Faculty News 2008-2009, Vol. 2
In 2008, Stephen Duncombe's "Times of the Future," appeared in the "Noted" section of the Nation. Earlier that year, with Benjamin Shepard and L.M. Bogad, he published "Performing vs. The Insurmountable: Theatrics, Activism and Social Movements," in Liminalities: Journal of Performance Studies. "Politics in the Age of YouTube," a transcribed and edited version of his discussion with Henry Jenkins, appeared in Electronic Journal of Communication, in a special double issue on "Irony and Politics: User-Producers, Parody, and Digital Politics." In January 2009, his review of Ennis Carter's Posters for the People: Art of the WPA, appeared in Afterimage, and edited selections from his book, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, appeared as "Impossible Dreams," in Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age (Tarcher/Penguin). In March 2009 his article, "They Believe, Can I?," ran in Adbusters.
Kathy Engel recently published several poems: "The Kitchen," available on www.lulu.com; "Begin Again," in Poet Lore; "Untitled," in Poets for Palestine; and "Inaugural," along with an interview with Ethelbert Miller, published on the Foreign Policy In Focus Web site at www.fpif.org.
Greg Erickson recently published two essays: "Bodies and Narrative in Crisis: Figures of Rupture and Chaos in Season 6 and 7," with Gallatin part-time faculty member Jennifer Lemberg, in Buffy Goes Dark: Essays on the Final Two Seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Television (McFarland, 2009), and "Humanity in a ‘Space of Nothin': Morality, Religion, Atheism, and Possibility in Firefly" in Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier (I.B. Tauris, 2008).
Emily Fragos recently published Music's Spell: Poems About Music and Musicians (Everyman's Library/Random House, 2009). The anthology, her third, includes Baudelaire on Beethoven, Langston Hughes on the blues, Joyce Carol Oates on Elvis, and Paul Muldoon on Kurt Cobain. Fragos edited the collection of more than 130 poems into chapters such as "The Opus" and "Music at the Close of Life." Fragos has also edited The Dance: Poems About Dance and Dancers and The Great Cat: Poems About Cats for Everyman's Library. She published a collection of her own poetry, Little Savage, in 2004. Fragos also recently had her poems published in The Yale Review and The Boston Review as well as several poems translated into Greek for dekata, a prestigious international literary journal in Athens.
The Fall 2008 issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal, a special issue on Stevens and France, included Lisa Goldfarb's essay, "Poetics of Variation: Wallace Stevens' and Paul Valéry's Poems of the Sea."
The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (University of North Carolina Press), for which Scott Korb is an associate editor, was released in 2008.
Donna Goodman recently published A History of the Future (Monacelli Press/Random House, 2008), which explores the impact of technology on architecture and urban planning, beginning with Renaissance concepts that lay the foundations for modern innovations and concluding with emerging projects in sustainable design. In her review of the history of visionary design, Goodman considers various concepts of the future from Leonardo da Vinci's time to the present day, and examines periods such as the automobile age, the information age, and the environmental age. Vanity Fair's Sophie Dawson wrote, "A History of the Future … exhibits a thoroughly researched, chronological history of architecture that should satisfy everyone—from the newly curious to the most erudite of design enthusiasts."
Ritty Lukose's Liberalization's Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India (Duke University Press, 2009) offers an analysis of Indian cultural politics as it relates to the issue of globalization. The book focuses on the clash between post-independence Nehruvian developmentalism, as exemplified by the older generation, and the more globally-oriented, unabashedly consumerist attitudes held by today's youth. Lukose examines the generational shift occurring in the country by concentrating on the youth culture in the state of Kerala, an area that has recently taken on a new face as a result of an influx of international workers and money and an increase in consumer products. Lukose looks at fashion, romance, student politics, and education as part of her exploration of such topics as a rise in Hindu nationalism, altered outlooks on citizenship, and new expressions of femininity and masculinity.
