Faculty and graduate students in American Studies, Urban Studies, the study of immigration, the study of New York City: The deadline for the NYMASA summer institute "Revisiting the Lower East Side" has been extended to February 20. See below under "Faculty and Graduate student activities."
Graduate students and junior faculty : See the announcement of the University College Dublin's Summer School at the Clinton Institute for American Studies, below under "Faculty and Graduate Student Opportunities."
American Studies undergraduates and graduate Americanists: The Graduate Americanist Reading Group wants to organize a group (the group rate is a really cheap and hard to reserve any other time of year!) visit to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum . The Museum is located in the heart of the LES, the iconic gateway to America for 200 years; its 97 Orchard Street address was home to an estimated 7,000 people from over 20 nations from 1863-1935. If you are interested, email Marty Northrop ( MNorthrop@fordham.edu ). For more info on the exhibits, visit www.tenement.org .
Read The Fordham American Studies Blog . We also have a Facebook group. To join, search groups for " Fordham American Studies." Graduate students and faculty: See the summer institute on "Re-Visiting the Lower East Side" below under "Faculty and Graduate Student Opportunities" Upcoming Fordham events
Thursday 2/9 : The Creative Writing Program presents "Prose Spotlight Reading: Tayari Jones." Tayari Jones is author of Leaving Atlanta , which won the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction and many other honors, and The Untelling . She is currently an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Rutgers Newark. 7pm, South Lounge, LincolnCenter Campus.
Upcoming New York City Events
Upcoming Events Sponsored by IRADAC, the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean.
Tonight! Tuesday 2/9 : "Black Malinche: The Black Woman as Traitor in African American Thought and Politics." A talk by Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd (Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Associate Member of Political Science Graduate Faculty at Rutgers New Brunswick, lawyer and political scientist). 6:30pm, CUNY Graduate Center Room 9204, 365 5th Ave. Free and Open.
Friday 2/19 : "Black Women in Jazz: A Tribute to the Women Who Made the Music." A special live jazz performance featuring Marjorie Eliot. Every Sunday for eighteen years, rain or shine, with no vacations, a jazz convert has taken place in the parlor of Marjorie Eliot's home in what she calls the northern tip of Harlem. Eliot brings her Sunday Jazz concert to the GraduateCenter in honor of the contributions made to Jazz music by women such as Mary Lou Williams, Betty Carter, and KoKo Taylor. 6:30pm, The GraduateCenter, Elebash Recital Hall, 365 5th Avenue. Free and open.
Wednesday 2/17: The New York Metro American Studies Association (NYMASA) is delighted to announce the first Salon Talk of the Spring 2010 semester. Jeff Allred (HunterCollege) will discuss his new book American Modernism and Depression Documentary, in which he looks at the tradition of the documentary book--hybrid, verbal-visual texts that flourished during a time when U.S. citizens were becoming increasingly conscious of the life a larger nation. Allred draws on a range of seminal works to illustrate the convergence of modernism and documentary, two forms often regarded as unrelated. 7:30pm, Faculty and Staff Lounge, 8th Floor of the WestBuilding, HunterCollege (Lexington and 68th). For more info, contact Sarah Chinn at sarah.chinn@hunter.cuny.edu .
Re-Siting Asian American Studies: Connecting Critical Approaches in the Field. A One-Day Conference at RutgersUniversity, featuring panels on "Connective and Comparative Histories," "Visual and Performance Cultures," Trans-Regional Asian Americas," and "Re/Siting Asian American Studies." 9am-6pm, Alexander Library, Teleconference Lecture Hall, 169 College Ave, New Brunswick, NJ. Free and open to the public. For a list of speakers and further information, go to http://amerstudies.rutgers.edu/events/resitingasamconference/index.html
The Institute of African-American Affairs, Afro-Latin@ Forum, and Programs in Africana Studies and Latino Studies at NYU present Tangled Origins: Race, Culture and Black Identity in the U.S.(a three-part series): The ways that people of African descent in the U.S. have defined themselves have always been complex, but recent demographic changes are posing new questions and new challenges. Can one "migrate" into blackness? What does it mean to be Black when you aren't African American? This three-part series of conversations at NYU will look at the shifting notions of race and the current redefinitions of "blackness" throughout the U.S.
Thursday 2/25 (Part II) - "Shades of Difference: Coloring Ethnicities." A Screening of the film "A Question of Color" by Kathe Sandler and Panel Discussion with Sandler, David Dent (NYU, Journalism), Tanya Hernandez (Fordham Law), Darrick Hamilton (New School, Management and Urban Policy). 6pm, Institute of African American Affairs, 41 East 11th Street, 7th Floor.
