RevAmStudies in November 2012!

Dear Everyone:

We hope this message finds you all well, and finds you having fared well through the storm and its aftermath.  So much has transpired since we last wrote, and since we last gathered for a RevAmStudies event — coming together again will be, as always, restorative!  It was terrific to see some of you in Puerto Rico for the American Studies Association conference last week.  Many, we saw at the awards ceremony where the inaugural Angela Davis Award for Public Scholarship was bestowed upon Ruth Wilson Gilmore — clearly, the ideal match between award and awardee, and the standing ovation (two of them!) as the award was given attests to the broad recognition of the significance and impact of Professor Gilmore’s work — congratulations, Ruthie!

As always, we want to thank Grad Center President William Kelly for his sustaining support as well as that of his office; and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center and the Center for the Humanities for their vital efforts on behalf of this initiative.  We’re also grateful to J. Kēhaulani Kauanui for bringing her insights and incisiveness and her expansive generosity to us last month, and to Cambridge Ridley-Lynch and Chris Eng, our student colleagues.

We are very much looking forward to seeing many of you at next week’s RevAmStudies seminar and lecture (both on Friday, 30 November), featuring Hester Blum, whose work and visit provide us the terrific opportunity to think about and through the rubric of “oceanic studies” as a frame for Americanist scholarship.  Professor Blum is Associate Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University and Interim Associate Director for the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities. Her first book,The View from the Mast-Head: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), received the John Gardner Maritime Research Award; she has also published a critical edition of William Ray’s Barbary captivity narrative Horrors of Slavery (Rutgers University Press, 2008). A founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, she is at work on a new book called Polar Imprints: The Print Culture of Arctic and Antarctic Exploration.  We are very pleased that she will be with us.

The details of the events — free and open to the public — are below, and the readings may be found on the Center for the Humanities RevAmStudies site: http://centerforthehumanities.org/seminars/revolutionizing-american-studies.

We wanted also to share information about upcoming opportunities at the Graduate Center, made possible by the Mellon Committee on Globalization and Social Change, to engage Lisa Lowe, Professor of English at Tufts University, who will be offering a lecture on 4 December at 4:30p titled “Archives of Liberalism: The Intimacies of Four Continents.”  Please seehttp://globalization.gc.cuny.edu/ for more information.

RevAmStudies goes on winter hiatus after next week’s events.  For spring 2013, we have conjured a line-up that includes Matt Jacobson (8 February), Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (March 8), and Fred Moten (12 April).  In the works are also a possible 30 January event (details TBA), and on 8 April, we will be co-sponsoring a daylong symposium on “The University Beyond Crisis” — stay tuned for more information!

We wish you all a lovely break and again, look forward to seeing you next week!
Best,
Kandice & Duncan

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