Friday, April 27, 6:30pm - Lina Bolzoni, "Memory Palaces" -- The New School - The Arts of Memory Conference

The NSSR Interdisciplinary Memory Group invites you to the following event: 

Friday, April 27, 6:30–8:30 p.m.

EVENING KEYNOTE AND RECEPTION

(The New School for Social Research, Wolff Conference Room, 6 East 16th Street, 11th Floor)

"Memory Palaces - The Renaissance and the Contemporary World"

Lina Bolzoni
Global Distinguished Professor of Italian Studies
New York University

 

An ancient tradition teaches the art of memory. This art builds palaces in the mind in which to place images that help us to remember. While this tradition may at first sight appear radically remote from the world we live in today, it nevertheless regularly resurfaces in different forms. This talk describes the most famous "theatre of memory" of the Renaissance, the magical-hermetic Theatro of Giulio Camillo, and draws comparisons with the Encyclopedic Palace of the World (now in the American Folk Art Museum of New York), the brainchild of an Italian emigrant who developed this project for Washington Mall in the 1950s. Further contemporary employments of the ancient memory techniques may be observed in the life and works of historian Tony Judt and writer Siri Hustdvedt, opening up intriguing questions as to why such reemergence should occur at this particular historical juncture.

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This keynote address will be given in conjunction with "The Arts of Memory," the Fifth Annual Interdisciplinary Memory Conference at The New School for Social Research, Thursday, April 26 - Friday, April 27, 2012.

More information is attached and the full conference schedule is available on the conference website:

http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/subpage.aspx?id=78306

The evening event and conference are both free and open to the public -- please join us!

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NSSR Interdisciplinary Memory Group
"The Arts of Memory" -- The 5th Annual NSSR Interdisciplinary Memory Conference -- Thu., Apr 26 - Fri., Apr. 27, 2012
http://www.nssrmemoryconference.com

Networked NY Conference: Material/Literary/Digital Connections in the City @ NYU - Friday, March 9

The Project on New York Writing,

The Colloquium in American Literature and Culture, and

the Workshop in Archival Practice at New York University

present

Networked New York

A conference on material, literary, and digital connections in the city

With a keynote address by

Marvin Taylor

Director, Fales Library & Special Collections

“Playing the Field, Thoughts about Social Networks and the New York Downtown Arts Scene”

Friday, March 9, 2012

10:00 am – 5:30 pm

19 University Place, Great Room

New York University

Panels include:

Institution and Enterprise

Community, Production, and Place

Authors and Neighborhoods

Blogscapes and Digital Interaction

networkednewyork.wordpress.com

This event is free and open to the public.

The City in Winter: Photographs by Draper Professor Peter Lucas

Draper adjunct Peter Lucas, who teaches "International Studies in Human Rights," will be showing his most recent photographic project, "The City in Winter" at the New School's Skybridge Art & Sound Space. The opening reception is this Wednesday, February 15.

The Skybridge Art & Sound Space

Eugene Lang College / The New School

65 West 11^th Street / 66 West 12^th Street

Third Floor Passageway

THE CITY IN WINTER

Photographs by Peter Lucas / Graphic design by Garry Waller

February 15 – March 21, 2011

Opening Reception: Wednesday, February 15^th, 5:00 – 9:00 p.m.

The Skybridge Art & Sound Space is proud to present The City in Winter, a recent photographic project by Peter Lucas.

In 1990, the late Belgian poet Francois Jacqmin published a book of poems entitled Le Livre de la Neige (The Book of the Snow). Each poem is ten lines; a classical format the French call dizain, a mode of writing that opens a space for expression but withdrawals from any overt meaning or resolution. With each poetic image, Jacqmin evokes a subtle philosophic query, a deft meditation on the ephemeral nature of existence, and a hushed description of the elemental condition of wintertime.

Using Jacqmin’s poems as inspiration, Lucas began to photograph New York during the winter to find visual equivalents. Since the poems are essentially quiet and placeless, he intuitively chose moments when nothing seems to happen and no location in particular can be marked. Shooting with negative space to accommodate the overwriting of poems, each image has been thoughtfully designed by graphic artist Garry Waller. The resulting photo/poems explore the possibility of opening each image to a deeper dimension, a fragment of a story, a whisper of something else, beyond the visual silence of the city in winter.

Students Report Back on the NYU Walk Out and March to Wall Street

We're collecting reflections from Draper students who attended the NYU walk out and march earlier this week. If you were there and would like to share your experiences and/or photos, email us at Draper and we'll add them below. (Thoughts on the ongoing demonstration from people who did not attend the march are welcome as well.)

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Mario Cancel-Bigay:

I was part of the march. It was amazing!!! Peoples of all races, ages and political tendencies marching together. It took me 3 hours to get to Liberty street marching from NYU. There were thousands and thousands of the 99%.

Below are some of the slogans that I saw:

1.Weed not Greed
2. Revolution is an obligation
3. Wall Street Needs an Enema. Full of Crap!
4. Jobs not Cuts
5.We march for hope not hate
6. Tax Wall Street Leeches
7. Jobs, Justice and Education
8. Workers rights are human rights
9.Boycott your debts
10. Fund Art and Music
11. Senators, Congressmen, please heed the call
12. Need vs Greed
13. Class War? Time to fight
14. Corporations does not equal people
15. Medicare Protect it, Improve it, expand it
16. Fight for socialism
17. This years bonus? New neighbors
18. Save our schools
19. The times, they are a changing
20. Imagine no religion in government
21. Imagine no greed in America
22. Tax the bankers Occupy Wall Street
23. Credit Union Power
24. Jobs Now
25. Tax the Rich, feed the poor
26. Tear down this Wall Street
27. I never wanted to work anyway
28. really...? REALLY?!
29. Your prosperity is our austerity
30. The American dream? You have to be asleep to believe it. Wake up!
31. Iranians Occupy Wall street
32. Not left not right just sick of corporate influence in my government
33. Stop coddling the rich
34. Full citizenship for all immigrants
35. The monetary system is the problem
36. People before profits
37 We are all Sean Bell
38. We are the 99%

Registration Open for AGSLSP Conf: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Water (Saratoga Springs, NY)

ASSOCIATION OF GRADUATE LIBERAL STUDIES PROGRAMS (AGLSP)

2011 ANNUAL CONFERENCE
SOURCE OF LIFE AND STRIFE: MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON WATER

October 13-15, 2011
Saratoga Springs, NY
Host: Skidmore College

As an element necessary to sustain life on the Blue Planet, water has played and continues to play a paramount role in all aspects of human existence. Yet water has also served as a trigger for conflict and has caused devastating cataclysms, as Hurrican Katrina and the recent flooding in Pakistan so pointedly illustrate. Water is both a blessing and a curse, yet it is crucial to life, pervading art, politics, society, science, and basic human survival.

How does water appear in different contexts and function in different miliuex? How can a dialogue among disciplines illuminate and address problems and solutions to issues presented by this vital natural resource? How can the past inform our understanding of the importance of water in the present and guide our actions in the future? Join us in Saratoga Springs to grapple with the harmony and dissonance inherent in water as the source of life and strife and as inspiration for creativity and invention.

For more information on conference registration, accommodations, and the full program schedule, see http://www.aglsp.org/2011_Conf_Home.html

Get Your Dog's POV: DoggyCorps

In the midst of all the end-of-semester chaos, check out DoggyCorps, an interview-based art project developed by an almost-grad in Tisch's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Per the description on the website:

"DoggyCorps asks people to adopt the perspective of man’s oldest companion species, the dog, and share stories in the first person. These hybrid portraits transcend geographic borders, socio-economic status, and political persuasions to offer an accessible, entertaining, and oddly honest view into what it means to be a breathing being in an age of ever-increasing automation."

The website features audio interview profiles with dog owners (or rather, dogs) from all over New York, as well as animated shorts of each interviewee. Great site for any animal lover!

1st NYC Vegetarian Food Festival This Sunday!

