Check Out the New Issue of Fiction Fix, Edited by Draper Alumna April Bacon

We recently profiled Draper alumna April Bacon, who for several years has been the editor-in-chief of Fiction Fix, an online literary journal founded by students, alumni, and faculty at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. We're now delighted to share Fiction Fix's newest 8th issue, which is available on their website or as a downloadable .pdf.

So when you need a break from the end of the semester craze, head over to Fiction Fix and take a break with some great new fiction.

NYU Office of Sustainability Green Grants Program- Intern Needed

NYU Office of Sustainability Green Grants Program- Intern Needed

The Office of Sustainability is seeking an unpaid Intern for the Fall 2010 semester to aid in the strategic revitalization of its Green Grant Program, a unique granting system that supports NYU student, staff, and faculty projects to improve NYU's environmental performance. The student will be working closely with Max Liboiron, the Green Grant Program Coordinator, to research, analyze and make thoughtful recommendations for the program.

Skills Required:

* experience in interviewing stakeholders and/or creating and analyzing surveys
* operational analysis skills
* quantitative and qualitative analysis skills
* the ability to work independently
* interest in and familiarity with environmental problems and solutions
* clear, concise and articulate writing skills
* expertise with Microsoft Office Suite

5-10 hours a week, somewhat flexible schedule

Tasks will include:
* survey former and current Green Grantees (of both successful and unsuccessful projects)
* survey the larger NYU community to see what students, staff, and faculty expect from a granting body
* analyse successful and unsuccessful projects for major trends
* do a quantitative analysis of NYU's Green Grant program compared to other citizen (non-expert) environmental grants from post-secondary institutions, including a comparison of rates of completion
* make recommendations for how to brand/outreach the program
* recommend a new strategy for how the grants are run so as to have the highest completion rate possible while maintaining accessibility for all members of the NYU community

To learn more about NYU and sustainability, visit www.nyu.edu/sustainability

Interested candidates should send a resume and cover letter to Max Liboiron at max.liboiron@nyu.edu

Interviews will begin Tuesday, October 19th, 2010.

--
Max Liboiron
PhD Candidate
Media, Culture and Communication
New York University
---
Program Assistant, Green Grants
NYU Sustainability Initiatives
www.nyu.edu/sustainability

Draper Student & Alumni Announcements

Draper students and alumni have been as busy as ever since we posted our last update. Thanks for letting us know what you've all been up to! Remember that if you would like to write a post for the blog about your experiences presenting at conferences, your academic work, or events/accomplishments of interest outside of academia, we love to have student contributions. Get in touch with us at draper.program@nyu.edu if you have news to report or are interested in writing a blog post.

Student and Alumni News

Marcia Alesan Dawkins (alumna '00) is an Assistant Professor of Human Communication at California State University, Fullerton. She is writes about political communication, diversity, popular culture and new media for "The Huffington Post" and "Truthdig" (www.marciadawkins.com/blog). Her forthcoming book, “Things Said in Passing,” is a critical analysis of instances of racial passing in the United States from the late nineteenth through early twenty-first centuries. She lectures and consults on these and other issues related to contemporary communication.

Shayne Leslie Figueroa (alumna, September 2008) was accepted to Steinhardt's doctoral program in Nutrition and Food Studies. Shayne will start the program in the fall while continuing to act as the administrator at NYU's Taub Center for Israel Studies.

Yelitzaveta Goldfarb's article, "Irony Behind the Iron Curtain" is set to be published in the Nabokov Online Journal (NOJ/НОЖ) on April 23, 2010. A link to her article will be made available when the journal is published.

Tara Haskins is presenting her paper "Put What? Where? Why Americans Don't Like Squat Toliets" at the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association's National Conference in St. Louis, Missouri (March 2010).

Everett Kramer will be presenting his paper, "A Teapot Arsenal: on Propaganda Porcelain in Mao's China" at Bard Graduate Center's "Materials of Persuasion" Conference (April 2010).

Ji Hyun Lee will be presenting papers at two upcoming conferences. At NYU's Graduate English Organization Conference on Literature and the Mass-Produced Image (April 2010), she will be presenting a paper entitled ""The Ontology of a Novel: Reading Dennis Cooper's Period alongside Andre Bazin's 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image.'" She will also be presenting at York University's conference, "The Future (TBD)," in Toronto (April 2010). Her paper for this conference is called "(An)Archiving after the Apocalypse: The Death Drive, Representation, and the Rise and Fall and Rise of Civilization in Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz."

