To foster communal intellectual vitality and conviviality, the English Program sponsors Friday Forums weekly. Friday Forums bring to the GC internationally recognized scholars, writers, and publishers to discuss a wide variety of literary and cultural topics. This series of lectures and readings is followed by a reception with food and wine. Forums generally take place at 4 p.m. on Fridays, but many occur in conjunction with all-day conferences and interdisciplinary events. Some Forums are devoted to special issues of student/faculty concern, such as financial aid, adjunct teaching, curricular changes, and the education job market. The first Forum of the Fall Semester is generally an orientation session for new students in the Program, and the last one in each semester, the Winter/Spring Revels, is a party not to be missed.
Friday Forum Schedule: Fall 2014
Unless otherwise noted, all events occur on Friday at 4 p.m. in the English Program lounge (room 4406). Please check back regularly for updates. All events are subject to change.
August 29
New Student Welcome
The event will include welcomes from the English Students Association, faculty and Program Officers and presentations by current English Program students on topics such as: Making the most of the First Year; Middle Years of the Program: Dissertation Years/Job Market; Balancing work and life; Getting the most from seminars; And more! Current students and faculty are encouraged to attend.
September 5
Critical Karaoke
This event is designed to showcase the different forms that meaningful intellectual work can take and celebrates the transformative power of performance, improvisation, play, failure, feeling, silence, and sound. Inspired by interdisciplinary and cross-field conversations about music and Experience Music Project’s annual “Pop Conference,” the organizers of this fall’s Critical Karaoke event—Duncan Faherty, Eric Lott, and Danica Savonick—invite brief essays that engage with a particular song. Beyond this stipulation of brevity, stylistic choices regarding format, volume, dance breaks, and dramatic pauses are up to participants. More promiscuous intellectual affair than long-term commitment, this low-stakes event encourages participants to dabble in a different field, flirt with an old fling, or linger with a guilty pleasure.
September 12
2:00PM
Research Workshop with Alycia Sellie
The aim of this workshop is to demonstrate research strategies and resources in practice rather than the abstract, centering on the project proposals of two students in our program: Tonya Foster and Alicia Andrzejewski (who have kindly volunteered to share drafts of their doctoral work with us at the early or pre-prospectus stage). To prepare for the workshop, attendees are asked to read the research proposals and Alycia Sellie’s recommendations for these students at: https://researchevent.commons.gc.cuny.edu
4:00PM
Feminism & the Archive: A Roundtable Conversation
This roundtable will bring together a variety of perspectives on feminism and the archive, broadly conceived. Participants will speak about their work about and in the archive as archivists, scholars, and feminists, as well as how archival research allows us to consider and reconceive of feminist genealogies and genres. Participants will include: Meredith Benjamin (CUNY Graduate Center), Kate Eichhorn (The New School), Margaret Galvan (CUNY Graduate Center), and Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz (CUNY Graduate Center, Lesbian Herstory Archives).
September 19
2:00PM
Job Workshop
Led by Professor Ammiel Alcalay, DEO of Placement, this workshop is for anyone going on the job market this year. Bring your questions!
4:00PM
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College, CUNY), “’A Charitable and Pitous Conscience’: The Queer Prioress and Her Pets”
Faculty Membership Talk. Chaucer’s Prioress is a notorious dog-lover and antisemite, reviled for the latter and pitied for the former. Her strange affections and violent exclusions, so often an embarrassment to the critics, should not be explained away or brushed aside. Rather, her attachments should be maintained in their strangeness and repugnance as a challenge both to the community established by the Canterbury pilgrims and to communities in general.
