We were privileged to have Roderick Ferguson, Leti Volpp, Priscilla Wald, Anne McClintock, and Jodi Melamed with us in fall 2011. Our great good fortune continues with a fabulous slate for spring 2012 — hope you’ll be able to join us!
Friday, 10 February
Seminar, 12:30-2p, Room 8201.01, with visitors Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler:
This session will focus on the forms of pedagogy and collaborative digital writing and composition enabled and fostered by the Keywords Collaboratory, the wiki-based space that was developed after the publication of the first edition of Keywords for American Cultural Studies and is being redesigned in conjunction with the production of a print-digital second edition. What are the pedagogical stakes in asking students—graduate and undergraduate—to think through keywords? What assumptions about writing, thinking, and reading are upended by asking these same students to compose keyword projects in a collaborative online environment? What skills and capacities can collaborative forms of composition cultivate?
Public Lecture, 4p, Room 4406 (co-sponsored with the PhD Program in English and the American Studies Certificate Program), by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Glenn Hendler
Title: What Do Keywords Do?
Drawing on their experience editing Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press 2007), Burgett and Hendler will discuss what makes keyword projects different from other forms of academic presentation and other means of approaching questions of interdisciplinary field formation. In contrast to encyclopedias and reference works, Keywords aims not to codify the state of scholarship in discrete fields called American studies and cultural studies, but to catalyze interdisciplinary conversations across those fields and others. In both print and digital formats, keyword projects encourage authors and users to think critical and creatively about the genealogies and futurologies of terms and concepts.
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Friday, 24 February
Seminar, 12:30-2p, Room 8201.01, with visitor Nayan Shah, readings TBA.
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Wednesday, 7 March
Panel Discussion, 6pm, The Futures of Gender and Sexuality Studies, co-sponsoring NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality event, with Lisa Duggan, Ann Pellegrini, Alexandra Vazquez, Sarita See, and Kandice Chuh, location TBA.
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Thursday, 22 March
Seminar, Time and Place TBA, with visitor Eric Lott.
Pubblic Lecture, Time and Place TBA, by Eric Lott (co-sponsored with the American Studies Certificate Program)
Title: Slavery and Capital
It is well known that Marx followed the progress of the American Civil War very closely and wrote about it in his dispatches for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. The war and Marx’s dispatches, too few have recognized, not only coincide with but also enter into the composition of Capital, Vol. 1 (1867). At several key points Marx calls on analogies with American slavery to depict the situation of the waged worker and the working day. I will investigate the vexed relationship between capitalism and a slave economy in Marx’s text as a way of thinking about state formation and political-economic revolution in the mid-nineteenth-century United States.
Also on Thursday, 22 March
Public Event, co-sponsored with POLICED, a seminar series of the Center for the Humanities, featuring Chandan Reddy, 6p, location and details TBA.