Even if you aren't a vegetarian or vegan, the first ever NYC Vegetarian Food Festival promises lots of free and delicious food this Sunday, April 3rd. Check out the website: http://nycvegfoodfest.com/

Internship Opportunities with Wassaic Project (NYC & Wassaic)

The Wassaic Project is currently seeking summer interns. Details are below.

Interns are deeply involved in the daily operations of our organization in a way that is seldom offered by an organization of our size. There are opportunities for programming, independent projects, and meeting professionals in the field.

Please forward widely to current students (seniors and graduate students preferred) and alumni.

Thanks!
Eve and The Wassaic Project Team

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THE WASSAIC PROJECT
www.wassaicproject.org / eve@wassaicproject.org
po box 220, wassaic ny 12592

Intern at the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY and NYC!

The Wassaic Project seeks:

Summer Session / May - August 2011

FIVE interns to work with Co-Directors in Wassaic NY and Music Director in NYC

• 2 interns in Wassaic with a strong administrative and programming interest and/or background to work closely with the co-directors and the Exhibition and Education Programs
• 1 intern in Wassaic with silk screening skills to work closely with the Artist Residency Program
• 1 intern in NYC to work closely withe the Music Director and the Summer Festival music production team
• 1 intern in NYC who is web focused to work closely with our Design Fellow and all staff members
  
  

ABOUT

Work with a group of young, passionate artists and curators at The Wassaic Project, a vibrant multidisciplinary arts organization in Wassaic, NY and New York City. Programming interns learn about aspects of curating and producing an art exhibition and arts and music festival, from curating, press, marketing, event planning, exhibition hanging, gallery management and more. Because The Wassaic Project is a small, young organization, interns have a unique opportunity to contribute to the long-term identity of the organization and take on substantial responsibility. Interns have the chance to manage their own projects and will work on our spring benefit, the residency application process and logistics, the Summer Festival application process, curation, promotion and installation, and will help manage our Artist Residency program and events. Inters will work directly with artists as well as the directors of The Wassaic Project.Music focused intern will meet musicians, work closely with our Music Director, Scott Anderson, in allaspects of curating, recruiting, promoting, and coordinating our festival musicians.

Web focused intern will be 2 days / week based in NYC and a strong programming background is preferred. You will work closely with all staff members including our Design Fellow to update our website and explore new ways to present our material via the web.Internships will be tailored to meet your particular interests and take advantage of your skills, from writing, to silk screening, to carpentry and installation, to anything else.

Interns must be passionate about The Wassaic Project's mission, have an interest in contemporary art, be detail-oriented, communicate well, and be able to climb lots of stairs.Wassaic is about 90 miles North of NYC and is accessible by car and by Metro North (train goes direct to Wassaic).

BENEFITS

- housing is provided for interns working in Wassaic, NY
- work directly with Co-Directors, Music Director and Design Fellow
- meet and work closely with over 40 artist residents
- meet and work closely with over 100 Summer Festival artists
- modest gas and travel stipend
- 2 days of informational interview will be arranged with relevant arts professionals in NYC
- programming interns have access to the wood and metal shops and silk screen studios

REQUIREMENTS

Programming Interns, based in Wassaic, NY FULL TIME

• Applicants must be responsible, have excellent interpersonal skills, be detail oriented and able to learn quickly, love art, and enjoy getting to know new people.
• Must be familiar with Microsoft office suite, particularly word, excel and mail merge tools, basic blogging, facebook.
• Please specify if you have silk screen printing skills.
• Must be available to live onsite 5 days per week in Wassaic, NY, including weekends (days off will be weekdays). Housing will be provided, cars are recommended but not required.
  

Music Intern, based in NYC, PART TIME, based in Wassaic for the Summer Festival, August 3 - 8

• Applicants must be responsible, have excellent interpersonal skills, be detail oriented and able to learn quickly, love art, and enjoy getting to know new people.
• Must be familiar with Microsoft office suite, particularly word, excel and mail merge tools, basic blogging, facebook.
  
