Library of Congress Photo Finds of the Week: December

As we near the end of 2010, here are some photos that were found in the LoC Flickr page in a keyword search for 'December.'


These first three are by photographer Jack Delano:

Skating, vicinity of Brockton, MA: December, 1940



Street in Christiansted, St. Croix? Virgin Islands: December, 1941

C & NW RR, working on a locomotive at the 40th Street railroad shops, Chicago:
December, 1942

The last photo was taken by the Bains News Service:

Winter Bathing, New York: December, 1912

Robin Nagle, Talk at NYU (Dec 8): The Twist-Ties that Bind: Garbage, New York City and You

Draper's Director, Robin Nagle, will be giving a talk entitled "The Twist-Ties that Bind: Garbage, New York City and You" next Wednesday, December 8th. The talk will be right around the corner from Draper's office at 5 Washington Place. More information is below.

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Freshkills Park Talks
The Twist-Ties that Bind: Garbage, New York City and You
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
7:00 p.m.–8:30 p.m.

Join Dr. Robin Nagle to learn (almost) everything you ever wanted to know about garbage in New York. Discover how profoundly it connects us to each other, to history, to politics, to infrastructure and technology. Hear stories and reflections from people who shoulder its burdens. Glimpse some of its surprising secrets. Consider why we need to ignore it, and ponder the consequences of its invisibility. The insights you glean might just change forever the way you see your city.

Dr. Nagle is the anthropologist-in-residence for the Department of Sanitation. She is also director of the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University, where she teaches anthropology and urban studies. Her book Picking Up, about what it is to be a sanitation worker in New York and why you should care, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the New York City Department of Sanitation and the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University.

NYU 5 Washington Place, Room 101
Manhattan

Location Details:
Enter on the corner of Mercer St & Washington Pl.
Nearest trains: R to 8th Street, 6 to Astor Place

For more information -- 212-788-8277 and/or doug.elliott@parks.nyc.gov

New MA in Literary Translation (French-English), NYU

A Message from NYU's French Department:

Dear Colleague:

We wish to call your attention to our new M.A. Program in Literary Translation (fiction, non-fiction, literary analysis, humanities and social science texts). Starting in Fall 2011, this one-year program (two semesters in New York, the following summer in Paris) will both train students in literary translation and put them in touch with representatives of the publishing industry in New York and Paris. Students will take courses in the theory of translation, in French literature and culture, as well as participating in workshops focusing on specific translating challenges (for example theatre or poetry). They will be encouraged to develop their own translating style. The final exercise for the M.A. degree will be an original translation, supervised by professionals in the field.

Housed in the Department of French at NYU, students will also benefit from the myriad lectures, conferences, visiting professors, and French- and Francophone-focused activities of the Department. The Paris component at New York University in Paris will feature encounters with French and Francophone writers and a course in creative writing taught by well-known Anglophone writers.

We hope you will bring this program to the attention of your colleagues and to those students who might be interested in learning more about translation, in translation as a career, and in enhancing their knowledge of the intricacies of the French language and the imbrication of language and culture.

For more details and contact addresses, please visit our website at:

www.french.as.nyu.edu/object/translationMA

Sincerely yours,

Denis Hollier, Chair

Emmanuelle Ertel, Director, M.A. in Literary Translation

We would, of course, also be most happy to have your students apply to our other graduate programs: the PhD in French Literature; the M.A. in Literature; the M.A. in Language and Culture; the M.A. in Teaching French. Please visit our website for specifics of these programs:

www.french.as.nyu.edu

Department of French

New York University

13-19 University Place

New York, NY 10003

Tel: 212 998 8700

Don't Forget! This Friday, Dec 3: DSO Fall Colloquium on Practice

DSO Fall Colloquium
Friday, December 3rd
7:00 PM in the Draper Map Room

with presentations by:

Greg Wersching
"A Discipline Divided: How Can Creative Writing Programs (Re)inform Literary Criticism?"

Lee Benjamin Huttner
"Theater in Praxis: On the Practical Turn in Understanding Dramatic Literature"

Benjamin Kampler
"De-structing Space: Anti-Gay Violence in Gay Bars"

Call for Papers: Comparative Philosophy conference at U. of Texas, Austin

Life, Death, and Liberation

A conference of comparative philosophy

9th Annual Philosophy Student Conference at the University of New Mexico

Keynote speaker: Professor Stephen Phillips (Philosophy, Asian Studies, U. of Texas at Austin)

Date: April 15-16, 2011

Submission deadline: January 10, 2011

(Notifications will be received by January 31)

Paper submissions: We welcome topics from the broadest range of philosophical and interdisciplinary traditions. Preference will be given to essays addressing the subtle and often problematic relations among living, dying, and liberation, as these have been explored in the last two-and-a-half centuries of Western philosophy—especially German Idealism, phenomenology, Marxism, and psychoanalytic philosophy—and in both ancient and contemporary Eastern philosophy. Treatments of points of contention within and across schools, traditions, and cultures, in theory and/or in practice, are of interest. We encourage critical perspectives, including those involving the attempt to define and distinguish concepts: “liberation,” “transformation,” “freedom,” “bondage,” “repression,” “knowledge,” “subject,” etc. We are also seeking original and creative applications of Asian, Indian, European, and American transformative philosophy. Submissions from both graduate and undergraduate students will be considered.

