Say It Ain’t Snow! How New York Battles Winter with Robin Nagle, PhD

Thursday, January 14

6:30 – 8:00 P.M.
Free; reservations required Open this link to register for this program.
NYU Lecture Hall at 19 University Place, near 8th Street
[This venue is wheelchair accessible.]

[photo credit: Robin Nagle, 2003 Presidents Day Storm]

Snow has played a surprisingly important role in shaping contemporary New York. The flakes may look pretty while they’re coming down, but a heavy snowfall can have devastating consequences.

This talk explores what it takes for New York’s Department of Sanitation, the agency in charge of snow removal, to clear the streets. Nagle will explain why the city is uniquely vulnerable to severe storms and how we dealt with snow before the era of mechanized plows. Despite the sophistication of today’s snow removal technology, much of the work requires the same tactics now as those used in centuries past.

Robin Nagle, director of NYU’s Draper Program, is Sanitation’s anthropologist-in-residence and author of the book Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)

Open this link to register for this program.

Co-sponsored with The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation

Draper Student Maria Slautina on Attending the Fifth Biennial French Graduate Conference “Authority and Authorship” at Johns Hopkins University

In October I attended the Fifth Biennial French Graduate Conference “Authority and Authorship” at Johns Hopkins University. My background in medieval French literature and authorship lead me to an interest in global medievalism, and as a result, in global comparative literature. It can be very illuminating to explore how people with different backgrounds and histories deal with the same problems. In the paper I presented, I looked into how Russian author Andrei Makine and Japanese author Akira Mizubayashi resolve problems of authority while writing in French, a foreign language for both. I wanted to understand what lead them each to chose French as their adopted language, and how this choice then influenced their voice as authors.

Though this research fits within the field of literature, it’s also close to the art history project that I have been developing during my studies at Draper. I’m exploring the notion of creativity in the context of contemporary societies in flux. How much relevance is there today for the idea of national arts, music and literature? How do we define an artist who is born in one country, grows up in another, and is creatively active in a third? How does the act of moving abroad or traveling between different places influence creativity? Finally, what does travel do to previously conventional perspectives? Do people start to create because of the experience of migration, perhaps as a way to deal with discomfort or anxiety? Or are they inspired by new acquaintances? How do the new forms of creativity influence actual art spaces and museums?

At the conference I was pleased to find myself in a thriving community of young scholars from around the world. Canadian, French, Australian and American graduate students and researchers came together for fascinating discussions about authorship, translation and the figure of the author in a wide range of disciplines.

Professor Alan Itkin awarded a Center for the Humanities Grant-in-Aid

Draper is thrilled to announce that our own Professor Alan Itkin was recently awarded a Center for the Humanities Grant-in-Aid to support the publication of his book, Underworlds of Memory: W.G. Sebald’s Epic Journeys Through the Past.

Professor Itkin’s book explores the afterlife of classical epic poetry in the works of the late twentieth-century German writer W. G. Sebald and the German-Jewish post-Holocaust writers who influenced him.  The book argues that classical epics are self-reflexive monuments of cultural memory, that is they help to commemorate a culture’s common history while asking their audience to reflect on this shared form of memory and the role literature plays in it.  Its central thesis is that Sebald uses epic tropes to frame his literary works as “modern epics,” that is as similar self-reflexive monuments of cultural memory, but ones suited to the traumatic and complex events of the modern era.

Congratulations!

Upcoming Events on the Fulbright U.S. Student Program

IIE Webinar: Launch of 2016-2017 Competition: Getting Started 

Wednesday April 8, 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm | Online Webinar
A complete IIE webinar schedule can be found here.

National Fellowship Opportunities Panel: Hear From The Experts

Thursday April 9, 2015, 5:30pm – 7:00pm | Wasserman Presentation Room A 133 East 13th Street 2nd Floor

Hear from the experts who have been awarded prestigious national and global fellowships such as Fulbright, Boren, and Global Health Corps. Panelists will review the goals and eligibility criteria for select fellowship programs, discuss the diverse skills that can be honed and/or acquired through completing a fellowship, and provide tips on preparing a competitive application among other topics. A question and answer session will follow the panel. Time will be reserved for informal networking. RSVP here

Fulbright U.S. Student Program Information Session for Graduate Students

Friday April 17, 2015, Noon – 1:00pm | Wasserman Presentation Room B 133 East 13th Street 2nd Floor

