Category: Blog

Steven Jones: The Priest and the CEO

The digital humanities did not spring up out of the ground, nor was the movement an inevitable byproduct of computing, information technology, or the internet. Instead, the emergence of DH has been a dialogue, an intersection of society and technology that renders in miniature the wider cultural tensions between the digital and the physical.

In his forthcoming book The Priest and the CEO, Steven Jones traces the pre-history of the digital humanities, focusing particularly on a 1949 meeting that has become the mythical origin of the movement.  In this encounter, Father Roberto Busa, a Jesuit scholar, met with Thomas Watson, CEO and chairman of IBM, to propose a collaboration on what would eventually become the Index Thomisticus, a lemmatization of the complete works of Thomas Aquinas. Though often recognized as the founding story of the digital humanities, relatively little serious historical research has been done on this seminal meeting. In his talk at the ARC Praxis seminar on November 13, Jones brought archival research and contextual analysis to bear on an event that has, until now, been more legend than history.

In contextualizing the Busa-Watson meeting, Jones drew a number of connections between the nascent technology at IBM and the “eversion,” or the rise in the early 2000s of digital technologies that made inroads on the physical world. Just as technologies such as GPS and social media refigured interactions between humans and machines in the early years of the 21st century, the mainframe era celebrated its own paradigm-shifting platforms and devices in the 1940s.  However, despite the optimism surrounding IBM’s machines in an era of sales copy and Madison-avenue hype, Busa’s proposal was an audacious one: “I knew, the day I was to meet Thomas J. Watson, Sr., that he had on his desk a report which said that IBM machines could never do what I wanted.”

Famously, Busa used IBM’s own self-assured rhetoric against Watson, persuading him by producing a company poster claiming that “the difficult we do right away; the impossible takes a little longer.” Yet Jones observes that this phrase, which echoes the motto of the British Navy’s corps of engineers, connects the Busa story to a larger postwar milieu. Busa served in World War II, first as a chaplain and later as a member of the partisan resistance, while IBM’s data storage technology served a darker and more controversial role in the war. In this light, Busa’s exchange with Watson mirrors the complex diplomatic relationships between the United States and European powers at the time of their meeting.

SSEC at IBMBusa’s “impossible” project did indeed take a little longer. Over thirty years, the collaboration between the Jesuit and the iconic American firm pushed storage, processing, and retrieval to their technological limit.  Given the state of card technology in this era, even data entry for the index took years. Yet the outcome was entirely novel, a “mixed marriage” between computing and linguistic research. The project wrestled with challenges, such as keyword context, that would become central concepts in the field of data analysis. In 1949, not only was IBM flexing its computational muscle with its innovative SSEC mainframe, but its nascent collaboration with Busa prefigured computers that could work not only with numbers, but with words.

While Professor Jones avoided drawing premature connections between his archival research and recent technology-fueled cultural developments, his work on this historic meeting clearly relates to issues at the heart of the movement. Whether lexical analysis, storage and retrieval, or search, the founding myth of the digital humanities prefigures a shift toward new modes of interaction between people and machines. In reflecting on the origin of the digital humanities, The Priest and the CEO may well give us insight into the movement’s future.

The Priest and the CEO: Towards A Prehistory of Humanities Computing

Professor Jones shared his ongoing research project on early humanities compuuting. It’s the canonical founding myth of the digital humanities: In November 1949, the Italian Jesuit scholar, Father Roberto Busa, came to IBM headquarters in New York to meet with the founder and head of the company, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., seeking support for the project of mechanizing the building of a concordance to the collected works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Drawing on Father Busa’s papers, recently accessioned in Milan, as well as IBM archives and other sources, Professor Jones aims to complicate the myth with history. Based on a book in progress, this presentation looked at a few details of that 1949 meeting, using the metaphor of the exploded-view diagram used by engineers, descended from examples in the notebooks of Leonardo, for example, suspending and zooming in on a few constituent details in order to understand the story as part of a larger history of computing in the 1940s and 1950s, and as part of the prehistory of the digital humanities.

