Comp Lit Colloquium on Archives: April 22

Please join us for the April installment of the NYU Comparative Literature Colloquium Series

Friday, 4/22, from 3-5 p.m. in 19 University Place, room 222

"Staging Archives"

Professor Cristina Vatulescu,

Departments of Comparative Literature, Russian & Slavic Studies

"East European Secret Police Archives: Reading Dilemmas"

&

Professor Peter Nicholls,

Department of English

"Living with the George Oppen Archive"

Reception to follow.

Cristina Vatulescu received her Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Harvard in 2005 and came to NYU after a year as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her first book, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and The Secret Police, a study of the relationships between cultural and policing practices in twentieth century Eastern Europe, was recently published by Stanford University Press. Taking advantage of the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania, Police Aesthetics focuses on their most infamous holdings-the personal files-as well as on the agency's less known involvement with cinema. Two articles stemming from this project, "Arresting Biographies: The Secret Police File in The Soviet Union and Romania," and "Politics of Estrangement: Tracking Shklovsky's Device in Literary and Policing Practices" have been published in Comparative Literature and Poetics Today. Vatulescu's current project is a crosscultural exploration of the interplay of documents and fictions in twentieth century literature, cinema, as well as in legal texts and practices.

Peter Nicholls has published widely on twentieth-century writing, with recent works including Modernisms: A Literary Guide (2nd ed. 2008) and George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (2009). He is especially interested in connections between American and European poetry, and in the political and economic dimensions of literary texts. Nicholls arrived at NYU in 2009 after many years at the University of Sussex, where he was Professor of English and American Literature and editor of the journal Textual Practice.


For more information: http://comparatorium.wordpress.com/