Thursday 3/25 (Part III) - "Untying the Knots: Diasporic Cultural Linkages." A Performance and Panel Discussion (more details forthcoming). 6pm, NYU Dept. of Social and Cultural Analysis, 20 Cooper Square, 4th floor.
Justice and Injustice in 1950s America: Funded by the New York Council for the Humanities, this lecture series brings together some of the most distinguished artists and historians in American to explore the various efforts to achieve justice in the U.S. during this transformative decade. Free and Open. Unless otherwise noted, all lectures will be held at 7pm in Room 630T at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 899 10th Avenue, New York, NY.
Thursday 2/18 : "Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Liberalism and Anti-Communism," Blanche Wiesen Cook.
Monday 2/22 : "Lessons of McCarthyism," Victor Navasky.
Monday 3/1 : "From the Korean War to Vietnam: American Foreign Policy in the 1950s," Marilyn Young.
Monday 3/8 : A conversation with playwright Tony Kushner , at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater.
Monday 3/15 : "Revolt Against the Cult of Domesticity," Joanne Meyerowitz.
Monday 3/22 : 6pm , "A Case Study of Resistance: The Rosenberg-Sobell Case Film: Heir to an Execution," Ivy Meerpol .
Monday 4/12 : "The Role of Folk Music as an Element in an Emerging Counter-Culture," folk singer Peggy Seeger .
Monday 4/19 : "The 1950s: Some Literary Snapshots," writer E.L. Doctrow , Gerald Lynch Theater.
Monday 4/26 : "Two Giants of Resistance: W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson," David Levering Lewis.
Monday 5/3 : "A Non-Conformist at Harvard in the 1950s: An Impossibility?" Noam Chomsky.
Monday 5/10 : "Talk Back: How Far Have We Come?" Michael Meerpol.
GothamCenter's Spring 2010 History Forum Series: History Forums are FREE but online reservations are now required. Links to register can be found after the description of each Forum. Seating is limited. If all the reservation spots for a specific Forum are taken there will be a stand-by line the evening of the event. To get on the stand-by list see the ticket table representative the night of the Forum. Unless otherwise noted, all Forums take place at the CUNYGraduateCenter, 365 5th Avenue at 34th St. For more info: 212-817-8471, or visit www.gothamcenter.org . Here are the Forums for Spring 2010:
Monday 2/22 : "NakedCity: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places," CUNY Graduate Cetner sociologist Sharon Zukin. As cities have gentrified, educated urbanites have come to prize what they regard as "authentic" urban life: aging buildings, art galleries, small boutiques, upscale food markets, neighborhood old-timers, funky ethnic restaurants, and old, family-owned shops. But as Zukin shows in her new book Naked City, the rapid and pervasive demand for authenticity has helped drive out the very people who first lent a neighborhood its authentic aura: immigrants, the working class, and artists. Join the author and panelists Samuel Zipp (Brown), Thomas Agnotti (Hunter), and Clara Irazabal (Columbia). 6:30 pm, Elebash Recital Hall. Click here to register.
Wednesday 3/10 : "The Row House Reborn: Architecture and Neighborhoods in New York City, 1908-1929." ColumbiaUniversity architectural historian Andrew Dolkart will discuss his new book, which examines the rediscovery of New York's deteriorated row houses built in the early 20th century. He will trace the radical alterations to these houses, examining how these changes impacted the character of urban neighborhoods. 6:30 pm, Elebash Recital Hall. Click here to register.
Thursday 3/18 : "Jacob's Cane: A Jewish Family's Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore." When Harvard English professor Elisa New held her great-grandfather Jacob Levy's cane in her hands for the first time in 1997, its elegant, finely crafted design led her to realize for the first time that her family's story was not the standard coming-to-America tale she had long assumed. In the mid-1880s, Levy landed not at Ellis Island, but at Baltimore, where he skipped the struggling, tenement-living experience and hit the ground running. 6:30pm, Skylight Room. Click here to register.
Tuesday 4/13 : "David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City." Graham Russell Gao Hodges provides the first biography of Ruggles (1810-1949), an African American activist, writer, and publisher who secured liberty for more than six hundred former bond people, the most famous of whom was Frederick Douglass. Hodges establishes the abolitionist as an essential link between disparate groups--male and female, black and white, clerical and secular, elite and rank-and-file--recasting the history of antebellum abolitionism as a more integrated and cohesive movement than is often portrayed. 6:30 pm, Elebash Recital Hall. Click here to register.
