NYU Humanities Council - 2004 - 2005 Workshops
The Humanities in an Era of Global Comparatism
| Emily Apter
212-998-8714 emily.apter@nyu.edu |
Mary Louise Pratt
212-998-7570 mlp7@nyu.edu |
Committed to an experimental pedagogy and the fomenting of intellectual community, this Workshop on "The Humanities in an Era of global Comparatism" aims to define current problems and approaches in comparative literary studies, especially in the fields of literary theory, aesthetics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, area studies, and global literature.
The Workshop will be organized around debates among major scholars and critics and topical mini-conferences linked to emerging paradigms in the humanities. Rubrics will include: I) Planetary Criticism and Area Studies (distant reading/global narration; postcolonial comparatism; transatlantic and hemispheric transnationalism); II) Geopolitics of Language (linguistic ecology, the politics of translation, global English/other Englishes); III) The Epistemology of Security (the adversarial imagination, "terror" and the organization of knowledge and truth, logics of conspiracy, media theory and human rights); and IV) Secular Criticism (humanist and enlightenment legacies, religiosity/psychotheology). Guest speakers will include Arjun Appadurai, Rey Chow, Etienne Balibar, Peter Hallward, Elizabeth Grosz, Sam Weber and Tom Keenan.
Enrollment limited to 30. The Workshop, as a course for graduate students, is cross-listed among the departments of French, Spanish and Portuguese, and Comparative Literature.
Latino Studies and Disciplinarity
| José Esteban Muñoz
212-998-1635 jose.munoz@nyu.edu |
Mary Louise Pratt
212-998-7570 mlp7@nyu.edu |
Founded in conjunction with the new Latino Studies program at NYU, this faculty-student Workshop aims to build scholarly community in Latino Studies and develop an NYU profile in the field. The Workshop combines presentations by outside speakers with presentations by NYU faculty and students. Speakers include scholars, artists and writers, activists and diplomats. The Workshop operates across school boundaries, in keeping with the broad reach of the field. At NYU the senior faculty in Latino Studies are housed in FAS, Education, Law, Gallatin, Tisch, Medicine and other schools. Students with Latino Studies interests are likewise spread across schools, making the Workshop all the more crucial.
| Ruth Ben-Ghiat
212-998-8731 ruth.benghiat@nyu.edu |
Georgina Dopico-Black
212-998-8763 georgina.dopico@nyu.edu |
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Khaled Fahmy 212-998-8896 khaled.fahmy@nyu.edu |
Katherine Fleming
212-998-8637 katherine.fleming@nyu.edu |
"Mapping the Mediterranean" is a Workshop that aims to bring together the many faculty and graduate students at NYU who work on themes relating to the post-classical Mediterranean world. The Workshop meets about four times each semester to hear presentations by members of the NYU community and outside scholars. Speakers in the past have been drawn from Middle Eastern Studies, Italian Studies, History, Film Studies/Tisch, French, and other departments. The Workshop has as its ongoing intellectual project the revisiting, from multiple angles, of the ways in which the "Mediterranean" is an interpretive category that has resonance beyond the merely geographic. Meetings this year are preliminarily scheduled for September 23, October 19, November 17, January 27, February 24, March 31, and April 13.
Political Theory and American Literature: Contemporary Intersections
| George Shulman
212-998-7310 gms1@nyu.edu |
Cyrus Patell
212-998-8827 cyrus.patell@nyu.edu |
Our Workshop, which is beginning its second year, has explored the relationship between political theory and American literature. Our goal is to examine the political bearing of literary art, the "politics" in the ways that literary representations create meaning, and to put these representations into conversation with contemporary political theory. Working in the other direction, we also examine how contemporary political theory conceives aesthetic form, narrative, and rhetoric in political life. We have focused these concerns specifically on race, sexuality, and citizenship.
