Faculty News 2008-2009, Vol. 1

 

PUBLISHED

Christopher Cartmill published the gothic comedy The Spectre Bridegroom with Playscripts, Inc. in June 2008. The play is part of a suite of adaptations that Cartmill is developing of Washington Irving’s works. His adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which Playscripts published in 2006, has been performed numerous times across the country. Cartmill is working on the third piece in his Irving suite, Rip Van Winkle, on which he intends to put an environmental spin. In addition, The Nebraska Dispatches, a memoir about his Native American history and heritage, will soon be published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Steven Duncombe published the article “FDR’s Democratic Propaganda” in a special issue of the Nation, “The New Deal Turns 75,” in April 2008. That same month, he published “The Art of the Impossible,” a catalog essay for Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert’s Wish You Were Here! Postcards from our Awesome Future exhibit, created for the San Francisco Arts Commission. Duncombe then had his article, “They Believe, Can I?” appear in the July/August 2008 issue of Afterimage: Journal for Media Arts and Cultural Criticism.

Religion and Popular Culture: Rescripting the Sacred, coauthored by Gregory Erickson and Richard W. Santana, was published by McFarland in April 2008. The book examines how texts, television drama and fan culture, advertising and pornography, music, film, and video games can reflect, influence, and create complex and conflicting American religious identities.

Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works, edited by Sharon Friedman and published by McFarland in September 2008, examines theatrical revisions produced since 1980 that have been influenced by feminism. The premise of the collection is that feminism, in its many incarnations and intersections with diverse political and aesthetic concerns, has had a profound effect on the postmodern revisionist stage. Essays are arranged according to the period and genre of the source text: classical theater and myth, Shakespeare and 17th-century theater, 19th- and 20th-century narratives and reflections, and modern drama.

Lisa Goldfarb's essay, “Music and the Vocal Poetics of Stevens and Valéry,” appears in the volume Wallace Stevens Across the Atlantic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), a collection of essays dedicated to Stevens’s relationship to Europe, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg.

Dave King's catalogue essay “BOOM,” originally published in coordination with the exhibit “Blown Away” at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has recently been republished, with an interview, by the arts and culture journal Ninth Letter. “BOOM” was also published in the Italian literary journal Nuovi Argomenti in a translation by Massimo Gezzi.

The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, for which Scott Korb is associate editor (along with Jean Fagan Yellin, Joseph M. Thomas, and Kate Culkin) is being published by the University of North Carolina Press in the fall of 2008.

Patricia Lennox recently had an article entitled “Joseph Papp” published in Directors of Shakespeare (Routledge, 2008), edited by John Russell Brown. The book is a collection of articles on 31 major international Shakespeare directors, starting with the 19th century. Lennox also recently had an article, “An Age of Kings and the ‘Normal American,’” appear in Shakespeare Survey 61, in an issue that focused on Shakespeare and television. The article discussed the 1961 broadcast of a 15-part BBC series of Shakespeare’s English history plays in England and the U.S.

Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, edited by Julie Malnig and published in October 2008 by University of Illinois Press, is an in-depth exploration of a broad range of social and popular dances from the 18th century to the present day. The book examines various styles of social and popular dance that developed as a result of the rich fusions of West African, African American, Euro-American, and Latin American forms of dance within the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean, and it analyzes these dances within their wider social, cultural, political, and economic backgrounds.

David Moore recently published the chapter “Workplace Learning and the Micropolitics of Knowledge” in The Learning Potential of the Workplace (Sense, 2008), edited by Wim J. Nijhof and Loek F.M. Nieuwenhuis.

A revised version of Sara Murphy’s essay, “Mourning and Melancholia: Bearing Witness Between Generations,” is reprinted in Imagining Law (SUNY Press, 2008), edited by Renee Heberle and Benjamin Pryor.

Ed Park had his debut novel, Personal Days, published by Random House in May 2008. The book, which focuses on a New York office in the midst of an aggressive and mysterious downsizing, has been widely and favorably reviewed. Newsweek called it “a lyrical and often piercing look at daily life,” the Los Angeles Times likened Park’s work to that of Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, and Mark Sarvas wrote in the New York Times Book Review: “Witty and appealing....Park has written what one of his characters calls ‘a layoff narrative’ for our times. As the economy continues its free fall, Park’s book may serve as a handy guide for navigating unemployment and uncertainty.”