Massimiliano Tomba: Insurgent Universality and the Question of Human Rights

Passive juridical citizen or agentic human being? This was one of the political and ideological tensions explored by Massimiliano Tomba, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Padova, in his presentation ‘Insurgent Universality’ on November 6th at the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) seminar.

Passive juridical citizen or agentic human being? This was one of the political and ideological tensions explored by Massimiliano Tomba, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Padova, in his presentation ‘Insurgent Universality’ on November 6th at the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) seminar. The room was filled to capacity with faculty and students eager to hear Professor Tomba speak, and on his birthday no less (Happy Birthday!).

Dr. Tomba presented two starkly distinct notions of human rights, as inscribed in the French Revolution’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and in the far more radical reworking of this document in 1793, the latter never officially adopted in France. Dr. Tomba explained that the 1789 declaration instantiates a type of juridical “universalism,” in which individuals have rights (e.g. life, liberty, property) that are protected by governments, but which have “limitations,” and can easily be suspended in the interest of “public order and national security,” economic interest, war, or states of declared emergency. In contrast, the 1793 declaration, written by the Jacobins, specifies no limits, instead writing that these freedoms “cannot be suspended, forbidden, nor limited.” The 1793 document emerged from an ongoing process of what Dr. Tomba calls insurgent universality, embodied in the radical praxis of slaves, women, and the poor during the French and Haitian Revolutions.french rev

While the 1789 document safeguards the natural right to “resist oppression,” it also regards resistance to the law as an offense, as the law is taken to be the direct expression of the people’s will. The 1793 declaration does not take this for granted, however, averring that the law must be the expression of the will of the people. Furthermore, one of the most radical articles in the 1793 declaration states “When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.” Here, any portion of the people (not just elected representatives) can act as “representatives” of the whole people by rebelling on their behalf. Dr. Tomba argued the poor, women, and slaves at the time did not merely claim the privilege to belong to an unjust order, but rather practiced “disbelonging” to “disorder” the existing unjust order. This is an example of people acting as “citizens” beyond the narrow legal boundaries of “citizenship,” as bestowed by the state.

Dr. Tomba concluded his lively talk by emphasizing that the 1789 framework sees people as passive subjects who lack agency and whose “universal” rights need protecting. On the contrary, the 1793 declaration promotes agentic praxis that may transcend the state and current political order. Given our current crisis of formal democracy in the US and globally, Dr. Tomba suggested that we think about this insurgent “path less travelled” (which is hardly mentioned in post WW2 thinking). In the wide-ranging question and answer session following the talk, discussion took up Marx’s interpretation of related issues of political, social, and human emancipation, as well as questions about the praxis involved in movements like Occupy Wall St., and even the question of animal rights and agency in relation to humans. One important part of the discussion was the question of the Reign of Terror in France as being related to the 1793 way of thinking. Dr. Tomba pointed out that the radical 1793 declaration was actually one of the first casualties of the Reign of Terror, as the new bourgeois state forcibly curtailed liberties amidst the foreign and civil war in France.

From Citizenship to Cit(y)zenship: Cities as Laboratories of Social Innovation Against Poverty

On March 23rd, 2014 Professor Yuri Kazepov presented his research into the rescaling of European welfare systems following the incorporation of the European Union as well as trends in European countries toward localized welfare policies.

On March 23rd, 2014 Professor Yuri Kazepov, Professor of Urban Sociology and Compared Welfare Systems at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo in Urbino, Italy, presented his research into the rescaling of European welfare systems following the incorporation of the European Union as well as trends in European countries toward localized welfare policies. The project proposes that prior scholarship has not adequately taken into consideration that European cities deliver the highest concentration of welfare services irrespective of the policy focus, or how recent changes in the level at which policies are administered affect patterns of welfare distribution. Although the project is in its initial stages, Dr. Kazepov hypothesizes that the localization of welfare policy can be connected to the redefinition of citizenship in accordance with practices of social inclusion and exclusion situated at the level of individual cities.