This seminar provides an overview of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, discusses the differences between research/study and English Teaching Assistantship grants, offers advice on selecting a Fulbright destination, and reviews the Fulbright competition timeline and application components. RSVP here

Fulbright Research/Study Application Development Workshop for Graduate Students

Thursday April 23, 2015, 1:00pm – 2:00 pm | Wasserman Presentation Room B 133 East 13th Street 2nd Floor

This workshop is open to graduate students who are considering applying for a Fulbright U.S. Student Research/Study Grant. Topics to be addressed include: the online application, transcripts, letter of affiliation, letters of recommendation, and writing the personal statement and research project proposal. Students will leave this workshop having created an individualized action plan for managing the Fulbright application. RSVP here

Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Application Development Workshop for Graduate Students

Friday May 1, 2015, 1:30pm – 2:30 pm | Wasserman Presentation Room B 133 East 13th Street 2nd Floor

This workshop is open to NYU graduate students who are considering applying for a Fulbright U.S. Student English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) Grant. Topics to be addressed include: the online application, transcripts, letters of recommendation, and writing the personal statement and the statement of grant purpose. Students will leave this workshop having created an individualized action plan for managing the Fulbright application. RSVP here

Webinar: Fulbright U.S. Student Program Information Session for Graduate Students

Wednesday May 13, 2015, 10:00am – 11:00am | Online Webinar

This seminar provides an overview of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, discusses the differences between research/study and English Teaching Assistantship grants, offers advice on selecting a Fulbright destination, and reviews the Fulbright competition timeline and application components. RSVP here

For more information on Fulbright, please visit this website.

Posthuman Antiquities: A Cross-Disciplinary Conference at New York University, November 14-15, 2014

Posthuman Antiquities: A Cross-Disciplinary Conference
November 14-15, 2014

Hemmerdinger Hall, The Silver Center for Arts & Science
New York University

What can an inquiry into antiquity offer posthumanist thinking on the body, on nature and its relationship with technology, and on the fundamental interrelatedness of the physical, the biological, the psychical, the social and the artifactual?

Greek and Roman literary, philosophical, and medical texts are resplendent with sites in which ‘materiality’ and ‘embodiment’ (in current parlance) erupt into a field of questioning, deliberation,
care, and experimentation. A return to antiquity is particularly pertinent in the wake of the philosophical demise of the sovereignty of the modern individual human subject and the rise not only of discourses such as deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and feminism, but also recent turns to chaos theory, complexity theory, vitalism, affect theory, environmental philosophy, and animal studies. As with these contemporary discourses, classical thinking displaces and complicates
the modern notion of subjectivity, and finds movement and life inherently at work in both organic and inorganic phenomena.

This international conference seeks to foster conversation and cross-pollination between these vastly different periods positioned, as they both are, as transitional zones. We propose that through an encounter with “the Greeks,” we can not only re-imagine the trajectories and potentialities of contemporary posthumanist theorizing, but also interrogate narratives of origin, legacy, and linear temporality.

*Keynote Speakers*: Claudia Baracchi (Milan) and Adriana Cavarero (Verona)

*Speakers*: Emanuela Bianchi (NYU), Sara Brill (Fairfield), Rebecca Hill (RMIT), Brooke Holmes (Princeton), Miriam Leonard (UCL), Michael Naas (DePaul), Ramona Naddaf (Berkeley), Mark Payne (Chicago), John Protevi (Louisiana State), Kristin Sampson (Bergen), Giulia Sissa (UCLA)

Organized by Emanuela Bianchi (NYU), Sara Brill (Fairfield), and Brooke Holmes (Princeton).

Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, New York University, with additional support from: Center for Ancient Studies at NYU; Gallatin Fund for Classics and the Contemporary World; College of Arts and Sciences, Fairfield University; Global Research
Initiatives, Office of the Provost, NYU; Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, NYU; The Humanities Initiative at NYU; Office of the Dean for Humanities, NYU; Postclassicisms (Princeton University); Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU; Department of Philosophy, NYU; Department of Classics, NYU; Department of Media, Culture, and
Communication, NYU; Department of English, NYU; and the A.S. Onassis Program in Hellenic Studies, NYU.

For further information please visit
http://posthumanantiquities.wordpress.com