Stacy Pies had two poems, “The Talismanic Adverb” and “For Anatole Mallarmé, Age 8,” recently published in the journal Fulcrum, No. 6. Go to http://fulcrumpoetry.com.

Millery Polyné recently published a piece on TheRoot.com: “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” about race and the Boston Celtics. The Root is an online daily magazine cofounded by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Lee Robbins’s paper, “Healing with the Alchemical Imagination in the Undergraduate Classroom,” was published in Psyche and the Arts: Jungian Approaches to Music, Architecture, Literature, Film and Painting (Routledge, 2008), edited by Susan Rowland. The paper is based on the Gallatin course Robbins teaches, Alchemy and the Transformation of Self.

George Shulman's American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture was published in September 2008 by University of Minnesota Press. The book, which explores what is dangerous, yet also valuable, in prophetic language, looks at the use of prophetic idiom by figures such as Henry Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Jerry Falwell, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. By focusing on how American critics of white supremacy have repeatedly reworked biblical prophecy, Shulman demonstrates how these writers and thinkers have transformed prophecy into a political language and given redemption a political meaning. He argues that, in this form, prophetic discourse can be used for progressive purposes.

Judith Sloan's article about teaching across cultural divides was published on the Third Coast International Audio Festival website, WBEZ Chicago, IL, in June 2008. The site also featured online audio of two of her narrative/essay/performance pieces, Sweeping Statements and What’s Your Status, a production of EarSay (www.earsay.org).

Matthew Stanley had his paper, “Mysticism and Marxism: A.S. Eddington, Chapman Cohen, and Political Engagement Through Science Popularization,” published in the June 2008 issue (Volume 46, Number 2) of the journal Minerva.

PRESENTATIONS AND APPEARANCES

In May 2008, Lenora Champagne moderated a panel of African American playwrights on the theme “Origins, Identity, Transformation” at NYC’s Symphony Space. In June, Champagne was in residence at Voice and Vision’s summer retreat at Bard College working on her new play, Staying Afloat. She later attended a conference of female artists and critics in York, England in September.

Nina Cornyetz served as a panelist on “The Utagawa School and Murakami Takashi: Portrayals of Women, Beauty, and the Erotic” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in May 2008. Her presentation was entitled “Murakami Takashi’s No Exit: The Hell of Others.”

Steven Duncombe was an invited panelist on “Expression=Life: ACT UP, Video and the AIDS Crisis” for Deep Dish TV/NYU in April 2008. He then gave a series of talks on “The Politics of Imagining the Future” at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies and the political science department at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, in May, and spoke on “Politics Past Commodification” at “The Contested Terrain of Consumption Studies” conference at Boston College in July. Duncombe also recently gave a television interview for SBT Brasil on the Kennedys and political celebrity, as well as a radio interview for Air America on propaganda and the New Deal.

In April 2008, Kathy Engel gave a reading in Berkeley, CA, from the book she coedited, We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon, to benefit the Middle East Children’s Alliance. That same month she gave a guest talk and reading in the sociology department at Simmons College in Boston, MA, on the subject of poetry and activism, and also took part in an online dialogue with Harriet Barlow sponsored by the Community Arts Network. In May, she had a reading from We Begin Here broadcast on East End Ink radio, and she served on a radio panel on mothers and activism broadcast by Long Island National Public Radio and Stony Brook University at Southampton College. In June, she was in residence at the Sea Change Cottage in Provincetown, MA, on the invitation of the Gaea Foundation.

Gregory Erickson presented a paper entitled “‘Goddamn You, God’: The New Atheism and Old Heresy in Narratives of Popular Culture” at the National Popular Culture Association-American Culture Association Conference in San Francisco, CA in April 2008. The following month he presented “The Monster that May Be” at the Cultural Studies Association Annual Conference in NYC, and in June he delivered “Ruptures in Understanding: Juxtapositions of Heresy and Music in Ulysses” at the International James Joyce Symposium in Tours, France.

Emily Fragos read from her work at Artists Space in NYC in May 2008. Fragos’s new poems have recently appeared in American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Threepenny Review, and Poetry.