• Familiarity with basic music equipment to assist with back end coordination a must
  

WEB and PROGRAMMING Intern, based in NYC, PART TIME

• Applicants must be responsible, have excellent interpersonal skills, be detail oriented and able to learn quickly, love art, and enjoy getting to know new people.
• Must be familiar with Microsoft office suite, particularly word, excel and mail merge tools, basic blogging, facebook, wordpress, css and html.
• Must be willing to work with all staff members to realize web updates and design changes
• familiarity with PHP preferred
  

TO APPLY:

Deadline: April 10
Send a single PDF file named: first_last_INTERNSHIPTYPE
(ex: Jane_Doe_PROGRAMING.pdf) to: eve@wassaicproject.org
subject: INTERNSHIP APPLICATION

Please include in the following order:

• Name, email, phone number, website (if applicable)
• Which internship program are you applying for?
• Do you have silk screen printing skills?
• Contact information for 2 references (professional or professors)
• BRIEF cover letter (half page tops) stating your interest in working with The Wassaic Project and something about yourself you think is interesting. What is your interest in the arts?
• Resume
  

Applicants will be contacted by April 15th, whether or not they are asked to interview.

MISSION

The Wassaic Project is an artist-run, sustainable, multidisiplinary arts organization located on an
historic farm in Wassaic, NY. We facilitate artists, performers, and participants to exhibit, perform, discuss, and connect with art, music, each other, our unique site, and the surrounding community. Artists-in-residence are encouraged to experiment with new ways of working that we share and celebrate during our public programs. Visitors to The Wassaic Project are inspired to see art in a new way in this unique and welcoming setting.

Our programs generate dialogue and collaboration across geographic, ideological, and disciplinary
boundaries. The Wassaic Project's activities include a year-round artist and musician residency, an annual summer festival, and a series of public programs throughout the year including open studios. We also offer studio visits/critiques for artists involved with the organization by guest curators and visiting artists, and artist workshops with community members.

The Wassaic Project values community engagement, experimentation, and having fun.

The DIY Museum: Re-Purposing the Past at The City Reliquary: Talk at Draper, 4/8

Draper and Museum Studies are proud to co-sponsor a talk with Leah Dilworth about the City Reliquary in Brooklyn. The talk will be held in the Draper office next week and all are welcome to attend. Please see below for more details.

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The DIY Museum:
Re-Purposing the Past at The City Reliquary
Friday, April 8 -- 5:00 - 7:00 PM -- 14 University Place, Ground Floor

Leah Dilworth
Professor of English, Long Island University
Resident Academic, The City Reliquary

The City Reliquary is a not-for-profit community museum and civic organization in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Through permanent display of New York City artifacts, rotating exhibits of community collections, and annual cultural events, The City Reliquary connects visitors to the city's past and present.

Leah Dilworth is a Professor of English at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus. She has written and lectured widely on cultural meanings of tourism, collecting, the history of craft in America, and museums. She is the author of Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past and editor of Acts of Possession: Collecting in America.

Former Draper Faculty Fellow at CUNY Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series (4/1)

Nicole Rizzuto, Draper's former faculty fellow in Literary Cultures, will be giving a talk as part of the CUNY Graduate Center's Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series on April 1st. More information is below.

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The CUNY Graduate Center Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2010-2011

Nicole Rizzuto

Oklahoma State University

Confession and the Juridical Crisis of the Colonial State in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967) circles around the Emergency in Kenya, a traumatic historical event of anticolonial insurgency and counter-insurgency. In detailing this period of indefinite detention and torture undertaken in the name of a benevolent civilizing mission, the novel states that the struggle over two specific losses suffered under British colonialism are at the heart of the Emergency. Those losses are land and freedom. And yet, the work’s formal strategies simultaneously challenge this direct statement by indirectly constituting the Emergency as an event whose losses exceed that of territory and control of the polity; the Emergency is staged also as a crisis of the juridico-legal order by which the category “human” becomes the contested site of, and justification for, exceptional state violence. Placing Ngữgi’s writing in conversation with Judith Butler’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theorizations of sovereignty and bare life in modernity reveals how the novel might displace a Euro-centered trajectory in Trauma Studies. By elaborating a state of exception in Africa under colonial rule, A Grain of Wheat both calls for and enacts what Michael Rothberg terms “multi-directional memory,” by which the insights of Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies illuminate each other while addressing the ethico-politics of responding to occluded pasts.

