Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Save the Date!

Draper Beginning-of-Semester Party and Celebration of our Graduates

Friday, January 22nd
Draper Map Room, 14 University Place
Festivities will start at 5:00 PM

Join us to celebrate the beginning of a new semester and to recognize the achievements of our September and January graduates. Current students, graduates and their families, alumni, and faculty are encouraged to attend. Guests are welcome. Food and drink will be served.

RSVP to draper.program@nyu.edu or to 212-998-8070

STREB at the Olympics

Draper alumna Elizabeth Streb's STREB Extreme Action Company will be performing at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver as part of the Cultural Olympiad! This press release has more information on the Cultural Olympiad and the other artists who will be performing at that festival.

If you'd like to see the company getting ready for Vancouver, you can attend their rehearsals, which are always open to the public. As their newsletter says, "We invite you to come watch Elizabeth and the company work any time!" Here are their upcoming rehearsal dates:

Company Rehearsal
11:30-3:30pm
December 22nd, 23rd, 29th and 30th
January 5th-8th and 11th-14th

Lots more info on STREB can be found on their website. Congratulations, Elizabeth Streb and company!

SUNY Cycles Conference Call for Papers Extended

Dear Students,

On behalf of all the organizers of the Women's & Gender Studies 3rd Annual Graduate Conference, I'm sending out our revised Call for Papers with the extended deadline of January 15. We've been receiving such interesting things that we've decided to extend our deadline and get even more! Please tell your friends, colleagues, and/or departments about the new deadline in case anyone couldn't make the first one. You'll find the new CFP attached; feel free to send it out and help spread the word!

We're looking forward to another great conference this year (and the announcement of a fantastic keynote)! Feel free to contact us at wstconf@gmail.com if you have any questions at all.

Thank You,

Dean Allbritton, Kristin Hole, Briana Martino & Betsy Shapiro
CYCLES Conference
Women's & Gender Studies
SUNY Stony Brook

----------

CYCLES
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Stony Brook University’s Manhattan Campus

CALL FOR PAPERS EXTENDED

Please email your 250-word abstract by January 15, 2009 to <wstconf@gmail.com>

Life is shaped by cycles. From patterns of migration and biological processes to the recycling of ideas and objects in mass culture, forms of re-circulation define our experiences. Cycles explores reiterations of gender categories, social movements, as well as what it might mean to have a temporality opposed to a teleological notion of history. This conference provides a critical space to map the terrain of the cycle by approaching it from various theoretical, analytic, and disciplinary positions of feminism. How might this process inform science, visual culture, music, and literature? Furthermore, can cycles as repetitions help us to negotiate the past by working through the traumas and mistakes of history? Or are we destined to repeat the past without the possibility of meaningful change?

This conference aims to generate an interdisciplinary and critical discussion about how gender and sexuality relate to the concept of the cycle. Papers are invited from all disciplines and theoretical positions. Some suggested topics include but are not limited to:

• Feminist and/or queer temporalities
• Trauma, repetition, and death
• Social movements and political change
• Technologies of reproduction
• Theorizing menstruation in literature and film
• Visual or textual strategies of repetition as an aesthetic or cultural politics
• The bicycle as an instrument of women’s liberation
• Migrations and geo-spatial movements
• Cycles of narrative: series, adaptations, remakes

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Party tomorrow!

Please find below a friendly reminder for Draper's End of the semester party tomorrow evening. We hope to see you there!

***

Draper's End of Semester Party
Thursday, December 17th
5:00 - 7:00 PM
Draper Map Room
(14 University Place, 1st Floor)

Monday, December 14, 2009

Verse Chorus Reading at KGB Bar feat. Yvonne Garrett, Tomorrow, 12/15

Head to the KGB Bar tomorrow, Tuesday, December 15th from 7:00 - 9:00 PM for a Verse Chorus reading featuring Draper student Yvonne Garrett!

More information is available on the KGB Web site:
http://kgbbar.com/calendar/events/verse_chorus_reading/

FINAL REMINDER! Theses due this Wednesday, December 16th

Please be reminded that Draper students who intend to graduate this coming January will need to submit their completed and approved Master's theses to Draper no later than Wednesday, December 16th. Any theses received after 6:00 PM on December 16th will be held over for May graduation. There will be no exceptions.

For more information on thesis guidelines, please see Draper's Web site, here: http://www.draper.fas.nyu.edu/object/draper.program.thesisguidelines.html

All thesis related forms--including a sample cover page and second reader sheets--can also be downloaded from the Draper website, here: http://www.draper.fas.nyu.edu/page/forms

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Call for papers - Bard Graduate Center "Materials of Persuasion"

Materials of Persuasion
Bard Graduate Center, New York
April 23, 2010


Few persons are capable of being convinced; the majority allow themselves to be persuaded.
Goethe

I’m in the persuasion business, and frankly I’m disappointed by your presentation.
Peggy Olson, Mad Men

Critics passing judgment, clergy seeking converts, advertisers selling products, and politicians running for office are all in the persuasion business. Persuasion is the key to the art of rhetoric, but there has always been a material dimension to persuasion as well.

Objects are vehicles of persuasion. We are persuaded to purchase and consume objects, and we use them to persuade others, to mediate the identities we put forth, and our interactions with each other. The roles of persuasive objects change over time as they pass from hand to hand. The mutable relationships between material objects, people, and desire are powerful, tantalizing subjects of study. So how does persuasion factor into these fluid equations? Makers, buyers, and users all have unique perspectives on the art of persuasion, as well as unspoken intentions that are constantly at work beneath the surface. Some of these intentions may be deceptive – persuasion can have a dark side. Finally, persuasion rests upon various types of evidence – what must we see in order to believe?

We invite scholars from diverse fields to explore these issues– come, and be persuasive.

  • Topics may include but are not limited to:
  • Marketing, advertising, and the mechanics of consumer desire.
  • Branding and the elevation of the status symbol: What’s in a name?
  • The continuum of authenticity: Influences, appropriations, copies, knock-offs and forgeries.
  • Persuasive scholarship: methodologies, authorial tone, and the use of revealed/suppressed information.
  • Surface treatments: Gilding, varnishing, veneering, trompe l’oeil and faux materiality.
  • The toolbox of persuasion: Emotion, rationalism, the hard sell, manipulation, and deceit.

