Announcements

Archives

Graduate Applications
M.A./Ph.D due 12/15/09Free-Standing M.A. due 4/15/10Related Programs American Studies Program Center for Comparative Literature & SocietyUndergraduate Writing ProgramAmerican Language Program (ESL)Creative Writing (Special Programs)Graduate Program in TheaterMFA in Writing (School of the Arts)Center for Jazz Studies Summer SessionAnglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium
PAST DEPARTMENTAL & RELATED EVENTS








Freedom, Law, and Academic Inquiry

Friday, November 20, 2009 from
10:30am to 5:00pm
Second Floor Common Room, Heyman Center

This day long conference will include, among others, Stanley Fish, Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Professor of Law, Florida International University; Catharine Stimpson, University Professor, Professor of English, and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University; and Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University.

Co-sponsored by the English Department.

This event is free and open to the public. No Tickets, no reservations required. Seating is on a first come, first served basis.





Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever


A talk and book signing with Farah Jasmine Griffin (Columbia University) and Salim Washington (Brooklyn College)

When Miles Davis invited the young John Coltrane to join his quintet in 1955, a collaboration was born that would change the landscape of jazz. In their new book, "Clawing at the Limits of Cool,” Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington focus on the profound implications of this collaboration.

Wednesday November 11, 2009
301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus
Free and Open to the public

For more information on the Center for Jazz Studies events, please visit www.jazz.columbia.edu or call (212) 851-1633






Approaches to the Late Medieval City
Friday, October 30th, 2009
20th Annual Medieval Guild Conference, Columbia University

Please RSVP to latemedievalcities@gmail.com so that we may put your name on a list for access to Butler Library

8:30 - 9:00: Morning Coffee and Pastries, 301 Philosophy Hall

9:00-10:30: Morning Methodology Panel, 301 Philosophy Hall

Featuring Anthony Bale (Birkbeck, University of London), Elliot Kendall (University of Exeter), Alyssa Meyers (Columbia University), Paul Strohm (Columbia University), and Marion Turner (Jesus College Oxford).  Introduced and Moderated by David Wallace (University of Pennsylvania)

10:45-12:15: Concurrent Panels

Citizens in Conflict, Hamilton 301, Moderated by Ruth Lexton

Peter Jones (New York University): Laughing and Believing: Mockery and Mirth in the World of Margery Kempe

Kathryn Malczyk (University of Pennsylvania): Quam noxius sit litterarum studiosis mulierum aspectus: Six Apologies for Celibacy in the Manuale scholarium

Deborah Shulevitz (Columbia University): Contemporary Accounts of Factionalism in Thirteenth Century Florence

Jeffrey Wayno (Columbia University): The Alien Among Us: The Implications of Hanse Trade in London at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century

Textual Cities, Hamilton 402, Moderated by Max Uphaus

Danielle Magnusson (University of Washington): A Play on Words: The Chester Cycle and Late Medieval Textual Culture

Tanya Mushinsky (New York University): Adam de la Halle, Author from Arras, Writer of Arras

Luke O'Hara (New York University): Gregory's Chronicle and the Structuring of Miscellaneous Temporality in Egerton 1995

Heavenly Cities, Kent 511, Moderated by Alyssa Meyers

M Jordan Love (Columbia University): Building the Border: Symbolism and Aesthetics of the Bastide Towns of Southwest France

Zachary Stewart (Columbia University):  A New Rome: Charles IV and the Urban Transformation of Prague

Elizabeth Strakhov (University of Pennsylvania): And That Compass, Say Men, Is The Midst of the World: Mandeville's Jerusalem and the Simultaneity of History

12:15-1:30: Lunch

1:30-3: Keynote Address, Butler Library, Room 523

Sheila Lindenbaum, *** The University and the City: A Cadre of Militant Intellectuals in Fifteenth-Century London *** Introduction by Rita Copeland