Ji Hyuck Moon published a Science Fiction short story entitled "Chaser" on naver.com, the largest and the most famous portal site in Korea (similar to Google in the US.) "Chaser" was featured on the main page of naver.com on Feburary 5, 2010 and will be published later by Minumsa, a popular publishing company in Korea.

Ji Hyuck's translation of Elephant Faith, by Cynthia Boykin, was published in Korea in January. He has also completed a Korean translation (his 7th) of In Quiet Light: Poems on Vermeer's Women by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre. The book will be published later this year.

Chandani Patel (alumna, May '08) is the recipient of a four year Jacob K. Javits fellowship supporting her research, which examines literature from East Africa, South Africa, and Mauritius revolving around movements and migrations within the Indian Ocean. Chandani is currently in her second year in the University of Chicago's doctoral program in Comparative Literature.

Yehudit Robinson (alumna, May '08) presented at SUNY Stony Brook's "Cycles" Conference in January 2010. Her presentation, entitledPlus de MetaFood: Economies of Consumption and the Disappearance of the Subject in Eating Disorder Literature," was based on her Draper Master's thesis and focused on the "cyclicality of want and our collective fantasy of avowal; on anorexia's relationship to metaphor, bulimia's to metonymy, and the potentially fatal consequences."

Jackie Simonovitch is presenting her paper, "The Cycle of Madness in Wide Sargasso Sea" at Stony Brook University's 3rd Annual Women's and Gender Studies Graduate Conference (March 2010).

Matt Williams (alumn, May '08) will be presenting a paper entitled "Launched Among Strangers": Personality and Politics During the Administration of Governor William Cosby, 1732-1736" at the 15ht Annual Barnes Club Graduate Student Conference (March 2010) at Temple University's Center City Campus. Matt is in his second year in SUNY Binghamton's doctoral program in History.

Draper Student Announcements!

It's been wonderful to hear of all the great things Draper students and alumni are up to these days. We hope you will continue to email us at draper.program@nyu.edu with your own news!

Here are the most recent items:

Hilarie Ashton has been accepted to the following conferences:

• Southwest/Texas PCA/ACA (February 2010): "'My Name is Johnny Cash': The Artistic Persona through Jameson and Foucault" [session: Music: Traditional, Political, Popular]
• Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 (February 2010): panel chair and speaker, "Stabat Stella: Depictions of Foucauldian Power in 'Stabat Mater' and Stella Dallas" [session: Slippery Eels and Postmodern Identities]
• Comparative Literature Conference at CSU Long Beach (March 2010): "The Othered Vocabulary of Zombies and Psychos: Genette's Paratext in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse"
  
• American Comparative Literature Association (April 2010): "The Urban (as) Flâneur: Narrator and City in Edgardo Vega Yunque's The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow Into The Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle" [session: Landscapes of Cultural Production]
• International Society for the Study of Narrative (April 2010): panel chair

April Pierce writes articles for the Examiner as the "Brooklyn Literature Examiner" and book reviews for Critical Flame. She's also submitting a paper to two conferences that might be of interest to Draper students: The Eighth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities at UCLA and The Philosophy and the Arts Conference at Stony Brook Manhattan

Yvonne Garrett will be presenting at two conferences this semester:

• January 29th "Taking Up Space" at Duke University delivering a paper entitled, "Breaking Boundaries: a Study of Native American Literary Voice on & off the Reservation."
• Feb. 10-13th @ Southwest TX PCA/ACA Conference in Albuquerque, NM presenting 2 papers. In the "American Indians Today" area/"American Indians and the Arts" section, a paper entitled, "This Ain't Rock'n'Roll, This is Genocide: Structures of Hybridity, Cosmopolitanism and the Silencing of the Native Subject in Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues " (based on her Draper MA thesis of the same title). And in the "Punk Rock" area/Punk Literature: Philosophically and Rhetorically" section, a paper entitled, "Punk Rock Bitches: Exploring the Agency of Gender and the Punk Rock Aesthetic in the fiction of Kathy Acker."
  

Alumni Russell MacKenzie Fehr (class of Fall 2009) is now a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of California Riverside. He also attended the annual meeting of the American Historical Association this month.