Redefining Performance in the 21st Century
| Thomas Bender
212-998-3773 tb1@nyu.edu |
RoseLee Goldberg
212-529-8849 roselee.goldberg@nyu.edu |
Andre Lepecki
212-998-1629 andre.lepecki@nyu.edu |
"Redefining Performance in the 21st Century" is an interdisciplinary round-table bridging the Steinhardt School of Education, The Faculty of Arts and Science, The Art and Art History Department and the Tisch School of the Arts Performance Studies Department. The round-table discussions will provide a focused forum for NYU professors, scholars, graduate students and practitioners from relevant fields to transcend the borders of disciplinary divisions and investigate highly interdisciplinary works of performance. Bringing together experts from the fields of Art History, Visual Art, Performance Studies, New Technologies, Photography and Imaging, Cinema Studies, Urban Studies, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Media Studies, the variety of perspectives will provide unique access into the multi-layered and multi-disciplinary works of art united by their performative elements. The goal of these round tables will be to develop a new definition of performance in the 21st century. It will reconsider performance of the past three decades, showing how aesthetic and conceptual threads from those years have been co-opted and reinterpreted by a younger generation of artists and academics and brought forward to express the particular ethos of the opening years of the new century. We will examine the ways in which artists who came of age in the media-saturated 1980s and 90s use performance or performance strategies in the construction of their individual aesthetics, and we will also devise new approaches to elucidating the meaning of such work. Its purpose will be to understand the relevance of performance as a vital and highly responsive art form in articulating contemporary issues and sensibilities, and to provide a framework for comprehending new performance paradigms in the future. [launch site]
Storytelling in Performance: Voices, Bodies, Texts, Images
| Timmie (Evelyn Birge) Vitz
212-998-8724 ebv1@nyu.edu |
Nancy F. Regalado
212-998-8737 nancy.regalado@nyu.edu |
Martha Hodes
212-998-8612 martha.hodes@nyu.edu |
This Workshop aims to inspire scholarly reflection on the nature and importance of storytelling, which is composed of three essential elements: the story itself, the storyteller, and the audience. Workshop events will address issues raised by each of these elements in their various modes, and by the interaction among them. The Workshop also explores larger theoretical issues: What are the differences between fiction and (ostensibly) truthful narratives? How does storytelling mediate between ordinary reality-the here-and-now-and that which is new and "possible;" and between the ritual character of much storytelling (models, genres, and precedents) and the storyteller's freedom? What kinds of knowledge do we acquire from storytelling as opposed to purely cognitive or scientific knowledge? How and why is storytelling-the telling of our own story-important to the construction and maintenance of the self: of personal identity, and of mental and physical health? How do stories serve to define the identity of groups and promote bonding among individuals within the group? Narratives are often used (as in the law) to articulate adversarial relations and positions; how can they also be used to resolve disputes? Narratives can be oral or written, heard or read; what does the live performance of a narrative, as of a drama, tell us-give us-that reading the work does not? Storytelling is primarily a verbal art: how, then, do pictures, music, and dance tell stories?
Meetings throughout the year will explore in depth and detail issues of storytelling in the professions, the humanities, and the arts, with participants from throughout the NYU community and beyond. Events include lectures and round-table discussions with colleagues, distinguished visitors, and students, live performances and demonstration talks by professionals and students. For additional information, please visit the Workshop Web-site.
Urban Studies/Multiple Sites: Rethinking 'Comparative' Urban Research in Global, National and Local Contexts
| Neil Brenner
212-998-8349 neil.brenner@nyu.edu |
Simone Buechler
212-998-8096 sb74@nyu.edu |
| Eric Klinenberg
212-998-8375 eric.klinenberg@nyu.edu |
Caitlin Zaloom
212-992-9671 caitlin.zaloom@nyu.edu |
The NYU Urban Studies Workshop was established in 2003 by junior faculty members in the Sociology Department and Metropolitan Studies Program at NYU in order to promote interdisciplinary discussions of cutting-edge urban theory and research. We organize bi-monthly Workshops in which leading international urban scholars discuss their work-in-progress with NYU faculty and graduate students as well as with other urbanists drawn from around the New York City region. We also organize a year-end conference in which graduate students present research they have developed in conjunction with their Workshop participation.
This year's Workshop focuses on the challenges of engaging in comparative urban research under contemporary conditions of simultaneous globalization and localization. Traditional approaches to comparative urban scholarship have tended to view cities as discrete, self-enclosed and analytically distinct units of analysis. However, many contemporary urban scholars have called this mainstream model of comparison into question. In particular, the expansion of worldwide interdependencies among cities, the apparent acceleration of local-global interconnections, the continued urbanization of formerly underdeveloped spaces and the widespread adoption of neoliberal, market-driven approaches to urban growth have generated widespread speculation and debate regarding the appropriate units of analysis in terms of which comparative urban studies should be framed. While we remain firmly committed to the use of comparative methods in urban studies, our aim in this Workshop is to begin to rethink their intellectual foundations in light of contemporary political, economic and spatial transformations.
We shall confront this task through an engagement with the uses and abuses of comparative methods in the following specific fields of empirical urban research, including: (a) cities and economic restructuring; (b) cities and governance restructuring; (c) cities and the production of new sociospatial divisions; and (d) cities, suburbs, and the transformation of metropolitan cultures. Because so many strands of urban studies fall under these rubrics, we expect that they will provide an appropriately broad-yet also intellectually focused-basis for our collective work in this Workshop.