. For the last few years, she has been working on a book on Cartesian alterities, which explores figures of the outside in the writings of Descartes such as blindness, dreams, and madness. As a Resident Mellon Fellow at The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY, she has started working on a book provisionally titled Familial Alterities.

Fiona Lee is a doctoral student in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Jordan Pascoe is a doctoral student in Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

No current events.

The Paradox of Sustainability

Faculty/Student co-chairs: Ashley Dawson, Melissa Checker/ Nick Gamso

Seminar meets several times a semester on Fridays only. For further information on guest speakers and required reading, please register above.

This seminar will explore sustainability as both myth and practice, investigating the specific ways that discourses and practices of sustainability map onto contemporary economics, politics, and cultures. In order to develop an in-depth understanding of the potential paradoxes in sustainability, we also will place the concept within an historic framework. Thus, seminar participants will question the degree to which models of sustainability are shaped by particular cultural perspectives at particular moments in history. Finally, we examine how an eco-centric emphasis on sustainability, combined with its marketization, erases and re-inscribes various inequalities. Invited participants include: Arun Agrawal (Natural Resources and Environment, Michigan); Amitav Gosh (philosopher/novelist); Rob Nixon (English, Wisconsin).

Ashley Dawson is Associate Professor of English at The Graduate Center, CUNY and Chair of the English Department at the College of Staten Island. He is the author of Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Michigan, 2007) and co-editor of three essay collections: Democracy, the State, and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge, 2009); Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (Michigan, 2009); and Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (Duke, 2007).

Melissa Checker is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College, CUNY. She is the author of Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town (NYU Press, 2005). Checker also co-edited (with Maggie Fishman) Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power and Public Life (Columbia University Press, 2004).

Nick Gamso is a doctoral student in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

No current events.

Undoing Marriage, Remaking the Social Contract

Faculty/Student co-chairs: Alyson Cole, Glenn Burger/ Karen Weiser

Seminar meets several times a semester on Fridays only. For further information on guest speakers and required reading, please register above.

The modern state has long sought to regulate domestic arrangements, from criminalizing miscegenation and polygamy, to assessing whether the privileges of citizenship should be extended through marriage. This seminar will engage with scholarly as well as creative work that disrupts this longstanding linkage of (heterosexual) marriage and the social contract whether by theorizing the social contract differently, or by attending to alternative modes of personal and communal association (both contemporary and historical). Invited participants include: Herman Bennett (History, Graduate Center, CUNY); Patricia Clough (Sociology, Graduate Center, CUNY); Ruth Karras (History, University of Minnesota); Tony Kushner (playwright); Sharon Marcus (English, Columbia); Jennifer Morgan (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU); Ruthann Robson (CUNY Law School).

Alyson Cole is Associate Professor of Political Science at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2006). Her articles have appeared in journals including Signs, American Studies, Feminist Studies, and the Michigan Law Review. Cole is currently working on a new book on the politics of affective labor.

Glenn Burger is Professor of English at Queens College and Professor of English and Medieval Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he also coordinates the Medieval Studies Certificate Program. He is the author of Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and is completing a book titled Conduct Becoming: Representing Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages.

Karen Weiser is a doctoral student in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

No current events.

What is Liberalism?

Faculty/Student co-chairs: Helena Rosenblatt, Richard Wolin/Debbie Charnoff

Seminar meets several times a semester on Wednesdays only. For further information on guest speakers and required reading, please register above.

Although liberalism is widely considered to be the dominant ideology of the west, there is no accepted definition of what it actually is. This seminar will bring together faculty and students working on the broad topic of liberalism. Through comparison with other concepts and their histories (such as democracy, republicanism, feminism, empire, religion, and human rights) we hope to arrive at some clarity on this key political concept. Invited participants include: Maurizio Viroli (Politics, Princeton); Samuel Moyn (History, Columbia); Matthew Specter (History, Central Conn. State U); as well as a fall conference which will include J.G.A Pocock (History, Johns Hopkins), Jonathan Israel (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) and Pierre Force (French, Columbia).

Helena Rosenblatt is Professor of History and Executive Officer of the History Program at The Graduate Center. She is the author of Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to The Social Contract, 1749-1762 (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2008). She is also the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Constant (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and a volume of essays on French liberalism (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History at The Graduate Center. He is the author of Heidegger’s Children (Princeton University Press, 2001), The Seduction of Unreason (Princeton University Press, 2004), and, most recently, The Wind From the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton University Press, 2010). He contributes frequently to The Nation, Dissent, and The New Republic.

Debbie Charnoff is a doctoral student in History at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

No current events.

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.

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