September 26 & October 3: No Friday Forum scheduled
October 10
What Is a Dissertation? New Models, New Methods, New Media
Chair: Cathy N. Davidson, Distinguished Professor and Director, Futures Initiative and HASTAC@CUNY
Panelists:
Jade E. Davis, Communications, University of North Carolina
Dwayne Dixon, Anthropology, Duke University
Gregory T. Donovan, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University
Amanda Licastro, English, Graduate Center, CUNY
Nick Sousanis, Teachers College, Columbia University
This Forum showcases recent and current doctoral students whose dissertations exemplify innovative, experimental formats–Scalar, video, websites, comics, multimedia inter actives. The Forum is co-sponsored by the Futures Initiative, HASTAC@CUNY, CUNY DHI (CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative), as well as by distance partners: the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge at Duke University, HASTAC Scholars (an international graduate student network), and the online journal Hybrid Pedagogy, and a growing list of programs at the GC and beyond. The event will be webcast and live tweeted by Futures Initiative and CUNY DHI fellows who will leading collaboration on an open public Google Doc designed to model successful institutional change.-
October 17
Admissions Workshop
Interested in Doctoral Studies in English?: The Program will host an information session on pursuing doctorial studies in English for interested students. We especially welcome African-American, Latino/a students but are eager to meet with any and all students considering graduate school. The event will include a welcome from faculty members, a panel discussion of different paths to graduate study, and workshops on the application process. Faculty members, current PhD. candidates, and representatives of the admissions committee will be on hand to answer questions.
October 24
Pedagogies of Embodiment: Diversity in Practice
This event is designed to draw attention to the relationship among pedagogy, curriculum, and the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of analysis inform the design and implementation of courses. Panelists, drawn from English Program faculty, will offer brief remarks designed to elicit conversation that addresses questions as these: How do pedagogical and curricular practices advance and/or hinder the epistemological transformations at the heart of critical race, gender, and sexuality theories, as well as those that provide insight from the standpoints of class, disability, and indigeneity? In what ways may such practices further our understanding of “diversity” and its relationship to the humanities and the academy broadly?
October 31
Critical Visualities
While empirical evidence suggests that the average museum visitor spends only 27.2 seconds looking at a painting, the organizers of “Critical Visualities”—Wendy Tronrud, Danica Savonick, Hilarie Ashton, Duncan Faherty, and Eric Lott—have curated a constellation of longer reflections on visual artifacts or experiences. Catalyzed, in part, by a summer of public art in NYC, from Kara Walker’s A Subtlety to Danh Vo’s We the People, this event will seek to fall into even more aesthetic encounters with the visual—encounters that can trouble and are so often troubled themselves.
November 7
Ewan Jones (Thole Research Fellow, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge), “Hegel, Patmore and the Turn of Rhythm”
This paper seeks to provide one specific justification for the general claim that the concept of rhythm as we today understand it came into being across the period 1770–1880. The case in question is the simultaneous ‘discovery’ of rhythm by contemporaneous German philosophers and poets ranging from Schelling to Fichte to Hölderlin to Hegel. Such ideas, I contend, are in turn taken up by Anglophone culture in surprising ways—one of which being the overlooked verse and aphoristic writings of Coventry Patmore. Where Patmore is commonly seen to subscribe to an abstract conception of poetic ‘Law’, I contend that his career instead reveals a complex form of embodied rhythmic life.
November 14
2:00PM
Miles Park Grier (Queens College, CUNY), “Reading Black Characters: Othello and the Staging of Literacy, 1604-1785”
I would like to pursue the proposition that, for the first two centuries of its stage life, Othello’s audiences considered it a play about ink and paper. This grounding in overlooked but prominent metaphors and stage properties of the play takes us inside Britain’s “empire of letters,” wherein learning to read entailed declaring mastery of alphabetical as well as human characters. Accordingly, my title, “Reading Black Characters,” has a double valence. On the one hand, it refers to the act of assessing black and blackened characters—in this case, literal letters and the stained bodies of the painted stage Moor and his wife, Desdemona. On the other hand, it focuses on two centuries of engagements with Othello that produce black and Amerindian characters as bad readers, arguing that their incapacities establish a character difference fundamental to Atlantic racial hierarchies. In contextualized readings of three episodes from the first two centuries of Othello’s Mediterranean and Atlantic career, I will argue that the play provided enduring figures for the Anglo imperial imagination—namely, submissive black moors, tarnished white women, and financially incompetent Indians. My hope is that, in moving to the media that produce character, we can consider literature and theatre a popular engine of racial thought with conventions and contradictions that do not always merely reflect racist projects happening in law, economy, or science.