Wednesday 5/5: "Sweatshop Cinderalla -- Documentary Film Premiere (Women Make Movies)." Please join Gothan Center Director, historian, and filmmaker Suzanne Wasserman for the New York City premiere of Sweathshop Cinderalla . The short documentary examines the life of Jewish immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska. Using archival film and still photography, footage from the 1922 silent film Hungry Hearts, letters, newspaper clippings and a tape-recorded interview, this film will tell the story of the 20th century New York novelist. 6:30 pm, Elebash Recital Hall. Click here to register.
Tuesday 5/11 : "The 'Weaker Sex' Takes Gotham: Fighting for Women's Right to Vote." Author Louise Bernikow will trace the places, characters, and tactics involved in winning the vote for women in New York. The battle for female suffrage played out against the city landscape with more drama than anything mounted on the Broadway stage. Filling 5th Avenue with marchers, Union Square with leafletters, Carnegie Hall with speechifiers, and surrounding the Statue of Liberty with demonstrators in small boats, suffragists left no corner of the city untouched. 6:30 pm, Elebash Recital Hall. Click here to register.
The 2009-2010 Columbia University American Studies Seminar Series:
"New York City in American Studies/American Studies in New York City"
Please note that this year the seminar will return to Faculty House, located 64 Morningside Drive (at 116th Street). We will gather in the downstairs bar at 5:45, move upstairs for dinner, and the talk will begin at 7:30 . If you would like to join the speaker, chairs and rapporteur for dinner, please RSVP to Christina Charuhas (cac2166@columbia.edu). For help locating Faculty House, you can view a map of Columbia's campus at http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map .
The remaining speakers for the 2009-2010 year are :
Thursday 2/18: Thuy Linh Tu, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University. "All in the Family? Asian American Designers and the Boundaries of Creative Labor."
Thursday 3/11: Oneka LaBennett, Research Director of the Bronx African American History Project and Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies, Fordham University. "Consuming Identities: Race, Gender and Transnationalism Amongst West Indian Girls in Brooklyn."
Saturday 4/10: "New York City in American Studies/American Studies in New York City," a symposium with the 2009-10 seminar speakers plus representatives from American Studies programs in New York City. 1-6pm, The Ella Weed Room (223 Milbank Hall), Barnard College.
Please don't hesitate to contact rapporteur Christina Charuhas, by e-mail or phone (925-683-2673) with any questions or comments.
Monday 6/7 : New York Public Library's Live from the NYPL series continues with filmmaker John Waters , in conversation with Paul Holdengraber. This will be an evening of inspiring depravity. Click here for tickets and for forthcoming information updates.
Undergraduate Student Opportunities
Wednesday 2/10 : Interested in getting a Masters Degree? Come to an Open House and Informational Session at ColumbiaUniversity. Be our guest for a fun and informative panel discussion and reception for the Oral History MA Program. Guest speaker Adam Bush will talk about how he has used Oral History in his career. Bush received a doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, and has traveled extensively in the US researching black cultural production, alternative pedagogy, and the origins of jazz education. 6pm, Philosophy Hall on Columbia's Morningside Campus, 116th Street. For more info, contact Molly Rosner at 212.854.9281 or ohma@columbia.edu .
The Center for Fiction is looking for a Development/Programming Intern for Spring 2010: The intern will work up to 20 hours a week in our administrative offices. Duties will be divided between development, programming, and general administrative work with an emphasis on helping with literary events and a conference for writers. This is a great opportunity to gain experience and to learn the day-to-day activities of a busy nonprofit. This is a nonpaying position, but access to an extensive fiction library, study space, and use of our Writers Studio is available.
Founded in 1820, The Center for Fiction is a literary arts organization located in the heart of New York City. We host readings, lectures, and panels featuring both established and emerging writers. This spring we'll be hosting events with Colson Whitehead, Jane Smiley, Mary Gaitskill and many others. Interested candidates should email Kristin Henley (kristin@centerforfiction.org) with a brief cover letter and resume.
Fresh Air Fund Internship: Be a part of the FriendlyTown team for Spring 2010! We are looking for interns to help us strengthen and grow our program. As an intern based in our NYC office, you will help us prepare for summer, when thousands of children living in New York City ’s disadvantaged communities will experience the joys of summer outside the city.
Established in 1877, the Fresh Air Fund, an independent, not-for-profit agency, has provided free summer experiences in suburban and rural communities for more than 1.7 million New York City children. Each year, thousands of children visit volunteer host families in 13 states and Canada or attend one of five camps in upstate New York . Many children enjoy Fresh Air Fund vacations year after year and form lifelong bonds with the families they visit.
