March 2012
Jini Kim Watson: The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form
Tuesday, March 28, 2012, 6:00PM
A panel discussion celebrating the publication of The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), by 2011-12 Humanities Initiative fellow Jini K. Watson (Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, NYU). With panelists Robert J.C. Young (Silver Professor; Professor of English, Comparative Literature, NYU), Kristin Ross (Professor of Comparative Literature, NYU, and Thomas Looser (Associate Professor of East Asian Studies).
Watson focuses on the gleaming Asian Tiger metropolises of Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore, and argues that reading cultural production in conjunction with built environments can enrich our knowledge of the lived consequences of rapid economic and urban development.
This event is co-sponsored by the Program in Asian/Pacific/American Studies. Please RSVP for this event at: http://bitly.com/jkwatson.
The Wisdom of the Humanities: Building Meaningful Lives and Successful Careers
Wednesday, March 21, 2012, 5:00PM
A round table discussion featuring five individuals describing diverse paths they have taken since majoring in the humanities as undergraduates. Featuring accomplished women and men of different ages, in a range of professional fields — publishing, management consulting, banking, non-profit/law, and film-making — this event will offer practical and personal advice on developing your interests and skills in the humanities to achieve success, both within and beyond the workplace. Featuring:
- Alexa Allen is a 2011 graduate of NYU's Liberal Studies program who currently work for Citigroup in New York.
- Laura Brown is Executive Vice President of ITHAKA, an organization "dedicated to helping the scholarly community make a successful and sustainable transition to digital and network technologies." She is also Managing Director of JSTOR, one of the most trusted digital archives of academic journals, and serves on the board of Yale University Press and the Meserve Kunhardt Foundation. Brown is the past president of Oxford University Press, USA and attended Goucher College.
- Barak Goodman is co-founder of Ark Media, headquartered in Brooklyn, and principal writer/producer/director for the company. His award winning documentary films have appeared on PBS and other networks. He was an American Studies major in college.
- Matt Gornick
- Eric S. Lee is the President of Bennett Midland LLC, a management consulting firm.
Thomas Augst, Interim Director of the Humanities Initiative and Associate Professor of English (NYU) will serve as moderator. This event is sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, and presented by the Humanities Initiative at NYU, in collaboration with the Morse Academic Plan and the Center for Study of Transformative Lives.
Writing the Dissertation: Tips and Trouble Spots
Thursday, March 1, 2012, 2:00 - 4:00PM
A workshop to learn practical strategies for conceiving of, writing, and completing your dissertation. Bring questions and your own experiences related to any part of the dissertation writing process!
With speakers: Thomas Augst (Associate Professor of English; Interim Director of the Humanities Initiative, NYU), Lauren Benton (Dean for Humanities; Professor of History, NYU), Faye Ginsburg (David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology, NYU), Shane Minkin (Assistant Professor of History, Swarthmore College), and Julie Shulman Kupfer, Psy.D. (Fellow at NYU Counseling and Wellness Services, NYU). Dean Kathy Talvacchia (Assistant Dean for Academic and Student Life, GSAS, NYU) will serve as moderator. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Initiative at NYU, the Graduate School of Arts & Science, and the FAS Office of the Dean for Humanities.
An RSVP is required for this event. Please register at: http://bitly.com/dissertationworkshop.
February 2012
Elliot Wolfson: A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination
February 28, 2012, 5:00PM
A panel celebrating the publication of A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination, by Elliot Wolfson, Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, NYU. Dreams have attracted the curiosity of humankind for millennia. Panelists include Virginia Burrus (Theology, Drew University), Jonathan Garb (Jewish Thought, Hebrew University), and Avital Ronell (German, NYU).
In A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, Wolfson grapples with the allusive and elusive place dreaming occupies in the panorama of human experience. Drawing on a variety of contemporary academic disciplines, he returns to and rethinks past explications of the dream: that the dream state and waking reality are on an equal phenomenal footing; that the sensory world is the dream from which one must awaken by waking to the dream in which one is merely dreaming that one is awake. By interpreting the dream within the dream, Wolfson articulates how a productive paradox emerges to reveal the wakeful character of the dream and the dreamful character of wakefulness.
Please RSVP for this event at: http://bitly.com/dreaminterpreted.
Download the poster here.