4:00PM
Siraj Ahmed (Lehman College, CUNY), “Lost Language”
Faculty Membership Talk. In the decades immediately after the East India Company conquered Bengal in 1765, colonial scholars pioneered an approach to language and literature that enabled the Company to seize authority over native traditions and, as a consequence, to consolidate its rule. This approach—which reduced traditions to printed texts and used historical method to define their meaning—remains the tacit framework of our own scholarship. This talk proposes that until we understand how print technology and historical thought served colonial rule, we will have difficulty even addressing the question of a properly post-colonial literary study, much less answering it. Such answers may depend on our capacity to re-imagine the different uses of language and literature our methods were designed to efface.
November 21
3:00PM
E. Gordon Whatley Retirement Event
details tba
November 28
No Friday Forum scheduled.
December 5
tba
December 12
Revels!
New Student Welcome
The event will include welcomes from the English Students Association, faculty and Program Officers and presentations by current English Program students on topics such as: Making the most of the First Year; Middle Years of the Program: Dissertation Years/Job Market; Balancing work and life; Getting the most from seminars; And more! Current students and faculty are encouraged to attend.
September 5
Critical Karaoke
This event is designed to showcase the different forms that meaningful intellectual work can take and celebrates the transformative power of performance, improvisation, play, failure, feeling, silence, and sound. Inspired by interdisciplinary and cross-field conversations about music and Experience Music Project’s annual “Pop Conference,” the organizers of this fall’s Critical Karaoke event—Duncan Faherty, Eric Lott, and Danica Savonick—invite brief essays that engage with a particular song. Beyond this stipulation of brevity, stylistic choices regarding format, volume, dance breaks, and dramatic pauses are up to participants. More promiscuous intellectual affair than long-term commitment, this low-stakes event encourages participants to dabble in a different field, flirt with an old fling, or linger with a guilty pleasure.
September 12
2:00PM
Research Workshop with Alycia Sellie
The aim of this workshop is to demonstrate research strategies and resources in practice rather than the abstract, centering on the project proposals of two students in our program: Tonya Foster and Alicia Andrzejewski (who have kindly volunteered to share drafts of their doctoral work with us at the early or pre-prospectus stage). To prepare for the workshop, attendees are asked to read the research proposals and Alycia Sellie’s recommendations for these students at: https://researchevent.commons.gc.cuny.edu
4:00PM
Feminism & the Archive: A Roundtable Conversation
This roundtable will bring together a variety of perspectives on feminism and the archive, broadly conceived. Participants will speak about their work about and in the archive as archivists, scholars, and feminists, as well as how archival research allows us to consider and reconceive of feminist genealogies and genres. Participants will include: Meredith Benjamin (CUNY Graduate Center), Kate Eichhorn (The New School), Margaret Galvan (CUNY Graduate Center), and Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz (CUNY Graduate Center, Lesbian Herstory Archives).
September 19
2:00PM
Job Workshop
Led by Professor Ammiel Alcalay, DEO of Placement, this workshop is for anyone going on the job market this year. Bring your questions!
4:00PM
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College, CUNY), “’A Charitable and Pitous Conscience’: The Queer Prioress and Her Pets”
Faculty Membership Talk. Chaucer’s Prioress is a notorious dog-lover and antisemite, reviled for the latter and pitied for the former. Her strange affections and violent exclusions, so often an embarrassment to the critics, should not be explained away or brushed aside. Rather, her attachments should be maintained in their strangeness and repugnance as a challenge both to the community established by the Canterbury pilgrims and to communities in general.
September 26 & October 3: No Friday Forum scheduled
October 10
What Is a Dissertation? New Models, New Methods, New Media
Chair: Cathy N. Davidson, Distinguished Professor and Director, Futures Initiative and HASTAC@CUNY
Panelists:
Jade E. Davis, Communications, University of North Carolina
Dwayne Dixon, Anthropology, Duke University
Gregory T. Donovan, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University
Amanda Licastro, English, Graduate Center, CUNY
Nick Sousanis, Teachers College, Columbia University
This Forum showcases recent and current doctoral students whose dissertations exemplify innovative, experimental formats–Scalar, video, websites, comics, multimedia inter actives. The Forum is co-sponsored by the Futures Initiative, HASTAC@CUNY, CUNY DHI (CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative), as well as by distance partners: the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge at Duke University, HASTAC Scholars (an international graduate student network), and the online journal Hybrid Pedagogy, and a growing list of programs at the GC and beyond. The event will be webcast and live tweeted by Futures Initiative and CUNY DHI fellows who will leading collaboration on an open public Google Doc designed to model successful institutional change.-
October 17
Admissions Workshop
Interested in Doctoral Studies in English?: The Program will host an information session on pursuing doctorial studies in English for interested students. We especially welcome African-American, Latino/a students but are eager to meet with any and all students considering graduate school. The event will include a welcome from faculty members, a panel discussion of different paths to graduate study, and workshops on the application process. Faculty members, current PhD. candidates, and representatives of the admissions committee will be on hand to answer questions.
