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.
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.
The Mellon Committee for the Study of Religion is holding its last event of the year on Wednesday, 15th May, from 12.30-5, in room 5307: “Catholicism: Crisis or Catastrophe?” (see flyer below). We have a range of excellent speakers from all sides of the debate – it should be a stimulating (and controversial) discussion.
Email Lydia Wilson (lwilson@gc.cuny.edu) for more information.
SIMA GODFREY LECTURE
“The Empire of Fashion in 19th-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 19th-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 19th-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
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
Nebahat Avcıoğlu
The Modern and Contemporary Mosque: A Cross Cultural Analysis
Today many cities in Europe possess big and small purpose-built mosques, constructed in diverse styles,
establishing a visible presence of Islam appropriate to the diversity and growing Muslim population in the West.
This desire for visibility underlines the political nature of mosque’s architecture. My book deals with the stylistic
transformations of these mosques in response to the public, intellectual and aesthetic controversies surrounding
them as well as focusing on the discursive roots of the refusal of the mosque in Europe, particularly the idea of
the Islamic city vs the European city. By focusing on the relationship between the mosque and its urban context
this book deals with the changing identity of the European city, and argues that the reasons behind conflicts,
which are manifold, are as much to do with history and resistance to Islam as with the fear of a disappearing
European city, a polemic which has been around since the beginning of the twentieth century. As the
quintessential Islamic space, the mosque is seen as pivotal in drawing distinctions between the Islamic city and
the European city – concepts that were in fact born out of Orientalism, in which the Islamic city is often invoked
as a contrasting image of cities in the West – or between Islam and modernity. I argue that the appearance of the
mosque on European soil both unsettles the key Orientalist principle, namely that the European city must
preclude the mosque, and serves various imperial and later modern democratic ideologies.
*Discussant will be Zeynep Celik, distinguished professor of architecture in the
College of Architecture and Design at New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Nebahat Avcıoğlu is professor of art history at Hunter College, specialized in Islamic art and architecture with a particular emphasis on Ottoman/European cultural encounters. Her publications include Turquerie and the Politics of Representation, 1737-1876 (2011), Globalising Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century, (ed. with Finbarr Barry Flood), Ars Orientalis vol. 39 (2011), and Architecture, Art and Identity in Venice and Its Territories 1450-1750, (ed. with Emma Jones), (2013). She is also the author of ‘Istanbul: The palimpsest city in search of its architext’, RES, 53/54(2008) and ‘Form-as-Identity: The Mosque in the West’ Cultural Analysis, vol. 6 (2008), as well as other articles appeared in Art Bulletin and Muqarnas.
Friday
May 3, 2013
1-3PM
365 Fifth Avenue
Room: 6304.23 [MEMEAC Space]
*All seminar participants are asked to read the paper in advance of the meeting. For reading and registration please contact:msulos@gc.cuny.edu
For further information on Dissections, please visit: http://centerforthehumanities.org/seminars
Todd Reeser Lecture
Orientations: Female-female Eros in Renaissance Neoplatonism
May 3, Friday, at 5:00 in room 4202
The Ph.D. Program in French
The Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue at 34 Street
In this talk, I historicize queer theory’s insight that lesbianism is often linked to problems of representation by focusing on links between questions of reading and Platonically-inflected female-female erotic love in the Renaissance. I begin by establishing the complicated discursive context of this hermeneutic question through the reception of the female-female being who makes a brief appearance in Aristophanes’s myth of the origin of love from the Symposium. Because the original Greek word referring to the female-female couple in Plato occurs only once in extant classical Greek texts, Humanists have great latitude in ascribing meaning to the morphology of “women who love women.” I then link the fluidity of this figure in a philological sense to one of the few Neoplatonic representations of female-female eros in the period, a curious series of poems by French male poets written in the voice of a woman in love with another woman. Embedded within the poems are Neoplatonic commonplaces as well as references to male-male love. The question on which I focus in reading the poems is: why is female-female eros imagined as Neoplatonic if women are largely absent from Plato and the Platonic tradition? The poems are not so much inscribing same-sex female eros in the Neoplatonic tradition, I argue, as much as writing it out. But in addition, the poets are also inherently evoking the problem of male-male homoeroticism, and the poems can be taken as a newly-developed and rather sophisticated way to set Plato straight by detour.
A lecture on queering Plato in the Renaissance. It is part of a book he is contracted to finish for Chicago.
Todd Reeser, University of Pittsburgh
Professor of French
University of Pittsburgh
Todd Reeser is Professor of French, with a secondary appointment in Women’s Studies, at the University of Pittsburgh. During academic year 2012-13, he was a Solmsen Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Reeser’s research interests lie largely in the areas of gender and sexuality, especially in the Renaissance, and he is especially interested in the various intersections between the ancient world, the Renaissance, and modern theoretical concepts. His first bookModerating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (2006) proposes a model of masculinity and alterity based on an Aristotelian notion of moderation. His second book, Masculinities in Theory (2010), provides a series of theoretical models for considering the growing field of masculinity studies from a literary/cultural perspective, especially as inflected by post-structuralist thought. His next monograph “Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Homosexuality in the Renaissance” (under contract at the University of Chicago Press) deals with the complicated question of the reception of Platonic sexuality in philosophical and fictional texts of the European Renaissance, from Leonardo Bruni in the early 15th century to Michel de Montaigne in the late 16th. Comparative and comprehensive in scope, the project studies how hermeneutics and sexuality do and do not dovetail in a number of textual-sexual contexts.
A reception will follow the lecture.
Co-Sponsored by Renaissance Studies, Women’s Studies, Center for the Humanities and the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies
