This post is part of an ongoing series of writing about the VHS Archives working group; this group is supported by the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research. Alexandra Juhasz The VHS Archives Working Groupworked. Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities* at the CUNY GC, and engaging in 2017-2018 over seven…

Daisy Atterbury We begin the day. We could begin anywhere. As Renee Gladman writes in Calamities, “I began the day…” and then again, “I began the day…,” finally bringing us to teaching and its challenges: “I began the day looking up at the whiteboard, wondering how I would do the thing I needed to…

Through the generous support of Poets & Writers, The Center for the Humanities, at the Graduate Center, CUNY was able to add another chapter to our ongoing work of fostering meaningful connection with organizations in our surrounding community. Our collaborations with Alex Cuff have steadily branched into a series workshops and panels, hosted by Raven…

Through the generous support of Poets & Writers, The Center for the Humanities, at the Graduate Center, CUNY was able to add another chapter to our ongoing work of fostering meaningful connection with organizations in our surrounding community. Our collaborations with Alex Cuff have steadily branched into a series of workshops and panels, hosted by…

This post is part of an ongoing series of writing about the VHS Archives working group, which is devoted to the use, preservation, digitization, and research of VHS collections currently held by organizations, scholars, artists, and activists. This working group is supported by the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research. Jaime Shearn Coan…

Shemon Salam Every tradition of the Left carries with it the moral and strategic imperative of solidarity: an injury to one is an injury to all, an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and that workers have no country to call their own. The Insurgent Solidarities Conference, sponsored by the Center for…

Tie Jojima On March 15th, 2018, the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center hosted the conference “Art and Literature in Contemporary Dominican Republic, Haiti, and their Diasporas,” co-organized by Abigail Lapin Dardashti and Wilfredo Burgos Matos. The conference took place in collaboration with the art exhibition Bordering the Imaginary: Art from the…

Karen Okigbo As a shy and introverted undergraduate student at Princeton University, one of the most meaningful courses I took was on nation building in post-conflict regions. After all these years, what remains most memorable about that class is not the various theories on the maladies of governance, nor the fact that the course…

As part of a research project supported by the CUNY Adjunct Incubator, Graduate Center PhD candidate Angelika Winner outlines the thinking and methods behind her ethnographic study of food provisioning practices in Newark, NJ. Taking a critical approach to the dominant narrative that links the notion of food deserts with obesity rates, Winner seeks to…

by Meropi Peponides As a young kid with two college-educated immigrant parents, I bought into the model minority myth, hard. I implicitly understood that I had to work the hardest, be the best, ace the tests, read the most books, play a musical instrument (or two), have the most extra-curricular activities –…

by Pamela Sneed Recently when I visited Daisy Atterbury’s writing class at Queens College I was talking about my book and asked a large group of students about one or two generations ahead of mine, “Do you know who Annie Lennox is?” They all shook their heads and said, “No.” …

Jimena Lucero Before there was Pride there was a desperate call for liberation from our gay, trans & queer ancestors. The Stonewall Riots that began on the night of June 27th, 1969–after a police raid that resulted in the arrest of LGBT people–would not have been possible without figures like Marsha P. Johnson &…

Rhea Tepp The archive has always been a place of great discomfort for me. Usually I have seen it presented with a capital “A”—a place of hierarchy (filled with items deemed “worthy” of preservation), a colonized space, a space of trauma, untouched by the passage of time. My mother is neurodivergent. When her body…

In the past couple of months alone, there has been a slate of articles in the international media devoted to Portugal’s contemporary art scene, and the much-criticized current real estate and tourism boom in Lisbon.[1] It is perhaps fitting, then, that the Center for the Humanities’ Director Keith Wilson invited Penelope Curtis the Director of…

E. Ethelbert Miller shares his presentation from the panel “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: A Discussion of Jordan’s Essay about Inclusivity and Accessibility,” part of the conference A Tribute to June Jordan. The panel was framed and moderated by Erica Hunt and also included presentations by Donna Masini and Evie Shockley. — …

Giggles were suppressed at the center of the room, where 10 strangers joined energy and made motions and sounds to create a machine, possibly mass-producing bread, or perhaps hauling water from a river, or maybe spinning earth around in a mine. The product was not as important as understanding each person’s role and responding to…

Benedict Nguyen A semi-concrete abstract: I try to write about a lot of things: gentrification and space, the power and capacity to choose where to be (in dance and in the world), reparations and who’s owed what, and how to reorganize institutions and non-profit boards, workers cooperatives, and more. In Part I,…

On May 10, the Doctoral Theatre Students’ Association presents its 2018 conference, Objects of Study: Methods and Materiality in Theatre and Performance Studies, bringing together working groups of visiting scholars, graduate students, and independent artist-scholars to explore the multiple potential meanings of “object” within theatre and performance studies. In this second part of a two-part…

On May 10, the Doctoral Theatre Students’ Association presents its 2018 conference, Objects of Study: Methods and Materiality in Theatre and Performance Studies, bringing together working groups of visiting scholars, graduate students, and independent artist-scholars to explore the multiple potential meanings of “object” within theatre and performance studies. In this two-part blog post, three of…

Benedict Nguyen A semi-concrete abstract: I try to write about a lot of things: gentrification and space, the power and capacity to choose where to be (in dance and in the world), reparations and who’s owed what, and how to reorganize institutions and non-profit boards, workers cooperatives, and more. In Part I,…

After the success of the first meeting in October of 2017 that focused on the theme of Ethics and Anxieties, the theme for the second meeting of the VHS Archives Working Group at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY was Nostalgia. Held on November 16, 2017 the session was centered around…

After the success of the first meeting in October of 2017 that focused on the theme of Ethics and Anxieties, the theme for the second meeting of the VHS Archives Working Group at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY was Nostalgia. Held on November 16, 2017 the session was centered around…

In anticipation of her New York Chapbook Launch at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop on April 11th with Major Jackson, we got in touch with Layla Benitez-James to celebrate the release of “God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode But He Had to Make Sure,” winner of the third annual Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook…

On March 4th the Graduate Center community was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of internationally-renowned performance and installation artist Dr. James Luna (Payómkawichum, Ipai and Mexican). Luna’s art interrogated the representation, objectification, and exoticization of American Indian peoples, cultures, and histories primarily through the deployment of his body as a site of…