October 24
Pedagogies of Embodiment: Diversity in Practice
This event is designed to draw attention to the relationship among pedagogy, curriculum, and the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of analysis inform the design and implementation of courses. Panelists, drawn from English Program faculty, will offer brief remarks designed to elicit conversation that addresses questions as these: How do pedagogical and curricular practices advance and/or hinder the epistemological transformations at the heart of critical race, gender, and sexuality theories, as well as those that provide insight from the standpoints of class, disability, and indigeneity? In what ways may such practices further our understanding of “diversity” and its relationship to the humanities and the academy broadly?
October 31
Critical Visualities
While empirical evidence suggests that the average museum visitor spends only 27.2 seconds looking at a painting, the organizers of “Critical Visualities”—Wendy Tronrud, Danica Savonick, Hilarie Ashton, Duncan Faherty, and Eric Lott—have curated a constellation of longer reflections on visual artifacts or experiences. Catalyzed, in part, by a summer of public art in NYC, from Kara Walker’s A Subtlety to Danh Vo’s We the People, this event will seek to fall into even more aesthetic encounters with the visual—encounters that can trouble and are so often troubled themselves.
November 7
Ewan Jones (Thole Research Fellow, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge), “Hegel, Patmore and the Turn of Rhythm”
This paper seeks to provide one specific justification for the general claim that the concept of rhythm as we today understand it came into being across the period 1770–1880. The case in question is the simultaneous ‘discovery’ of rhythm by contemporaneous German philosophers and poets ranging from Schelling to Fichte to Hölderlin to Hegel. Such ideas, I contend, are in turn taken up by Anglophone culture in surprising ways—one of which being the overlooked verse and aphoristic writings of Coventry Patmore. Where Patmore is commonly seen to subscribe to an abstract conception of poetic ‘Law’, I contend that his career instead reveals a complex form of embodied rhythmic life.
November 14
2:00PM
Miles Park Grier (Queens College, CUNY), “Reading Black Characters: Othello and the Staging of Literacy, 1604-1785″
I would like to pursue the proposition that, for the first two centuries of its stage life, Othello’s audiences considered it a play about ink and paper. This grounding in overlooked but prominent metaphors and stage properties of the play takes us inside Britain’s “empire of letters,” wherein learning to read entailed declaring mastery of alphabetical as well as human characters. Accordingly, my title, “Reading Black Characters,” has a double valence. On the one hand, it refers to the act of assessing black and blackened characters—in this case, literal letters and the stained bodies of the painted stage Moor and his wife, Desdemona. On the other hand, it focuses on two centuries of engagements with Othello that produce black and Amerindian characters as bad readers, arguing that their incapacities establish a character difference fundamental to Atlantic racial hierarchies. In contextualized readings of three episodes from the first two centuries of Othello’s Mediterranean and Atlantic career, I will argue that the play provided enduring figures for the Anglo imperial imagination—namely, submissive black moors, tarnished white women, and financially incompetent Indians. My hope is that, in moving to the media that produce character, we can consider literature and theatre a popular engine of racial thought with conventions and contradictions that do not always merely reflect racist projects happening in law, economy, or science.
4:00PM
Siraj Ahmed (Lehman College, CUNY), “Lost Language”
Faculty Membership Talk. In the decades immediately after the East India Company conquered Bengal in 1765, colonial scholars pioneered an approach to language and literature that enabled the Company to seize authority over native traditions and, as a consequence, to consolidate its rule. This approach—which reduced traditions to printed texts and used historical method to define their meaning—remains the tacit framework of our own scholarship. This talk proposes that until we understand how print technology and historical thought served colonial rule, we will have difficulty even addressing the question of a properly post-colonial literary study, much less answering it. Such answers may depend on our capacity to re-imagine the different uses of language and literature our methods were designed to efface.
