Draper Student Announcements!

It's been wonderful to hear of all the great things Draper students and alumni are up to these days. We hope you will continue to email us at draper.program@nyu.edu with your own news!

Here are the most recent items:

Hilarie Ashton has been accepted to the following conferences:

• Southwest/Texas PCA/ACA (February 2010): "'My Name is Johnny Cash': The Artistic Persona through Jameson and Foucault" [session: Music: Traditional, Political, Popular]
• Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 (February 2010): panel chair and speaker, "Stabat Stella: Depictions of Foucauldian Power in 'Stabat Mater' and Stella Dallas" [session: Slippery Eels and Postmodern Identities]
• Comparative Literature Conference at CSU Long Beach (March 2010): "The Othered Vocabulary of Zombies and Psychos: Genette's Paratext in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse"
  
• American Comparative Literature Association (April 2010): "The Urban (as) Flâneur: Narrator and City in Edgardo Vega Yunque's The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow Into The Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle" [session: Landscapes of Cultural Production]
• International Society for the Study of Narrative (April 2010): panel chair

April Pierce writes articles for the Examiner as the "Brooklyn Literature Examiner" and book reviews for Critical Flame. She's also submitting a paper to two conferences that might be of interest to Draper students: The Eighth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities at UCLA and The Philosophy and the Arts Conference at Stony Brook Manhattan

Yvonne Garrett will be presenting at two conferences this semester:

• January 29th "Taking Up Space" at Duke University delivering a paper entitled, "Breaking Boundaries: a Study of Native American Literary Voice on & off the Reservation."
• Feb. 10-13th @ Southwest TX PCA/ACA Conference in Albuquerque, NM presenting 2 papers. In the "American Indians Today" area/"American Indians and the Arts" section, a paper entitled, "This Ain't Rock'n'Roll, This is Genocide: Structures of Hybridity, Cosmopolitanism and the Silencing of the Native Subject in Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues " (based on her Draper MA thesis of the same title). And in the "Punk Rock" area/Punk Literature: Philosophically and Rhetorically" section, a paper entitled, "Punk Rock Bitches: Exploring the Agency of Gender and the Punk Rock Aesthetic in the fiction of Kathy Acker."
  

Alumni Russell MacKenzie Fehr (class of Fall 2009) is now a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of California Riverside. He also attended the annual meeting of the American Historical Association this month.


Alumna Elena Landriscina (class of May 2009) just published an article in a peer-reviewed journal, Essex Human Rights Review, entitled "The Legal Obligation to Prosecute 'Rendition to Torture.' " It appears in a Special Issue (Volume 6, No. 1, December 2009) devoted to the topic of "Preventing Torture in the 21st Century." The article is available through the link above.


You may remember us posting about a benefit for The Organization for Visual Progression, a nonprofit co-founded by Draper alumni Ben Foley (class of August 2006). Since founding OVP in September of 2008, the organization, which is dedicated to helping social justice organizations create and utilize visual media in their advocacy efforts, has conducted a two-week video advocacy training in the Southern Philippines and collaborated with the Legal Action Center, non-profit law firm in New York City to produce a DVD that will give people leaving prison the skills and knowledge necessary to find jobs and prepare them for the challenges they may face in the reentry process. In 2010 they are conducting a 12-month video advocacy training project in Sri Lanka, and preparing for projects in Nepal, China, and the Philippines.


Finally, we wish to note all the students who participated in the recent Draper Student Organization Colloquium on Silence last December:

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

Jason Slaughter
“Three Unusual Instances of Silence in Music”

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

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

Congratulations, all!