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Tony Kushner Angels
Chair of the English Department, Jean E. Howard
June 21, 6–7 pm
Howard revisits Tony Kushner’s (’78CC) play Angels in America two
decades after its first publication and suggests that as well as being
a play about the AIDS crisis of the late ’90s, it also is about
history, particularly the intertwined histories of Mormons and Jews in
America. Examining Kushner’s playful but intricate engagement with the
many angels that are mentioned in his drama, she will show how they are
the instruments for his examination of what America has been and might
be.
Café Arts is a series of informal discussions about the
questions surrounding the arts field today, led by Columbia
University's foremost professors. The discussions are held at the Picnic
Market
Café at
2665 Broadway (between 101st and 102nd streets).
Space is limited; $10 cover (cash only) includes one drink.
First Come, First Served. No RSVP Necessary.
Adventures
in Science Fiction Today
Literary Critic Lejla Kucukalic
June 7, 6–7 p.m.
As we move deeper into the 21st century, science fiction continues to
offer critical commentary and imaginative dramatization of science’s
latest developments. As they revisit the traditional tropes and themes
of science fiction, writers such as Stephen Baxter, Nicola Griffith and
Peter Watts describe human progress and potential failures in the
developing fields of genetic engineering, information and environmental
science, and space programs. This talk will survey current writers and
trends and address issues such as globalization, the ubiquity of
trilogies and new frontiers in science fiction.
Café Arts is a series of informal discussions about the
questions surrounding the arts field today, led by Columbia
University's foremost professors. The discussions are held at the Picnic Market Café at
2665 Broadway (between 101st and 102nd streets).
Space is limited; $10 cover (cash only) includes one drink.
First Come, First Served. No RSVP Necessary.
Announcing the Columbia-Penn Poetics Initiative.
We are convening a three-day conference at Columbia (June 11-13, 2010),
"Rethinking
Poetics." It is our sense that the practices of poetics are in danger
of becoming pro forma and that a focused, skeptical examination of
basic assumptions will be most useful. Terms continue to be used
routinely in circumstances that increasingly call for nuanced or even
fundamental change. What does "materiality of the signifier" mean in
the era of data mining or platform instability? What does "news" mean?
How useful are current periodizations? Such questions can be multiplied.
Given that new questions need to be raised and old certainties
troubled, our goal is to have a conference dedicated to articulating
what most needs to be rethought, what familiar formulations seem
increasingly inadequate, what new directions seem best to pursue.
In order to allow for time for substantial conversation, we are
scheduling no multiple panels and no plenaries; rather, there will be a
series of plenary-panels, two in the morning and two in the afternoon,
with four or five speakers each taking 10-12 minutes for themselves,
leaving half the session for more general discussion. There will be a
panel chair to moderate discussion, but there will be no introductions.
Participants will include Rachel Zolf, Rodrigo Toscano, Jennifer
Scappettone, Brent Hayes Edwards, Lytle Shaw, Juliana Spahr, Kenny
Goldsmith, Erica Hunt, Alan Golding, Monica de la Torre, Andrew
Schelling, Bruce Andrews, Michael Taussig, Joan Retallack, Rachel
DuPlessis, K. Silem Muhammad, Jena Osman, Craig Dworkin, Elizabeth
Willis, Barrett Watten, Rob Fitterman, Jonathan Skinner, Marjorie
Perloff, Sherwin Bitsui, Mark Nowak, Judith Goldman, C. S. Giscombe,
Steve Evans, Stephanie Young, Lisa Robertson, Paul Stephens, Rob
Halpern, Jeff Dirksen, Ben Friedlander, Joshua Clover, Michael Taussig,
Astrid Lorange, James Livingston, Jeff Nealon, Richard Doyle, Tan
Lin, Tonya Foster, Matthew Hofer, John Melillo, Susan Howe, and
Charles Bernstein.
Click
here
to
go
to
the
website.
The English Dept
& the Seminar on “Theory, Religion, & Culture”
present a symposium on
MYTHS
OF
SECULARISM
AND
THE
SACRED
Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 4:00-7:00 pm
Common Room, Heyman Center for the Humanities
[Please have a photo ID when entering the Heyman Center]
Featuring:
Hent de Vries, Russ Family Professor in the Humanities and Director,
Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University: "On Secular Faith: Sari
Nusseibeh, Hannah Arendt, and the Politics of Miracles."
Simon During, Australian Research Professor, Center for the History of
European Discourses, University of Queensland, Australia: “Not
religion, not secular: how to live in state democratic capitalism
today.”
Vincent Pecora, Gordon B. Hinckley Professor of British Literature and
Culture, University of Utah: "Political Theology, Race, and the Case of
Otto Brunner."
Regina Schwartz, Professor of English and Law, Northwestern University:
“Sacramental Poetics.”
Moderated by Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Hent de Vries is the Director of the Humanities Center and holds the
Russ Family Chair in the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University,
Baltimore. He is also Professor of Systematic Philosophy and the
Philosophy of Religion at the University of Amsterdam and Program
Director at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris. He
is the author of Minimal Theologies:
Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (2005), Religion and Violence: Philosophical
Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (2002), and Philosophy and the Turn to Religion
(1999). Among the volumes he has co-edited are, with Lawrence E.
Sullivan, Political Theologies:
Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (2006), with Samuel
Weber, Religion and Media
(2001) and Violence, Identity, and
Self-Determination (1998), and, with Henri A. Krop and Arie L.