Hannah Gurman: The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond
February 15, 2012, 5:00PM
A book launch celebrating the publication of The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond, by Hannah Gurman, Clinical Assistant Professor at Gallatin, NYU. This program features a one-on-one between Professor Gurman and Lloyd Gardner, Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers University.
Gurman's teaching and research focuses on the interconnections between the politics, economics, and culture of U.S. diplomacy and military conflict. In The Dissent Papers, she examines the history of U.S. foreign policy through the writings of diplomats that challenged the status quo. She is also editing a collected volume on counterinsurgency for the New Press. Her articles have appeared in Salon, Huffington Post, and Small Wars Journal, as well as The Journal of Contemporary History and Diplomatic History, among others.
Download the poster here. Check out pictures from the event here.
Ranjana Khanna: The Lumpenproletariat, The Subaltern, The Mental Asylum
Tuesday, February 7, 2012, 6:00PM
A lecture by Ranjana Khanna (Duke) engages the notion of the lumpenproletariat in Fanon, tracing the concept through Marx and Engels, its transformation through Fanon, and its commonality with and distinction from notions of the subaltern. She draws in particular on the material in The Wretched of the Earth on mental asylums and on Fanon's work as a psychiatrist to think of the radical form of subjectivity announced in mental life, an engagement with an idea of rogues, and a politics that emerges less from a sense of the moral or of right than of desubjectivation. Mark Sanders (NYU), Professor of Comparative Literature, will serve as respondent.
Khanna is the Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies and Professor of English, Women's Studies, and the Literature Program at Duke University. She works on Anglo- and Francophone Postcolonial theory and literature, and Film, Psychoanalysis, and Feminist theory, and has published widely on transnational feminism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial and feminist theory, literature, and film. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2003) and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the present (Stanford University Press, 2008.) She has published in journals like Differences, Signs, Third Text, Diacritics, Screen, and Art History. Her current book manuscript in progress is called: Asylum: The Concept and the Practice.
This event is sponsored by The Humanites Initiative at NYU and the NYU Postcolonial Colloquium, and co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Anglophone Project.
Download the poster here. Check out pictures from the event here.
December 2011
Nicholas Mirzoeff: The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality
Tuesday, December 13, 2011, 5:30PM
A reception celebrating the publication of The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Duke University Press, 2011), by Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU.
In The Right to Look, Nicholas Mirzoeff develops a comparative de-colonial framework for visual culture studies, the field that he helped to create and shape. Casting modernity as an ongoing contest between visuality and countervisuality, or “the right to look,” he explains how visuality sutures authority to power and renders the association natural. Encompassing the Caribbean plantation and the Haitian revolution, anticolonialism in the South Pacific, antifascism in Italy and Algeria, and the contemporary global counterinsurgency, The Right to Look is a work of astonishing geographic, temporal, and conceptual reach.
Download the poster here. Check out pictures from the event here.
Bella Mirabella: Orientalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories
Thursday, December 8, 2011, 5:00PM
A panel celebrating the publication of Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories (University of Michigan Press, 2011), edited by Bella Mirabella, Associate Professor at Gallatin, NYU. With panelists Virginia Cox (Italian Studies, NYU), Patricia Lennox (Gallatin, NYU), and Caroline Weber (French, Columbia).
In recent years much scholarly attention has been devoted to clothing in the Early Modern period. Ornamentalism: the Art of Renaissance Accessories brings accessories to the center of the material cultural stage and to the debate about the role of fashion in the Renaissance and beyond. The volume, focusing on Italy and England, including accessories worn by men and women, looks at the use of accessories from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Ornamentalism considers the social, political, cultural, gendered, and erotic roles accessories played in the early modern period and features a number of well-known Renaissance scholars including Anne Jones, Peter Stallybrass, Natasha Korda, Will Fisher, Eugenia Paulicelli, and Amanda Bailey and focuses on such accessories as veils, pearls, busks, ruffs, rebatos, handkerchiefs, and codpieces.
Download the poster here. Check out pictures from the event here.
Louis Menand: On The Marketplace of Ideas and "Live and Learn: Why we have college."
Thursday, December 8, 2011, 12:30 - 1:45PM
Louis Menand, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard, discusses his recent book and a new essay on what we do in higher education and how we might do better. Part of the Morse Academic Plan (MAP) Teaching and Learning Colloquium series. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Initiative. Check out pictures from the event here.