The conference will take place on April 23, 2010, at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Those interested in submitting papers for consideration should contact gradsymp@bgc.bard.edu. Please include the title and a 250-word abstract of your paper topic, as well as a CV that includes your contact information and email address. Please send your submission no later than Friday, January 29, 2010. Accepted speakers will be notified in February.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Call for Papers: Disagreement (NYU Comparative Literature Grad Conference) Abstracts due 1/15

Disagreement:
Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference at New York University
Spring 2010

March 5-6, 2010

Can we disagree? The question forces you to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ to commit to one path or the other. Perhaps it even forces you to choose your allies, to prepare for combat.

If we can disagree, how do we do this? Why the desire to disagree in the first place? This questioning asks us to examine the epistemological and material conditions of disagreement; the possibility of dialogue and understanding; the relationship between eristic and dialectic; the role and function of polemos; and the relation between negation, negativity, difference and disagreement.

What forms, moreover, does disagreement take within literary texts? How might literature subvert, use, or propagate ideology? In view of deconstructionist readings that present a text in disagreement with itself, what is the connection between the rhetorics and the materiality of disagreement? As for translation, does it assume an incompatibility between texts that can be termed disagreement?

In the context of academic practices, the issue of disagreement concerns the ethos and the methodology of a community of researchers whose discussions operate according to different models of argumentation. This questioning opens up the possibility of a debate between different disciplines and approaches: for example, how does the model of scientific falsification relate to more interpretive paradigms? How do the forms of disagreement in literary texts compare to the forms it takes in art, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences?

This discussion may also lead us into the political dimensions of disagreement: violence as a form of disagreement; the contradictions inherent in theories of social contract; the figure of authority and tradition; and the moral demand to disagree in the public sphere. Does disagreement, an allegedly belligerent, disruptive force, play a role in the formation of communities? How does this role agree with the community-building functions of consensus?

Finally, does the very possibility of disagreement lead us to an unspoken universality that transcends (or destroys) language games, the linguistic community, and even language itself?

Being together and being against each other–if these are the two modes of disagreement–we invite you to come and disagree with us. Submissions from any discipline on all possible permutations of disagreement are welcome.

300 word abstracts due 01/15/2010 to disagreement.NYU@gmail.com. Please visit our website, http://disagreement.wordpress.com, for more information.

Student presentations from Brathwaite's Fall 2009 sycoraX Aesthetics course

Featuring Draper students Faith Merino-Davies, Michael Marra, Charlotte Kelly, and Tiffany Vaughan!

How does sycoraX see b(l)ack?

Presentations by Students of “Caribbean Literature: sycoraX Aesthetics” (Fall 2009)
taught by Prof. Kamau Brathwaite

Friday, December 11, '09
Silver Center Rm 705

Schedule
10:00am The theory/thesis/journey - Faith Merino-Davies and Alake Pilgrim
11:00am Vocabulary, iconography & method - Ian Foster and Ayinde Jean-Baptiste
12:00pm MR and the Academy - Aika Masomi Swai

2:00pm The historical and native narrative - Michael Marra
3:00pm Critique of the method - Jane Bolin and Marlon Burgess
4:00pm Critique of the word, critique of the course - Charlotte Kelly and Julia Haav

5:00pm The ideal entero: the interdisciplinary basis of the course - Brendan
Wattenberg, Tiffany Vaughan, Sachiko Koto

Friday, December 4, 2009

Thesis submission deadline for January grads: December 16th

Please be reminded that Draper students who intend to graduate this coming January will need to submit their completed and approved Master's theses to Draper no later than Wednesday, December 16th. Any theses received after 6:00 PM on December 16th will be held over for May graduation. There will be no exceptions.

For more information on thesis guidelines, please see Draper's Web site, here: http://www.draper.fas.nyu.edu/object/draper.program.thesisguidelines.html

All thesis related forms--including a sample cover page and second reader sheets--can also be downloaded from the Draper website, here: http://www.draper.fas.nyu.edu/page/forms

Thursday, December 3, 2009

The New York University

Colloquium in American Literature and Culture

presents

"Transatlantic Revision and American Literary History: The London Editions of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper”

Joseph Rezek, UCLA

and

"This is the Way the World Ends: Herman Melville and the Invention of an African Iago"

Miles P. Grier, New York University

Wednesday, 9 December

6:00 p.m.

13-19 University Place, room 222

New York University

All are welcome!

Refreshments will be served.

Joseph Rezek received his PhD in English from University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Miles Grier is a PhD Candidate in American Studies at New York University.

For more information: www.nyucalc.com

The final NYU Comp Lit Horizons of Translation Series lecture will be TONIGHT, Thursday, December 3.

William Granara

Harvard University

(12/3 @ 6:00)

"Translation, Cultural Conflict, and the Literary Text"

Deutsches Haus. 42 Washington Mews

Reception to follow!

Prof. Granara teaches Arabic language and literature and directs the Arabic language program at Harvard University. He studied Arabic at Georgetown University and received his PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania . He is the former executive director of the Center for Arabic Study at the American University in Cairo and the former director of the Arabic Field School of the U.S. Department of State in Tunis , Tunisia . He has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and North Africa . Dr. Granara specializes in the history and culture of Muslim Sicily. He has written on cross-cultural encounters between Islam and Christendom throughout the Middle Ages, as well as the poetry of Ibn Hamdis , Sicily 's most celebrated Arab poet. His study of "Ibn Hamdis and the Poetics of Exile" was published in the 1998 issue of Edebiyaat. In addition, he lectures and writes on contemporary Arabic literature and has published translations of Egyptian and North African fiction. His translation into English of the Algerian Arabic novel, The Earthquake, was published in March, 2000. His work on literary criticism focuses on postcolonialism and cross cultural poetics.





Guest entry by Rebecca Colesworthy, Literary Cultures

A tenured professor and college administrator for whose work I have great respect recently told me that “a few years ago everybody was interested in the literary.” Such, she suggested, was no longer the case. Nowadays “objects” and “things” are all the rage. Her intention in remarking the declining preoccupation with “the literary” across the humanities was benevolent. Well aware that my current academic post is not tenure-track, she was trying to help me to determine how best to frame and, indeed, how to “sell” my work when applying for jobs in the future.