Molendijk, Post-Theism: Reframing
the Judeo-Christian Tradition (2000).
Simon During is Australian Research Professor at the Center for the
History of European Discourses, University of Queensland,
Australia His most recent book is Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory,
and Post-Secular Modernity (2009). His other publications
include Cultural Studies: A Critical
Introduction (2005), Modern
Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (2002), Foucault and Literature (1993), and
Patrick White
(1998). He has also published numerous essays on cultural studies,
secularization, postcolonialism, globalization, postmodernism, and
British literature from 1760 to 1900, including “The Mundane against
the Secular” in Varieties of
Secularism in a Secular Age (2010) and “Church, State, and
Modernization,” in Studies in
Eighteenth-Century Culture (2008).
Vincent Pecora is Gordon B. Hinkley Professor of British Literature and
Culture at the University of Utah. He is the author of Secularization and Cultural Criticism:
Religion, Nation, and Modernity (2006), Households of the Soul (1997), and Self and Form in Modern Narrative (1989).
He
has
also
edited
Nations and
Identities: Classic Readings (2001) and written numerous
articles, among them “Dead Again: The Ink-bottle and the Paraclete”
(forthcoming), “Be Here Now: Mimesis and the History of Representation”
(2009), “Inheritances, Gifts, and Expectations” (2008), “Culture as
Theater / Culture as Belief” (2007), and “Religion and Modernity in
Current Debate” (2003).
Regina Schwartz is Professor of English and Law at Northwestern
University. She teaches seventeenth-century literature, especially
Milton; Hebrew Bible; philosophy and literature, law and literature,
and religion and literature. Her publications include
Remembering and
Repeating: Biblical Creation in Paradise Lost (1988), which won
the
James Holly Hanford prize for the best book on Milton; The Book and the Text: The Bible and
Literary Theory (1990); Desire
in
the
Renaissance:
Psychoanalysis
and
Literature
(1994); The
Postmodern Bible (1995) and Transcendence:
Philosophy,
Literature,
and
Theology
Approach
the Beyond (2004).
The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of
Monotheism (1997), a study of identity and violence in the
Hebrew Bible, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent book
is Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of
Secularism: When God Left the World (2007). Her essays on
postmodern theology appear in Post-secular
Philosophy, Questioning God,
and
Transcendence;
on
Milton
and
Renaissance
literature
in
The
Blackwell Companion to Milton and The Journal of Religion and Literature;
and
on
Shakespeare
and
Law
in
Triquarterly.
 On April 19th, 2010,
the
English Department will sponsor a lecture to be held at 4pm in 424 Kent, by Denis Flannery, Senior
Lecturer in American and English Literature at the University of Leeds.
The title of the talk is "Henry James
and Ireland." Denis Flannery is the author of HENRY JAMES: A
CERTAIN ILLUSION (2000)
and SIBLING LOVE, QUEER ATTACHMENT, AND AMERICAN WRITING (2007).
He has also published on American cinema, theater, and
photography.
Professor Marah Gubar (Pittsburgh)
will be speaking on Wednesday, March
31, at 6pm, in 501 Butler
Library. Her talk will be entitled "On Not Defining Children's Literature: The
Case of Victorian Children's Theatre."
The family of Karl Kroeber and
the Department of English and Comparative Literature will hold a
service of commemoration for Karl Kroeber on Thursday, April 8, from 3:30 to 5:30
in St. Paul's Chapel at
Columbia University, Broadway and 116th Street. Professor Kroeber died
on November 8, 2009. Friends, colleagues, and former students are
cordially invited to attend. Click here for
more information about Karl Kroeber.
THE UNIVERSITY
SEMINARS
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
announce the seventeenth series of the
LEONARD HASTINGS
SCHOFF MEMORIAL LECTURES
to be given by Professor Jean Howard
George Delacorte
Professor in the
Humanities at
Columbia University
Staging History; Imagining the Nation
I. Bosworth
Field and Agincourt:
The Making of
Shakespeare's England
8:00 pm, Monday,
February 8, 2010
II. Tony Kushner's
America and Its Angels
8:00 pm, Monday,
February 15, 2010
III. Protestant
Radicals and Jewish Children:
Caryl Churchill's
National Histories
8:00 pm, Monday,
February 22, 2010
All lectures held in
the Kellogg Center,
International
Affairs Building, room 1501.
American
Exceptionalism and the Question of Style
Tuesday, December 8,
2009 at 6:15pm
Second Floor Common Room, Heyman Center
Ezra Tawil, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University,
will speak on "American Exceptionalism and the Question of Style." His
Columbia colleagues Andrew Delbanco and Ross Posnock will serve as
commentators.
This event is free and open to the public. No Tickets, no reservations
required. Seating is on a first come, first served basis. Click here for directions to
the Heyman Center.
"The Virtue
of Modernist Criticism"
Thursday,
December
3,
2009
at
12:15pm
The Heyman Center Common
Room, East Campus
Lunch will be provided.
www.columbia.edu/cu/societyoffellows/
The
Edward Said
Memorial Lecture: "The Unipolar Moment and the Culture of Imperialism"
Thursday, December
3, 2009 at 6:15pm
Altschlul Auditorium, 417 International Affairs Building
Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and professor emeritus at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, returns to the Heyman Center to
deliver the 5th Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture.
Click here for more information
on Noam Chomsky.
This event is free and open to the public. No Tickets, no reservations
required. Seating is on a first come, first served basis. Enter from
118th Street just off Amsterdam Avenue.
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.
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