April 1^st at 2 p.m.

CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5409

All are welcome

Nicole Rizzuto is Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. She has published on issues of testimony and trauma in journals such as World Picture and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and is completing a book manuscript entitled Spectral Witnesses: Testimony, Historical Memory, and the Modern Novel.

The CUNY Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

The Postcolonial Studies Group is a chartered organization of the Doctoral Students' Council. Please visit our website at www.opencuny.org/psg. Questions? Email Lily Saint at lsaint@gc.cuny.edu

Bike Trade-In This Weekend!

Hello friends -

Got an old bike sitting around? Trade it in - and trade up: Bring it in this weekend and get a voucher for $50 off a new bike!

WHEN Saturday March 26th, from 11am - 4pm

WHERE Bicycle Habitat, 250 Lafayette Street, NY, NY 10012

WHAT trade-in a bicycle or bike parts and get $50 OFF a new bike or 20% off bike gear

WHY All donations will go to Recycle-A-Bicycle, a local non-profit organization

For more information, visit our website or call (212) 431-3315.
Hope to see you this Saturday!

Charlie McCorkell
Bicycle Habitat

Photography and Film Panel at Barnard, 3/28

The Barnard Center for Research on Women invites you to attend:

The New Woman International:

Representations in Photography and Film

a panel with Kristine Harris, Elizabeth Otto, Vanessa Rocco, and Clare Rogan
moderated by Linda Nochlin
Monday, 3/28, 6:30 pm
James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall
Barnard College
3009 Broadway (at 117th Street)
New York, NY

During the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, a range of iconic female forms emerged to dominate the global pictorial landscape. Female athletes and adventurers, chorine stars, flappers, garçonnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, suffragettes, and trampky were all facets of the dazzling and urbane New Woman who came to epitomize modern femininity in photographs and on film. This construct existed as a set of abstract ideals, even as it varied when translated across national contexts and through a range of key historical moments including First Wave feminism, colonialism, the First and Second World Wars, political revolutions, and the rise of modernism.

This panel, moderated by art historian Linda Nochlin, will examine the nuances of visual representations of this transgressive and border-crossing figure from her inception in the later nineteenth century to her full development in the interwar period and beyond.

Kristine Harris is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Asian Studies Program at the State University of New York at New Paltz and recently was a Visiting Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

Linda Nochlin, moderator, is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Elizabeth Otto, assistant professor in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, is an art historian who focuses on issues of gender, visuality, and media culture in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in Germany and France.

Vanessa Rocco is an adjunct assistant professor in the History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute.

Clare I. Rogan is Curator of the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University, where she also teaches courses on history of photography, the history of prints, and museum studies.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Barnard Center for Research on Women at (212) 854-2067 or visit our website, www.barnard.edu/bcrw.

Breaking Down “Breaking Boundaries”

by Michelle Matthews (Silver School of Social Work) and Katie Koumatos (Draper Program)

A week ago, we (Michelle and Katie) attended the 13^th Annual Women’s History Conference at Sarah Lawrence College together. Entitled, “Breaking Boundaries: Body Politics and the Dynamics of Difference,” the conference incorporated scholastic voices from a variety of very different but interconnected disciplines, including a strong presence from the disabled community, the fat activist community and scholars studying the specific experiences and needs of African American women. We both had a really wonderful time and wanted to share our experiences with you.

