Other Events Archive

Please see the announcement  below for the Dissections seminar with Hoda El Shakry on Friday, May 17, 2013 between 1-3pm in room 6304.23 [MEMEAC Space]

*Discussant will be Alexander Elinson,  Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Hunter College, CUNY.

Hoda El Shakry- flyer

Beneath the American Renaissance at Twenty-Five

David S. Reynolds and American Cultural Studies–A Symposium

Friday, October 18, 2013, 2-4 p.m.

CUNY Graduate Center, Rooms 9204/9205

Speakers:

Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard), author of The Hemingses of Monticello, Andrew Johnson, Vernon Can Read!, others. Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Humanities Medal.

Bill Kelly (CUNY Graduate Center), author of Plotting America’s Past: Fenimore Cooper and the Leatherstocking Tales; articles in TLS, N. Y. Times Book Review, American Scholar, & elsewhere.

Robert Reid-Pharr (CUNY Graduate Center), author of Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black Aemrican; and Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual.

Sean Wilentz (Princeton), author of The Rise of American Democracy, Bob Dylan in America, Chants Democratic, The Age of Reagan, others. Bancroft Prize, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Grammy Award nominee.

Brenda Wineapple (Columbia; The New School), author of Ecstatic Nation, White Heat, Hawthorne, Genêt, Sister Brother Gertrude and Leo Stein, others. Pushcart Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Respondent:  David S. Reynolds (CUNY Graduate Center), author of Beneath the American Renaissance, Walt Whitman’s America, Mightier than the Sword, Faith in Fiction, others. Bancroft Prize, Christian Gauss Award.

Email Lydia Wilson (lwilson@gc.cuny.edu) for more information.

Catholicism Flyer

SIMA GODFREY LECTURE

“The Empire of Fashion in 19^th-century France”

May 15, Wednesday, at 6:30 in room 4202

Sima Godfrey teaches in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia. From 1999- 2007 she changed hats to establish and direct the Institute for European Studies at that university, where her interests quickly shifted to questions of cultural identity. She has published widely on the usual suspects of 19^th-century French literature, including Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gautier, Mallarmé, Maupassant, Nerval and others.  For the past decade she has focused on aspects of modern French cultural history, most notably the concept of fashionability in 19^th-century France —  the research for which has inspired her talk. Along the way, however, she has also published on Concrete Poetry (on poetry and architecture in France), Product Placement in French literature, the representation of North American First Nations in French cinema, and most recently, on the Crimean War in French Cultural Memory, a project she is calling “La Guerre de Crimée n’aura pas lieu.”

Professor Godfrey’s talk is designed to accompany the “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A reception will follow

DROP-IN SERIES

DISSERTATION COMPLETION NOW!

Every Tuesday, April 9, 2013 – May 28, 2013

10:00 AM to 11:00 AM

The Wellness Center, Room #6422.04

These workshops were developed especially for the doctoral students of the Graduate Center on the basis of the experiences of doctoral students who attended dissertation completion groups during the past three years. These workshops and groups are led by clinical psychologist, Prof. Daniel Rothenberg of the Student Counseling Services/Wellness Center.

Practical dimensions of completing your dissertation

What you need to know about the “nuts and bolts”, as well as the complexities of completing the dissertation, selecting an advisor and what you must do in order to successfully navigate the dissertation completion process from beginning to end.

Personal dimensions of completing the dissertation

What you need to know about the personal dimensions of how you relate to your dissertation topic, your advisor, your family and friends in order to successfully complete the doctorate. What is the inner wisdom that you need to acquire in order to navigate the dissertation and avoid pitfalls on the road to a life in academia?  This workshop will provide mindfulness skills, as well as awareness tools that you need to regulate your life and maintain clarity from the time that you begin your dissertation through the time that you obtain employment beyond the doctorate.

You must be a registered GC student to participate in this workshop.  To register for this workshop stop by the Wellness Center Student Counseling Services in Room 6422 to fill out an application (also attached for your convenience).

For more information, please call (212) 817-8731. For a calendar of all upcoming workshops or to download an application, please visit our website at http://cuny.is/wellnesscenter

workshopapplication_2012

Dissections- May 17, Friday 1-3pm

Speaker: Hoda El Shakry is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University.  She is currently serving as an Assistant Professor, Faculty Fellow at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.  Her research and teaching interests lie in twentieth century literature, criticism and visual culture of the Middle East and North Africa.  Her current book project examines Islamic discourses in relation to Arabophone and Francophone literature of the Maghreb.  She is the author of “Revolutionary Eschatology: Islam & the End of Time in al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār’s al-Zilzāl” in Journal of Arabic Literature (42.2-3: 120-147) and “Apocalyptic Pasts, Orwellian Futures: Elle Flanders’ Zero Degrees of Separation,” in GLQ (16.4: 611-621).

Discussant: Alexander Elinson, Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Hunter College and Director of the Hunter College Summer Arabic Program

Title: ”The Poetics of Sufism: Reading the Literature and Criticism of Mahmud al-Mas’adi (1911-2004).”

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines the literary project of the renowned Tunisian intellectual Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī (1911-2004).  He was a trade unionist, educator, Minister of Cultural Affairs, Speaker of Parliament, as well as the architect of Tunisia’s educational policy following independence in 1956.  In addition to a series of critical essays, al-Masʿadī wrote a number of short stories, novels and plays between 1938 and 1941.  Due to the densely philosophical nature of his fiction and the absence of a transparent nationalist agenda, his work confounded Arab literary critics of the time who were preoccupied with the ideologies of literary commitment [Iltizam] and Socialist Realism [al-Wāqiʿīya al-Ishtirākīya].  Crowned the founder of “Muslim Existentialism” by the Nahda intellectual Ṭaha Ḥusayn, al-Masʿadī’s fictional and critical writings reflect a deep engagement with early Arab and Islamic thought, as well as existentialist philosophy and literature.  This paper reads al-Masʿadī’s critical works in dialogue with his novella Mawlid al-Nisyān [The Genesis of Forgetfulness], positing that the story enacts a Sufi poetics situated at the crossroads of existential and aesthetic concerns.

Please contact msulos@gc.cuny.edu for further information

Please join us for Prof. Ervand Abrahamian’s book launch of The Coup: 1953, the C.I.A. and the Roots of Modern U.S. – Iranian Relations (New York: New Press), and MEMEAC’s year-end reception, on Friday, May 10, 2013, 6.30-9.30 pm, Room 6304.24.

Anny

Anny Bakalian, Ph.D.
Associate Director
Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center (MEMEAC)

and Master’s Program in Middle Eastern Studies

The Graduate Center
City University of New York (CUNY)
365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street)

Room 6304.24
New York, NY 10016
Tel: (212) 817-7571

Fax: (212) 817-1545
email: ABakalian@gc.cuny.edu
Center Web Site: http://memeac.gc.cuny.edu/

MA Program Web Site: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mames

Ervand Abrahamian Book Launch 5_10_2013 – Long Poster