Still, she is not alone in marking such a sea change. In a recent issue of PMLA, the queer theorist and modernist studies scholar Heather Love observed a widespread shift from interest in “the discursive” to interest in “the affective.” It would be wrong to suggest that the turn to affect (or the “affective turn,” to cite the title of a 2007 anthology) is either tantamount or reducible to the turn to the object. Nevertheless, it seems fair to suggest that they do coincide in ways both temporal and conceptual. (Note the title of Draper’s own topics in gender politics course, “Objects of Affection.”) As someone who works on notions of “the gift” and “generosity” in particular and notions of “the social” in general – the subtitle of The Affective Turn is Theorizing the Social – I would promptly count myself among those invested in conceptualizing both affect and things. But what is one to do when the primary “things” on which one works are literary?

This question is in part a pragmatic one. How does one pursue a career in literary studies and encourage one’s students to do the same when “the literary” is no longer a hot commodity? In using such economic rhetoric I do not mean to suggest that the turn away from discursive analysis is motivated by interest rather than intellectual and (in some cases) political concerns, but simply to acknowledge the fact that academia is a business even if it is – thankfully – not only that.

Yet this question also has conceptual and even political valences for me.

In my course this semester, Introduction to Literary Cultures I, my students and I read and discuss theorists from a range of disciplines who figure culture as a “literary” phenomenon. What exactly this means and the ramifications of such a presupposition vary from one theorist to the next. Certainly we might question the extent to which “our” culture could be called “literary,” whether that term is taken to connote a certain Arnoldian notion of high culture or a more generalized Derridean notion of “textuality.” Admittedly, there is something counterintuitive about the claim that contemporary life is not “textual,” saturated as it is with text messages, tweets, facebook updates, and blog entries like this one. Yet in my view the abundance of information and communication and the technologies that enable them hardly fosters textual engagement of either the critical or the belletristic variety.

In teaching, I cannot help but feel a certain disjunction between the linguistically oriented theories we read and discuss and the world outside the classroom. My response to this disjunction varies. I wonder, isn’t such a disjunction the very point of the classroom, a space that Ellen Rooney provocatively terms a “semi-private room”? Shouldn’t it and the space and time it affords for reflection on such outmoded objects as literature be preserved?

But I also remain convinced that the literary and the discursive remain relevant – and not only because I and many of my students work on literature. I could say a lot about this. For example, the Lacanian in me worries that the turn away from the literary is a foreboding sign of the times, a symptom of the widespread repression of the signifier – in all its imperfection – in an era ruled (as Michel Foucault would also have it) by a misbegotten wish for total knowledge. Setting such rarefied terminology aside, we might also ask in a much more general way: what are the potential costs of this turn away from the literary (and the textual, the discursive, the linguistic, and so on)?

In re-reading Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s 1986 essay “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes” for class this week, I was reminded of what a powerful tool literary criticism can be in enabling us to expose the ways in which the literary has been marshaled in the service of maintaining injustice and inequality. Gates writes: “The growth of canonical national literatures was coterminous with the shared assumption of intellectuals that race was a ‘thing,’ an ineffaceable quantity, which irresistibly determined the shape and contour of human feeling as surely as it did the shape and contour of human anatomy” (3). Race, Gates persuasively argues, is not a “thing,” but a “trope” (5). Even if we wouldn’t ascribe the same authority to national literatures today we might still ask how the literary is put to use for various political and economic ends. What tropes are treated as if they were things? How do we distinguish between tropes and things? At what cost do we confuse them?

At stake in these questions is not only a project of critique and demystification, but also our confrontation with the limits of what “we” – that is to say, literary critics – do. Thus while I would want to insist on the importance of distinguishing between the textual and the material for myriad reasons, I would also suggest that the task of what Gayatri Spivak called “reading the world” twenty years ago is far from finished.

So, what is a literary critic to do? I hope, a lot.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Museum of Chinese in America Architectural Design Tour & Brown Bag Lunch: Friday, Dec. 4

Museum of Chinese in America
Exhibit and Architectural Design Tour & Brown Bag Lunch
Friday December 4, 12:00-2:00pm
Meet at MOCA- 215 Centre Street- at noon

The Archives and Public History Brown Bag Lunch Series presents the final brown bag for the semester this Friday, December 4. This session will feature a tour of the Museum of Chinese in America led by MOCA staff. The tour will be followed by an open question and answer session. Founded in 1980, the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) is dedicated to preserving and presenting the history, heritage, culture and diverse experiences of people of Chinese descent in the United States. The greatly expanded MOCA at 215 Centre Street is a national home for the precious narratives of diverse Chinese American communities, and strives to be a model among interactive museums.

Please RSVP to Keara Duggan kearadugganATgmailDOTcom by Thursday, December 3.

Guest post part two, by Rick Halmo

If you missed it, part one of Rick's account of his recent travel was posted on this blog on Nov. 25th. Enjoy!

Jerusalem: The Holy City


I had the opportunity to spend a full day in Jerusalem, although given how much Jerusalem has to offer for a history buff like me one day was not enough in this intriguing city. The security presence was apparent everywhere once we entered the city limits. Coming off the hour-long bus ride from Tel Aviv we were immediately subjected to a security screening into the bus depot/full-scale mall. In lieu of describing the history of the city, I think it is more interesting to discuss the manifestations of “modernity” that have been attempted in the “Holy City,” particularly in the realm of architecture and infrastructure.

One of the more astounding things I had learned during my trip was that the city of Jerusalem has a law stating that anyone wishing to put up a building within the city limits could do so but if they hit an archeological “dig” site that company would have to stop its construction and finance the remainder of the dig. Also, the new buildings would have to be built with the same old-looking stone with which the rest of the area is built. What an interesting roadblock to future development and construction. Only currently is Jerusalem putting in an aboveground rail line (think of the T train in Boston’s suburbs) through the city, and the project has apparently taken a long time to develop.

As I was leaving Jerusalem, I had the sense that this city had trapped itself in the past. Proud of its immense history, I felt that it attempted to retain that history by keeping the city’s entire character contained in the past as well, as if its incredible history could not stand on its own. More likely, perhaps it was just that the city’s inhabitants yearned for the past, a point that gains even more credibility when you consider their reaction to a place like Tel Aviv.

