Draper's Annual Good News Round Up!

It's been another busy, productive, and exciting year for Draper's students (and alumni!), both in and out of the classroom. The long-awaited Good News Roundup is below; if you have any information you'd like to share about your activities and accomplishments, please email us at draper.program[at]nyu.edu.

 

April Bacon (May 2009) will be starting Adelphi University's Creative Writing MFA Program in the fall. Prior to beginning this program, she'll be attending the NYU SCPS McGhee Division's Summer Writing Intensive in Creative Nonfiction with David Shields.  This is summer program is one that April has participated in before--last summer she attended the Fiction session with Rick Moody, which she says was both "fantastic and transformative." (For more on April's fiction writing and editorial work, see her profile on in.ter.reg.num from 2010 here.)

In April 2012, Emily Colucci (May 2011) curated Michael Alan's Living Installation 'We Are All Living Installations," a 2 show performance at the Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn. The featured another Draper grad, Matthew Annis (May 2011), who was one of the show's performers, and also created a six hour soundtrack for the project, featuring collaborations with bands around the world from The Boredoms to Jello Biafra to Geneva Jacuzzi and artists Kenny Scharf and Maripol. The show, which Emily described as "a wild and fun performance/happening" won the Brooklyn Arts Council Regrant. 

After graduating from Draper in January 2009, Russell Fehr entered the Ph.D. program in History at the University of California, Riverside. Russell will advance to candidacy on May 15th and will spend the next year researching his dissertation on civic participation in urban politics during the 1920s, focusing on competing reform visions in Chicago, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Detroit, and ethnic politics in Boston. He has received support from the Center for Ideas and Society and from the Graduate Division of the UC Riverside for this project. Russell will be returning to New York (and NYU) to complete some of his research at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives in Bobst in September.

In 2010, David Ferris co-founded 3B, a downtown Brooklyn B&B, with several friends. 3B is "a boutique bed and breakfast cooperatively owned and run by 7 young creators out of our home," and has expanded quite a bit since its opening. It has been profiled at numerous publications, and the co-owners were interviewed for The L Magazine last year (see here).

Eric Hodges (May 2011) recently published  his book Messianism in Ding Ling and Zhou Libo's Novels: A study of The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River and The Hurricane and their literary and philosophical milieu. The book was developed from Eric's Master's thesis at Draper.

This month, Christopher Iverson will be presenting a paper at The University of Washington Germanics Graduate Student Conference 2012: Acceptance in German Literary and Visual Culture. (Draper sent out the call for papers.) The paper he will be presenting is called "Rubble Films on the German and International Screens" and discusses how a short-lived film genre, the Trümmerfilm, or Rubble Film, which was prevalent between 1946 and 1950, dealt with the ideas of victim-hood, complicity, and guilt among the German people after World War II. Chris received Draper's Travel Grant to attend this conference. 

Whitney Johnson (May 2011) has started a short-term position as a Rights Assistant at HarperMedia (a division of the publisher Harper Collins). Whitney is primarily involved in e-book rights, and finds the work fascinating.

Sarah Jones' paper, "When Computers Read: Literary Analysis and Digital Technology" was published in the April/May issue of the Bulletin of American Society for Information Science and Technology. The issue focuses on digital humanities and information visualization. You can read Sarah's paper online here. 

After finishing her Draper degree in January 2012, Jess Krzeminski started working as a College Counselor at Options for College in Manhattan. The job is a great fit for Jess, who explained in a profile this month on the website College Xpress, that "[a]s I was pursuing my M.A. in humanities and social thought at NYU, and was looking toward the necessary next step of applying for jobs, I could not picture myself doing anything but teaching or counseling. I realized that working with students has been my lifelong interest."


Christine Olson will be completing an internship at Villa la Pietra in Florence this summer, one of two collection management internships offered through NYU's Museum Studies department. 

Rafe Posey's short story collection The Book of Broken Hymns has been named a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. The book is the first that Rafe has published, although he has previously published poetry, essays, and short stories and had an essay excerpt anthologized last year. Rafe also published a short story, "Kitten Goes to Sea" in the Poydras Review in May. 

The award ceremony for the Lamdba Literary Award will be in June--good luck, Rafe!

Yehudit Robinson (May 2008) is pleased to announce her engagement to Sam Daitch.

Nancy Ross published her poem "los salmones" in the most recent issue of imanhattan, the journal of NYU's MFA program in Creative Writing in Spanish. You can read her poem (and the rest of the journal) here.  


Over the course of her last semester at Draper, Zeinab Saiwalla (May 2012) completed an internship at the United Nations' UN Women, Asia-Pacific Division

Orla Stapelton's article (co-authored with Maria Besiou) “System Dynamics for Humanitarian Operations,” was published in the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management and has been chosen as a Highly Commended Award Winner at the Emerald - Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2012.

Whitney Walker (January 2012) recently accepted a position on The New York Times' Sales Development team where she is working on their digital media platform marketing strategies and is also responsible for coming up with creative ways for other companies to advertise with the Times, using all of their different media platforms.

Yun Emily Wang appeared with a New York-based contemporary ensemble, The Cabinet, at the annual Hartford Women's Music Festival in March 2012, and will also be performing with the String Orchestra of Brooklyn this month. See the SOB's schedule here. 

Miri Young (May 2012) has recently taken up a position as Manager of Programs and Tours at Judd Foundation (New York and Texas), based in SoHo. She focuses on programming, interpretation and outreach for artist Donald Judd's residence and studio space at 101 Spring Street, which will open to the public June 2013. As one of the founding sites in the program of Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, 101 Spring Street is the only intact, single-use cast-iron building remaining in SoHo. The Judd Foundation’s mission is to maintain and preserve Donald Judd's permanently installed living and working spaces, libraries, and archives in New York and Marfa, Texas.

Miri says that the Judd Foundation will run tours for university groups and has an intern program, and encourages Draperites to be in touch if either of these opportunities are of interest! (She can be reached at myoung@juddfoundation.org)

Congrats to all of you!