November 2011
Louis Menand and Alison Simmons: "The Nature of General Education"
Thursday, November 10, 2011, 12:30 - 1:45 PM
Louis Menand and Alison Simmons (Harvard), co-chairs of the recent Harvard task force on general education, speak on the state and future of higher education. Part of the Morse Academic Plan (MAP) Teaching and Learning Colloquia series. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Initiative.
October 2011
Michael Stoller: "The Place of Libraries in the Academy, Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow"
Wednesday, October 19, 2011, 5:30 PM
From the tiny, little-used collections that accompanied the classical curriculum of early 19th-century American colleges to the closed-stack libraries that first supported graduate research to the burgeoning open-stack repositories of the Cold War era and the digital gateways of the 21st century, Stoller discusses the ways that academic libraries have grown and evolved to meet the changing needs of this country’s research universities. Michael Stoller is Director of Collections and Research Services in NYU’s Division of Libraries. He took his PhD in medieval history at Columbia University and has written extensively about the importance of collaboration between scholars and librarians in shaping the library of the 21st century.
Listen to the podcast:
Check out pictures from the event here.
Grant-Writing for Graduate Students in the Humanities:
A Panel Discussion
Wednesday, October 12, 2011, 5:30 PM
A panel to discuss how to identify grant opportunities and how to prepare a successful proposal for projects and research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. With speakers: Professors Emily Martin (Anthropology), Ara Merjian (Italian), Helen Nissenbaum (Media, Culture, & Communication), Guy Ortolano (History), and doctoral candidates Maggie Popkin (IFA) and Reynolds Richter (History). Dean Lauren Benton (Dean for Humanities, FAS) served as moderator. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Initiative at NYU, the Graduate School of Arts & Science, and the FAS Office of the Dean for Humanities.
Download the poster here. Check out pictures from the event here and the Grants for Humanists document here. Watch the video here.
September 2011
Jini K. Watson: The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form
Friday, September 30, 2011, 3:00 PM
Location: 19 University Place, Room 222
A talk celebrating the publication of The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), by 2011-12 Humanities Initiative fellow Jini K. Watson (Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, NYU). In addition to discussing her new book, which focuses on the gleaming Asian Tiger metropolises of Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore, and argues that reading cultural production in conjunction with built environments can enrich our knowledge of the lived consequences of rapid economic and urban development, Watson will discuss the process of rewriting and publishing her dissertation as a book. Sponsored by the Postcolonial Seminar.
Coping with Idol Anxiety
Monday, September 19, 2011, 5:30 PM
A panel celebrating the publication of Idol Anxiety (Stanford University Press, 2011), co-edited by Josh Ellenbogen (Art History, University of Pittsburgh) and Aaron Tugendhaft (Gallatin, NYU). Panelists include Caroline Walker Bynum (Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study), Michael Kunichika (Russian and Slavic Studies, NYU), Seth L. Sanders (Religion, Trinity College), and Irene Winter (Art History, Harvard), as well as the co-editors.
Idol Anxiety is an interdisciplinary collection of essays which brings together diverse perspectives from scholars in religious studies, art history, philosophy, and musicology to show that idolatry is a concept that can be helpful in articulating the ways in which human beings interact with and conceive of their surroundings.
Check out pictures from the event here.
Dana Polan: Julia Child's The French Chef
Thursday, September 15, 2011, 5:30 PM
A reception celebrating the publication of Julia Child's The French Chef (Duke UP, 2011), by Dana Polan, Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU. In his new book, Polan examines the enduring impact that Julia Child made on American popular culture and situates her television show within the appropriate historical and cultural contexts. He argues that Child's show changed the conventions of television’s culinary culture by rendering personality indispensable. Child was engaging, and her cooking lessons were never purely about food preparation, though she was an effective instructor. They were also about social mobility, the discovery of foreign culture, and a personal enjoyment that sought to transcend the daily life of domesticity.
Check out pictures from the event here.
Cathy N. Davidson: The Future of Learning
Tuesday, September 13, 2011, 5PM
A lecture celebrating the publication of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking Press, 2011), by Cathy N. Davidson, Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University. Davidson shows how "attention blindness" has produced one of our society’s greatest challenges: while we’ve all acknowledged the great changes of the digital age, most of us still operate in work and educational environments designed for the last century. She "has produced an exceptional and critically important book, one that is all-but-impossible to put down and likely to shape discussions for years to come ... one of the top ten science books" of Fall 2011. Publisher's Weekly
Download the poster here. Check out pictures from the event here. Watch the video here.
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