Rosanna Simons is Draper's Latest Travel Grant Winner! You Could be Next!

Congratulations to Rosanna Simons!

Rosanna won Draper's travel grant for the January/February period.

Another $200 award is up for grabs in the current application period, which ends April 30 at 5:00pm. If you'll be traveling to a conference and would like some additional funding, please apply! The application form is also available from our Forms page, and has additional information, including eligibility.

Rosanna was able to put her $200 toward her travel to a conference at York University, in Toronto -- Multilingual Identities: Translators and Interpreters as Cross-cultural Migrants. Rosanna's paper was entitled Translated, Translator: Hybridized Language in Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Here is her abstract:

Junot Díaz, who was born in 1968 in the Dominican Republic and was relocated by his mother to New Jersey at the age of six, composed his 2007 novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in what New York Times critic, Michiko Kakutani called “a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish…” In this paper, I will explain how the in-between space that Junot Díaz occupies as a translated man enables him to create a hybridized language in his novel. Expanding on Maria Tymoczko’s theory of literary translation as an analogue for post-colonial writing, I will then argue that the hybridized language of Oscar Wao does not only indicate that Díaz is a translator, but also requires that his readers become translators themselves. Díaz calls his readers into a hermeneutic community wherein traditional binaries such as original/translation and empire/colony are complicated, and the imperative to form counter-histories is expressed.

Once again, congratulations, Rosanna!

Seven Draper Students Competing in the NYU Threesis Challenge, 3/31

The Draper Program is proud to be the most-represented program in the upcoming Threesis Challenge! Our students will be competing against other NYU MA students for a grand prize of $2,500.

Date: Saturday, March 31, 2012
Time: Final Round begins at 4:00pm. Doors open at 3:30pm.
Location: Eisner & Lubin Auditorium, Kimmel Center, 60 Washington Square South, Room 401
You can see more information about the Threesis Challenge and RSVP here: http://gsas.nyu.edu/object/gsas.threesis2012.rsvp

Your fellow Draperite competitors, and the thesis projects they'll be presenting are:

Christopher Cappelluti
Joyce & Dante: The Politics of Filiation

Homa Zaryouni
Time and Narrative in Three Persian Novels

Kevin McKouen
Institutional Destructiveness: Corporate Ethics and Responsibility through Changes in Organizational Behavior

Roy Schwartz
Is Superman Circumcised? The Hero in Jewish Literature from the Bible to Comic Books

Sam Belkin
The Birth of Music out of the Spirit of Dionysus

Theresa D'Andrea
The Architecture of Fear: Claustrophobia & Confinement in Horror Film

Yun Emily Wang
Noisy-hot: the Sociopolitical Ramifications of Taiwanese Noise Ideologies

Congratulations, Draperites! We wish you all the best in the competition!

Draper's Annual Round Up: Send Us Your Good News!

We're doing our annual round up of good news in the Draper community. If you are a current student or graduate and have news to share--academic or not--about recent publications, projects, performances, conference participation, internships, or any other exciting developments in your life, drop us a line!

We'll be compiling a post for the Draper blog with all the details soon, so please get in touch with Larissa directly (larissa.kyzer[at]nyu.edu) by April 27.

Spivak Lecture, April 5 @ NYU

You’re cordially invited to the…

COMP LIT UNDERGRADUATE MAJORS’ CHOICE LECTURE with

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“Comparative Literature and the Subaltern”

Thursday, APRIL 5th

Silver Center, Room 703  -  6:30-8:30pm

Reminder: On Limits, Grad Conference at NYU: March 22-23

New York University Department of Comparative Literature

Graduate Student Conference—March 22-23, 2012

For the full schedule, see the website, here: http://onlimitsnyu.wordpress.com/schedule/

The concept of the limit figures centrally, yet in different ways, across a wide range of discourses and disciplines. But what precisely constitutes a limit? We propose to examine both different conceptualizations of the limit and whether and how the limit may be productive of its own transgressions, exceptions, and excesses. Further, what tensions arise from understanding limits to be either immanent or transcendent? And how have understandings of the limit changed with the advent and subsequent transformations of modernity?

With this conference, we seek to stage an interdisciplinary engagement with different ways of understanding the limit, in its formal and structural as well as textual and historical manifestations. We thus invite participants to address the question of the limit as it emerges across the spectrum of theoretical discourses as well as social and aesthetic practices. Submissions are encouraged from the literature and language fields and from disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences.

Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature and the Graduate School of Arts & Science, New York University.

"Walt Whitman's Faces": NYU, 3/27

The New York University

Colloquium in American Literature and Culture

presents

Walt Whitman’s “Faces”:

A Typographical Reading

Tuesday, March 27, 6:30 p.m.

19 University Place, Great Room

Internationally recognized letterpress artist Barbara Henry and Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener offer a first look at their collaborative effort, a letterpress book introducing a “typographical reading” of Whitman’s poem, “Faces.” Karbiener will discuss the poet’s interests in physiology, phrenology, and the faces he encountered on the streets of New York. Henry will present Whitman’s peculiar fascination with typefaces and relate how his work as a printer inspired her innovative setting of the poem.

www.nyucalc.com

Draper's Preliminary Fall 2012 Course Schedule Available Now

A preliminary fall 2012 course schedule is now available on Draper's website, here: http://draper.as.nyu.edu/object/drap.courses.fall12

This is a very early schedule--crosslists have only been confirmed with a few programs so far. We will add course descriptions and additional course information to the fall 2012 schedule page as we receive it, so please check back regularly. 

Remember that Draper's fall 2012 academic advising period will be held from August 13 - August 30, 2012. We will begin scheduling advising appointments on Monday, July 23rd.