Friday, May 11, 2012

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! 




 

Creative Research Center Symposium -- The Scientific Imagination

SAVE THE DATE The 2nd Annual CRC Symposium/Real-time Webcast in collaboration with the new MSU School of Communication and Media; the College of Science and Mathematics; and the Research Academy for University Learning.


Friday, October 12, 2012 @ 11:00 a.m. live from the DuMont Broadcasting Studio
The Scientific Imagination: Where Do Ideas Come From?   


NEW in May 2012 @ The Creative Research Center click here.



DEADLINE EXTENDED: Forum on Forms of Seeing (Extended to May 23)

DEADLINE EXTENDED FOR APPLICATIONS: APPLY BY MAY 23

New York University
Forum on Forms of Seeing
CALL FOR NOMINATIONS & APPLICATIONS
Spring 2012

FORUM DESCRIPTION

The Graduate School of Arts and Science and the Institute of Fine Arts are pleased to invite nominations and applications for a specialized interdisciplinary forum for graduate students whose work addresses modes of visual representation and their products. Focused on the ways in which cultures give form to visual experience, the Forum on Forms of Seeing aims to bring together students from a wide range of graduate programs. Applications are encouraged from students who have strong historical and/or theoretical interests in images and visuality in the broadest sense, and who wish to become closely familiar with other disciplines concerned with visual representation.

Over the past few decades, many disciplines have become interested in “visuality” as a wider natural and cultural phenomenon that includes not only the traditional fine arts but imaging practices of all kinds, from cinema and popular print culture to digital reality techniques and scientific modeling. Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Literary Criticism, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience have taken significant interest in the concept of the visual, and relatively young disciplines such as Cinema Studies and Visual Studies or Visual Culture put visual representation at the center of their research. Art History itself has become more cognizant of the limitations of traditional medium‐bound definitions of the image, and has taken up a more fluidly‐defined visuality as one of its central problems. Reflecting the dramatic expansion of visuality as a category for scholarly inquiry, the Forum invites applications for membership from any NYU graduate program. 
 
How images in different periods and cultures imitate, model, render, or critique the world and our visual apprehension of it, for their makers and for their viewers, will be of central interest to the Forum. This historical and comparative approach may profitably be complemented by a philosophical understanding of the image as record of, or model for, acts of seeing. The creation, dissemination, function, signification, efficacy, duration, destruction, and demise of images will be welcome topics for the Forum.

MEETING FORMAT

Membership in the Forum on Forms of Seeing will be for one academic year, commencing in September 2012 and ending in April 2013. All eight members will present and critique work in progress during monthly, moderated lunch sessions, scheduled on Fridays, from 12–3 p.m., at Washington Square and the Institute of Fine Arts. The meetings will culminate in a one‐day event at the end of the semester, showcasing the year’s presentations. Members are expected to attend every session and to participate in the end‐of‐year symposium. A stipend of $500 is distributed per semester.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE

To apply for membership in the 2012‐13 Forum on Forms of Seeing, please provide a one‐page statement of your scholarly interest in visual representation and the relevance of interdisciplinary debate about visuality for your graduate work. Your application should include a current transcript (unofficial is fine), CV, and a recommendation by a NYU faculty member. Please submit your completed application electronically by end‐of‐day Wednesday, May 23 to Anna Antoniak (anna.antoniak@nyu.edu).

For more information, please visit the Forum on Forms of Seeing blog at

The Forum on Forms of Seeing is supported by the Office of the Provost, the Graduate School of Arts and Science, and the Institute of Fine Arts and its Alumni Association.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Don't Forget to Register for Draper's Summer Writing Workshops


Dear students:

Please find a reminder below about Draper's upcoming Summer Writing Workshops, offered in summer sessions one and two with Profs. Theresa MacPhail and Steven Moga. 
If you plan on enrolling, please do so within the next week--courses with low initial enrollments are often cancelled over the summer. 

You do not need an access code to register for the writing workshop; the class numbers you need to enroll are below. 
Please contact draper.program@nyu.edu with questions. 

***


Every summer, Draper offers a workshop course called "Preparation for Graduate School: Summer Writing Workshop." Although this course was originally designed for incoming graduate students, it has also been very useful to some Draper students after completing their first semesters in the program. 

If you'd like to brush up your writing skills this summer, the course will be offered in both summer session one (with Prof. MacPhail) andsummer session two (with Prof. Moga). It's a pass/fail class which can be taken for two credits, or as a non-credit course (there's a flat fee of $1,000 for the non-credit section; regular tuition applies to the two credit sections). There are no access codes for Draper's summercourses, so you can just enroll directly on Albert. 

Course descriptions for both Prof. MacPhail and Prof. Moga's workshops are below. Email Draper (draper.program@nyu.edu) with any questions about the course or summer registration. 