Julie Malnig's "All Is Not Right in the House of Atreus: Feminist Theatrical Renderings of the Oresteia," appeared in Sharon Friedman's Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works (McFarland, 2008). In a special issue on Martha Graham, the journal Dance Chronicle featured "Clytemnestra and the Dance Dramas of Martha Graham: Revising the Classics," a panel discussion at the Gallatin School, edited and with an introduction by Malnig.
In Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), Kim Phillips-Fein examines the underpinnings of American conservatism, offering a narrative history that begins in the 1930s. The book chronicles how a handful of prominent businessmen forged alliances in an effort to roll back the New Deal—long before the "culture wars" of the 1960s. "Much of the writing on the conservative movement focuses on the cultural side, instead of on the evolution of its economic ideas," she states. "The economic agenda—of deregulation, tax cuts, anti-government sentiment, anti-unionism—has been so successful that I wanted to understand its origins." Phillips-Fein won Columbia University's prestigious Bancroft Dissertation Award for her original research for Invisible Hands.
Stacy Pies recently had a review, "Néant sonore: Mallarmé ou la traversée des paradoxes," published in Nineteenth Century French Studies (Volume 37).
Chris Spain published a short story, "The Least Wrong Thing," in Open City, in the winter 2008-2009 issue.
Matthew Stanley recently published an article, "The Pointsman: Maxwell's Demon, Victorian Free Will, and the Boundaries of Science," in Journal of the History of Ideas.
In January 2009, Aaron Tugendhaft published "Paradise in Perspective: Thoughts from Pavel Florensky" in the online version of Kronos, a Polish philosophy journal published by the University of Warsaw. The essay can be found at http://kronos.org.pl/index.php?23250,469.
PRESENTATIONS AND APPEARANCES
Maria-Luisa Achino-Loeb delivered a paper, "Through Silence: Elusive Sources of Meaning and Power," in a seminar titled "Sounds of Silence: Silence and Speech in Cultural, Political and Ethical Contexts" at Harvard University in March 2009.
Gene Cittadino gave a talk titled "Reluctant Revolutionary: The Life and Times of Charles Darwin" in February 2009 at the College of Mount St. Vincent. His lecture served as the opening address of the college's celebration of the bicentennial of Darwin's birth.
Stephen Duncombe recently gave several invited talks: "New Media, New Terrain, New Activism," at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in November 2008; "How To Win: The Politics of Political Art," (with Steve Lambert) at "BYO: Voices of the Contemporary at the Carpenter Center," at Harvard University in December 2008; and "The Art of New Deal Politics and Propaganda," at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, and "Politics and Popular Culture," for the Communications Forum and Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in February 2009. In 2008, he was interviewed for the Italian newspaper Liberazione and he was also keynote speaker at the "Underground" conference at NYC's CUNY Graduate Center, where his talk was entitled "Is There an Underground on the Internet? Zines, Blogs and the Democratization of Alternative Culture." In 2009, he served as panelist for "A Few Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production" at Colombia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
Greg Erickson presented a paper, "Modernist Literature's God After God," at the Modern Language Association Convention in San Francisco, CA, in December 2008, and gave a lecture, "Rescripting the Sacred: Religion and Popular Culture," with Richard Santana, at Rochester Institute of Technology in January 2009.
Sharon Friedman presented a paper, "Susan Glaspell's Theatre and the ‘Discourse of Home'" at the American Drama Conference in Brooklyn, NY, in November 2008. At the same conference, she served as a panelist for the workshop "Broader Contexts for Teaching Susan Glaspell." In March 2009, she presented a paper entitled "‘Sounds Indistinguishable from Sights': Staging Subjectivity in Katie Mitchell's Waves" at the Comparative Drama Conference in Los Angeles.
Lisa Goldfarb presented her work on Wallace Stevens at the "Modernism and Unreadability" conference at école Normale Supérieure/Université de Lyon II in October 2008. The paper considered Stevens' late work and was entitled "The Poetic Promise of Unreadable Moments: Wallace Stevens' Things of August."