3:15-4:45: Concurrent Panels

Writing London, 301 Hamilton, Moderated by Kathleen Smith

Frederic Clark (Princeton University): Ab orbe condito usque ad urbem conditam: London, Rome and Troy between Universal History and Medieval Genealogy

Cristina Pangilinan (University of Pennsylvania):  Aristotle in London: Love, Community, and Thomas Usk

Wade Razzi (Oxford University): An Hell with out Order: Robert Crowley's view of London in the Early Reformation

Technology and Urban Transformation, Butler Library, Room 523, Moderated by Hannah Barker

Anna Noice (California State University, Los Angeles): Clothing and Christian Virtue in Langland's London

Ellen Wurtzel (Oberlin College): What greater pleasure can there be then To peruse those books of Citties: urban cartography and political space in the sixteenth century

Kenneth Mondschein (Fordham University): The Reckoning and Use of Time in Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Paris

Cities and Rulership, 302 Hamilton, Moderated by Beth Bonnette

Mary Zito (Catholic University of America):  Dominican Father, Son of Genoa: Jacopo da Varagine's presentation of Genoese rulership in the Chronica Civitatis Ianuensis

Jena Al-Fuhaid (North Carolina State University): Alexandria: Representations in the Literary Cross-Cultural Alexander Tradition

5:00-6:00: Play Reading, Butler Library, Room 523

"The Testimony of William Thorpe," by Paul Strohm, is a dramatization of the appearance of the Lollard priest William Thorpe before Archbishop Thomas Arundel

6:00: Reception, Butler, Room 522

"Approaches to the Late Medieval City" was organized by Gania Barlow and Jess Fenn, as members of the Columbia University Medieval Guild

This conference has been made possible by the generous support of the Columbia Department of English and Comparative Literature, the Columbia University Graduate Student Advisory Committee, the Heyman Center Society of Fellows, the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University's Interdepartmental Committee on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Department of English, University of Pennsylvania.



Žižek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
7:00 pm

BOOK PARTY / FORUM
@ the Cooper Union, Great Hall
7 East 7th Street, NYC

"Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation."
—New Yorker

"Unafraid of confrontation and with a near limitless grasp of pop symbolism."
—The Times

"Žižek is one of the few living writers to combine theoretical rigor with compulsive readability."
—Publishers Weekly

Called “the most dangerous philosopher in the West,” Slavoj Žižek is today's most controversial public intellectual. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and jokes—all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary ideology as well as a serious and sophisticated philosophy. The author of over 50 books, his forthcoming First as Tragedy, Then As Farce (Verso Books) will be published in October.

Slavoj Žižek's provocative prose has challenged a generation of activists and intellectuals. Now “the Elvis of cultural theory” will make a major New York City appearance. He will frame the current global crisis, with an accessible analysis of how we moved from the tragedy 9/11 to the farce of the financial meltdown.

Please click here to RSVP.



Histories of Reading/Reading Processes

Friday, October 16th, 2009

A one-day conference sponsored by the Eighteenth-Century Group in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, with support from the Department, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and a Mellon Foundation grant on the future of the disciplines.

Co-organizers:  Jenny Davidson (jmd204@columbia.edu), Nicole Horejsi (njh2115@columbia.edu), Adela Ramos (amr2105@columbia.edu), Alice Boone (ab787@columbia.edu) and Marina Graham (mkg2113@columbia.edu).

The first and second panels will be held in Hamilton 603; the talk at the end of the day will be held in Butler Library 523, with a reception to follow in the adjacent room (522).

Please come to some or all of the events, and feel free to forward the invitation to others who might be interested.

Panel I: 10:30-12:15 (Hamilton 603)
Histories of the discipline

Chair/moderator: Marina Graham

A moderated discussion of short selections from Adam Smith and Hugh Blair on rhetoric and belles lettres, along with brief excerpts by Thomas Miller (The Formation of College English), Gauri Viswanathan (Masks of Conquest) and Maureen McLane (Romanticism and the Human Sciences).  Readings will be available via a wiki (we will also make a few hard copies, available in 602) – details to follow.

