Faculty News 2007-2008, Vol. 2

 

PUBLISHED

Sinan Antoon recently published four poems in World Literature Today, as well as the article "Returning to the Wind" in Mahmud Darwish, Exile's Poet: Critical Essays, ed. Hala Nassar (Interlink, 2007).

Christopher Cartmill's play, The Spectre Bridegroom, is being published this spring by Playscripts, Inc.

Gene Cittadino's article on the pioneering American ecologist Henry Chandler Cowles appears in the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2007).

A section of Susan Daitch's novel, The Dreyfus Book, was published in February 2008 in International Literary Quarterly, a magazine published in London and Rio de Janeiro (http://www.interlitq.org). Daitch was also recently invited to be the fiction/nonfiction editor of WSQ, a journal of The City University of New York Graduate Center.

Stephen Duncombe recently published several pieces: "(From) Cultural Resistance to Community Development" in Community Development Journal, 42 (4) (Oxford University Press, October 2007); "Taking Celebrity Seriously" in The Nation magazine, October 29, 2007; and the political essay "Why Don't Liberals Dream?" in Playboy magazine, November 2007.

Emily Fragos's poems were recently published in Poetry and The American Poetry Review. Fragos is selecting and editing her third poetry anthology on classical music for the Everyman's Pocket Library series.

More than a year after its initial publication in English, Letters to Juliet, coauthored by Lise Friedman, has been published in Juliet Capulet's language, Italian. Coauthored with Friedman's sister, Ceil Friedman, an art historian and translator who lives in Verona-the setting for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet-the book chronicles the stories behind the thousands of letters recounting love lost, found, and remembered that have been sent to Juliet since the 1890s. Originally published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang, the book's Italian language edition has been published by Milan-based TEA.

Judith Greenberg's recent publications include the article "Trauma and Transmission: Echoes of the Missing in Dora Bruder" in Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, 31.2 (2007) and a book review of The Era of the Witness, by Annette Wieviorka, in Women's Studies Quarterly (Fall 2007).

Dave King published a catalogue essay, "BOOM," for the exhibition Blown Away at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The group show included work by Gerhard Richter and Boym Partners. "BOOM" will also appear, in an Italian translation by Massimo Gezzi, in the literary magazine Nuovi Argomenti. The paperback edition of Homecoming, the German edition of King's The Ha-Ha, was released in the fall of 2007.

Scott Korb’s book, The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God, coauthored with Peter Bebergal, was published by Bloomsbury in November.

Patrick McCreery’s article, “Save Our Children / Let Us Marry: Gay Activists Appropriate the Rhetoric of Child Protectionism,” appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Radical History Review.

Eve Meltzer reviewed the New York City exhibition Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy, recently on view at the Americas Society Art Gallery, for Frieze magazine.  The exhibition featured the work of Argentine contemporary artists working between 1960 and 2007.

Sara Murphy’s article, “Law, Norm, Novel,” recently appeared in a special issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society entitled Law and Literature Reconsidered, Vol. 43 (London, Elsevier, 2008). Murphy also published “Women and Communism,” an encyclopedia entry/essay in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, 4 vols. ed. Bonnie Smith (Oxford, 2007).

Millery Polyné recently published an article in Caribbean Studies: "Expansion Now!: Haiti, 'Santo Domingo' and Frederick Douglass at the Intersection of U.S. and Caribbean Pan-Americanism," 34:2. In addition, two encyclopedic entries he penned were published in the African American National Biography (Oxford, 2008).

A 20th anniversary edition of Ulysses Annotated, by Don Gifford with Robert Seidman, was published by the University of California Press in the spring of 2008.

An article Aarti Shahani coauthored on immigrant organizing in New York and the immigrant rights movement nationally, "Families for Freedom, Against Deportation and Delegalization," was published in Keeping Out the Other: A Critical Introduction to Immigration Enforcement Today, eds. David Brotherton and Philip Kretsedemas (Columbia University Press, 2008). Shahani also published an article in ColorLines: "Sanctuary's Human Face," Jan/Feb 2008 (http://colorlines.com/article.php?ID=263).

Laura Slatkin's article, "Notes on Tragic Visualizing in the Iliad," was published as the first chapter in a book entitled Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth, and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature, eds. Kraus, Goldhill, and Foley (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Jack Tchen is a coprincipal investigator of a newly released report, "Asian/Pacific Americans and Higher Education: Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight," from the Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at NYU (a Publication of the College Board).

Eve Tuck's most recent publications include: "Inner Angles: A range of ethical responses to/with Indigenous and decolonizing theories" in Ethical Futures in Qualitative Research: Decolonizing the Politics of Knowledge, eds. Denzin and Giardina (Left Coast Press, 2007); and "PAR Praxes for Now and Future Change" in Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion, eds. Cammarota and Fine (Routledge, 2008).