In January 2009, Judith Greenberg delivered a presentation entitled "Cypora's Echo: Exploring the Transmission of Holocaust Resistance" to the "Engendering the Archive" group at Columbia University's Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. In March, she gave a talk on "Siedlce's Child" in a panel on "Global Languages of the 'Other Europe'" at the American Comparative Literature Association conference at Harvard University.
In 2008, Dave King was interviewed for the New York Times column "Paper Cuts": http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/stray-questions-for-dave-king/.
Julie Malnig was a presenter on the "Dance Education" panel for the first graduate student "Dance Across the Board" conference at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in January 2009.
In February 2009, at the College Art Association annual conference, Eve Meltzer was the discussant for a session titled "Torture, Extraordinary Renditions, and the Aesthetics of Disappearance." In March, she gave a talk entitled "After Affects" at NYU, in conjunction with the Grey Art Gallery exhibition, "Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion."
In 2008, Stacy Pies delivered a paper, "The Music of Prose: the Evolution of Mallarmé's Faun," at the 34th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium, "Empire, Identity, Exoticism," at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.
Laurin Raiken recently served as a co-convener for the summer seminar "Art, Public Policy and Politics" for the NYU Faculty Resource Network. The seminar examined art and civil society and the role of the arts in creating and sustaining our communities. NYU's Faculty Resource Network (FRN) is an award-winning professional development initiative that sponsors programs for faculty members from a consortium of over 50 colleges and universities. FRN hosts lectures, symposia, and intensive seminars, all of which are designed to improve the quality of teaching and learning at its member and affiliate institutions. Raiken is also a consultant to FRN on Native American colleges.
Barnaby Ruhe is working with the organization Food and Water Watch (www.fwwatch.org) on his Waterposse Project to stop global corporations from stealth buy-ups of local township water utilities across America.
In 2008, George Shulman gave a talk entitled "From Political Theology to Vernacular Prophecy: The Idea of Redemption in American Politics" for the American Studies Association, and one on James Baldwin and political theory at Duke University. In early 2009, he spoke about his book, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture, at NYC's All Souls Unitarian Church, and the New York Metro American Studies Association devoted one night to a Salon Talk on the text at Hunter College. Cornel West says of American Prophecy: "This is the grand book on the American prophetic tradition of thought and action we've been waiting for! Shulman's subtle theoretical analyses, sophisticated historical narratives, and progressive political project bring new life to a set of issues and figures—such as race, empire, and democracy in the texts of Thoreau, King, Baldwin, and Morrison—that either we honestly face or we sadly succumb to, to our destruction."
In November 2008, Matthew Stanley appeared on the History Channel's program, Einstein. In 2009, he presented a paper, "Past as Prediction: Newcomb and the Eclipse of Thales," at the American Astronomical Society Meeting, and another entitled "Uniformity of Natural Laws in Historical Context" at Columbia University. In addition, Stanley recently founded and has been running the New York City History of Science Working Group. The group has been meeting regularly to discuss ongoing research, has brought in outside speakers, and hosted a conference to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial in April 2009 at the Gallatin School (see http://www.nyu.edu/gallatin/news/2009/02/darwin.html).
In February 2009, Lauren Walsh participated in Stony Brook University's conference, "The Desire for Representation/The Desire of Representation," delivering a talk entitled "The Desire for Truth or the Desire for Concealment? Form and Representation in Ian McEwan's Atonement."