***
Summer Session One: 5/21 - 6/29

Summer Writing Workshop
Prof. Theresa MacPhail

Mondays, 6:00 - 8:30 PM
Draper Map Room

DRAP-GA.2900
Section 001: non-credit (CLASS NUMBER: 1487)
Section 002: two credits (CLASS NUMBER: 1488)

This course introduces incoming and first-year graduate students to the practice of academic writing. We’ll cover some of the specific forms and styles that graduate students routinely encounter, including: grant proposals and prospectuses, abstracts, book  and literature reviews, critical essays, and research papers. We’ll also seek to demystify the writing process by discussing some of the practical problems that writers face and breaking down the process into manageable tasks at each stage.
           
Because this course is a practical, hands-on workshop, it will be centered around what you write from week to week, as well as in-classwriting activities including peer review, feedback, editing, and discussion. Readings will consist of short articles on particular aspects ofwriting, and examples of the genres we are working with.

Aside from the writing you produce during the course, you should also have a longer paper that you would like to revise, either something in progress or previously written for another course. It doesn’t have to be a fully polished piece but it should have a recognizable shape with introduction, body and conclusion fleshed out. In case you do not have a suitable paper available, we can make other arrangements.

Summer Session Two: 7/2 - 8/10

Summer Writing Workshop
Prof. Steven Moga

Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:30 PM
Draper Map Room

DRAP-GA.2900
Section 003: non-credit (CLASS NUMBER 1489)
Section 004: two credits (CLASS NUMBER 1490)

This course focuses on academic writing in the form of short essays and research papers. Designed as a workshop, it aims to teach students practical skills for success in graduate school through weekly writing assignments, in-class writing and editing exercises, readings about academic writing, and discussion. Topics include style and tone in academic argument, writing with clarity and sophistication, the use of jargon and technical language, time management and the term paper, and the writing process.

CFP - "Global Lives" Conference at SBU Manhattan, with Keynote by NYU's Una Chaudhuri

Call for Papers [Deadline: June 1, 2012]
3rd Annual Graduate Student Conference
Stony Brook University, The State University of New York
Cultural Analysis and Theory Department

Stony Brook Manhattan
October 13th, 2012

Keynote Lecture to be delivered by:
Una Chaudhuri


“Global Lives”
The rapid changes currently experienced in the different spheres of contemporary life are loosely addressed by the term “globalization.”
How do we theorize these changes? And perhaps more importantly, while these changes are often considered a global phenomenon, are they not also shaped by a set of discourses? This calls for a reconsideration of key terms such as “domination” and “hegemony”, as well as of the various intellectual/cultural positions associated with them. In particular, we aim to reconsider the cultural sphere as a globalized phenomenon in which cultural products circulate on a worldwide scale, and as a sphere where “global” experiences are articulated.

The conference will attempt to explore some of the many aspects of this globalized view of culture, as well as other aspects of global lives, economical, political or other. We seek to engage scholars from a wide range of disciplines to bring together the different theories and perspectives of globalization in order to articulate the diverse experiences of living in a globalized world.

Topics include but are not limited to:
-        Transnational cinema and global film industry
-        New media and transnational communication networks
-        Mass media and global culture industry
-        Transnational literature(s)
-        Colonialism and postcolonial theory (empire, diaspora, exile, migration)
-        Neoliberalism
-        Emerging discourses of globalization, academic and popular
-        Globalization as historical process
-        Global material culture
-        Circulation of capital, goods, and people
-        Labor and work life on a global scale
-        Travel and tourism
-        Cultural Geography and Cartography
-        Educational Responses to a Global Culture
-        Popular movements and the various shapes of resistance
-        Ecology on a worldwide scale
-        National identities
-        Military, defense, homeland security and warfare studies

Submission and acceptance to the conference is based on blind peer review of a 250-300 word abstract. Panels and non-traditional presentations will also be considered. Graduate students interested in submitting should email an abstract, paper title, 2-3 sentence bio, affiliation and contact information to catgradconf@gmail.com by June 1, 2012. Presenters will be informed by August 1, 2012.


Conference Website:

Congratulations to Draper Travel Grant Recipient, Christopher Iverson

We are pleased to congratulate Christopher Iverson, the most recent recipient of a Draper Travel Grant, on his award! Christopher will use the grant to attend the University of Washington's conference "Acceptance in German Literary and Visual Culture," where he will be presenting his paper Rubble Films of the European and American Screens later this month.

A friendly reminder to all students that five Draper Travel Grants are awarded per academic year and that applications are accepted during five different periods. The next submission deadline will be June 30th. Currently matriculated Draper students who will be delivering papers or posters at scholarly conferences should fill out and deliver the necessary forms to the Draper office or via email to draper.program@nyu.edu by 5:00 pm, 6/30. The application is available through our website at http://draper.fas.nyu.edu/object/draper.forms. Along with the completed application, please submit confirmation that a conference has accepted the paper or project for presentation.
Again, we congratulate Mr. Iverson and wish him the best of luck on his presentation!