| Working Research Groups 2009-2011 |
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Health, Humanities, and Culture Assistant Professor Bradley Lewis Professor Jerome Lowenstein Our Working Research Group (WRG) is devoted to teaching and scholarship at the interface of health, medicine, and culture. Increasingly health care scholars have recognized that health care involves more than bodies and biology; it also involves human meaning, purpose, and culture. And, in the other direction, humanities scholars have increasingly recognized the bodily dimensions of human subjectivity and culture. People are more than their hopes, dreams, and imagination; they are also embodied creatures intimately connected to their biology. Thus, to understand this side of human side of medicine and the bodily side of humanity, academic centers must foster quality inquiry into this rapidly growing interdisciplinary domain. October 13, 12:30PM-2PM: Kickoff meeting for the NYU Humanities Initiative Working Research Group devoted to Health, Humanities, and Culture (HHC). Lennard Davis Guest Discussant (University of Illinois, Chicago)
Associate Professor Sibylle Fischer Professor Jennifer Morgan Fifteen years ago, Paul Gilroy mobilized the ship as a metaphor or chronotope for considering the histories of race that shape the Atlantic world. The Black Atlantic was part of a sea-change in the studies of American slavery and its aftermath. Historians, literary critics, art historians, cultural critics, and economists alike have been exploring what the heuristic of a black Atlantic might produce. Collectively, this intellectual movement demanded that scholars address the history of slavery and the formation of the New World as an interdisciplinary formation that situated the Atlantic regionally, focusing on how the confluence of trade, colonialism, and settlement set in motion ideological formations with which we continue to grapple. The implications have been transformative. In the past decade and a half, our understanding of both the histories of slavery and its reverberations in the Atlantic world has been radically reframed. No longer are studies of history and culture delimited by national boundaries, but rather a commitment to considering the space of the Atlantic as both a geographic and a symbolic region containing subjects of African descent. Significant new scholarship on the mechanisms of the Black Atlantic—on the slave trade, on the mono-crop agriculture that fueled the growth of the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe, on the legal and extralegal framework through which race was codified, on the processes of culture formation that shaped the lived experiences of both enslaved and free subjects in the Atlantic—has expanded and complicated both the framing of our scholarship and its methodological approaches. It is in the context of the black Atlantic that notions of slavery, of race and racial heredity became the scaffolding for modern notions of freedom and democracy. It is also in its intellectual wake that crucial questions about culture and ethnic formation have shaped religion, the visual arts, and the performing arts. This Humanities Initiative Working Research group grant seeks to contribute to this transformative work and simultaneously offer the space to consider the complex reconceptualizations that are required to grapple with the analytic spaces opened up by Gilroy’s call to “rethink modernity via the history of the black Atlantic and the African diaspora in the western hemisphere.”
Professor Jacques Lezra Assistant Professor Lidia Santarelli The Mediterranean is a subject of study in itself, but the sea—what it holds and signifies, what it makes possible or more difficult, how it is mapped, crossed, exploited, celebrated, enjoyed—plays an exceptionally important, if sometimes covert, part in many different, established disciplines. The Mediterranean Studies Research Group seeks to bring into conversation the scholars at NYU, in New York and in the region whose fields of study include the Mediterranean. We envision this conversation eventually to include social geographers, historians, literary scholars, art historians, anthropologists, scholars of religion, economists, political scientists, philosophers, archaeologists... We hope to make this Group as encompassing chronologically as it is intellectually, and to involve scholars from the pre-classical to the contemporary periods. Our Working Group in Mediterranean Studies opens this year with a round-table (November) devoted to celebrating (rethinking, evaluating) the 60th anniversary of the publication of Fernand Braudel’s 1949 La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II. We will meet monthly to read and discuss current work, and in April will have a capstone meeting at which we will discuss with Tahar ben Jelloun his novel Leaving Tangier, devoted to the problem of S-N migration on the Mediterranean. Professor Robert Rowe Professor Jim Anderson The Music and Audio Research Laboratory (MARL) initiative groups scholars from music theory, technology and composition, computer and information science, interactive media and media studies, to explore the intersection between music, computation and science. The objective is to combine techniques and methodologies from the arts, the humanities and the sciences to 1) understand and model human cognitive abilities in music, and 2) innovate the analysis, organization and creation of music. MARL aims to provide a forum that increases the visibility and contextualizes the work of NYU faculty, post-doctoral researchers, and doctoral, master and undergraduate students, interested in the intersection of music and science. By providing a space for discovery and discussion, MARL seeks to spark collaborations across departments and schools that have the potential to evolve into interdisciplinary research, co-supervised student work, joint publications, grant writing, curricular development, event organization and artistic output. It proposes to do so by: 1) establishing six interdisciplinary special interest groups (SIG), each exploring a particular aspect of the music/computation/science overlap; 2) organizing weekly meetings for the discovery and discussion of concepts, methodologies and ideas pertaining one or more of the disciplines involved; and 3) setting up an initiative website to include a list of members, projects, publications and an online discussion forum.
Assistant Professor Gabriella Coleman Assistant Professor Ben Kafka Professor Clifford Siskin Professor Robert Young This Working Research Group will bring together faculty from across schools, departments, and fields at NYU. The difficulties in doing so constitute a problem of “mediation”—of how to work through often surprising combinations of similarities and differences between academic disciplines. The very idea of a “working research group” as defined by the Humanities Initiative assumes that such mediation is possible, and furthermore that it might be beneficial. Our group will test that hypothesis by taking “mediation” itself as a problem of theory and practice. “Technologies of Mediation” will meet for two years. In year one, we will experiment with mediation as a load-bearing concept in three avenues of inquiry, each informed by promising overlaps in our existing areas of expertise:
As we conduct these experiments in 2009-2010, we will be paying particular attention to a current problem of mediation that faces all researchers today. How can we negotiate and optimize the new possibilities for collaborative research emerging from new technologies?
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Working Research Group Grant Deadline Monday, January 25, 2010 Working Research Groups in Progress Exporting Enlightenment: The Local Careers of a Global Idea Health, Humanities, and Culture Ideologies of Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World Mediterranean Studies Music and Audio Research Laboratory Problems in Poetics and Theory Technologies of Mediation The 21st Century and Critical Perspectives in Africana Studies Working Research Groups by Year |
WRG 2009-2011
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