Aaron Tugendhaft's essay, "Divine Law and Modernity," an extended book review of Rémi Brague's The Law of God, appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of the journal Arion.

PRESENTATIONS AND APPEARANCES

Maria-Luisa Achino-Loeb organized a session, "Bamboozling the Public: Ignorance or Design in the Distortion of Science?" for the American Anthropological Association national meetings held in Washington, DC, in late 2007. There she presented a paper entitled "Secular Fundamentalism in the Misrepresentation of Science."

In the fall of 2007, Sinan Antoon was interviewed in the French Daily Liberation and served as a juror on the Neustadt International Prize for Literature at Oklahoma University. He also delivered several papers and lectures: "Aborted Returns: the Exilic Poetry of Mahmud Darwish and Saadi Youssef" at the University of Toronto; "The Discourse on Iraq, Iraqi Nationalism and Nation-Building," a lecture in Arabic, at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University; and "The Last Iraqi Communist: The Poetry of Saadi Youssef" at the annual Middle East Studies Association of North America meeting in Montreal, Canada. In 2008 Antoon served on a panel on Arab and Arab-American writing in times of war for New York's Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and in 2007 and 2008 he read from his recent publications at the University of Oklahoma, Festival d'Automne à Paris, Georgetown University, House of World Cultures in Berlin, and the Philadelphia Public Library.

Gene Cittadino attended the 2007 annual meeting of the History of Science Society in Arlington, VA, where he presented a paper titled "Contested Knowledge and Resource Policy in the Red River Boundary Dispute" as part of a session on 20th-century ecology.

During the fall of 2007 Nina Cornyetz took part in two conferences. At the Association for Asian Studies New England regional conference held at the University of New Hampshire, she delivered a talk titled "Activating the Object: the Bishônen and Heteroeroticism in Izumi Kyôka's Yôken kibun" as part of a panel she coorganized, "Narrating Same-Sex Desire: Modernity and the Bishônen in Japanese Literature." At the Association for Japanese Literary Studies Annual Meeting at Princeton University, she coorganized a panel titled "The Ends of Literature," for which she gave a talk, "Chasing the Tails of Tales: Nakagami Kenji and the End of Folklore."

In late 2007 Susan Daitch read at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY, with Jim Shepard-a National Book Award finalist-and Amy Hempel.

In February 2008, the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA, presented From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy: Politics in the Age of YouTube, a discussion with Stephen Duncombe and M.I.T. Professor Henry Jenkins. In a conversation about how the Internet and technology are changing the face of politics and the role of citizens in our evolving democracy, the pair explored how mass culture has increasingly become an interactive medium with burgeoning opportunities for audience participation. To view a clip of the discussion, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=onxVxtVSHOw. Duncombe also recently presented several talks: "The Problematic Politics of Resistance" at the Art Institute of Chicago; "What's So Political About Political Art?" at the Department of Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY; and "Is There Such a Thing as Progressive Persuasion?" at the "Where the Truth Lies: Issues of Contemporary Propaganda" conference at The City University of New York Graduate Center.

In 2007 Kathy Engel coorganized a memorial vigil and reading for Grace Paley outside of Jefferson Market Library. She then read from the anthology she coedited, We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon (Interlink, 2007) at the National Lawyers Guild Conference in Washington, DC, and at Portland State University; and copresented a panel on women and the anti-war movement at The City University of New York Graduate Center conference on academics and activism. Engel also served as creative consultant/cultural coordinator for "Because We Love This Earth," a national day of climate action, and participated in a benefit reading at NYC's Bowery Poetry Club for the Split This Rock Poetry Festival. In 2008 she gave a reading and book signing of her book, Ruth's Skirts (Ikon, 2007), and took part in another reading from We Begin Here hosted by the Just Buffalo Literary Center in New York.

At the Modernist Studies Association Conference in Long Beach, CA, in November 2007, Gregory Erickson presented a paper entitled "Moses, Music, and Modernism: The Birth and Death of the Book." The next month at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago, IL, he presented one entitled "Twentieth Century Literature and Absolute Music: Heretical Paths of Musical Meaning."

In March 2008 Emily Fragos gave a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y, Buttenwieser Hall, at which she was introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon.

Nathaniel Frank presented a workshop in January 2008 at the 97th annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in NYC. The subject of the workshop was the mental health impact of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gay, lesbian, and bisexual service members. Dr. Frank's material was taken from his ten years of research and writing on the current gay exclusion rule, which he is currently compiling for a book to be published by St. Martin's Press in 2009.