Dr. Kazepov identified subsidiarization as a major outcome of the localization of welfare policy. Schemes for delegating administrative responsibility and various levels of fiscal autonomy exhibit several inconsistencies in the delivery of welfare services across the European Union and within individual nation states. This mosaic of policies has the advantage of widening options for individual welfare organizations and allowing greater freedom to grassroots organizations. However, a greater number of actors has led to increased difficulty in coordinating services, loss of accountability and procedures aimed at deterring blame rather than improving welfare. Dr. Kazepov suggested that the complex decision-making processes of the Caritas organization are exemplary of these advantages and disadvantages.

Historical Trends in Rescaling

Italy was repeatedly highlighted as an area of concern for the rescaling of welfare policies. Dr. Kazepov noted that the figure for young people not employed, in education, or training (NEET) in Italy stood at twenty-five percent. Italy also exhibits a higher disparity in the delivery of welfare services across its region. By contrast, in Norway measures for welfare services were more consistent across regions and levels of implementation. How administrative discretion is parceled out to different actors remains a matter in need of further study, however. Dr. Kazepov noted that he and his colleagues are conducting further interviews about the impact of policy rescaling in over forty case studies, including London, Budapest, Malmö, Lecce, and Dublin.

During the question and answer session following Dr. Kazepov’s presentation, discussion centered on comparison between European and American welfare models. One participant in the discussion raised the issue of the unfunded mandate in American society as a source of considerable friction between federal bureaus and local welfare administrators, to which another faculty member added that the No Child Left Behind policy of the Bush administration was an exemplar. Dr. Kazepov suggested that the unfunded mandate bore some similarities to the passive form of subsidiarity highlighted in his discussion. It did not seem possible for the discussion to reach a satisfactory conclusion about the transnational comparison of welfare. With further research, however, such a comparison looks promising.

Sharon Zukin’s ARC Seminar: “New York’s Creative Ecosystem: ‘Imperial Project’ or Lively Arts?”

Sharon Zukin, Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College, presented her current project entitled “New York’s Creative Ecosystem: ‘Imperial Project’ or Lively Arts?” at the Advanced Research Collaborative on Thursday, October 16, 2014. The project is in its initial stages, and explores New York City material changes (changes to physical city structures) and their connection to changes in creativity, and to resulting changes in how people conceptualize the city.

Sharon Zukin, Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College, presented her current project entitled “New York’s Creative Ecosystem: ‘Imperial Project’ or Lively Arts?” at the Advanced Research Collaborative on Thursday, October 16, 2014. The project is in its initial stages, and explores New York City material changes (changes to physical city structures) and their connection to changes in creativity, and to resulting changes in how people conceptualize the city.

The theme in her work can be expressed as a comparison between, on the one hand, corporations supporting and instigating city-wide creativity, and on the other hand, individual artists creating art on a smaller scale, and perhaps in a purer sense. One illustration she made of this was the fairly new trend of artists and creators making use of shared physical spaces, contrasting starkly with the “old ideal of the independent artist” and private studio.

Dr. Zukin next identified large-scale, corporate-financed, “marketed” art initiatives, such as Bloomberg’s Public Art Challenge, a grant supporting temporary public art projects. Another example was Red Bull Studios New York—self-defined on their website as “a multi-disciplinary project space located in the heart of Chelsea, featuring an exhibition space, state of the art recording studio, radio booth, lecture hall and performance space”—a case of a corporation “reaching out” and subsidizing the creation of music by young males (the target group marketed by Red Bull). These examples contrasted with examples of the small-scale, unsubsidized, individual artist, illustrated by photographs taken by the author herself of—for example—an unemployed philosopher offering “creative advice” in Union Square, and a hipster in Downtown Manhattan advertising her creativity on a T-shirt, and identifying it a source of power.