November 21
3:00PM
E. Gordon Whatley Retirement Event
details tba
November 28
No Friday Forum scheduled.
December 5
tba
December 12
Revels! – See more at: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Page-Elements/Academics-Research-Centers-Initiatives/Doctoral-Programs/English/Community#sthash.HLMClozi.dpuf
New Student Welcome
The event will include welcomes from the English Students Association, faculty and Program Officers and presentations by current English Program students on topics such as: Making the most of the First Year; Middle Years of the Program: Dissertation Years/Job Market; Balancing work and life; Getting the most from seminars; And more! Current students and faculty are encouraged to attend.
September 5
Critical Karaoke
This event is designed to showcase the different forms that meaningful intellectual work can take and celebrates the transformative power of performance, improvisation, play, failure, feeling, silence, and sound. Inspired by interdisciplinary and cross-field conversations about music and Experience Music Project’s annual “Pop Conference,” the organizers of this fall’s Critical Karaoke event—Duncan Faherty, Eric Lott, and Danica Savonick—invite brief essays that engage with a particular song. Beyond this stipulation of brevity, stylistic choices regarding format, volume, dance breaks, and dramatic pauses are up to participants. More promiscuous intellectual affair than long-term commitment, this low-stakes event encourages participants to dabble in a different field, flirt with an old fling, or linger with a guilty pleasure.
September 12
2:00PM
Research Workshop with Alycia Sellie
The aim of this workshop is to demonstrate research strategies and resources in practice rather than the abstract, centering on the project proposals of two students in our program: Tonya Foster and Alicia Andrzejewski (who have kindly volunteered to share drafts of their doctoral work with us at the early or pre-prospectus stage). To prepare for the workshop, attendees are asked to read the research proposals and Alycia Sellie’s recommendations for these students at: https://researchevent.commons.gc.cuny.edu
4:00PM
Feminism & the Archive: A Roundtable Conversation
This roundtable will bring together a variety of perspectives on feminism and the archive, broadly conceived. Participants will speak about their work about and in the archive as archivists, scholars, and feminists, as well as how archival research allows us to consider and reconceive of feminist genealogies and genres. Participants will include: Meredith Benjamin (CUNY Graduate Center), Kate Eichhorn (The New School), Margaret Galvan (CUNY Graduate Center), and Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz (CUNY Graduate Center, Lesbian Herstory Archives).
September 19
2:00PM
Job Workshop
Led by Professor Ammiel Alcalay, DEO of Placement, this workshop is for anyone going on the job market this year. Bring your questions!
4:00PM
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College, CUNY), “’A Charitable and Pitous Conscience’: The Queer Prioress and Her Pets”
Faculty Membership Talk. Chaucer’s Prioress is a notorious dog-lover and antisemite, reviled for the latter and pitied for the former. Her strange affections and violent exclusions, so often an embarrassment to the critics, should not be explained away or brushed aside. Rather, her attachments should be maintained in their strangeness and repugnance as a challenge both to the community established by the Canterbury pilgrims and to communities in general.
September 26 & October 3: No Friday Forum scheduled
October 10
What Is a Dissertation? New Models, New Methods, New Media
Chair: Cathy N. Davidson, Distinguished Professor and Director, Futures Initiative and HASTAC@CUNY
Panelists:
Jade E. Davis, Communications, University of North Carolina
Dwayne Dixon, Anthropology, Duke University
Gregory T. Donovan, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University
Amanda Licastro, English, Graduate Center, CUNY
Nick Sousanis, Teachers College, Columbia University
This Forum showcases recent and current doctoral students whose dissertations exemplify innovative, experimental formats–Scalar, video, websites, comics, multimedia inter actives. The Forum is co-sponsored by the Futures Initiative, HASTAC@CUNY, CUNY DHI (CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative), as well as by distance partners: the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge at Duke University, HASTAC Scholars (an international graduate student network), and the online journal Hybrid Pedagogy, and a growing list of programs at the GC and beyond. The event will be webcast and live tweeted by Futures Initiative and CUNY DHI fellows who will leading collaboration on an open public Google Doc designed to model successful institutional change.-
October 17
Admissions Workshop
Interested in Doctoral Studies in English?: The Program will host an information session on pursuing doctorial studies in English for interested students. We especially welcome African-American, Latino/a students but are eager to meet with any and all students considering graduate school. The event will include a welcome from faculty members, a panel discussion of different paths to graduate study, and workshops on the application process. Faculty members, current PhD. candidates, and representatives of the admissions committee will be on hand to answer questions.