Alumna Elena Landriscina (class of May 2009) just published an article in a peer-reviewed journal, Essex Human Rights Review, entitled "The Legal Obligation to Prosecute 'Rendition to Torture.' " It appears in a Special Issue (Volume 6, No. 1, December 2009) devoted to the topic of "Preventing Torture in the 21st Century." The article is available through the link above.


You may remember us posting about a benefit for The Organization for Visual Progression, a nonprofit co-founded by Draper alumni Ben Foley (class of August 2006). Since founding OVP in September of 2008, the organization, which is dedicated to helping social justice organizations create and utilize visual media in their advocacy efforts, has conducted a two-week video advocacy training in the Southern Philippines and collaborated with the Legal Action Center, non-profit law firm in New York City to produce a DVD that will give people leaving prison the skills and knowledge necessary to find jobs and prepare them for the challenges they may face in the reentry process. In 2010 they are conducting a 12-month video advocacy training project in Sri Lanka, and preparing for projects in Nepal, China, and the Philippines.


Finally, we wish to note all the students who participated in the recent Draper Student Organization Colloquium on Silence last December:

Rhyannon Rodriguez
“Silence & the Sound of Difference: The Narrative Qualities of Silence in Horror Cinema”

Jason Slaughter
“Three Unusual Instances of Silence in Music”

Alanana Smith
“Silence as Violence – Muting Politics in Humanitarian Discourse”

Tamara Day
“The Powers of Silence in Wide Sargasso Sea”

Congratulations, all!

STREB at the Olympics

Draper alumna Elizabeth Streb's STREB Extreme Action Company will be performing at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver as part of the Cultural Olympiad! This press release has more information on the Cultural Olympiad and the other artists who will be performing at that festival.

If you'd like to see the company getting ready for Vancouver, you can attend their rehearsals, which are always open to the public. As their newsletter says, "We invite you to come watch Elizabeth and the company work any time!" Here are their upcoming rehearsal dates:

Company Rehearsal
11:30-3:30pm
December 22nd, 23rd, 29th and 30th
January 5th-8th and 11th-14th

Lots more info on STREB can be found on their website. Congratulations, Elizabeth Streb and company!

SUNY Cycles Conference Call for Papers Extended

Dear Students,

On behalf of all the organizers of the Women's & Gender Studies 3rd Annual Graduate Conference, I'm sending out our revised Call for Papers with the extended deadline of January 15. We've been receiving such interesting things that we've decided to extend our deadline and get even more! Please tell your friends, colleagues, and/or departments about the new deadline in case anyone couldn't make the first one. You'll find the new CFP attached; feel free to send it out and help spread the word!

We're looking forward to another great conference this year (and the announcement of a fantastic keynote)! Feel free to contact us at wstconf@gmail.com if you have any questions at all.

Thank You,

Dean Allbritton, Kristin Hole, Briana Martino & Betsy Shapiro
CYCLES Conference

Women's & Gender Studies

SUNY Stony Brook

----------

CYCLES
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Stony Brook University’s Manhattan Campus

CALL FOR PAPERS EXTENDED

Please email your 250-word abstract by January 15, 2009 to <wstconf@gmail.com>

Life is shaped by cycles. From patterns of migration and biological processes to the recycling of ideas and objects in mass culture, forms of re-circulation define our experiences. Cycles explores reiterations of gender categories, social movements, as well as what it might mean to have a temporality opposed to a teleological notion of history. This conference provides a critical space to map the terrain of the cycle by approaching it from various theoretical, analytic, and disciplinary positions of feminism. How might this process inform science, visual culture, music, and literature? Furthermore, can cycles as repetitions help us to negotiate the past by working through the traumas and mistakes of history? Or are we destined to repeat the past without the possibility of meaningful change?

This conference aims to generate an interdisciplinary and critical discussion about how gender and sexuality relate to the concept of the cycle. Papers are invited from all disciplines and theoretical positions. Some suggested topics include but are not limited to:

• Feminist and/or queer temporalities

• Trauma, repetition, and death

• Social movements and political change

• Technologies of reproduction

• Theorizing menstruation in literature and film

• Visual or textual strategies of repetition as an aesthetic or cultural politics

• The bicycle as an instrument of women’s liberation

• Migrations and geo-spatial movements

• Cycles of narrative: series, adaptations, remakes

Thesis submission deadline for January grads: December 16th

Please be reminded that Draper students who intend to graduate this coming January will need to submit their completed and approved Master's theses to Draper no later than Wednesday, December 16th. Any theses received after 6:00 PM on December 16th will be held over for May graduation. There will be no exceptions.