The author drew her talk to a close by establishing five “reshaping” strategies, observed in two general geographical areas: one from Midtown to Lower Manhattan, and one in Brooklyn stretching from Greenpoint through DUMBO. The strategies are as follows: One, attract corporations, such as the Google building in Chelsea; two, re-industrialize, such as the case of the Brooklyn Navy Yard being utilized today as a commercial space and creating thousands of jobs in Brooklyn; three, build on “DIY” (“do it yourself”), such as the New York Media Center in DUMBO; four, encourage small mixed-use development, such as the Chelsea Market; and five, commercialize cultural consumption, as evidenced by the event space and café “Wallplay” in the Lower East Side.

These trends and implementations came together to paint a picture of the varied efforts being made to sustain NYC as a cultural center, cultural icon, and creative ecosystem.

Behemoth: Giant Factories and Discourses of Modernity

Drawing from a variety of sources, from travel accounts and literature to paintings and photographs, Freeman presented preliminary findings to the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) on Thursday, October 9th. Rather than focusing on the singularity of modern Chinese factories, Freeman began with what might be called a genealogy of the gigantic factory, tracing it from its origins in 18th century Britain, through the United States and the Soviet Union in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the far-flung multinational producers of today’s electronics and consumer goods.

Controversy surrounding some of East Asia’ largest factories has risen in recent years, particularly on the heels of rioting and attempted suicides in plants operated by Foxconn in the Chinese cities of Chengdu and Taiyuan. Joshua Freeman, Distinguished Professor of History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, was inspired to take a deeper look at the cultural significance these “behemoths” hold around the world.

Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry
Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry, 1932-33

Drawing from a variety of sources, from travel accounts and literature to paintings and photographs, Freeman presented preliminary findings to the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) on Thursday, October 9th. Rather than focusing on the singularity of modern Chinese factories, Freeman began with what might be called a genealogy of the gigantic factory, tracing it from its origins in 18th century Britain, through the United States and the Soviet Union in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the far-flung multinational producers of today’s electronics and consumer goods. To some observers a symbol of progress and national pride, and to others, a symbol of the satanic consequence of hubris, these edifices and the lives of those who operated their machinery have long presented questions and ambiguities.

Freeman’s project begins with simple questions which might bear much more complex answers: Why do we build such big factories in the first place? When and why have state authorities chosen either to concentrate workers in such numbers, or to disperse them into smaller, separate manufactories? How and why have these factories become poles for public discourse?

A brief historical overview reveals a familiar trajectory in Europe and the United States. Industrialists and state supporters saw that larger factories could increase production and profits exponentially. Leftists and conservatives alike often found a certain wonder in these industrial organisms; Freeman reminds us of the photo-journalist Margaret Bourke-White, who once claimed, “The beauty of industry lies in its truth and simplicity.” Some hoped these sites could produce a modern, rational, and even utopian lifestyle among its workers.

Homestead LOC 10140
Homestead Steel Works, Homestead, Pa. (Library of Congress)

Yet there seemed to be a limit to these “Promethean” enterprises: workers, when concentrated in such numbers, would chafe under deteriorating conditions. Gigantic factories had become unwieldy and costly, and eventually attempts were made to disperse manufacturing to more manageable suburban areas.

The recent resurgence of gigantic factories in East Asia cannot be explained by a simple “catching up” of “developing” world powers. Like the 19th century nationalists of Britain and Germany, modern governments continue to take pride in building massive projects like dams and bridges. Yet many of today’s largest factories do not evoke the same sort of pride they once might have. Freeman wonders whether this might be a consequence of the goods they produce: from Reebok shoes to iPads, these small products, mostly financed by multinational corporations and sold in foreign markets, are a far cry from the train cars and bridge girders of Pittsburgh’s heyday.