Tel Aviv: Sin City

Tel Aviv is your standard beach city. Its characteristics mirror that of other beach cities that one can think of; the city is relatively more progressive than the rest of the territory, people regularly walk around in bathing suits, and there are abundant clubs and bars that you certainly would not see in other parts of the country like Jerusalem. Tel Aviv has corporate parks and a highly developed, futuristic downtown. Balancing this modern flare, there are a plethora of quaint marketplaces where bargaining is also part of the culture. Around the city there are a number of large parks and exercising areas, and while one may not feel alien in this area coming from America, the feeling of separation between Tel Aviv and the rest of Israel seemed quite palpable.

One of the more incredible things I picked up during my trip to Israel was a free magazine in the Jerusalem tourist headquarters. It was from the “TimeOut” publishing group (from “TimeOut New York”) and they had a magazine cover with the headline “JRS vs. TLV: Holy City vs. Sin City.” Two of their comparisons will do just fine to show how the area views these two distinct cities.

Under the comparison of “Architectural Trademark,” Jerusalem’s section describes, “Jerusalem stone and ancient ruins,” while Tel Aviv’s states that they have, “Bauhaus alongside indistinct contemporary architecture.” In the “religion” comparison, Jerusalem is said to be a place where “Judaism, Christianity and Islam are practiced in synagogues, churches and mosques, built in the name of God, Jesus and Allah, respectively,” while Tel Aviv’s religion is “Hedonism. Practiced in bars and nightclubs. God is a DJ.” The comparisons seem to reflect a kind of distaste for the modern and a preference for the past. Given the history of this region, it is hard for me to blame the inhabitants of the region for that mentality. Even so, I felt my experience of these two cities to be enhanced by experiencing the other one.

As you can see, a weeklong trip provided a lot of memories and lessons that one can only get by living what they learn in class. The trip gave me a better perspective not only on what I am learning in my classes, but also on the way in which people interact in other societies. I look forward to applying what I learned here to future scholarship and future travels.

Special “Thank you” to my professors, Mrinalini Rajagopalan and Maia Ramnath, for being so supportive of my travels to this incredible area.
The Draper Student Organization invites you to a colloquium on SILENCE

with presentations by


Rhyannon Rodriguez
“Silence & the Sound of Difference: The Narrative Qualities of Silence in Horror Cinema”

Jason Slaughter
“Three Unusual Instances of Silence in Music”

Alana Smith
“Silence as Violence – Muting Politics in Humanitarian Discourse”

Tamara Day
“The Powers of Silence in Wide Sargasso Sea”

Friday 11 December 2009 6:30 pm in the Draper Map Room


Refreshments will be provided.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Guest post by Draper student Rick Halmo

Note: Rick has so much to tell about his trip that we'll be posting in two parts: Cairo today and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv after the break. Happy Thanksgiving weekend, everyone.

My Travels To Cairo, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: The Story of the Ancient City, the Holy City, and Sin City

I recently returned from a Middle East excursion to the cities of Cairo, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Reflecting upon my experiences, I find that only now am I able to appreciate just how different these cities were. The trip added a new dimension to my studies in global history and urban modernities; it put our theoretical studies in the classroom into the practical, and thus supplemented what I had been studying all semester.

Cairo: The Ancient City

A majority of my time during the trip was spent in Cairo, a very dense city (just shy of 82,000 people/sq. mile) that seamlessly blends together its ancient history with modern aspects of a global city. The pyramids of Giza, a town right on the outskirts of Cairo, can be easily seen from the Nile River, which is lined with rows of high-rise buildings, expensive hotels, and lavish riverboat cruises. The riverboat cruises in and of themselves represent the duality of this city; on a boat that makes the Titanic look modest, the entertainment for the night consisted of belly dancing and a whirling dervish. For tourists, this city is open for business, and there is no greater proof of this than the Khan El Khalili marketplace in downtown Cairo.

The Khan El Khalili is a famous marketplace frequented by visitors because of its abundance of (relatively) cheap goods, as well as great coffee shops and eateries. It embodies the density of the city – very tight alleys lined with merchants looking to sell you everything they have – and it was a lot of fun to negotiate prices with the merchants to see how low they would go. There were so many tourists that our ability to negotiate prices to what they should actually cost was compromised (because the merchant could easily go find someone who would pay four times what we would pay) but it was still a vibrant atmosphere and it can be quite fun if you enjoy arguing with a stranger. The exchange rate is roughly 5 Egyptian pounds : 1 American dollar, but the real exchange rate (i.e. the purchasing power of 1 American dollar) is about 8 or 9 Egyptian pounds : 1 American dollar. I think this is important for any person who wishes to go to Cairo to know, because the merchants in Khan El Khalili can be tough, and it’s nice to know how far your money can go. Nonetheless, the bargaining is part of the culture, so that particular marketplace is not just for buying souvenirs to bring home but rather is a Cairo experience worth having.

There seemed to be a part of Cairo that was reserved for tourists, and a part reserved for Egyptians. The separation that took place between tourists and the locals reminded me somewhat of Times Square in a way; the locals could go to the tourist destinations (especially the Khan El Khalili marketplace) but why would they do that when it is cheaper to go to a less tourist-populated area (Islamic Cairo or the Village in NYC)? In this comparison I wish to show that the separation of locals and tourists was not that of force, but rather of choice.

I decided to venture off of the tourist path and go see what the more “real” Cairo was like. I was rewarded well for my choice. Once off the beaten trail in Cairo, I found the people to be incredibly nice and open to Americans. I did not know until I arrived in Cairo that I looked Egyptian, but my blonde-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend gave us away as non-locals. Though initially nervous of this fact, the people we met in Islamic Cairo – a part of the city that is no more “Islamic” than any other part, but where very few tourists go for some reason – were so kind and welcoming that I quickly put my guard down.