For more information on thesis guidelines, please see Draper's Web site, here: http://www.draper.fas.nyu.edu/object/draper.program.thesisguidelines.html

All thesis related forms--including a sample cover page and second reader sheets--can also be downloaded from the Draper website, here: http://www.draper.fas.nyu.edu/page/forms

Spring advisement dates

Draper will begin scheduling advising appointments for Spring 2010 on Friday, October 30th. To schedule your appointment, please call 212.998.8070 anytime after Thursday the 29th.

Spring advising appointments will be held in two separate sessions. The first session will begin on Wednesday, November 11th and end on Wednesday, November 25th. Any students who are unable to come in for advising during this session will have the opportunity to do so during the second advising session, January 11-12. No advising appointments will be held in December.

Course listings will be up on the Draper website by the end of this week, with cross-listed courses added continually.

Call For Papers: Interdisciplinary Conference, Duke (January 2010)

Call for Papers

Taking Up Space: An Interdisciplinary Conference

Hosted by Duke History Graduate Students with Support from the Sociology Department, Latino/a Studies, and the Women's Studies Program January 29, 2010 (Abstract Submissions due November 1, 2009)

A central feature of Western scientific thought originated by René Descartes and elaborated further by physicists and mathematicians has been a notion of space as a container within which objects exist and actions take place. Despite the widespread acceptance of all-encompassing mathematical and physical space as part of our inherited common sense, scholars have increasingly questioned its relevance for the spaces of human activity. They have explored other spaces, including literary space, social space, mental space, the space of the body, racialized and gendered spaces, cities, regions, oceans and the globe. They have drawn attention to the production of spaces, the power relations imbued within them, and various ways in which space can be productive, prohibitive or instrumental for human actors. There has also been renewed attention to scholarly spatial methodology regarding scale and the appropriate distance between the research and the researched.

We invite scholars across disciplines to submit papers for a one-day conference during which we will place into dialogue a wide variety of approaches to questions of space and consider their application to historical inquiry. We specifically encourage with works in progress or at an early stage in their research, including pre-dissertation graduate students, to apply. Drawing on diverse traditions, we hope to explore how to understand the production and productive capacity of sites, locations, scales, and geographies.

Submissions to the conference could address, but are by no means limited to, the following topics:

     o The production and erosion of particular spaces.

     o Lived spaces and hegemonic spaces.

     o Landscapes and their meanings.

     o The spatial constitution of identities, politics and knowledges.

     o Relations between Mathematical, physical, mental and social space.

     o Capitalist structures, creative destruction and alternative or oppositional 
       economic spaces.

     o Money, capital and the trend toward eliminating spatial differentiation.

     o Fixed investments in space.

     o Modern, premodern and postmodern spaces.

     o Mobility, territory, nationalism and community.

     o Geographic scales, social topography, cartography and globalization.

     o Ideologies of space.

     o Racial, class and gender power relations embodied in landscape.

     o Social movements and public space.

     o Environmental histories of natural and built environments and ecosystems.

     o Uneven development and disruptions of historical periodizations.

     o The history of science and technology.

     o Scholarly distancing and other spatial methodologies.

The conference will consist of panels organized around specific questions with a commenter. Please submit an abstract of no more than 350 words by November 1, 2009, to Patrick McElwee at pmm21@duke.edu. Those selected will be notified
by November 15, 2009. The conference will take place at Duke University on Friday, January 29, 2010.

Patrick McElwee
Duke University
Department of History
http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/grad/specialty.html

Dean's Student Travel Grant Program

Those of you interested in participating in conferences or professional meetings this year should be aware of the Dean's Student Travel Grant Program. The Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS) provides funds to graduate students in the humanities, social sciences and sciences for travel to professional meetings and conferences to present invited papers or posters. The Dean's Student Travel Grant Program provides a total of 225 awards each year, in the amount of $500 each, to help students defray the cost of presenting their scholarly work. The grant may be used for travel, lodging, and related expenses.

The program is fully described on the GSAS web site at http://gsas.nyu.edu/page/grad.travelgrant. Awards are made through a two-tier lottery process during three award periods. Applications for Period 1 are being accepted from this Wednesday, October 8, through October 23.