Format: Please prepare papers for blind review. Email complete papers (no longer than 3,500 words), preceded by an abstract, to UNMphilconf2011@gmail.com in Word or PDF format; include in the body of your email 1) title of paper, 2) author’s name, 3) university or institutional affiliation, 4) word count, and 5) contact details. Please refrain from providing any self-identifying information in either the paper or the abstract.

Possible themes:

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Ways to Liberation: “Spiritual” vs. “material”?

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Ego and Anātman: The liberative aims, methods, and effects of śila prajñā and psychoanalysis

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From Hegel and Nietzsche to Žižek: Western critiques of Eastern traditions

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Groundlessness, Śūnyatā, and Ethics: The notion of responsibility in existentialism and Buddhism

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Karma, Causality, and Rebirth: The mechanics of enlightenment

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Spectrality and Death in Derrida

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Knowing Liberation: śruti, sṃṛti, reason, and experience

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Yoga, Unity, Unions?: The (ir)reconcilability of individual and social transformation

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Non-dualism East and West: Spinoza, Hegel, Deleuze, Advaita, Madhyamaka, Yogācāra

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Phenomenology as Transformative Philosophy: Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger

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Liberation from Life or Liberation in Life?: The problem of escapism

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Eastern Philosophies in the West, Western Philosophies in the East

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Philosophy and Soteriology: Truth vs. liberation?

NYU's Colloquium in American Literature and Culture, Spring 2011 Call for Papers (1/7/11)

The Colloquium in American Literature and Culture

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Colloquium in American Literature and Culture (CALC) at New York University is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for our Spring 2011 events. CALC is a forum for the presentation and discussion of new Americanist scholarship by both junior and senior researchers. CALC encourages paper proposals by graduate students and faculty that focus on any subject or period relevant to American literature and culture.

A typical CALC event features two presentations of 20-25 minutes, followed by audience questions and discussion. All sessions are open to the public. Past speakers have presented on such diverse topics as early twentieth-century suffrage cookbooks, antebellum children's literature, and early American structures of feeling. Approaches have included single-author and comparative studies, media studies, as well as print and material culture studies. We invite the attendance of all faculty and graduate students, regardless of specialty, to CALC events. Please visit our website at: http://nyucalc.com/.

To submit your work for consideration, please email an abstract of your project to nyucalc@gmail.com by Friday, January 7th. CALC also encourages, but does not require, submitters to include a CV with the abstract.

New York Metro American Studies Association Conference on Dirt (Dec. 4)

The New York Metro American Studies Association (NYMASA) is delighted to announce our annual conference

DIRT

8:30am-6pm
December 4th, 2010
St. John's University in Lower Manhattan
41 Murray Street

Dirt is among the most material but also the most metaphorical and expressive of substances. This conference will explore how people imagine, define, and employ the various concepts and realities of dirt. What does it mean to call something dirty? How do we understand dirt and its supposed opposite, cleanliness? How do we explain the points at which we draw the line between clean and dirty, what we embrace and what we refuse to touch? Drawing on multiple disciplines we will uncover and foreground the (often unconscious) centrality of the metaphors and actualities of dirt to U.S. cultures, values, and lived experiences.

Registration forms can be found at www.nymasa.org. Registration is $20, $10 for students/unwaged. For more information contact nymasadirt@gmail.com.


Sarah E. Chinn
English Department
Hunter College, CUNY
695 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10065

sarah.chinn@hunter.cuny.edu
(212) 772-5178

Oral History in New York: Archives and Public History Brown Bag Lunch Discussion: Dec. 3

The NYU Archives and Public History Program first Friday brown bag lunch series presents:

- Oral History in New York: Planning, Implementation and Use -

Friday December 3, 12:00-2:00pm
King Juan Carlos Center (53 Washington Square South), Room 607

The Archives and Public History brown bag lunch series continues on Friday, December 3rd for a panel discussion featuring oral historians from the New York area. Speakers will discuss their recent and ongoing projects as well as the diverse uses of oral history in exhibits, research projects and education.

Please RSVP to Margaret Fraser at mfraser522@gmail.com by Wednesday, December 1.

Speakers include:

• Amy Starecheski, Columbia Oral History Research Office, recently worked on the Telling Lives Project in Chinatown and currently working with squatters
• Sady Sullivan, Director of Oral History at the Brooklyn Historical Society
  
• Nina Talbot, artist and oral historian, recently curated the exhibit "Painting Brooklyn Stories of Immigration and Survival" at the Brooklyn Historical Society

The Archives and Public History Program first Friday brown bag lunch series is organized in part by the NYU student chapter of the Society of American Archivists