October 24
Pedagogies of Embodiment: Diversity in Practice
This event is designed to draw attention to the relationship among pedagogy, curriculum, and the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of analysis inform the design and implementation of courses. Panelists, drawn from English Program faculty, will offer brief remarks designed to elicit conversation that addresses questions as these: How do pedagogical and curricular practices advance and/or hinder the epistemological transformations at the heart of critical race, gender, and sexuality theories, as well as those that provide insight from the standpoints of class, disability, and indigeneity? In what ways may such practices further our understanding of “diversity” and its relationship to the humanities and the academy broadly?
October 31
Critical Visualities
While empirical evidence suggests that the average museum visitor spends only 27.2 seconds looking at a painting, the organizers of “Critical Visualities”—Wendy Tronrud, Danica Savonick, Hilarie Ashton, Duncan Faherty, and Eric Lott—have curated a constellation of longer reflections on visual artifacts or experiences. Catalyzed, in part, by a summer of public art in NYC, from Kara Walker’s A Subtlety to Danh Vo’s We the People, this event will seek to fall into even more aesthetic encounters with the visual—encounters that can trouble and are so often troubled themselves.
November 7
Ewan Jones (Thole Research Fellow, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge), “Hegel, Patmore and the Turn of Rhythm”
This paper seeks to provide one specific justification for the general claim that the concept of rhythm as we today understand it came into being across the period 1770–1880. The case in question is the simultaneous ‘discovery’ of rhythm by contemporaneous German philosophers and poets ranging from Schelling to Fichte to Hölderlin to Hegel. Such ideas, I contend, are in turn taken up by Anglophone culture in surprising ways—one of which being the overlooked verse and aphoristic writings of Coventry Patmore. Where Patmore is commonly seen to subscribe to an abstract conception of poetic ‘Law’, I contend that his career instead reveals a complex form of embodied rhythmic life.
November 14
2:00PM
Miles Park Grier (Queens College, CUNY), “Reading Black Characters: Othello and the Staging of Literacy, 1604-1785″
I would like to pursue the proposition that, for the first two centuries of its stage life, Othello’s audiences considered it a play about ink and paper. This grounding in overlooked but prominent metaphors and stage properties of the play takes us inside Britain’s “empire of letters,” wherein learning to read entailed declaring mastery of alphabetical as well as human characters. Accordingly, my title, “Reading Black Characters,” has a double valence. On the one hand, it refers to the act of assessing black and blackened characters—in this case, literal letters and the stained bodies of the painted stage Moor and his wife, Desdemona. On the other hand, it focuses on two centuries of engagements with Othello that produce black and Amerindian characters as bad readers, arguing that their incapacities establish a character difference fundamental to Atlantic racial hierarchies. In contextualized readings of three episodes from the first two centuries of Othello’s Mediterranean and Atlantic career, I will argue that the play provided enduring figures for the Anglo imperial imagination—namely, submissive black moors, tarnished white women, and financially incompetent Indians. My hope is that, in moving to the media that produce character, we can consider literature and theatre a popular engine of racial thought with conventions and contradictions that do not always merely reflect racist projects happening in law, economy, or science.
4:00PM
Siraj Ahmed (Lehman College, CUNY), “Lost Language”
Faculty Membership Talk. In the decades immediately after the East India Company conquered Bengal in 1765, colonial scholars pioneered an approach to language and literature that enabled the Company to seize authority over native traditions and, as a consequence, to consolidate its rule. This approach—which reduced traditions to printed texts and used historical method to define their meaning—remains the tacit framework of our own scholarship. This talk proposes that until we understand how print technology and historical thought served colonial rule, we will have difficulty even addressing the question of a properly post-colonial literary study, much less answering it. Such answers may depend on our capacity to re-imagine the different uses of language and literature our methods were designed to efface.
November 21
3:00PM
E. Gordon Whatley Retirement Event
details tba
November 28
No Friday Forum scheduled.
