CFP: Black Lives – April 11-12th, 2019

CFP extended to Jan 30th. The Twentieth Century Area Studies Group is co-sponsoring:

Black Lives Conference // Niv Acosta, “Discotropic”; photo by Thomas Seifert

BLACK LIVES

CUNY Graduate Center English Student Association Conference. See website for more information or updates. SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JANUARY 30, 2019.

Thursday, April 11 – Friday, April 12, 2019

CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY

KEYNOTES BY:
Michelle Wright, Emory University
Rafael Walker, Baruch College

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:

  • Regional and global Black activisms and cross-struggle affinities
  • African-American and African Diasporic Literary Studies
  • Contemporary theory regarding blackness and black subjectivity, including Afro-Pessimism, Afro-Futurism, Black Atlantic Studies, Black Pacific Studies
  • Critical Archive Studies
  • Critical Science Studies
  • Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction and Biopolitics
  • Black cultural histories and Blues historiography
  • Blackness and “modernity”/globalization
  • Middle Passage theory
  • Black sovereignty and selfhood
  • Critical Race studies
  • Blackness, Brownness, and Affect
  • Black, Queer and Trans Feminisms
  • Queer Sexualities
  • Queer of Color Critique, Queer Theory, Critical Trans Studies
  • Native-American/First Nations studies
  • Blackness and Jewishness
  • Postcolonial studies
  • Disabilities studies
  • Performance studies/Body as Archive
  • Prison abolitionism
  • Critical interventions in Post-Humanism, New Materialism, and Object Oriented Ontology
  • Black utopianisms and Marxisms
  • Black aesthetics and/or aestheticism
  • The Black Radical Tradition, Black Power and the Black Arts movement
  • The New Negro (Harlem) Renaissance/The New Black (post-Civil Rights)
  • Intersectionality
  • White Feminism/Womanism
  • Black literacies and critical pedagogy
  • Blackness and religion

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.

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Workshop series Fall 2018

Organized by Dan Hengel!
The Fall 2018 inaugural Workshop Series Event commenced on Friday, September 14, 2018.
Michelle Chintz and Genevieve Bettendorf volunteered to read.
The details:
Day: Friday, 09-14-18
Time: 14:00-15:30
Location: English Program Thesis Room
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Upcoming student workshops: Friday, April 20th, 2pm & Friday, May 11th, 2pm

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!

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April 14th, 2018: Saturdays at NYPL – Open House for Archival Encounters

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:

  • hone your archival research skills
  • read with your colleagues and speak with a specialist
  • encounter new material and new possibilities for your work

Continue reading

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March 23, 2018: ESA Conference – “Breaking Through: Textures and Aesthetics of Rupture”

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.

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Friday, Oct 27th, 2017: Omri Moses – “Poetry and the Environmentally Extended Mind”

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.

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March 31, 2017: ESA Conference – “The Vibrating World: Soundscapes and Undersongs”

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.

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