It seems that two overarching dimensions of these factories are at play: size, and location. Freeman’s ongoing work hopes to shed light on deeper layers of these dimensions. One observer noted that size can take many forms: number of workers, number and size of machines, and size of the finished products, for example. Location, too, will introduce enticing complications – to what extent can these “behemoths,” having spread around the world over the past three centuries, be linked together in a way that deepens our understanding of their role in social change and public discourse?

Reflection on “How to Pick Apples: Colonialism and Citizenship in the Formation of Puerto Rican Migrant Farm Labor”

In a presentation at The Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) on Thursday, October 2nd, professor Ismael García Colón shared with the audience the first results of his ongoing research…

A fascinating collection of interviews, documents, and reports on rural workers from Puerto Rico in the United States, “How to Pick Apples: Colonialism and Citizenship in the Formation of Puerto Rican Migrant Farm Labor” is part of a book project on the experiences of Puerto Rican farmworkers in the United States. In a presentation at The Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) on Thursday, October 2nd, professor Ismael García Colón shared with the audience the first results of his ongoing research.

Instead of looking at Puerto Rican farmers only from the perspective of transnationalism and migration policies, García Colón considers the group as part of the history of U.S. farm labor. The contrast between Puerto Ricans (as U.S. citizens) and guest workers from countries such as Jamaica and Mexico (frequently holding H-2 visas) raises questions of labor policies, state-formation, and practices of citizenship.

Professor García Colón focused on the lives of Puerto Rican apple pickers in the 1960s and 1970s, but the evidences presented suggest that some fundamental questions can be extended to Puerto Rican rural workers in the United States, in general. How conflicting classifications of nationalism, and citizenship impacts labor relations? What are the rights and working conditions of U.S citizens and guest workers, and in what category Puerto Ricans fit (in theory and in practice)? How Puerto Rican and U.S. governmental policies relate to everyday forms of labor relation? And what role nationalism plays in such dynamic?

The presentation began with the narrative of a New England apple grower who fired a group of Puerto Rican workers who complained about working conditions, wages, and working benefits. García Colón suggests that the episode is part of “a series of escalating events that accelerated the demise of Puerto Rico’s farm labor program.” He goes back to the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, which reaffirmed to Puerto Rican U.S citizenship, a status granted in 1917 as a result of the Spanish-American War.

The brief history of U.S. migratory policy towards Puerto Ricans is the first step to understand how U.S. colonialism (the author uses, here, Eric Wolf’s concept of structural power) shaped Puerto Rican migration. It is interesting to notice that the author reinforced the application of the term “migration,” instead of “immigration,” during the presentation. García Colón claims that transnationalism is not enough to understand how Puerto Ricans participated of U.S. legal and political structures. It is necessary to smoke out the limits of citizenship, and how apple growers and other workers perceived this group.

The Widening Divide Revisited- Economic Inequality in Los Angeles

Professor Paul Ong presented a case of Los Angeles in terms of income inequality and poverty. He and a group of his colleagues examined the income inequality in LA about a quarter century ago, and found a prevalent economic disparity in those days. Their report in 1989 spurred the public and media to pay more attention to the economic phenomenon. Now, Professor Ong reexamined whether the situation has been improved since then…

Professor Paul Ong presented a case of Los Angeles in terms of income inequality and poverty. In fact, this is his second visit to the area. He and a group of his colleagues examined the income inequality in LA about a quarter century ago, and found a prevalent economic disparity in those days. Their report in 1989 spurred the public and media to pay more attention to the economic phenomenon. Now, Professor Ong reexamined whether the situation has been improved since then, because the recent housing and financial crises across the nation affected LA to a great extent and concomitantly renewed attention was called for. But, what he found is that there still exist a substantial degree of income inequality, in fact, even a greater disparity in the city.