Lunch: 12:15 – 2

Panel II: 2-3:30 (Hamilton 603)
Digital experiments

Chair/moderator: Alice Boone

Each panelist will bring something from a digital database – a text, a list of hits, an example of interface – and narrate or explicate some possibility opened by technological change for research and reading.  Several eighteenth-century collections are widely used: ECCO, EEBO, the Sabin Americana collection, the American Periodical Series, Shakespeare editions from Chadwyck-Healey and elsewhere, smaller projects to digitize the Spectator and other periodicals.  Aside from convenience in retrieval and dissemination, how does our use of these media transform our processes of investigation as well as our objects of study?  What can we do with these databases, and how do we free our imaginations to perceive the new capabilities they offer?  How do we take advantage of the things they let us do that are not traditionally a strength of English studies (for instance, computing large quantities of data) to enrich the disciplinary practices whose possession we already take for granted?

Mary Kate Hurley on blogging and literary studies
Ashley Brinkman on the boons and banes of searching EEBO
Ivan Lupíc on the classical page in the digital age

Keynote Lecture: 4-5:15, Room 523, Butler Library
“Shakespeare's Hard Drive: Our Born-Digital Literary Heritage”
Professor Matthew Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland)

Description: “A writer working today will not and cannot be studied in the future in the same way as writers of the past because the basic material evidence of their authorial activity---manuscripts and drafts, working notes, correspondence, journals---is, like all textual production, increasingly migrating to the electronic realm. This talk, which should be of interest to anyone with a stake in future literary studies, will discuss these issues and challenges, with examples of major writers whose computers, hard drives, diskettes, and cell phones are already being archived alongside the rest of their ‘papers.’”

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities), and Director of Digital Cultures and Creativity, a new “living/learning” program in the Honors College. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2008 and won the 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS) and the 2009 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP).  Kirschenbaum speaks and writes often on topics in the digital humanities and new media; his work has received coverage in Wired, Boing Boing, Slashdot, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. See http://www.mkirschenbaum.net for more.

Reception: 5:15-6:30, Room 522, Butler Library





Thursday, October 8, 2009, 6:30 p.m.
"The Children of Burroughs: The Legacy of Naked Lunch Among New York Artists"

Panel discussion with Robert Fitterman, Lytle Shaw, Jurgen Ploog, and Penny Arcade. Moderated by Marvin J. Taylor.

The Fales Library & Special Collections
New York University
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, 3rd Floor
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012

***

Friday, October 9, 2009
"Fifty Years of Naked Lunch: From the Interzone to the Archive...and Back"

Columbia University
Faculty House, 3rd Floor
400 West 117th Street
New York City

1:00 p.m. Keynote Address
"From Dr. Mabuse to Doc Benway: The Myths and Manuscripts of Naked Lunch"
Oliver Harris
Professor of American Literature and American Studies, Keele University

2:30 p.m. Short Papers

"William S. Burroughs: The Writer as Avant-Garde Archivist"
Isaac Gewirtz
Curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library

"Manifestations, Multiple Versions, and Showstoppers: Collecting the Various Guises of Naked Lunch"
Brian E. C. Schottlaender
Audrey Geisel University Librarian, University of California, San Diego

"Honing the Word Hoard: Kerouac, Tangier, and Naked Lunch"
Regina Weinreich
Professor in Humanities & Sciences, School of Visual Arts, New York City

4:30 p.m. Panel Discussion

"From the Bunker and Beyond: First-hand Encounters with William S. Burroughs & Naked Lunch"

Barry Miles
Author; Visiting Fellow, Liverpool School or Art and Design, John Moores University

Bradford Morrow
Novelist; Editor, Conjunctions; Professor of Literature, Bard College