Sharon Friedman presented a paper, “The Feminist Playwright as Critic,” at a panel on Shakespeare and Gender at the “Shakespeare Forum: Page, Stage, Engage” conference in April 2008 at NYU. In June, Friedman and Karen Hornick were guest speakers at a post-performance discussion of Palace of the End, a new play by Judith Thompson, 2008 winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn award, produced by the Epic Theater Ensemble at Playwrights Horizons in NYC.

Lisa Goldfarb gave a talk at the Sorbonne (Université de Paris IV), “Le possible-à-chaque-instant’: Valéryan Variations in the Poems of Wallace Stevens,” as part of a critical research group entitled “Texte et Critique du Texte” in March 2008. The talk inaugurated a new research initiative on modern poetry.

In June 2008, Lanny Harrison cotaught a brand new module, “Leader As Artist: Cultivating Authentic Leadership Through Shambhala Art,” with Barbara Bash and Arawana Hayash at The Shambhala Institute in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Scott Hightower was featured as a symposium teacher at the 2008 Ocean State Summer Writing Conference at the University of Rhode Island in June. Hightower taught a two-day symposium on “Teaching by the Practice of Writing,” which focused on the benefits of teaching the elements of writing through the creative practice versus literary analysis and theory.

Patricia Lennox delivered a paper, “Shakespeare’s Roman Women: The Disappearing Matron,” and served as a panelist on the subject of “Using Films to Teach Shakespeare” at the “Shakespeare on Screen: The Roman Plays” international conference at the University of Rouen in France in March 2008.

In May 2008, Dave King was the invited Strnad Fellow at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, IL. In July, King participated in the conference “Writing the Medical Experience” at Sarah Lawrence College, delivering a talk entitled “Getting Technical Without Losing the Narrative.”

Julie Malnig presented a paper entitled “‘How Do I Write about Dance?’ Thoughts on Teaching Criticism” for the “Writing and Dancing” panel at the Society of Dance History Scholars conference in Saratoga Springs, NY, in June 2008.

In June 2008, David Moore was the keynote speaker at the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute on Experiential Education, an international conference for college educators in cooperative education, internships, service-learning, undergraduate research, and study abroad.

In July 2008, Millery Polyné delivered a lecture on “Caribbean Social Movements and the Campaign Against Sex Tourism” at The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Lee Robbins gave a workshop on archetypal parenting at a joint conference of the International Association for Jungian Analysts and the International Association for Jungian Studies in Zurich, Switzerland, in the summer of 2008.

In May 2008, Barnaby Ruhe collaborated on an abstract mural project at Detroit’s MONA Museum with Frank Shifreen. In August, he ran Shamandome, a shamanic practitioner week of workshops at the Burning Man annual festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. (Eight of Ruhe’s instructors for the workshops were Gallatin alumni.) Ruhe is also slated to appear in a film directed by Diana Morse that began shooting in September.

Leslie Satin was in residency at the Yaddo artists’ colony in June 2008, working on several choreographic projects. Also in June, she participated in a panel discussion/workshop at the Society of Dance History Scholars conference in Saratoga Springs, NY. Satin performed an improvisation and presented a paper about the intellectual life in contemporary dance. In July and August, she taught a performance workshop and performed new dance works in Santa Fe, NM, presented by the Center for Contemporary Arts.

In April 2008, Laura Slatkin was a respondent and chaired a session at a conference on “The Centrality of Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion: Ancient Reality or Modern Construct?” that was organized by the Midwestern Consortium on Ancient Religion and held in Chicago, IL. That same month, she participated in a workshop with the actress Fiona Shaw on “Medea Then and Now” at The University of Chicago, and gave a talk on “The Poetics of Homecoming in Early Greek Epic” for the department of classics at Arizona State University.

Judith Sloan presented a lecture on “New Immigrant Health: Interviewing Across the Cultural Divide” at The American Association of Physician Assistants National Conference in San Antonio, TX, in May 2008. Her talk focused on interviews with refugees and immigrants who have fled military dictatorships, war, and torture, and therefore have difficulty sharing the truth about their medical histories.

Christopher Trogan presented a paper, “The Ambiguity of Suicide and Freedom in Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther,” at the American Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Conference in Long Beach, CA, in April 2008. The following month he chaired a panel on “Ethics and Literary Theory” at the Stanley Cavell Literary Conference, sponsored by the University of Edinburgh in Edinburg, Scotland.