We ended up meeting a gentleman named Ayman who asked us to join him in his quilt and bag shop for tea. “Conversation and laughter is free,” he said, obviously aware of the people in the tourist areas known as “touts” who offer to lead you around town and then afterwards ask you for money. Ayman was one of the nicest people I have ever met. We ended up sitting with him and talking for two hours until I informed him I had promised a merchant in Khan El Khalili that I would watch the Egypt/Algerian soccer match with him. “Watch it with us!” Ayman said glowingly. I wondered initially who “us” was exactly, and then quickly realized that he was referring to the entire street of people! We were escorted down the street and found roughly 100 chairs, a large sheet and a projector that was broadcasting the game for the neighborhood. Once the chairs were full, the crowd ended up just standing wherever they could see the match. What a sense of community and national pride one could feel amidst this block in the middle of Cairo! It was almost overwhelming, but as a sports fan I was right in the middle of it.

We watched the match (and celebrated the victory, as if we were the reason they won) with Ayman and company, and after the match he invited us to a local caf̩ for food and drinks. He was so kind to us, and he did it in exchange for only our friendship. There was such a stark contrast between the Egyptians we had met in the tourist areas Рaggressive to make a sale and belligerent at times Рand the Egyptians we had met in Islamic Cairo and other less touristy places. We made it a point to avoid tourist places the rest of the time there. The city on the whole was a fantastic experience I would love to go back, equipped now with lessons learned from my first time there.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Party at Draper!

Draper will be throwing a party for students, faculty, and staff to celebrate the end of this semester. We hope you can join us!

Thursday, December 17th
5:00 p.m.
Draper Map Room

There will be things to nibble and imbibe and much good cheer. We look forward to seeing you and wish you a great end to your semester.

Best,
Robin, Robert, Larissa, and Georgia

Monday, November 23, 2009

Critical Reflections on "Intersectionality"

SCA Speaker Series Presents:

Two Decades & Counting: Critical Reflections on "Intersectionality"
A Roundtable Discussion

With:
Kimberle Crenshaw, Columbia University and UCLA
Lisa Duggan, NYU
Karen Shimakawa, NYU
Chandan Reddy, University of Washington


DECEMBER 1, 2009
4:00 - 6:00 pm
20 Cooper Square, 4th Fl


This forum commemorates the 20th anniversary of the enunciation and analysis of “intersectionality” by legal theorist Kimberlé W. Crenshaw in her path-breaking essays, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” (1991). Panelists explore the ongoing analytic purchase of “intersectionality” for anti-racist social critique and legal activism and also ask how the term has been transformed as it travels across different historical and disciplinary contexts.

Kimberlé Crenshaw teaches Civil Rights and other courses in critical race studies and constitutional law. Her primary scholarly interests center around race and the law, and she was a founder and has been a leader in the intellectual movement called Critical Race Theory. She now splits her time each year between UCLA and the Columbia School of Law. Professor Crenshaw's publications include Critical Race Theory (edited by Crenshaw, et al., 1995) and Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment (with Matsuda, et al., 1993). In 2007, she was nominated the Fulbright Chair for Latin America in Brazil. In 2008, she was a fellow at the Center of Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford. Professor Crenshaw is the co-founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum, a think tank that works to bridge the gap between scholarly research, public discourse and public policy related to inequality, discrimination and injustice.

Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. She is the author of Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy and Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity, co-author with Nan Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, and co-editor with Lauren Berlant of Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest.

Karen Shimakawa is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at NYU. She is the author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage and co-editor (with Kandice Chuh) of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora. Her current project, titled Somatic Citizenship, focuses on the construction and maintenance of bodily regimes of cultural identification and her research and teaching interests include critical race theory, law and performance, and Asian American Jurisprudence.

Chandan Reddy is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of a number of articles on the topic of race, sexuality and late capitalism. He is currently at work on a forthcoming book entitled: A Freedom with Violence: Trajectories of US Modernity as a Politics of Race.

Thanks to our co-sponsors:
American Studies Program
Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, and
the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality

Friday, November 20, 2009

GSAS Master's College End of Semester Toast, 12/2

GSAS' Master's College extends its invitation to you for its End of Semester Toast on Wednesday, December 2nd celebrating the achievements of Master's students throughout GSAS. This event will take place from 4:30 - 6:30 PM at the NYU Torch Club and hors d'oeuvres and beverages will be served. They will also be accepting voluntary donations at the door for the NYU Holiday Food Drive. All varieties of canned food will be gratefully accepted.

If you'd like to attend this event, please RSVP at Gsas.masterscollege.rsvp@nyu.edu for the event by Monday, November 30th.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Call for Papers: Women's and Gender Studies Conference, Stony Brook Manhattan (Submissions Due 12/15)

Dear Graduate Students,

The Stony Brook Women's and Gender Studies Program is pleased to announce its Third Annual Women's and Gender Studies Graduate Conference, to be held on Saturday March 13th, 2010 at the Stony Brook Manhattan Campus. This conference aims to facilitate academic dialogue between disciplines, and to open a space for us to share and exchange feedback on on a wide range of student work. After two successful conferences in previous years, we are excited to invite graduate students from a variety of disciplines and theoretical positions to submit original papers so that we may again engage each other in invigorating discussion.

Attached please find our Call for Papers that includes a description of the conference topic and submission information. The deadline for submissions is December 15th, 2009.

Please feel free to direct any questions or comments to wstconf@gmail.com.
Sincerely,
Your conference organizers,
Dean Albritton, Kristin Hole, Briana Martino, Betsy Shapiro

Women's and Gender Studies
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY

************

The Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Stony Brook University Announces its 3rd Annual Graduate Student Conference

CYCLES
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Stony Brook University’s Manhattan Campus

CALL FOR PAPERS
Please email your 250-word abstract by December 15, 2009 to: wstconf@gmail.com

Life is shaped by cycles. From patterns of migration and biological processes to the recycling of ideas and objects in mass culture, forms of re-circulation define our experiences. Cycles explores reiterations of gender categories, social movements, as well as what it might mean to have a temporality opposed to a teleological notion of history. This conference provides a critical space to map the terrain of the cycle by approaching it from various theoretical, analytic, and disciplinary positions of feminism. How might this process inform science, visual culture, music, and literature? Furthermore, can cycles as repetitions help us to negotiate the past by working through the traumas and mistakes of history? Or are we destined to repeat the past without the possibility of meaningful change?