The conference was scheduled to begin Friday evening with a keynote address by Marilyn Wann, author of Fat?So! and fat-activist extraordinaire. When we arrived, Marilyn was already there, inviting people to step on her Yay! Scale. An excellent example of the way that Fat Activists are creatively subversive, the Yay! Scale is a scale in which the numbers have been removed and replaced by compliments. Repurposed for the task to creating body self-esteem, this scale weights you and then gives you compliment. While the Yay! Scale told Katie that she was “the definition of Cute”, Michelle was reportedly “Fine, bordering on Perfect.”*

Marilyn’s keynote address was a basic introduction to the arguments behind the Fat Acceptance and the Health at Every Size (HAES) movements. She led the group in an analysis of the cultural associations of the fat/thin binary and challenged the common misconceptions about fat bodies. This ended up being a very useful exercise as people who were well versed in the culturally constructed ideas around race and gender were able to see how many of the same associations – dirty, ugly, messy, lazy, dangerous – as are used to oppress other marginalized groups are used to oppress fat people .

I (Katie) felt that one of the most salient points that Marilyn made revolved around the money that we spend on dieting in this country. Despite the fact that scientific studies have consistently shown that diets fail 95% of the time, last year Americans still spent over $59,700,000,000 trying to lose weight. Putting this into perspective, that is enough money to build a house for every single homeless person in this country and still have more than twenty billion dollars left over.

Wann offered valuable knowledge, but it was her engaging demeanor and happy dances that turned what could have been a cold lecture of facts and frustration into an enjoyable shared learning environment. Ending on a fat mad lib and a song, Marilyn’s keynote was engaging, informative and fun.

The evening continued with some dinner and a night of spoken word poetry. Maria James-Thiaw, Lara Frater, Tatiana McKinney and other poets all contributed to the event. By holding it in the Slonim Living Room, an intimate and safe space was created for personal and political expression.

Saturday began with a plenary panel that included presentations by Kathleen LeBesco, Susan Schwiek and Zoe Spencer. While the presentations by LeBesco and Schwiek were compelling and informative, we both felt that it was Spencer’s work, entitled “The Sexualized Body Politics of African American Women: From Enslavement to Hip Hop,” that really engaged and challenged the audience.

In my (Michelle) opinion, Spencer’s presentation was the highlight of the day. Not only did I love the fact that she is a fellow social worker, but her work was truly gripping. Several times she pointed out the race bias of the audience in a challenging but non-judgmental way. Her lecture was organized around the historic stereotypes of African American women and included categories like the Jezebel, the Mammy, the Sapphire and the Welfare Mom.

In the beginning of her lecture, she carefully presented the true horror of African American women’s slavery. Working to help the audience fully grasp the extent of their oppression, Spencer reiterated that these women had been treated like animals. They were raped, used to breed more slaves, and denied the chance to be mothers to their children. It was clear that she felt the need to impress upon us the intensity of this trauma and how her community is still feeling the effects of it. She moved through history, discussing the changing stereotypes of African American women and how their sexuality has continued to be controlled, manipulated and adjusted to fit the needs of the dominant culture. It was towards the end of the lecture that she interrupted herself to tell the mostly white audience that their lack of personal interaction with the African-American community probably left them with skewed views of African-American women. “You don’t go over to our houses for dinner. You don’t invite us to your house for dinner. For many of you, your ideas of African American women come from these constructed stereotypes.”

I (Katie) was particularly impressed with Spencer’s courage in challenging the notion of liberal safe spaces and her decision to present her work in a style that differed from the traditional academic model. Her lecture was equally filled with intense scholastic research and casual stories, random thoughts and personal interjections as she visibly negotiated how to best share this information with our particular audience. After the presentation, I (Michelle) sought her out to thank her for her lecture and talk with her more about teaching difference within the field of social work. We came to the conclusion that teaching difference and politeness are really incompatible, as it takes the uncomfortable experiences of being confronted with your privilege to allow students the chance to learn their biases and better understand “ethnocultural issues.” Spencer didn’t shy away from creating this same uncomfortable space with the audience and we both greatly respected her fierce candor.

The conference broke up into a series of smaller sessions, intermingled with a lunch break and some more hands-on activities. While the smaller presentations were engaging, it was truly these two larger lectures that captured our attention. We both networked a great deal, meeting scholars from other institutions and establishing the beginning of what could be very beneficial collaborative projects.