Lisa Goldfarb delivered a paper, "Post-Symbolist Variations: Wallace Stevens' and Paul Valéry's Poems of the Sea," at the 2007 Modern Language Association convention in Chicago, IL, as part of the Wallace Stevens Society panel on Stevens and France.

Lauren Kaminsky presented at two international academic conferences in 2007. At the "Revolutions and Sexualities: Cultural and Social Aspects of Political Transformations" conference in Krakow, Poland, she delivered a paper entitled "Liberty, Equality, Alimony." At the "Utopias, Human Rights, and Gender in Twentieth Century Europe" conference in Vienna, Austria, she presented a paper entitled "Utopian Visions of Private Life in the Soviet Union under Stalin."

Julie Malnig presented paper, "The Americanization of the Immigrant Social Dancer," for the November 2007 Congress on Research in Dance conference, "Choreographies of Migration," at Barnard College in NYC. She also presented a paper on televised teen dancing of the 1950s, "Teen Idols: Televised TV Dance and American Youth Culture," for the World Performance Project at Yale University in February 2008.

In November 2007 Eve Meltzer presented a paper, "The Love of Language and the Politics of Dis-Affection: Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document," at Reed College in Portland, OR. Meltzer later delivered another entitled "How One Diagram Made 1970s Sculpture Intelligible For Us, Or, Dark Voids, Suspended Structures, and the Ever-Expanding Expanded Field" at The 96th Annual College Arts Association conference, in Dallas, TX, in February 2008 as part of a session titled "Sculpture/Drawing."

Stacy Pies organized, chaired, and presented a paper, "Writing on the Outside of Literature: l'universel reportage," on a panel entitled "Mallarmé, Musique, Poésie, Reportage" at the 33rd Annual 19th-Century French Studies Colloquium, "High/Low: 19th-Century French Cultures," at the University of South Alabama in October 2007.

In the fall of 2007 George Shulman gave a talk entitled "Redemption and Politics" at the American Political Science Association annual conference in Chicago, IL.

Aarti Shahani recently gave a presentation entitled "Loud and Clear: Case Studies in Affordable Housing and Immigration" at a multi-disciplinary conference, "Bridging Scholar/Activist Divides in the Field of Communications," that convened during the annual meeting of the International Communication Association.

In November 2007 Laura Slatkin delivered a lecture on "Cataloguing Women: Reflections on Homeric and Hesiodic Poetics" at the Classics Department at Johns Hopkins University.

In 2007, Jack Tchen: delivered a lecture, "Off-Kilter: Adventures in Surplus Practice & Surplus Theory" at the University of Michigan (http://www.ginsberg.umich.edu/faculty/lectures.html); gave a keynote address, "Thirty Years and Counting: A Context for Building a Shared Cross-Cultural Commons," at the national conference "Sustaining Voices from the Battlefront: Community Grounded Cultural Arts Organizations @ 30," in New York (the paper is now being used in regional convening sessions around the country); and served as a commentator in Never Perfect, a film by Regina Park on Asian-American women having cosmetic surgery and issues of popular perceptions of beauty, self-hatred, and the longing to be more "perfect."

Beauty, a movie starring Hal Holbrook, Jeanine Turner, and Jaime Sheridan, for which Selma Thompson the teleplay, aired on the Lifetime Network in November 2007.

Ella Turenne's short film, woodshed, was screened in 2007 at the Reel Sisters Film Festival and the International Montreal Haitian Film Festival and nominated for Best Short Film at both. Turenne was also a presenter at the "Arts in Criminal Justice" conference in Philadelphia, PA, in October 2007.

In November 2007 Alejandro Velasco introduced and moderated a panel discussion on Venezuelan domestic policy at the conference "Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution at Home and Abroad: A New Geometry of Power?" held at Yale University Law School.

PPERFORMANCES AND EXHIBITIONS

Martha Bowers recently directed a repeat performance of Angels and Accordions, a site-specific performance for Brooklyn's historic Green-Wood Cemetery. The event is featured as part of openhousenewyork's annual celebration of New York City's architecture.

Lanny Harrison presented Pick a Card Any Card, a short performance involving audience choices, at the Shady Corners Festival in Milford, NY, in the fall of 2007. She then taught a weekend workshop, "Characters in the Shrine Room," at the New York Shambhala Center in December.