This conference aims to generate an interdisciplinary and critical discussion about how gender and sexuality relate to the concept of the cycle. Papers are invited from all disciplines and theoretical positions. Some suggested topics include but are not limited to:

๏ Feminist and/or queer temporalities
๏ Trauma, repetition, and death
๏ Social movements and political change
๏ Technologies of reproduction
๏ Theorizing menstruation in literature and film
๏ Visual or textual strategies of repetition as an aesthetic or cultural politics
๏ The bicycle as an instrument of women’s liberation
๏ Migrations and geo-spatial movements
๏ Cycles of narrative: series, adaptations, remakes



Guest entry by Nina Hien, Art Worlds

SEMINARRATING
Serial Memories of Seminars
[part 1]

The word seminar comes from the term seminarium or “seed plot”. Add a “y” and you have “seminary”, which attaches a religious institutional connotation to it. Discipline, dissemination, and devotion are clearly written into the success of this process of the germination and cultivation of knowledge. Like gardening, it is a hands-on pursuit that ideally relies on communal efforts. Someone lays out the plot with the intention of inseminating and reproducing his ideas. I say “his” because this is the role of the professor, who, by no small note, has commonly been gendered as male through these seminal terms. But the growth of the patch also falls into the dutiful hands of the group, the students, who are supposed to reap the greatest amount of fruits from the harvest. Beyond the roots of patriarchy and agriculturing found at the bottom of the concept of the seminar, a utopian strain seems also to be grafted onto it. (But perhaps I am reading these qualities into the practice because I spent so many years at Cornell University—a land-grant institution in a rural upstate farming community that had been founded by a former Quaker.)

With all that in mind, even with all of the variations that a seminar can take due to diverse subject matter, disciplinary modes, institutional contexts, and individual pedagogical styles and professorial personalities, it seems that perhaps some tiny seedlings of insight about them can be culled from a private conservatory filled with snaps and shoots of memories from the more than two decades in which I was a participant and witness in university seminars (both as a student and as a teacher). With the following recollections, I have no intention of asserting any grand, generalized or scientific claims about the current state of “the seminar”. However, from these seminal fragments (and their contexts) perhaps this rarefied form of language and interaction and academic construct can be demystified a speck, which could then be particularly relevant to us here at the Draper, a program based on seminar learning and positioned on the ground and in the air between the more square plots of traditional disciplines.

The Seminar of the Confusion of Tongues (tied or babbling), circa late 1980s at The University of Missouri Journalism School—Columbia, MO

During this period, two earth-shattering shifts that would change our perception of the world as we knew it were underway. The first could be spotted through what turned out to be the tragic fate of an innovative professor at the J-School who had been formulating ideas about what he called, “The Knowledge Tablet”. Conceiving this to be the ultimate tool in which anyone could punch in a question and get spit out an answer, his research was likely blown to bits as soon as the World Wide Web and Google—the ultimate knowledge tablet—exploded onto the scene a few years later. The second shift could be marked when the multi-cultural management program at the school published its "Dictionary of Cautionary Words and Phrases"—a list of politically incorrect words. The student reporters working at the J-School newspaper—one of the two daily papers in the city—could no longer use terms like “Dutch-treat”, “illegal aliens” and “third-world countries” in their articles. “Black”, once an acceptable word to identify an “African-American” person, was also to be avoided for that objective. Needless to say, these constrictions resulted in much convoluted and repressed thought within an enterprise in which clarity and concision are major goals. They were also the cause of many daily practical blunders. But at play as well at this point when racial and ethnic categories were being reconfigured through a strong wave of identity politics, were the J-School’s own black-and-white categorical binaries and hierarchies that transcended skin color. People were either pegged as innate “word people” or “picture people”. I believed that the basic word-image distinction was ludicrous because in my experience as a writer, sights and visual senses informed the images that were used to produce good writing.

So in this technologically transforming, racially charged and dichotomizing environment, I enrolled in a seminar on cross-cultural mass media. The teacher, who had a doctorate in communication studies, was a new professor (and was, if not the first “black” female professor in the history of the program, definitely the first “African-American” woman faculty member). The course content included press systems in “developing countries” and interrogated the strategic power maneuvers and values that determine what becomes newsworthy in the United States. This was a loaded focus because it directly considered “racial” and “minority” injustices as well as “ethnic” and “cultural” “issues”. The discussions throughout the semester were pretty stilted and stifled with only certain students speaking up, and others remaining silent. Attempting to explain this awkward imbalance, the professor remarked that the class was comprised of two kinds of people—adding to the order a new set of binaries, which resonated with the word/picture one.

The broadcast journalists (the image people) were articulate, chatty, expressive, and could work magic with surfaces. The print journalists (the text people)—and I was in this print-concentration camp—were reticent, but better at writing papers and achieving depth. As much as I hated tags, there did seem to be some truth to these. I then started to think that what may have actually been squelching the speech of some students had a lot to do with their anxiety about using the wrong terms and language, especially when discussing these sensitive topics with an African-American professor in this awkward environment of political correctness. And perhaps the text folks were more easily susceptible because of their attachment to word craft, which clearly affected newspapers more than televisions. The broadcasters were not only more comfortable with different modes of self-presentation, but they were taught to speak in sound bytes and be led by the lines of teleprompters. They also dealt with a much more glossy and general form of news, much of which they hadn’t written themselves. Beyond that, some of them had been instructed in public speaking and had developed stellar verbal gate-keeping skills so they were more adept at thinking appropriately in public spheres.

But through these apparent differences, I began also to contemplate the diverse ways and speeds at which individual people acquire knowledge, process information and then articulate it. And also, how aptitude is largely conditioned by professional background and training, as well as the circulating political ideologies, the media technologies already on the table, and the new media impulses coursing throughout the air. At that point, I imagined being a teacher who would bring forms of visual media into active play in the seminar—on the one hand to create engaged discussions, and on the other, to observe the relationships between visual, verbal and textual content and communication. (I knew there would never be an answer to these questions on any old Knowledge Tablet.)

So, in this land located on the edge of the fertile Missouri River bottoms, the seeds of experimentation with vision, visuality, virtuality, textuality, verbality and verbosity were implanted. Here at the Draper Program, they have started to sprout as I plot my seminars, prod the students to really toil the soil, and cultivate courses, always with many more seeds in hand (and pocket).