PERFORMANCES AND EXHIBITIONS
In February 2009, the United Nations Postal Administration issued three definitive stamps designed by Jaime Arredondo. His Cielo Rosado, Rosa De Sangre, and Espiritu De Mujer are featured on the one-cent, nine-cent, and ten-cent stamps, respectively. Arredondo is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Ford Foundation Fellowship and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Though his work has been shown in galleries and museums throughout the United States, this is his first set of stamp designs for the UN. The United Nations is the only organization in the world that is permitted to issue postage stamps. These stamps reflect the organization's efforts, aims, and achievements and are created by artists around the world. UN stamps have won international design awards and have featured the work of renowned artists such as Marc Chagall, Vincent Van Gogh, and Peter Max.
Washington & Lee University chose Christopher Cartmill to be the 2009 featured playwright in the seventh annual Flournoy Playwright Festival, following the likes of Paula Vogel and Neil LaBute. The festival celebrates the pivotal role of the playwright in theatre arts and encourages playwriting in the United States and throughout the world. Cartmill directed his play, The Apotheosis of Vaclav Drda; performed his solo show, The Nebraska Dispatches; and saw staged readings of his plays The Robbers of Madderbloom, Benjamin Constant, The Choir, and Romeo's Dream.
In early 2009, Songs for Obama, a performance piece conceived and directed by Imani Douglas in which historical figures salute Barack Obama, was presented by the Richard Allen Center for Cultural Arts Seaport Salon at NYC's South Street Seaport. Sticks and Stones, a one-woman piece that Douglas developed and directed, was also recently presented at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts at Long Island University's C.W. Post Campus.
Lanny Harrison premiered a one-woman show, ISBA: Dreams, Memories, Other Lives in NYC at The Club at La MaMa in late 2008.
Kristin Horton directed Dano Madden's In the Sawtooths during the 2008 Playwrights Week at the Lark Play Development Center in New York, and also produced their fall Playwright's Workshop series featuring writers Arthur Kopit, Lisa Kron, Sam Hunter, Thomas Bradshaw, and Deirdre O'Connor. In January 2009, she collaborated with the Workhaus Collective by directing the premiere of Planting Shelly Anne by Jeannine Coulombe at The Playwright's Center in Minneapolis, MN. The Workhaus Collective is a diverse group of nationally recognized playwrights based in the Twin Cities. Other projects currently in development include work by playwrights Sam Hunter, Jessica Litwak, Dano Madden, and Christopher Cartmill.
In March 2009, Judith Sloan performed Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America as a featured artist at SUNY Oswego in dialogues about ethics and politics of oral history and performance. That same month, Sloan appeared on The Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio, WNYC to discuss her work with EarSay's Cross-Cultural Dialogue through the Arts project, an arts-in-education interdisciplinary arts project in its eighth year in residence at the International High School at LaGuardia Community College. Sloan was joined by a student from Afghanistan, a student from Haiti, and a teacher from HIS to talk about teaching arts to teenagers from war-torn countries.
KUDOS
Judith Sloan received a grant from the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center to present the first work-in-progress of her new show, Yo Miss; Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide, directed by Gallatin professor Michael Dinwiddie, in March 2009. Sloan also received a Jewish Studies Grant from Gallatin to research collaborations between Black and Jewish artists.
Chris Trogan was awarded a summer teaching fellowship at Transart Institute, an international M.F.A. program for working artists in Berlin, Germany.
Ella Turenne is a recipient of the NYU Martin Luther King, Jr., Faculty Award, which is sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Development and the Office of the Assistant Vice President of Student Diversity. The award recognizes faculty members who exemplify the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., through their positive impact within the classroom and the greater NYU community. In her "Lyrics on Lockdown" course, Turenne's students study art as a tool for social change by engaging with high school students from Island Academy in Rikers Island. Turenne was honored at a ceremony in January 2009. The award carries a research stipend, which she is using to work on a project about new media and social activism.
Alejandro Velasco's paper, "‘A Weapon as Powerful as the Vote': Urban Protest and Electoral Politics in Venezuela, 1978-1983," was recently awarded the Best Paper prize by the Section on Venezuelan Studies of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). He presented the paper in June 2009 at the LASA conference in Rio de Janeiro.