December 5
tba
December 12
Revels! – See more at: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Page-Elements/Academics-Research-Centers-Initiatives/Doctoral-Programs/English/Community#sthash.HLMClozi.dpuf
New Student Welcome
The event will include welcomes from the English Students Association, faculty and Program Officers and presentations by current English Program students on topics such as: Making the most of the First Year; Middle Years of the Program: Dissertation Years/Job Market; Balancing work and life; Getting the most from seminars; And more! Current students and faculty are encouraged to attend.
September 5
Critical Karaoke
This event is designed to showcase the different forms that meaningful intellectual work can take and celebrates the transformative power of performance, improvisation, play, failure, feeling, silence, and sound. Inspired by interdisciplinary and cross-field conversations about music and Experience Music Project’s annual “Pop Conference,” the organizers of this fall’s Critical Karaoke event—Duncan Faherty, Eric Lott, and Danica Savonick—invite brief essays that engage with a particular song. Beyond this stipulation of brevity, stylistic choices regarding format, volume, dance breaks, and dramatic pauses are up to participants. More promiscuous intellectual affair than long-term commitment, this low-stakes event encourages participants to dabble in a different field, flirt with an old fling, or linger with a guilty pleasure.
September 12
2:00PM
Research Workshop with Alycia Sellie
The aim of this workshop is to demonstrate research strategies and resources in practice rather than the abstract, centering on the project proposals of two students in our program: Tonya Foster and Alicia Andrzejewski (who have kindly volunteered to share drafts of their doctoral work with us at the early or pre-prospectus stage). To prepare for the workshop, attendees are asked to read the research proposals and Alycia Sellie’s recommendations for these students at: https://researchevent.commons.gc.cuny.edu
4:00PM
Feminism & the Archive: A Roundtable Conversation
This roundtable will bring together a variety of perspectives on feminism and the archive, broadly conceived. Participants will speak about their work about and in the archive as archivists, scholars, and feminists, as well as how archival research allows us to consider and reconceive of feminist genealogies and genres. Participants will include: Meredith Benjamin (CUNY Graduate Center), Kate Eichhorn (The New School), Margaret Galvan (CUNY Graduate Center), and Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz (CUNY Graduate Center, Lesbian Herstory Archives).
September 19
2:00PM
Job Workshop
Led by Professor Ammiel Alcalay, DEO of Placement, this workshop is for anyone going on the job market this year. Bring your questions!
4:00PM
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College, CUNY), “’A Charitable and Pitous Conscience’: The Queer Prioress and Her Pets”
Faculty Membership Talk. Chaucer’s Prioress is a notorious dog-lover and antisemite, reviled for the latter and pitied for the former. Her strange affections and violent exclusions, so often an embarrassment to the critics, should not be explained away or brushed aside. Rather, her attachments should be maintained in their strangeness and repugnance as a challenge both to the community established by the Canterbury pilgrims and to communities in general.
September 26 & October 3: No Friday Forum scheduled
October 10
What Is a Dissertation? New Models, New Methods, New Media
Chair: Cathy N. Davidson, Distinguished Professor and Director, Futures Initiative and HASTAC@CUNY
Panelists:
Jade E. Davis, Communications, University of North Carolina
Dwayne Dixon, Anthropology, Duke University
Gregory T. Donovan, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University
Amanda Licastro, English, Graduate Center, CUNY
Nick Sousanis, Teachers College, Columbia University
This Forum showcases recent and current doctoral students whose dissertations exemplify innovative, experimental formats–Scalar, video, websites, comics, multimedia inter actives. The Forum is co-sponsored by the Futures Initiative, HASTAC@CUNY, CUNY DHI (CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative), as well as by distance partners: the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge at Duke University, HASTAC Scholars (an international graduate student network), and the online journal Hybrid Pedagogy, and a growing list of programs at the GC and beyond. The event will be webcast and live tweeted by Futures Initiative and CUNY DHI fellows who will leading collaboration on an open public Google Doc designed to model successful institutional change.-
October 17
Admissions Workshop
Interested in Doctoral Studies in English?: The Program will host an information session on pursuing doctorial studies in English for interested students. We especially welcome African-American, Latino/a students but are eager to meet with any and all students considering graduate school. The event will include a welcome from faculty members, a panel discussion of different paths to graduate study, and workshops on the application process. Faculty members, current PhD. candidates, and representatives of the admissions committee will be on hand to answer questions.