In March 2008, Alejandro Velasco served as a panelist discussing “Urban Roots of Resistance and the New Left in Latin America” at the Left Forum annual conference, this year themed “Cracks in the Edifice” and held at The Cooper Union in NYC. The next month he presented “‘A Weapon as Powerful as the Vote’: Urban Protest and Electoral Politics in Venezuela, 1978-1983” at the “Interrogating the Civil Society Agenda” conference at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He presented this same paper in September at “Workers, the Nation-State, and Beyond: The Newberry Conference on Labor History Across the Americas” at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Susan Weisser delivered the paper “Wordsworth’s ‘Bliss of Solitude’: Loneliness and Solitude in Literature and Life” at the Fourth Joint International Psychoanalytic Conference in Vancouver, Canada, in July 2008.

In the summer of 2008, Greg Wyatt was featured in an arts profile broadcast on both Bloomberg TV’s Bloomberg Muse and WNET Channel 13 New York. Wyatt, sculptor-in-residence at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, spoke about the responsibility an artist must take when working with bronze and the inspiration he finds in Shakespeare and the spiritual world.

PPERFORMANCES AND EXHIBITIONS

In May 2008, Christopher Cartmill presented The Nebraska Dispatches: Forward and Reverse, a solo performance piece he wrote, to sold-out audiences in the Johnny Carson Theater of the Lied Center for the Performing Arts in Lincoln, NE. The piece is based on his soon-to-be-published memoir. In June, Cartmill performed Time Travelers: American Places, an interactive performance/lecture he penned, for the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago.

TRACES/fades, Lenora Champagne's intergenerational play, was featured in the 2008 Ice Factory Festival at the Ohio Theatre in NYC in July 2008. The production, a meditation on Alzheimer’s and our inability to remember history, was developed at HERE Arts Center, with additional support from Soho Think Tank, New Georges, and New York Theatre Workshop. Champagne recently received grants from the Puffin Foundation and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council toward the production; she had previously received commissioning funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and a residency at the Yaddo artists’ colony to work on the script.

Judith Sloan was a featured performer at World Savvy’s performance event for global education in June 2008 at the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in Long Island City, NY. Sloan also performed her solo show from Crossing the BLVD (www.crossingtheblvd.org) for Facing History and Ourselves and for the New York Institute of Technology School of Education in July.

In April 2008, Ben Steinfeld and his theater company, Fiasco Theater, presented three scenes at the “Shakespeare: Page, Stage, Engage” conference hosted by NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. In May, he travelled with Fiasco to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to join the NC Jazz Repertory Orchestra for a unique concert event that mixed Shakespearean scenes and monologues with the music of Duke Ellington. Over the summer, using the Gallatin Jewish studies grant he received, Steinfeld began developing a solo play about the life and work of Joseph Papp.

Idol Anxiety, an exhibition curated by Aaron Tugendhaft, opened in April 2008 at The University of Chicago’s David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art.

KUDOS

Steven Duncombe received a Humanities Initiative Grant-In-Aid from NYU for the 2008-2009 academic year. The grant was given to Duncombe as well as to Gallatin part-time faculty member Mark Read and Deep Dish TV to help fund a series of archival videos shot by political activists.

In June 2008, June Foley received an award from the Literacy Assistance Center of New York, a nonprofit organization that provides referral, training, information, and technical assistance to support and promote the expansion of quality literacy services. This recognition—which went to six people this year—is for Foley’s work in the Gallatin Writing Program’s Literacy Project, which includes the founding and supervision of The Literacy Review, an annual book of writing by adults in Basic Education, GED, and ESOL programs throughout NYC, which is edited, designed, and photographed by Gallatin undergraduates; and for the creating and coordinating of the annual Literacy Review Workshops in Teaching Writing for Adults in Basic Education, GED, and ESOL Programs.

Maria Hodermarska has been awarded a 2008 Teaching Excellence Award for part-time faculty by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.

Keith Miller was an artist in residence at the Elizabeth Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy, from May through June 2008. Miller has recently completed the short film The Fire and the Wood, for which he served as writer, director, producer, and editor.

Meera Nair received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction for the year 2008. Nair is working on her novel, A Harvest of Stones, which is being published by Pantheon. This is her second NYFA fellowship.