Americanist Colloquium
The Americanist Colloquium brings together graduate students and faculty interested in exploring topics in American literature and in American Studies in general. Our scope is wide, open to all categories of critical interest and ranging, historically, from pre-Colonial America to the present. Past events have addressed questions of sovereignty, settler-colonialism, cultural studies, speculative fiction, legal studies, and more. We organize a variety of events—talks, reading groups, workshops, mini-conferences, film screenings, and symposia—with the aim of building a community involved in the relevant issues of the field today. Recent guests of the colloquium include Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Jordan Stein, Mark Rifkin, David Kazanjian, and Edlie Wong.
Past Events
Now and then, humanity shocks itself into brief moments of introspection. We think a bit about the species and the world we have collectively created. For the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, these are moments of danger in which memory flashes up to elucidate — briefly, fleetingly — the violence inherent in everything we tend to touch. Two…
Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor(2022) explores cultural productions around migrant practices that mark other ways of sensing, making sense of, and feeling time with others. Migrant subjects harness time and the imagination in their creative, life-making capacities to make communal worlds out of one steeped…
Barbara Browning is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Professor of American Studies and English and Associate Dean of the Humanities at Rutgers University. He received his BA from Williams College and His PhD in Comparative Literature from NYU.
Lyric Education as a Practice of Freedom
This talk explores the poetry and pedagogy that emerged from organizing spaces of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Voting Rights Campaign in the US South in 1963 and 1964: namely the SNCC mass meetings and Freedom Schools in Mississippi. Poetic reading practices emerging…
Assembling a Black Counter Culture
Rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown presents his forthcoming book, Assembling a Black Counter Culture, which constructs the history of techno and adjacent electronic music with a focus on Black experiences in industrialized labor systems, and explores the development of on-the-ground culture…
This event has been canceled.
Melting Modernities: Ice, Sound, and Revolutions
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
Temporal Pulsations: Tishan Hsu in New York and Shanghai
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
Frederick Douglass, New Orleans, and the Possibility of Editorship Studies
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
"Something Else You Have to Figure In: the Ethical Dilemma of Unreliable Citizenship in Morrison's Home and Jazz"
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
Speculative Pleasures, "The Archive" and a Pig Roast; Or, Who Are Obour Tanner and Cesar Lyndon
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
Black Digitality
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
Alchemy in African/American Poetry: Experimental Ekphrasis
Decolonizing Climate Justice: Indigenous Movements
Lunch will be provided.
Afro-Feminism Before Afro-Pessimism
Please contact Kimberly Bain ([email protected]) prior to talk to obtain copies of readings.
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
After the Future: Notes on Black Elegiac Feel
"The voice explaining at once formally and intimately": James Merrill's 'Cavafy' and the Poetics of Intimacy
Spies Not Like Us: Yellow Peril and the Fictions of National Security and Immigration Control
Atlantic Speculations, Quotidian Globalities
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.