October 24
Pedagogies of Embodiment: Diversity in Practice
This event is designed to draw attention to the relationship among pedagogy, curriculum, and the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of analysis inform the design and implementation of courses. Panelists, drawn from English Program faculty, will offer brief remarks designed to elicit conversation that addresses questions as these: How do pedagogical and curricular practices advance and/or hinder the epistemological transformations at the heart of critical race, gender, and sexuality theories, as well as those that provide insight from the standpoints of class, disability, and indigeneity? In what ways may such practices further our understanding of “diversity” and its relationship to the humanities and the academy broadly?
October 31
Critical Visualities
While empirical evidence suggests that the average museum visitor spends only 27.2 seconds looking at a painting, the organizers of “Critical Visualities”—Wendy Tronrud, Danica Savonick, Hilarie Ashton, Duncan Faherty, and Eric Lott—have curated a constellation of longer reflections on visual artifacts or experiences. Catalyzed, in part, by a summer of public art in NYC, from Kara Walker’s A Subtlety to Danh Vo’s We the People, this event will seek to fall into even more aesthetic encounters with the visual—encounters that can trouble and are so often troubled themselves.
November 7
Ewan Jones (Thole Research Fellow, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge), “Hegel, Patmore and the Turn of Rhythm”
This paper seeks to provide one specific justification for the general claim that the concept of rhythm as we today understand it came into being across the period 1770–1880. The case in question is the simultaneous ‘discovery’ of rhythm by contemporaneous German philosophers and poets ranging from Schelling to Fichte to Hölderlin to Hegel. Such ideas, I contend, are in turn taken up by Anglophone culture in surprising ways—one of which being the overlooked verse and aphoristic writings of Coventry Patmore. Where Patmore is commonly seen to subscribe to an abstract conception of poetic ‘Law’, I contend that his career instead reveals a complex form of embodied rhythmic life.
November 14
2:00PM
Miles Park Grier (Queens College, CUNY), “Reading Black Characters: Othello and the Staging of Literacy, 1604-1785″
I would like to pursue the proposition that, for the first two centuries of its stage life, Othello’s audiences considered it a play about ink and paper. This grounding in overlooked but prominent metaphors and stage properties of the play takes us inside Britain’s “empire of letters,” wherein learning to read entailed declaring mastery of alphabetical as well as human characters. Accordingly, my title, “Reading Black Characters,” has a double valence. On the one hand, it refers to the act of assessing black and blackened characters—in this case, literal letters and the stained bodies of the painted stage Moor and his wife, Desdemona. On the other hand, it focuses on two centuries of engagements with Othello that produce black and Amerindian characters as bad readers, arguing that their incapacities establish a character difference fundamental to Atlantic racial hierarchies. In contextualized readings of three episodes from the first two centuries of Othello’s Mediterranean and Atlantic career, I will argue that the play provided enduring figures for the Anglo imperial imagination—namely, submissive black moors, tarnished white women, and financially incompetent Indians. My hope is that, in moving to the media that produce character, we can consider literature and theatre a popular engine of racial thought with conventions and contradictions that do not always merely reflect racist projects happening in law, economy, or science.
4:00PM
Siraj Ahmed (Lehman College, CUNY), “Lost Language”
Faculty Membership Talk. In the decades immediately after the East India Company conquered Bengal in 1765, colonial scholars pioneered an approach to language and literature that enabled the Company to seize authority over native traditions and, as a consequence, to consolidate its rule. This approach—which reduced traditions to printed texts and used historical method to define their meaning—remains the tacit framework of our own scholarship. This talk proposes that until we understand how print technology and historical thought served colonial rule, we will have difficulty even addressing the question of a properly post-colonial literary study, much less answering it. Such answers may depend on our capacity to re-imagine the different uses of language and literature our methods were designed to efface.
November 21
3:00PM
E. Gordon Whatley Retirement Event
details tba
November 28
No Friday Forum scheduled.
December 5
tba
December 12
Revels! – See more at: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Page-Elements/Academics-Research-Centers-Initiatives/Doctoral-Programs/English/Community#sthash.HLMClozi.dpuf