In his study, he used Gini Index, which is widely used to measure income and wealth inequality. Before going deep into the examination of the city, he showed some historical changes in terms of economic disparity. To list a few points, he underlined economic disparity in 2000 was about 80% of that in 1920 when we had a Great Depression. In addition, income share of top tenth was about the same between the two times, and bottom 80% incomers’ non-home financial wealth decreased by about 50% from 1983 to 2012 (8.7% to 4.7%).

After the review of national, historical trend in economic disparity, he laid out findings in the city of LA. Comparing LA households with the US overall, he pointed out that income inequality increased substantially from 1980 to 2012 while it increased gradually in the US as a whole, and that disparity in wealth was even greater than that in income. In addition, economic inequality is still substantial between upper 20% and bottom 80% in labor market within each group of native people and immigrants.

Upon these findings, the audience expressed some concerns on a solution to the problems or a vision for LA. Corresponding to their concerns, Professor Ong anticipated that there would not be a significant change or development in the economic matter. However, showing some small, positive changes affected by scholarship engagement, such as Mayor’s minimum wage proposal and County Supervisor’s neighborhood hiring proposal, he said “we still can have hope.” In this presentation, not only his scholarly findings but also his active engagement in policy arena to bring justice was impressive.

First Annual Graduate Center Archival Research Conference

The Graduate Center’s first Archival Research Conference featured student recipients of one of several different fellowships funded by the Provost’s office. Panels moderated by Graduate Center faculty were followed by an afternoon roundtable featuring New York Public Library and New-York Historical Society archivists discussing the collections they curate.

archival_research_lennihanFriday, September 5th, 2014
CUNY Graduate Center
#GCArchivalResearch

The Graduate Center’s first Archival Research Conference featured student recipients of one of several different fellowships funded by the Provost’s office: the Lost & Found Stipends Program, the Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants, The Advanced Research Collaborative Award for Archival Research in African American and African Diaspora Studies, and The Advanced Research Collaborative Knickerbocker Award for Archival Research in American Studies. Panels moderated by Graduate Center faculty were followed by an afternoon roundtable featuring New York Public Library and New-York Historical Society archivists discussing the collections they curate.

Photos from the conference (via Twitter and Christopher Eng):

In order to showcase the type of research being funded by the Provost’s Office, some of the student presenters have graciously provided their presentations for this conference archive:

The full conference schedule and program follows below.

Archival-Research-Conference

Schedule

9:00-9:20am — Welcoming Remarks

  • Duncan Faherty (English and American Studies)
  • Provost Louise Lennihan

9:20 – 10:20am — Panel Session I

10:20 – 10:30am — Break

10:30 – 11:30am — Panel Session II

11:30 – 12:15pm — Lunch

12:15 – 1:15pm — Panel Session III

1:15 – 1:30pm — Break

1:30 – 2:30pm — NYC Archivists Roundtable (Elebash Recital Hall)

2:30 – 3:30pm — Reception (Elebash Lobby)

Panel Session I — 9:20-10:20am

C205 — Aesthetics, Politics, and Difference

Chair: Kandice Chuh (English)

  • Denisse Andrade* (Earth & Environmental Sciences, Geography)
    “The Black Radical Movement and the Poetics and Politics of Land”
  • Paul Fess* (English)
    “Slavery and Anti-slavery: Sound and Text”
  • Tonya M. Foster* (English)
    “Umbra Writers’ Workshop: Archives and Extensions—Tom Dent”
  • Saisha Grayson* (Art History)
    “Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work of Charlotte Moorman, 1963-1980″
  • Stefanie A Jones* (Theatre)
    “Acts of Provocation: Racial Formation and Twenty-First Century U.S. Commercial Theatre”

C203 — Print Culture and Canon Formation in the Early Republic

Chair: William Kelly (English)

  • Brian Baaki* (English)
    “The Black Criminal in Early American Print Culture”
  • Courtney Chatellier* (English)
    “Archival Research in Early American Literature”
  • Nora Slonimsky* (History)
    “‘The Engine of Free Expression’ [?]: The Political Development of Copyright in the Colonial British Atlantic and Early National United States”
  • Nicole Zeftel* (Comparative Literature)
    “‘The Economics and Poetics’ of the Nineteenth Century Dime Novel”

