Friday, September 30, 2011

Distinguished Teacher Award Nominations

The NYU Office of Faculty Resources is pleased to announce that nominations are now being accepted for the 2011-2012 Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA). The DTA highlights NYU's commitment to teaching excellence and is given annually to outstanding members of the faculty. Recipients are awarded a medal and a grant of $5,000.

Students, faculty, and alumni are invited to submit nominations to their school's DTA Representative before NOVEMBER 11, 2011. To find your School Representative and for additional information about the award, visit the DTA website at
http://www.nyu.edu/dta . For additional questions, contact the Office of Faculty Resources at 212-998-2987 or facultyresources@nyu.edu.

Visions Global Empowerment: Benefit Event

All are invited to Style & Substance, a charity fundraiser for Visions Global Empowerment, an organization committed to the education of youth affected by crisis in South Asia.

Date: Tuesday, October 18th, 7-9 pm
Where: Misha Nicole, 303 Bowery Street.
What: Misha Nicole, a boutique that carries clothing from international designers will donate 10% of sales made at the event to Visions.
RSVP: www.razoo.com/story/MishaNicole
Suggested Donation: $20 (General) / $10 (Students). Includes wine & appetizers.

What is Visions Global Empowerment?

Visions Global Empowerment, or Visions for short, is a grass roots, educational development non-profit that supports & develops programs for youth affected by poverty and conflict in South Asia.
Visions runs
annual camps that teach South Asian students about human rights, leadership, organizational skills, critical thinking & personal health & hygiene; and maintains an educational center that serves over 300 girls in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Visions also financially supports a number of educational initiatives implemented by various NGOs committed to providing improved & enhanced education to students in need in India & Sri Lanka

www.visionsforthefuture.org

For further details about the event or to become involved with Visions, please email Kari Dietrich, NYU Visions Coordinator, at
kad421@nyu.edu

Interdisciplinary Project Seeks Contributors

Prometheus Mediated: Exploring Audience Perception Through an Evolution of Forms

Funded by the Lucrece Project: Creative Experiments in Critical Practice www.thelucreceproject.com

In his widely known 1964 book, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, media theorist Marshall McLuhan asserts “the medium is the message.” He theorizes that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. Using the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus as content, we will express the story through three different mediums: a short theater performance, a short film piece and a new media piece that incorporates a variety of digital forms and social media tools to enhance the audience’s experience. Bringing together a dynamic group of scholars, artists and media makers interested in exploring form’s effect, not just on content but on the audience experience of content, the project will rely on a collaborative interdisciplinary process to shed new light on an old question. We are particularly interested in examining how the evolution of the mediated audience experience from a massive social gathering to an individual, human-computer interaction changes the implications and understanding of content. The project will be realized in a site-specific installation that allows audience members to experience each of the three pieces as individual forms and as a continuous media event.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Prometheus Mediated is an ambitious project calling on academic scholarship as well as a wide range of creative skills. We are looking for participants at all levels – those who want to be involved in a specific area of interest and those who want to take on a major creative role in realizing the piece. We are specifically looking for the following collaborators, listed below. Anyone interested please e-mail Joyce Mishaan at jhm347@nyu.edu by Monday, October 3rd.

Media Theory Scholars – Anyone with a background and/or interest in Media Theory.

Dramatic Writers – We will be adapting the Prometheus myth into three working scripts. This will include workshops exploring the themes and context of the story as well as the ways in which we can carry those themes across our different media platforms. Anyone with a specific interest in adaptation, classical stories and/or writing for new media especially encouraged to join the project!

Creative Producers – Anyone interested in getting involved at the producer level. We will be producing a site-specific installation including live theater, film projection and interactive media. Producers will be heavily involved in the project from start to finish, with a more intensive schedule in the spring semester. We are especially looking for highly organized, tech-savvy individuals who can help stretch a budget creatively.

Installation Artists – Participating artists will be heavily involved in the creative realization of the project, specifically in the spring semester. We’re looking for anyone with an interest in installation art or site-specific performance art.

Digital Media Producers – This is a major creative role in the project and as of yet very loosely defined. We will be creating a digital media piece as part of the installation and looking for anyone with a creative interest in new media art and the technical know-how to bring a project to life.

Tech Assistant – Looking for a tech savvy individual to help install and manage all echnical aspects of the project including audio, video and online media.

Director of Photography - Looking for a DP for a short film piece, approximately 2 – 3 day shoot during the Spring semester. We’d like the DP to be involved in the creative planning for the film, and would encourage participation during pre-production meetings in the Fall semester. Have a camera? Even better!

Sound Designer/Audio Mixer – Ideally looking for someone who can sound design for the installation piece and mix audio for the film shoot. 2 – 3 days of shooting in the spring semester plus pre-production meetings in the fall.

AD/Production Manager/Production Assistants – Anyone interested in being involved in the short film production. This can include crew support, script supervision and logistical support. 2 – 3 day commitment, on set. Happy to teach/train anyone looking to gain more set experience.

Performers – Looking for actors both for live performance and short film shoot. Roles TBD. Especially those interested in classical adaptations, site-specific performance art and new media projects.