That first night, Marilyn Wann said, “If we can’t be at home in our own bodies, where are we supposed to go?” This beautifully sums up the entirety of the conference. As women, we must fight to regain psychological and physical ownership of our bodies above all else. If we are undermined in the control we have over how we conceive of our own flesh, everything else that we do in the world is weakened.

Katie Koumatos is a first year student in the Draper Program. She is trained in psychological anthropology and uses a multi-media approach to study the burgeoning fat activist movement. Michelle Matthews is a first-year master's student in the Silver School of Social Work, where she focuses her practice on health and women's issues. She founded the Size Diversity Coalition of Social Workers and blogs as the Fat Social Worker. Katie and Michelle are both fat activist who first met on a list-serve created to support the writing of the Fat Studies Reader. They met in person two months ago when Katie arrived in New York and have been planning mischief ever since. Currently they are working on creating an NYU student group affiliated with fat activism out of which they plan to run the Fat Studies Writing Workshop, a writer’s group for academics in this developing discipline. They are also planning on attending the Endangered Species: Women international summit at The New School this coming weekend. They welcome their fellow students to join them at this upcoming conference. You can reach them through their nyu emails at ksh287 or mmm608.

*We are planning a “Make Your Own Yay! Scale” Workshop for the Spring. If you are interested in joining us, please shoot us an email.

A Celebration of Czeslaw Milosz (Polish Institute of NY): 3/21

A CELEBRATION OF CZESLAW MILOSZ WITH CLARE CAVANAGH, ROBERT HASS, AND ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI Czeslaw Milosz's "trust in the delicious joy-bringing potential of art and intellect was protected by strong bulwarks built from the knowledge and experience that he had gained at first hand and at great cost." - Seamus Heaney, 2004 The Polish parliament has declared 2011 the Milosz Year in honor of one of Poland's greatest cultural figures, and the Polish Cultural Institute in New York is honored to announce the first US event in an international celebration of the centennial of the birth of Nobel Prize winning poet, essayist, translator, and scholar, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004). The Unterberg Poetry Center, which hosted six readings by Czeslaw Milosz during his lifetime, now in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute in New York have invited Milosz's friend and Berkeley colleague, poet Robert Hass, translator and Milosz biographer Clare Cavanagh, and one of the most important contemporary Polish poets also dividing his time between Poland and the US, Adam Zagajewski, to read and reflect upon the poet's life and work at the 92nd Street Y. One hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay [The Captive Mind], Milosz's indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: "his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself." - Tony Judt, New York Review of Books, 2010 Branded a "catastrophist" by critics of his early poetry in the 1930s, publishing underground at great risk during the Second World War, challenged by leftist intellectuals in Paris in the 1950s for seeking asylum from the Polish Communist government, criticized by Polish emigres for having served as a diplomat in the same government, joining the anti-war movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, and questioned by conservative Catholics as a heretic at his burial, Czeslaw Milosz lived a full life as an independent thinker and as an inspiration to others struggling against the prevailing forces in their own contexts. Milosz spent over 40 years in the United States, becoming an important figure in the West Coast poetry scene, across the country, and throughout the world, and many of the Milosz Year events in the United States in 2011 will focus on his time in America and his American legacy. 2011 MILOSZ YEAR USA Calendar Mon, Mar 21, 2011 8:00 PM The Unterberg Poetry Center 1395 Lexington Avenue New York, NY 10128 Tickets: $19//$10 age 35 and under $10 online with discount code "POLE" Tel. 212.415.5550 Additional Event: Wed, Mar 23, 2011 5:30 PM Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West. A lecture by Clare Cavanagh on Milosz, Szymborska, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam NYU The Humanities Initiative 20 Cooper Square 7th Floor New York, NY 10003 Tickets: Free and open to the public Tel. 212.998.2190

Polish Cultural Institute | 350 Fifth Avenue | Suite 4621 | New York | NY | 10118

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Mapping New Media: Symposium at Bard this Month

The Bard Graduate Center will be holding a symposium on Mapping New Media on Friday, March 25, 2011 from 1:00 to 5:00pm.