[More to come…Part 2: “The Seminars of Striking Poses, Seminar Vogue-ing and Blush Exchanges". Part 3: "The Seminars of Artificial Insemination & Artificial Intelligence"]

Recap: Resumes for Master's Students

This year, GSAS' Master's College is attempting to expand the number of events, workshops, and resources that are created with Master's students in mind. As part of this effort, the Wasserman Center for Career Development has also begun to hold more 'Master's-centric' career-planning workshops, such as "Resume Writing for Master's Students" session. I attended this session this week, and would like to share some of the general tips that Wasserman counselor Lisa Wong provided, as well as give a few more details about the resources available at Wasserman.

The workshop, which about 10 other people (including a few Draper students) attended, was about an hour long and largely informal, structured to allow students to ask specific questions and also review several sample resumes that Ms. Wong handed out in a packet of "Resume Guidelines and Samples for Master's Students." As a Master's student planning to transition into a new profession myself, I found the examples very useful. Each one uniquely addressed the difficulty of entering a field in which one has very little previous experience, and provided a basic template that could be simply adjusted to match one's own particular goals and skill set.

Ms. Wong enumerated a variety of approaches for selecting the most effective resume format for your needs and deciding how best to present skills and information to a potential employer. Some of these are as follows:
  • Resumes should be no longer than one page, unless you have 7-10 years of experience in the field in which you are applying.
  • Margins should be no larger than one inch, no smaller than 1/2 inch. Font should be 10-12 point font in a standard typeface (make sure its readable when you hold it in front of you at arm's length).
  • Organize your experience in subsections that are easy to skim quickly.
  • Many recruiters and employers get around a hundred applications for the same position and will spend 15 seconds to one minute skimming your resume. Make sure your most pertinent information is near the top of the page, clearly organized and concisely summarized.
  • Don't worry if there are 'holes' in your employment history. While common practice once suggested that it was important to show consistent employment, it is now generally preferred that resumes highlight pertinent experience, even if there are chronological gaps.
The last fifteen minuets of this workshop were set aside so that students who brought their resumes could receive a more personalized review. Ms. Wong reminded us that Wasserman holds daily walk-in hours. During these walk-ins, students can have multiple counselors review their resumes and provide feedback and suggestions for possible improvements. Each day's walk-in hours can be found on the Wasserman Web site, here.

It's Draper's hope to co-sponsor a career-planning workshop for Master's students next semester, so we'd love to hear students' feedback on what kind of workshops would be of interest. Possible topics include resume building and interview skills, but we welcome your other suggestions! Feel free to leave them in a comment or email us directly at draper.programATnyuDOTedu.

Reminder: Panel Discussion with Kathryn Bond Stockton & Lisa Duggan Tomorrow, 11/20

Those of you taking Gender Politics this semester and reading Bond Stockton's Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame may find this event of interest.

November 20, Friday
4 to 6 PM

Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Bowery @ East 5th Street


Monday, November 16, 2009

Reminder: Master's Thesis Submission Deadline, January Grads: December 16th

Students who intend to graduate this coming January will need to submit their completed and approved Master's theses to Draper no later than one month from today:
Wednesday, December 16th
.
Any theses received after 6:00 PM on December 16th will be held over for May graduation. There will be no exceptions.

For more information on thesis guidelines, please see Draper's Web site, here: http://www.draper.fas.nyu.edu/object/draper.program.thesisguidelines.html

All thesis related forms--including a sample cover page and second reader sheets--can also be downloaded from the Draper website, here: http://www.draper.fas.nyu.edu/page/forms

Workshop: Resumes for Master's Students, Tomorrow, 11/17

Resumes for Master's Students
Wasserman Center for Career Development


Tuesday, November 17th
12:30 - 1:30 PM
133 E. 13th Street, 2nd Floor
Wasserman Presentation Room B

Master's Students bring to their job search an extra level of knowledge and training; but how best to communicate this to prospective employers?

Attend this workshop and learn how to write a resume that will:

* Effectively highlight your academic strengths and contributions
* Incorporate your previous professional and academic activities
* Explore the difference between a business resume format and a CV format, and learn when which one is most appropriate to use
* Learn about formatting tips and tricks to make your resume stand out!

Friday, November 13, 2009

"Collective," an art exhibit featuring Draper student Jean Shepard

NYU and UCATS announce the opening of “Collective,” a multimedia art exhibit.

“Collective” is an exciting multimedia art exhibit featuring UCATS members of New York University. This is the first show of what hopes to become and annual event for the artists of the Union of Clerical, Administrative and Technical Staff at the university. The opening reception will be held at NYU’s Kimmel Center, at 60 Washington Square South, on Dec. 4 from 5 to 8p.m., and the works will be on view Nov. 25 through Jan. 31.

The exhibit is an example of UCATS and NYU coming together as a community to foster and showcase the talents of their members and employees. “It is very encouraging, as an NYU employee, to feel the support of the union and the university towards the abundant creativity of its members and employees respectively,” said Jane O'Mahony, one of the artists represented in the exhibit.

Artists featured in the show are Sarah Bahr, David Fry, Amy Hendy, Sonia Horan, Joan Carol Hutcheson, Roslyn Kelly (Paris Woods), Michael Krieg, Daniel Lega, Ljubisha Milenkovic, Mya K. Myint, Jane O’Mahony, Liz Schnore, Jean Shepard, Mathias Sias, Naomi Tarantal, Michael Tice, Betty Tsang, and Pauline Roony Yeargans.

Some of the works in “Collective” will be displayed in the first-floor windows of the Kimmel Center at 60 Washington Square South, where they can be viewed by passers-by 24 hours a day. The rest of the show will be hung in the center’s Commuter Lounge Gallery and Stovall Family Gallery on the second and eight floors respectively.

The indoor galleries will be open Monday through Wednesday, 9 a.m.-10 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday, 9 a.m.-midnight; and Sunday, noon-8 p.m. The center will be closed from Dec. 23 to Jan. 3. Visitors to the indoor galleries must show a government-issued photo ID.

