Open House returns! Dates TBA soon — fall 2019.
Image: Edward Sanders glyph from A Book of Glyphs, Granary Books. With permission.
CFP extended to Jan 30th. The Twentieth Century Area Studies Group is co-sponsoring:
Black Lives Conference // Niv Acosta, “Discotropic”; photo by Thomas Seifert
CUNY Graduate Center English Student Association Conference. See website for more information or updates. SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JANUARY 30, 2019.
CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY
“Black Lives” has emerged in recent years as a conceptual touchstone following the wake of Black Lives Matter, a galvanizing social movement of public protest against the persistence of institutionalized forms of anti-black violence that besiege Black individuals and communities on a daily basis, both within the United States and across a range of geopolitical contexts. The phrase implicitly challenges nationalist and global concepts of humanity that do not include blackness as a viable sign of life and citizenship. As critics such as Paul Gilroy, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Robert Reid-Pharr and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have noted, “universal humanism” has been historically built upon a constitutive rejection of black being. To push back against such entrenched conceptual repudiations of black particularity, we take a cue from Jamaican philosopher and novelist Sylvia Wynter, who argues that black particularity paradoxically retains a utopian impulse for recognizing “our collective agency and authorship of our genres of being human” (2006). We intend for the conference to respond to the urgent need to think about the impact and meaning of “Black Lives” both as a touchstone for contemporary activism as well as a scholarly heuristic for research across a range of fields and disciplines. By doing so, we hope to make resonant the potentiality of blackness to signify as a radical node of meaning and being across a range of identitarian and relational articulations.
We seek papers and panel proposals that take up any aspect of “Black Lives” understood broadly as an entry point into research in, but not limited to, any of the areas listed below. We are especially interested in workshop proposals that address the necessary rituals and habits for self-care, success/pushing back in a hostile workplace, building and maintaining your village, and contemporary radical Black artists/activists:
Please submit an abstract of up to 400 words, a short biographical description, and your contact information by January 30, 2018. Proposals and questions should be sent to conference organizers at blacklivesconferencecommittee@gmail.com.
The 20th/21st c workshops or works in progress series continues. Organized by Dan Hengel.
Friday, April 20th, 2pm, room 4406 in the Thesis room.
&
Friday, May 11th, 2pm, room 4406 in the Thesis room.
Past workshops included: sharing ideas for projects, drafts of conference papers, prospectus proposals, parts of dissertation chapters, practice job talks, seminar paper ideas, and more.
Details to follow on future workshops!
Second date! More to follow – fall 2018!
Join us for Saturdays at NYPL: Open House for Archival Encounters at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.
Saturday, April 14th: 10am-2pm
Location: Room 320, The New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue
To join, please pre-register here
The New York Public Library, the Twentieth Century Area Studies Group, the Doctoral Students’ Council, the English Program at The Graduate Center, CUNY, Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, the Center for the Humanities and Primary Source: On Special Collections, Archives, and Libraries working group invite you to:
The Twentieth Century Area Studies group co-sponsored the English Student Association Graduate Conference:
Breaking Through: Textures and Aesthetics of Rupture
Friday, March 23rd, 2018 – full program is here. Reception to follow.
The day will feature two keynote speakers — Sarah Schulman at 10:20 am, and Jasbir Puar at 2:50 pm — followed by an afternoon panel with English Program faculty members Eric Lott, Siraj Ahmed, Jonathan W. Gray, and Jessica Yood.
Upcoming in fall 2017, co-sponsored by the Twentieth Century Area Studies Group
Omri Moses – “Poetry and the Environmentally Extended Mind”
Friday, October 27th, 4pm – 7pm, room 4406
Over the last two decades, cognitive scientists working in embodied, extended, enactive, and embedded cognition have sought to understand mental processes in ways that take us “out of our heads.” In this paper Omri Moses (Concordia University, Montreal) argues that this new science of mind offers humanists a better entry point than we have so far found into productive cross-disciplinary engagement with scientists. By privileging the role that the body and physical and cultural environment play in organizing and constituting thought, it transforms our understanding of such supposedly “inward” meditative experiences as poetry reading into a more collaborative, individually tailored, and culturally situated activity.
Two summer workshop meetings. Students discuss work in progress:
Thursday, June 15th, 4406: 1 pm – 3 pm
and
Friday, August 18th, 4406: 2pm – 4pm
The Twentieth Century Area Studies Group is co-sponsor of this year’s English Student Association Conference – “The Vibrating World: Soundscapes and Undersongs” – on Friday, March 31st, all day. Open to all.
Conference Website and Center for Humanities page
Join us for “The Vibrating World”, the annual English Student Association Graduate Student Conference exploring sound and song with keynote speakers Joseph Straus, Distinguished Professor of Music, The Graduate Center, CUNY, and David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds Sing, composer, and musician.
If we take seriously Jacques Attali’s claim that the world is “not legible, but audible,” what scholarly shifts are possible by turning our focus to acts of listening and representations of sound? Sound has long been represented in literature, philosophy, art, and science, but we are only now encountering a ‘sonic boom’ in critical and theoretical writings on sound in the humanities and social sciences. If we scramble our notions of language, what other sounds, voices, musics, or understandings might become legible or audible to us? We will consider the spaces between words, pauses between calls and responses, and the breaths and rests that produce multidimensional rhythms, harmonies, discordances, resolutions, and meanings, the undersong that carries the burden of a song, the chorus, the refrain.