Barney Rosset
Publisher, Evergreen Review and founding publisher, Grove Press

Moderated by Ann Douglas
Parr Professor of Comparative Literature, Columbia University

6:00 p.m. Reception and Exhibition Viewing
"Naked Lunch: The First Fifty Years"

Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Butler Library, 6th Floor, East)
535 West 114th Street

***

Saturday, October 10, 2009, 3:30 to 8:00 p.m.
An evening of film and performances, including a screening of excerpts from The Beat Hotel, a new documentary by Alan Govenar






Etienne Balibar on “Secularism and Cosmopolitanism”

Etienne Balibar, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the Sorbonne and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, will deliver a talk, “Secularism and Cosmopolitanism,” on October 1st at 4 pm in the Maison Francaise: Buell Hall, East Gallery.  Professor Balibar is one of the most influential interdisciplinary thinkers alive today.  From his early work as a collaborator of Louis Althusser to his recent Wellek Lectures on violence and civility, he has offered fundamental re-imaginings of concepts such as ideology, freedom, class, universality, secularism, and politics, concepts that are indispensable to today's cultural criticism.  Himself a powerful critic of the present, he has written with unique and prophetic eloquence about the links between racism, nationalism, and the plight of non-European immigrants in a newly unified Europe.


Professor Brent Edwards to be featured in PBS' Great Performances: Harlem in Montmartre.


Harlem in Montmartre airs as part of PBS' Great Performances series on
THIRTEEN Wednesday, August 26th at 8 p.m. EST (check local listings).
The documentary is a co-production of THIRTEEN for WNET.ORG, Vanguard
Documentaries, Inc., Ideale Audience SAS, ARTE France and Independent
Television Service (ITVS).

Beloved American jazz singer and bandleader Cab Calloway once said,
"You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmy Luncefords, the Fletcher
Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in
the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones."
While far from ordinary, Harlem in Montmartre tells the story of the
long-forgotten "extraordinary ones," who left America to create the
jazz age in Paris between the First and Second World Wars. After peace
was signed at Versailles, many black Americans remained in Europe
rather than return to the brutal segregation and racism of America.
Over the next two decades, they formed an expatriate community of
musicians, entertainers and entrepreneurs, primarily congregating in
Paris' hilly Montmartre neighborhood. Some achieved enduring fame,
while others faded into history.

Inspired by the book Harlem in Montmartre: a Paris Jazz Story
(University of California Press) by historian William A. Shack and
utilizing rare archival material from both France and America, this
remarkable performance- driven documentary features the stories and
music of such key figures as James Reese Europe, Josephine Baker,
Sidney Bechet, Bricktop, Eugene Bullard, Django Reinhardt and more.
"The film explores a fascinating, yet often neglected, era in
African-American cultural history," says producer Margaret Smilow. "It
is a colorful, musical, poignant look at the contributions of a select
group of black Americans, without whom the collective voice of jazz
music around the world would sound entirely different." Vanguard
Documentaries Executive Producer Charles Hobson reveals, "The French
were the first people in the world to respect jazz as serious art form,
and it all began in Paris with the arrival of the Harlem Hellfighters,
a military band." Directed by Dante J. James, with performance
sequences directed by Olivier Simmonet, and written by James and
Simmonet with Allan Miller, the production was co-produced by Smilow
with Hobson and Helene Le Coeur; S. Epatha Merkerson narrates.



CENTER FOR JAZZ STUDIES
welcomes visiting Professor Greg Tate

He will be teaching
Topics in Jazz Studies:
BLACK ART & CONSCIOUSNESS


Click here to read more about Professor Tate and this course.




ONGOING SERIES / SPECIAL CONFERENCES
The Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium
The Medieval Guild
The Columbia Early Modern Seminar
Eighteenth Century @ Columbia English 
The Cultural Memory Colloquium
Graduate Theory Reading Group
Columbia New Poetry