Ideal candidates will have interest or experience in community organizing and possess organizational, communication, research, and problem-solving skills. This would be an unpaid or for-credit internship for the Spring semester (January or February- May.) For more information about the Fresh Air Fund, please see www.freshair.org . To apply or for more information about Spring internships, please contact American Studies major Kaylyn Toale, who was the Fall 2009 intern, at ktoale@freshair.org .
Faculty and Graduate Student Opportunities
The University College Dublin Clinton Institute for American Studies offers a Summer School program that will bring together scholars and graduate students from around the world to engage in wide-ranging discussion on interdisciplinary study of the United States. The School is aimed at advanced graduate students and junior faculty in the fields of American Studies, History, Political Sciences and Literary and Cultural Studies. The school's format will include daily workshop seminars and plenary lectures. Participants work with the School's core faculty in one of four week-long seminars. In 2010 the faculty will include Hamilton Carroll (U of Leeds), Amy Kaplan (U Penn), Ruth Wilson Gilmore (USC), Liam Kennedy (UCD), Scott Lucas (U Birmingham), Peter Nicholls (NYU), Donald Pease (Dartmouth), and Werner Sollors (Harvard). For further details, visit www.ucdclinton.ie
Deadline extended :
Call for Proposals for “Re-Visiting the Lower East Side: A NYMASA Summer Institute”
The New York Metro American Studies Association (NYMASA) invites proposals for participants in a summer institute from June 14 to June 18, on the theme “Re-visiting the Lower East Side.” This weeklong series for educators will allow participants to visit and re-visit New York’s Lower East Side (LES). It will focus on the history of the LES as a site of immigration, urban development, architecture, commerce, and art as well as a site of fantasy and cultural tourism. Almost as long as immigrants and internal migrants have flooded into the LES to settle, survive, and create communities, readers and tourists have been curious enough about the LES to allow a culture of real and virtual cultural tourism to be sustained. The LES has been commercial as a neighborhood and has been commercialized for those not living there. The seminar will explore both aspects of LES history. The seminar will be interdisciplinary in nature, hoping to draw participants from immigration studies, urban studies, American studies, sociology, history, literature, theatre, women studies and other fields.
The institute is designed to bring together 15 scholars and teachers from the New York metropolitan area to engage in the study of the Lower East Side. Our goal is to create an academic community that studies, reads about, and walks through the Lower East Side.
One segment of the institute will include visits to partnering organizations such as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the New-York Historical Society, and the Ellis Island Museum, in-depth tours of their exhibits, and discussions with curators about the issues that arise out of preserving histories of immigration in an area that bears the weight of so much personal and cultural memory. In visiting these cultural institutions, we hope to revisit not just the Lower East Side itself, but the narratives that have grown up around it. The rest of the week will be taken up with seminar-style discussions of shared reading and writing workshops in which participants can present their own work and gain valuable peer analysis of their research in the field.
The instituted is sponsored by an American Studies Association Regional Chapters grant and hosted by HunterCollege, CUNY. The cost of the week will be $100, and will partly cover breakfasts and lunches and admission to all cultural events. NYMASA is not able to provide accommodations for participants.
Proposals should include: a current cv; a writing sample, ideally on a relevant topic (scholarly, pedagogical, or creative writing are equally acceptable); and a cover letter outlining the applicant’s interest in the institute, current project, and possible intellectual contributions to the group. Please send two copies of all materials by February 20 , 2010 to Sarah Chinn, English Department, HunterCollege, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY10065.
The institute is open to educators of all kinds, including doctoral students and college and university faculty; K-12 teachers are encouraged to apply. For more information, please contact either Sarah Chinn at sarah.chinn@hunter.cuny.edu or Hildegard Hoeller at hilhllr@aim.com
Dissent Magazine and JSL Films present the Paul Goodman Essay Contest. We invite you to write an original essay--from 1,000 to 3,000 words long--in the spirit of Goodman's "utopian essays and practical proposals." Tell us: What is one of the pressing social and political issues of our time, and how would you address it? The winning essay will receive a cash prize of $1,000 and will be published in Dissent. Two runner-up essays will be published on the Dissent web site and will receive $250 and a signed DVD copy of the new film Paul Goodman Changed My Life. Essays should be sent in PDF of DOC format to "essaycontest@paulgoodmanfilm.com" by May 1, 2010 . For more info on the contest, and on Goodman, click here .
The Massachusetts Historical Society will offer about 30 research fellowships for the academic year 2010-2011. The Society offers Short-Term Fellowships, and participates in the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium. For more information about the Society's research fellowships please visit our website, www.masshist.org/fellowships , or contact Conrad E. Wright (fellowships@masshist.org), 617-646-0512. Application deadline for MHS Short-Term fellowships, March 1 , 2010.