C197 — Mining Alternative Geographies of Race and Labor

Chair: Herman Bennett (History)

  • Hector Agredano* (Earth & Environmental Sciences, Geography)
    “Railroads, Railroad Workers and Geographies of the Mexican Revolution of 1910″
  • Gordon Randolph Barnes Jr.* (History)
    “Imperial Fears: Planter Ideology, Violence, and the Post-Emancipation Experience in the British Empire, 1800-1900″
  • Megan Brown* (History)
    “Which Integration for Algeria? Eurafrica and the Treaty of Rome”
  • Jenny LeRoy* (English)
    “Capitalizing on the Global South: Eliza McHatton’s Hemispheric Plantation Economy”
  • Frances Tran* (English)
    “Traces of the Coolie: An Archival Encounter”

C201 — Sexuality, Politics, and the Archive

Chair: Alyson Cole (Political Science)

  • Meredith Benjamin* (English)
    “Engaging Feminism’s Archive”
  • Elizabeth Decker* (English)
    “Recovering Edith Summers Kelley”
  • Margaret Galvan* (English)
    “Watching Out for Dykes in Activist Archives and Special Collections”
  • Alisa Wade Harrison* (History)
    “An Alliance of Ladies: Power, Public Affairs, and Gendered Constructions of the Upper Class in Early National New York City”
  • Wen Liu* (Psychology)
    “Untying the Knot: Archiving the Marriage Equality Movements in Taiwan, China, and the US as Recent History”

Break — 10:20-10:30am

Panel Session II — 10:30-11:30am

C201 — Cultures of Political Economy

Chair: Jessie Daniels (Psychology)

  • Flannery Amdahl* (Political Science)
    “Big Brother’s Keepers: Liberal Religious Organizations and the Development of the American Welfare State”
  • Velina Manolova* (English)
    “Queer Interventions in Racial Liberalism in the Writings of Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry, 1944-1970″
  • David McCarthy* (Historical Musicology)
    “The Appearance of the Comedy LP (1957-1973)”
  • Adam McMahon* (Political Science)
    “President-Led American State Unbuilding 1953-2013″
  • Sara Rutkowski* (English)
    “The Federal Writers’ Project and its Influence on African American Literature”

C203 — Critical Pedagogies: Rewriting of Knowledge Production

Chair: Steve Brier (Urban Education)

C197 — Representing Geographies of the Urban and the Rural

Chair: Cindi Katz (Earth & Environmental Sciences)

  • Jacob Cohen* (Music)
    “Experiences of New England: Urban and Rural in the Music of Chadwick, Ives, Ruggles and Crawford Seeger”
  • Nicholas Gamso* (English)
    “Race, Cities, and American New Wave Documentary of the 1960s and 70s”
  • Marjorie Gorsline* (Anthropology)
    “An Archaeology of Accountability: Race, Power, and Privilege in the Rural Northeast”
  • Cara Jordan* (Art History)
    “Joseph Beuys and Social Sculpture in the United States: Rick Low and Ongoing Residency”
  • Katherine Uva* (History)
    “Dawn of a New Day: New York City Between the Fairs”

C205 — Forum on Digital Initiatives and Fellowships

Chair: Matthew K. Gold (English)

  • Amanda Licastro† (English)
    “The Writing Studies Tree”
  • Natascia Boeri† (Sociology)
    “Community IT Centers and Organizing Women Workers in Gujarat, India”
  • Micki Kaufman† (History)
    “Quantifying Kissinger”

Lunch — 11:30am-12:15pm

Panel Session III — 12:15-1:15pm

C197 — Diasporic Cultures and Identity Formation

Chair: Sujatha Fernandes (Sociology)