Production Designer/Art Department – Looking for a production designer who is comfortable working across a variety of mediums, including live performance, film and digital media. We will be working with limited resources and are especially looking for someone who is adept at stretching a budget creatively. Participation will require some pre-production meetings in the fall semester and a heavier commitment during production in the spring. Also looking for art department support for those who would like to be involved with a lesser commitment.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Check Out Wasserman's Funded Internship Award

via 'The NYU Minute'

The Wasserman Center for Career Development is currently collecting applications for the Funded Internship Award for fall 2011. This $1,000 scholarship affords students the opportunity to participate in unpaid internships at non-profits, international organizations, arts institutions, and other industries that traditionally do not pay their interns. Applications are due by Monday, Oct. 3 at 12:00 noon. For more information, visit www.nyu.edu/careerdevelopment/funded_internship.php or contact FundedInternshipAward@nyu.edu

Call for Papers: Stony Brook English Grad Conference

24th Annual Stony Brook University English Department.
Graduate Conference:
Instrument, Image, Ekphrasis: Intersecting Genres of Knowledge.

Location: Stony Brook University, Manhattan Campus
Date: Saturday, February 25, 2012
Proposal Deadline: December 17, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Laura Kipnis

The Stony Brook Manhattan English Department Graduate Conference, the longest running interdisciplinary graduate student conference in the nation, welcomes papers and panels from all disciplines, including the arts, cultural studies, social and hard sciences, and the humanities. This year’s conference will feature a faculty-sponsored Best Paper Award; for details and registration visit
www.stonybrook.edu/gradconf

Call for Papers:
The tools of a trade can enclose: a poem becomes its form, patients become their diagnoses, people their demographic, and students their grades. Complex ideas about history, foreignness, alienation, memory, subject and object are often distilled into a single image produced by our instruments of "knowledge." The production of an instrument is ekphrastic: it blends genres and frames one genre within another: A paintbrush, x-ray or spreadsheet; a rubric, or questionnaire; a literary form – stream of consciousness, or fourteen lines towards a sonnet. Memory, artifact. Pen and ink. How do the instruments of a vocation establish a politics of communication? What do these images reveal, or obscure? When do they make us think, and when do they put an end to thinking?

The English Department at Stony Brook University is proud to offer an interdisciplinary call for papers that asks graduate scholars to reflect on the instruments of their discipline, and to think about how ekphrasis (ek as "out," and phrasis as "speaking") speaks out about the intersection of image, instrument, and genre. What is "instrumentality" in literature, or art, or philosophy? How is it the same, or different, in the social or hard sciences? Does it imply a certain mentality, or construct a static "reader"?

Abstracts can be up to 250 words, and should be submitted by Friday, December 17, 2011. Applicants will be notified of their acceptance shortly after the December deadline. Students interested in competing for the Best Paper Prize sponsored by Stony Brook English faculty must submit a completed paper no later than January 16, 2012 for consideration. Award winners will be announced at the conference. Email submissions to: SUNYSB.GradConf@gmail.com.

Paper and panel submission topics can address a broad range of interests. Diverse genre proposals are welcome, including music, art, science posters, social research, etc. Possible "instruments" are listed below:

Instruments of change: Migrations and Diasporas
Instruments of Memory: Cultural Memory, Testimonial Narratives, Memory and Written Record
Instruments of Place: Maps, regions, “Homelands” (real or imaginary)
Instrumentality, performance, and art (e.g. ekphrastic narratives)
Philosophy (e.g., debates over realism)
Rhetoric (e.g., the use of strategic reason in communication)
History (e.g., scientific instruments in the history of science)
Literature (e.g., literary devices, characters as instruments, Representations
of marginalized people as instruments, literary ekphrasis)
Art (e.g., the use of artistic tools or philosophical questions related to the use of art)
Image in popular media
Health science (i.e. the gaps between tools and the human subject).
Cultural texts
Linguistics and translation
Narrative: Myth, Borders, Storytelling
Visual/Performing Arts and Music; musical ekphrasis
Oral Traditions
Postmodernity and its narratives
Voice and reflexivity in oral and written texts
Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives
Conquest and Political Memory
Globalization and indigenous cultures
Notional Ekphrasis
Displacement Heritage
Technology, gaming, and social media; emerging technologies
Children’s Stories- Language, Authority and Silence

Talk & Book Signing

The Coles Science Center and the NYU Libraries Information Futures Group present:

"THE INFORMATION: A History, A Theory, A Flood"

A talk and book signing by author James Gleick

DATE: Wednesday, October 5, 2011
TIME: 5:30-7:00PM
LOCATION: Bobst Library, 3rd floor, Fales Reading Room, 70 Washington Sq S, New York, NY

James Gleick, author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, will discuss his bestselling new book, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.

From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. His compelling characters include Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself. And bringing us up to date in a time when we often feel we are drowning in a deluge of information, Gleick tells us how we got here and where we’re heading.

The Information will be available for sale on site by the NYU Bookstore, and the author will be signing copies.

**RSVP required: http://tinyurl.com/GleickRSVP

Seating for this event is on a first come, first served basis. For more information, please contact Jill Conte at jill.conte@nyu.edu.

Monday, September 26, 2011

For Your Weekend Calendar - Sept. 30th

The New Asian City
Talk with author Prof. Jini Watson
September 30, 3-5 PM
19 University Place, Rm 222


Dear colleagues,
Postcolonial Seminar of the English Department will be presenting Professor Jini Watson talking about her forthcoming new book The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). In conversation with Ph.D. candidate in English Laurie Lambert, Professor Watson will not only introduce her new book but also share her experiences of turning the dissertation into a book.

All Welcome
Refreshments will be served