NYU Conference, "Lost New York, 1609-2009," Oct. 2 & 3, Explores City's Literary and Cultural Roots

“Lost New York, 1609-2009,” at New York University on Friday, October 2 and Saturday, October 3, coincides with the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage and the 200th anniversary of Washington Irving’s legendary re-imagining of the New World in his Knickerbocker’s History of New York.

Conference participants will explore the dynamics of creativity and destruction and nostalgia and invention that have, for centuries, marked efforts to “Do New York,” as Henry James advised Edith Wharton. Lectures and panels will address the relationships between literary imagination and the archives, between migrations and displacements, between loss and remembrance, and between preservation and development in the long and storied history of one of the world’s great cities. Presentations include: “How Writings from New Netherland Shaped American Literature”; “Washington Irving and the Creation of Old New York”; “Lower East Side Poetics, 1960-1980”; and “Blue Light ‘Til Dawn: Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley’s Showtime at the Apollo.”

Keynote speakers include Princeton University Professor Daphne Brooks, City University of New York (CUNY) Professor Marshall Berman, and journalist David Freeland.

Friday’s sessions take place at NYU’s Fales Library (70 Washington Square South, 3rd floor/at LaGuardia Place) and Saturday’s will be held at 13-19 University Place, room 102 (at 8th Street). All sessions are free and open to the public. Call 212.998.8819 for more information. For a complete schedule, go to: http://ahistoryofnewyork.com/.

The event is sponsored by the Department of English, the Humanities Initiative, and Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University. The conference coincides with an exhibition opening, “Lost New York,” at Fales Library and Special Collections, on view through November 6.