  • Anahí Douglas* (English)
    “African American Ex-pats and Exiles in Mexico”
  • Aídah Gil* (History)
    “Arthur, Arturo, and the Archive: A History of a Historical Imagination”
  • Abigail Lapin* (Art History)
    “Afro-Brazilian Art, Architecture and the Civil Rights Movement in Brazil, 1960s-80s”
  • Rocío Gil Martínez de Escobar* (Anthropology)
    “Bordering States, Bordering Race: Afro-Indigenous Struggles for Recognition in the Coahuila-Texas Borderland”

C203 — The Performances of Citizenship and National Belonging

Chair: Eric Lott (English)

  • Devora Geller* (Musicology)
    “Mamele on the Yiddish Stage and Screen”
  • Sissi Liu* (Theatre)
    “Monkey King Performances as Alternative Discourse of Asian Americanness”
  • Kristin Moriah* (English)
    “Dark Stars of the Evening: Performances of African American Citizenship and Identity in Germany, 1890-1930″
  • Melissa Phruksachart* (English)
    “Cherry Blossoms in Bryant Park: Mediating Asiatic Racialization on Cold War Television”
  • Hallie Scott* (Art History)
    “The Driftwood Village and the Truckin’ University: Experimental Architecture Education on the West Coast, c. 1970″

C205 — The Long Project of Abolition & Black Radical Resistance

Chair: Donald Robotham (Anthropology)

  • Laura Bini Carter* (Anthropology)
    “Embodied & Inscribed—Gwoka: Guadeloupan Social Movement and UNESCO Immaterial Heritage of France”
  • Sean Gerrity* (English)
    “Uncovering the Literature and History of U.S. Slave Marronage: An Archival Study in Virginia and North Carolina”
  • Timothy M. Griffiths* (English)
    “Other Black Households: The Archives of Queer Black Affective Formations”
  • Lydia Pelot-Hobbs* (Earth & Environmental Sciences, Geography)
    “The Consolidation of the Louisiana Carceral State, 1970-1995″
  • Wendy Tronrud* (English)
    “Buried Alive: Researching William Walker and Thomas Gaines”

C201 — Lost and Found

Chair: Ammiel Alcalay (English)

  • Lauren Bailey‡ (English)
  • Philip Griffith‡ (French)
  • Gabrielle Kappes‡ (English)
  • Kai Krienke‡ (Comparative Literature)
  • Megan Paslawski‡ (English)
  • Alex Wermer-Colan‡ (English)

Break — 1:15-1:30pm

NYC Archivists Roundtable — 1:30-2:30pm

Elebash Recital Hall

Welcoming Remarks by President Chase Robinson

Chair: Polly Thistlethwaite, Chief Librarian CUNY Graduate Center

Panelists:

Reception — 2:30-3:30pm

Elebash Lobby

* ARC Archival Research Grant Recipients

Names marked with an asterisk (*) received research funding through the ARC Knickerbocker Archival Research Grant in American Studies or the ARC Archival Research Grant in African American and African Diaspora Studies.

Additional grant recipients not listed above:

  • Vanessa Burrows (History)
    “The Medicalization of Stress: Hans Selye and the Transformation of the Postwar Medical Marketplace”
  • Omar Ramadan-Santiago (Anthropology)
    Performing the Third Race: Rastafari and the Racial Imagination in Puerto Rico

† Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant Recipients

Names marked with a dagger (†) received funding through the Provost’s Digital Innovations Grant Program for the 2013-14 academic year.

‡Lost & Found Stipend Recipients

Names marked with a double dagger (‡) received funding through the Center for the Humanities Lost & Found Stipend Program for the 2013-14 year.

‘I own I love the vegitable world extremly’: The Gender of Genre and Women’s Natural History Writing, 1688-1808

View Diana Epelbaum’s (English) presentation from the Graduate Center Archival Research Conference.

Diana Epelbaum

English Ph.D. Program
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Presented at the First Graduate Center Archival Research Conference
September 6, 2014

View Original on Prezi