Friday, March 4, 2011

Memory: Silence, Screen and Spectacle Conference at New School, 3/24 - 3/26

The Center for Public Scholarship at The New School recommends...
the Fourth Annual New School Interdisciplinary Memory Conference:
Memory: Silence, Screen and Spectacle

March 24-26, 2011

The New School for Social Research, New York City

Speakers Include:

Marianne Hirsch, Susannah Radstone, Diana Taylor,

Yael Hersonski, Dirk Moses, William Hirst, Tom Allen,

Cynthia Milton, Daniel Levy, Louis Bickford, Jonathan Bach,

Rick Crownshaw, Susan Pearce, and many others

For information on the 2011 conference visit

www.newschool.edu/nssr/subpage.aspx?id=57135

or email nssrmemoryconference@gmail.com

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Comparative Literature Lecture on Philip K. Dick: 3/24

We would like to invite you and your students to this year’s Undergraduate Major’s Choice Lecture of the Comparative Literature department, which is entitled:

From Here to California:
Philip K. Dick, The Simulacra & the Integration of Germany

6:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 24th, in Lecture Hall 102

at 19 University Place of New York University

For this year’s Undergraduate Major’s Choice Lecture, the students of Comparative Literature have selected Laurence Rickels to present on his thorough and exhaustive work, I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (2010).

Laurence Rickels is professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California in Santa Barbara, professor at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, and Sigmund Freud Professor of Media and Philosophy at the European Graduate School. Professor Rickels has published seven books and edited four collections of critical essays, including Looking After Nietzsche (1990), one of the most thoughtful and necessary collaborative works on Nietzsche to date.

With the book launch of I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick, Laurence Rickels takes off for the outer spaces of critical, psychoanalytic and philosophical texts in order to land Philip K. Dick’s trek out of Faust’s Germany and onto P.P. Layout’s pad in Californian dreaming.

Of the hundreds of students who flocked to such well-designed courses as The Vampire Lectures (1999) and The Devil Notebooks (2008), many claimed to recognize the precognitive scientist of fiction, PKD, as an influence to Laurence Rickels’ teaching and writing. One crucial feature of textually encountering Professor Rickels is that you can never take for granted literal and literary appearances: Through a relentless irony, he will explain and exemplify at one and the same time — a talent in the profession of professing something like truth or knowledge.

For this presentation, Professor Rickels plans to shift his focus onto the postwar predicament of the integration of Germany as “Our Problem.” The poster boy of Rickels' The Case of California (1991), Philip K. Dick projected the future as fitting the Coast while carrying forward “Germany” as its ambivalent introject, our problem. This includes the ethical-clinical problem of the violent psychopath as failure of interpretation and treatment that can at best be contained. In and around The Simulacra, Dick and his intertexts connect denial of mourning to a notion of productivity based on restitution and reparation without responsibility for the specified dead. That the policy of restitution, which became the quintessential foreign policy of the Federal Republic of Germany, has come to be identified as the enabling context for the postwar German “economic miracle” is one more piece of this puzzle of integration.


Guest Post: Katie Koumatos on Two Upcoming Women's Issues Conferences

On the west coast, we hear that New York City has everything. As a newly minted resident of Queens, I am beginning to see evidence that this might actually be true. This month there are two inexpensive and impressive conferences on women’s issues happening in the area and I can’t wait to attend.

Interested in the dynamic nature of discourse surrounding the female body? Want to learn and talk about how these ideas intersect with topics like health, race, law and education? Then you should attend Breaking Boundaries: Body Politics & the Dynamics of Difference. This conference is being held this coming weekend at Sarah Lawrence College. It is free and open to the public but you must register on the website. The conference runs Friday, March 4th from 6pm-8pm and Saturday, March 5th from 10am-6pm (there is an optional $10 luncheon on Saturday). The conference features keynote speaker Marilyn Wann, author of Fat?So!, prominent Fat Activist, and all around phenomenal speaker.

Concerned about the cultural constructs that stop women from accepting their bodies? I am too. That’s why I am attending the international summit, Endangered Species: Preserving the Female Body on March 18th and 19th. Hosted by the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute, this incredible educational opportunity will be held at The New School. Featuring international speakers from a wide range of backgrounds, this summit consists of several complex and carefully crafted panels where speakers are discussing the “toxic culture that teaches women and girls to hate their bodies” and the way they are facing this challenge in their respective fields. The summit runs 6pm-9pm on Friday, March 18th and 8am-8pm on Saturday, March 19th. Registration requires some level of body activist donation (the least expensive option is $20).

I will be attending both conferences with a fellow fat studies scholar from the NYU School of Social Work and we would love to have you join us. Feel free to email larissa.kyzer@nyu.edu for my contact information.

Katie*

Katie Koumatos, a transplant from Northern California, has just started her education at NYU this semester. She is trained in anthropology and studies the burgeoning fat activist movement and the discourse that occurs at the intersection of fat, food, and shame. She is greatly interested in collaborative work and would welcome contact from scholars interested in Fat Studies.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Clean Up Your Research and Bibliographic Skills at Bobst Over Spring Break

Hello from the NYU Libraries:

As another spring semester kicks off, we're offering a chance to brush up your skills with a series of Graduate Student workshops. These workshops focus on learning how to organize your bibliographies, finding out to how to track down tricky citations, understanding the intricacies of processing and analyzing data, and even simply knowing your way around an American research library. For the complete listing of these sessions, and to sign up, go to:

--> http://library.nyu.edu/grads

You may have noticed that during the last month of the Fall semester we opened our long-awaited Research Commons on the 4/5 floors of the library. The Commons integrates spaces and services designed to enhance productivity and enrich the research process. Come visit the commons and find amenities suggested by, and designed for, graduate student researchers. Lastly, pay a visit to the 10th floor Graduate Student Exchange. The Exchange extends our efforts to provide graduate students spaces that encourage conversation and collaboration and provide a place for grad students to decompress and recharge.

We have been working hard over the past few years to expand and improve our services and spaces to fit your needs, and we hope you'll help us keep improving.

We look forward to meeting you and wish you the best of luck this semester!


Monday, February 28, 2011

Local Conferences in March

Women's History Month Conference
Breaking Boundaries: Body Politics & the Dynamics of Difference

Free and Open to the Public (Optional $10 for lunch)
March 4-5 @ Sarah Lawrence College
http://tinyurl.com/6bn5ns8

***

Endangered Species Women Conference
Preserving the Female Body

Membership Required ($20 is the least expensive option)
March 18-19 @ The New School
http://tinyurl.com/35a37op

Workshops!

Mark your calendar for two upcoming workshops for Draper students. RSVPs are appreciated: call 212.998.8070 or email draper.program@nyu.edu to let us know if you'll be attending.

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Master's Thesis Workshop
Friday, March 11 from 5:00 - 7:00 PM
Draper Map Room

Led by Professor Steven Moga and Robin Nagle

This workshop is primarily intended for students who are in the early phases of thesis preparation, but also for those at later stages of the process. Students will receive guidance on how to refine their topics and narrow the scope of their theses, and on some of the basic mechanics of writing their work.

Ph.D. Application Workshop
Friday, April 29, 5:00 - 7:00 PM

Draper Map Room