For more information on “Collective,” visit www.collectivearts.org or contact UCATS’ Liz Schnore at (212)998-1420 or liz.schnore@nyu.edu.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Panel Discussion with Kathryn Bond Stockton & Bethany Moreton: November 20




The Queer Child: Or Growing Sideways in the 20th Century
Kathryn Bond Stockton
With comment by: Jose Muñoz (Performance Studies, NYU)

(Series Q, Duke University Press) Children are thoroughly, shockingly queer, as Kathryn Bond Stockton explains in The Queer Child, where she examines children's strangeness, even some children's subliminal "gayness," in the twentieth century. Estranging, broadening, darkening forms of children emerge as this book illuminates the child queered by innocence, the child queered by color, the child queered by Freud, the child queered by money, and the grown homosexual metaphorically seen as a child (or as an animal), alongside the gay child. What might the notion of a "gay" child do to conceptions of the child? How might it outline the pain, closets, emotional labors, sexual motives, and sideways movements that attend all children, however we deny it?

Kathryn Bond Stockton is Professor of English and Director of Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She is the author of Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer," also published by Duke University Press, and God between Their Lips: Desire between Women in Irigaray, Brontë, and Eliot.



To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
Bethany Moreton
With comment by: Nikhil Singh (SCA/History, NYU)

(Harvard University Press) The world's largest corporation has grown to prominence in America's Sun Belt-the relatively recent seat of American radical agrarian populism-and amid a feverish antagonism to corporate monopoly. Moreton unearths the roots of the seeming anomaly of corporate populism, in a timely and penetrating analysis that situates the rise of Wal-Mart in a postwar confluence of forces, from federal redistribution of capital favoring the rural South and West to the family values symbolized by Sam Walton's largely white, rural, female workforce (the basis of a new economic and ideological niche), the New Christian Right's powerful probusiness and countercultural movement of the 1970s and '80s and its harnessing of electoral power. Giving Max Weber's Protestant ethic something of a late-20th-century update, Moreton shows how this confluence wedded Christianity to the free market. Moreton's erudition and clear prose elucidate much in the area of recent labor and political history, while capturing the centrality of movement cultures in the evolving face of American populism. (Publishers Weekly)

Bethany Moreton is Assistant Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia.

Moderator: Michael Cobb, Prof. of English, University of Toronto

Special thanks to our co-sponsors:
Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU: American Studies; and Gender and Sexuality Studies
History Department, NYU
Performance Studies, NYU
Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, NYU

November 20, Friday
4 to 6 PM

Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

For more information, please visit:
http://sca.as.nyu.edu/object/stocktonmorton_sca_fall09


Event and panel host: Lisa Duggan (SCA, NYU)

Foucault Society reading group meeting

The Foucault Society, NYC

Fall 2009 Reading Group
Foucault(s) Beyond Foucault: Essays, Interviews, Lectures (1976-84)
The third meeting of the Foucault Society's Fall 2009 Reading Group will be on Friday, November 13, 7:00-9:30pm.
Location: CUNY Graduate Center , 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 5414.

Texts for discussion:

--Michel Foucault, "Questions of Method." (In Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. James D. Faubion, ed.; Robert Hurley, trans., New York : The New Press, 2000).

--Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito, trans. (New York: Semio-text(e), 1991).

Please come prepared with a question or section of the text to discuss with the group.

To access the readings:

For a limited time, readings are available on GoogleDocs to reading group participants. For access instructions, please write to reading group organizer Aaron Weeks at foucaultsociety2009@gmail.com.

About the Reading Group:

This reading group explores lesser-read works from Foucault's later period, 1976-84--between the publication of The History of Sexuality's first volume in 1976 and the later two volumes in 1984. Challenging the critical view of these years as an eight-year silence for Foucault, we hope to show that this was an incredibly productive, if intellectually troubling, time for him. We aim to move beyond the tendency of some social theorists to preserve, as in a fossil, the Foucault of Discipline and Punish or The History of Sexuality, Volume I (reducing his ideas to a few pages on panopticism or a slogan, "power/knowledge"). We also interrogate the critical tendency to focus on reconciling this "break" between Foucault's early and late work. (After all, how could the antihumanist who proclaimed the death of Man turn to such a homely problem as the self, o r the astute historian of disciplinary power turn to the question of ethics?) Recognizing that the recent publication of Foucault’s lectures on state racism, governmentality, and liberalism is beginning to generate new approaches, we also maintain that work remains to be done on his shorter pieces.

We will read lectures, interviews, and essays by Foucault, many of which have become available in English translation only in the past decade. Beginning with Society Must Be Defended, we first consider Foucault's intimations of a methodological crisis in Lectures 1 and 2. We then follow Foucault's various trajectories and intellectual experiments--his methodological concerns, his encounter with Iranian politics, his re-engagement with Kant, and his experiments with an ethics of the self. Rather than aiming to reconstruct a continuous intellectual history or determine the real or final Foucault, we will treat the apparent discontinuities and ruptures of thought in these texts as so many Foucaults capable of destabilizing the author function. What new directions for our own contemporary research are opened up by Foucault's work of this period?

Suggested Donation: $5/meeting. No one will be turned away for lack of ability to pay.

Open to the public. No experience necessary. Advanced researchers and graduate students will be encouraged to share their research in progress.

For more information or to register: Contact Reading Group Organizer, Aaron Weeks (Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center ) at foucaultsociety2009@gmail.com.

About the Foucault Society:

The Foucault Society is an independent, non-profit educational organization offering a variety of forums dedicated to critical study of the ideas of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) within a contemporary context. The Foucault Society is a 501 (c) (3) recognized public charity. As such donations are tax deductible under section 170 of the Internal Revenue Code.

E-mail: foucaultsociety2009@gmail.com

Website: www.foucaultsociety.org

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=12929420844

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

NYU Colloquium in American Literature and Culture tomorrow

The New York University

Colloquium in American Literature and Culture

presents

“Williams, Whitman and the Prosody of American Empire"

Greg Londe, Princeton University

and

“Street Trees, City Forests, and New York City's Urban Ecology”

Mark Feldman, Stanford University

Wednesday, 11 November

6:00 p.m.

13-19 University Place, Rm. 222

New York University

All are welcome!

Refreshments will be served.

_____________________________________________________

Greg Londe is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at Princeton University specializing in 20th and 21st century Anglophone poetry. Mark Feldman is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University, and his talk is part of a larger book project entitled Urban Ecologies: New York City ’s Visionary Urbanisms.

For more information:

www.nyucalc.com