Maps are a wonderful metaphor for the new media world. But even more, digital mapping has altered the way that we perceive and represent space. This symposium will offer presentations and discussions about these new forms of cartographic methods in the digital humanities. We will look at old maps and new ones, learn about historical data and geo-spatial techniques, and study New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

The afternoon will be devoted to two presentations along with a roundtable and reception.

1:30–3:30pm

Aligning Past and Present: New Tools for the study of Historical Geography

Matthew Knutzen, Geospatial Librarian, New York PublicLibrary Map Division

New Deal Visions, Post-War Plans? Visualization, Remapping, and the Politics of Urban Space

Janice Reiff, Associate Professor, Department of History, UCLA

3:45–4:45pm

Roundtable

Matthew Knutzen, Geospatial Librarian, New York PublicLibrary Map Division Janice Reiff, Associate Professor, Department of History, UCLA

Wendy Bellion, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, University of Delaware

David Jaffee, Professor, BGC

All events take place at the BGC Lecture Hall in 38 West 86th Street, New York City between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West.

For general information, please contact academic-events@bgc.bard.edu

For RSVP click here or go to http://www.bgc.bard.edu/news/events/mapping-new-media.html

Memory: Silence, Screen and Spectacle Conference at New School, 3/24 - 3/26

The Center for Public Scholarship at The New School recommends...

the Fourth Annual New School Interdisciplinary Memory Conference:

Memory: Silence, Screen and Spectacle

March 24-26, 2011

The New School for Social Research, New York City

Speakers Include:

Marianne Hirsch, Susannah Radstone, Diana Taylor,

Yael Hersonski, Dirk Moses, William Hirst, Tom Allen,

Cynthia Milton, Daniel Levy, Louis Bickford, Jonathan Bach,

Rick Crownshaw, Susan Pearce, and many others

For information on the 2011 conference visit

www.newschool.edu/nssr/subpage.aspx?id=57135

or email nssrmemoryconference@gmail.com

Guest Post: Katie Koumatos on Two Upcoming Women's Issues Conferences

On the west coast, we hear that New York City has everything. As a newly minted resident of Queens, I am beginning to see evidence that this might actually be true. This month there are two inexpensive and impressive conferences on women’s issues happening in the area and I can’t wait to attend.

Interested in the dynamic nature of discourse surrounding the female body? Want to learn and talk about how these ideas intersect with topics like health, race, law and education? Then you should attend Breaking Boundaries: Body Politics & the Dynamics of Difference. This conference is being held this coming weekend at Sarah Lawrence College. It is free and open to the public but you must register on the website. The conference runs Friday, March 4th from 6pm-8pm and Saturday, March 5th from 10am-6pm (there is an optional $10 luncheon on Saturday). The conference features keynote speaker Marilyn Wann, author of Fat?So!, prominent Fat Activist, and all around phenomenal speaker.

Concerned about the cultural constructs that stop women from accepting their bodies? I am too. That’s why I am attending the international summit, Endangered Species: Preserving the Female Body on March 18^th and 19^th. Hosted by the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute, this incredible educational opportunity will be held at The New School. Featuring international speakers from a wide range of backgrounds, this summit consists of several complex and carefully crafted panels where speakers are discussing the “toxic culture that teaches women and girls to hate their bodies” and the way they are facing this challenge in their respective fields. The summit runs 6pm-9pm on Friday, March 18^th and 8am-8pm on Saturday, March 19^th. Registration requires some level of body activist donation (the least expensive option is $20).

I will be attending both conferences with a fellow fat studies scholar from the NYU School of Social Work and we would love to have you join us. Feel free to email larissa.kyzer@nyu.edu for my contact information.

Katie*

Katie Koumatos, a transplant from Northern California, has just started her education at NYU this semester. She is trained in anthropology and studies the burgeoning fat activist movement and the discourse that occurs at the intersection of fat, food, and shame. She is greatly interested in collaborative work and would welcome contact from scholars interested in Fat Studies.