Kristin Horton is currently serving as an artistic associate at the Lark Play Development Center and a member of the Lark Artistic Advisory Board for the 2007-2008 season. The Lark is a laboratory for new voices and new ideas in theater, providing playwrights with resources to develop their work. Horton directs and develops works, is piloting a new play development program, and also helps with casting and producing the Playwrights' Workshop Program. In the fall of 2007, Horton participated in the Lark's U.S./Mexico Exchange project by developing and directing an English translation of De Príncipes, Princesas, y Otro Bichos (Of Princes, Princesses, and Other Creatures) by Paola Izquierdo/translated by Susana Cook, which culminated in a staged reading in November. Horton also directed both a staged reading and a performance of She Like Girls by Chisa Hutchinson.

Barnaby Ruhe appeared at Art Basel Miami, a prominent art show and sister event of Switzerland's Art Basel, in December 2007. There he held a special exhibition painting "action portraits" to benefit Darfur.

In 2007 and 2008, Judith Sloan's Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America, a multimedia traveling museum exhibition she created in collaboration with Warren Lehrer, was the subject of multiple performances and viewings: at NYC's Tenement Museum, at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, and at the Facing History and Ourselves Memphis Benefit Dinner-in a juxtaposing performance based on oral histories of Holocaust survivors and oral histories of new immigrants and refugees. The Crossing the BLVD exhibit opened at the Queens College Godwin-Ternbach Museum in February and will be on view there through June 28, 2008 (http://www.crossingtheblvd.org). In February 2008 Sloan also performed a new work-in-progress at NYC's Bowery Poetry Club with Frank London and directed by Gallatin Professor Michael Dinwiddie.

KUDOS

Laura Ciolkowski has been appointed assistant director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference (CCASD) at Columbia University, an advanced study center that promotes innovative interdisciplinary scholarship on the global dynamics of gender, race and ethnicity. CCASD serves as the research arm of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

In 2007 Michael Dinwiddie was selected as a member of the Tony Awards Nominating Committee. In this prestigious three-year appointment, Dinwiddie is responsible for attending all eligible Broadway productions and submitting nominations in all categories for the annual Tony Awards. Dinwiddie submits his first nominations this May for the awards ceremony taking place on Sunday, June 15. Dinwiddie is one of 25 members on the 2007-2008 Tony Awards Nominating Committee. Other members include actor, director, and playwright Roger Rees; Tom Viola, executive director of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS; playwright Lynn Nottage; and Joe Benincasa, executive director of The Actors' Fund of America.

Scott Hightower has been awarded a Willis Barnstone Translation Prize for his translation of the Aurora de Albornoz poem "In Search of Those Children in a Row, #3" from its original Spanish. The award, named in honor of the American poet and translator Willis Barnstone, is given by the University of Evansville in Indiana, and is awarded annually for an unpublished translation of a poem from any language and time period-from ancient to contemporary. Barnstone served as this year's final-round judge. Hightower shares this year's prize with Dante translator Michael Palma.

Dave King served as one of six judges for the 2008 Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize, which publishes a first book every year by an American female poet. In February, King was an invited visiting writer at the Vermont Studio Center.

For the third consecutive year Laurin Raiken , chairman of Gallatin's Interdisciplinary Arts Program, has coordinated the efforts of his Gallatin faculty colleagues Antonio Rutigliano and Michael Dinwiddie to receive a major grant from the Newington-Cropsey Foundation. Through the Foundation's board member, Gallatin arts faculty and distinguished sculptor Greg Wyatt, Raiken and his colleagues have created 2007-2008 fellowships for five Gallatin graduate students, one undergraduate student, and faculty members Stacy Pies and Patricia Rock. Professor Rutigliano plays a major role in organizing the fellowship seminars, as well as the travel and placement of Wyatt's sculpture in cultural institutions throughout Italy and the United Kingdom. The fellowship, named after Hudson River Valley painter Jasper Cropsey, enables the 2007-2008 Newington-Cropsey Gallatin fellows to pursue their research and writing (see http://www.nyu.edu/gallatin/news/news-stories-f07-Newington-Cropsey.html). The Gallatin fellows are also enjoying the use of a newly-constructed library in the Academy of Art located on the grounds of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.

Lush Life: Billy Strayhorn, a film cowritten by Robert Seidman, won a 2008 Writers Guild Award for best documentary script from the Writers Guild of America, West. Lush Life, which Seidman cowrote with Robert Levi, aired on PBS's Independent Lens series in February 2007 as part of Black History Month. The film recounts Strayhorn's life as a pioneering African-American composer, arranger, and pianist who composed many of the world's most recognizable jazz standards-classics such as Duke Ellington's theme song, Take The 'A' Train, and the widely recorded Lush Life-but who remains one of the most under-recognized American composers in history, perhaps because of his choice to live openly as a gay black man.

Ella Turenne is a recipient of an NYU Office of Community Service Learning Grant for her course, Lyrics on Lockdown, to create an anthology of the work of incarcerated youth at Rikers Island and NYU college students.