Fall 2011
September 16th 2011
Remembering 9/11 - Tenth Anniversary Conference
Alexander Library, PANE Room
169 College Avenue, New Brunwick, New Jersey
9:00 AM - 4:45 PM
Some of the region’s leading experts will discuss the theoretical and practical challenges of “Remembering 9/11” during a September 16 conference at Rutgers University’s Alexander Library. The conference will feature four panels that will discuss various aspects of the tenth anniversary observations involving visual cultures, first person narratives, artifacts of memory, and the politics of memory.
September 29th 2011
Geographies of Identity Lecture Series: Racism, Real Estate, and the Economics of Black Impoverishment and White Flight
Van Dyke Hall - Room 301, College Ave Campus
4:30 PM
Beryl Satter - Professor at Rutgers-Newark
Beryl Slatter's most recent book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, investigates segregation and urban decay in 20th century America
Sept. 29th, 30th & Oct 1st
Conference of the Caribbean Philosophical Association
Shifting the Geography of Reason VIII: The University, Public Education, and the Transformation of Society
Student Center, College Campus - Sept 29th & 30th
Bloustein School of Planning and Mason Gross School for the Arts - Oct 1st
The impact and consequences of the current crisis of economic, social, and political priorities, and the social and economic models that are heavily affecting universities, public education in general, and society at large. Also covered will be the general disinvestment in the public good and the growing forces of “racial neoliberalism” and “neoapartheid” that are growing in different regions of the globe as the numbers of formerly colonized peoples and people of color increase in the global north. There will be more than sixty panels in the conference in areas such as education and epistemology, race discourse, feminism, shifting geographies, and the arts.
October 3rd 2011
Seeing Revolution: The Altered Image of War in New and Old Media
Peter Maass, War Correspondent (Washington Post, New Yorker, NY Times Magazine)
Rutgers Student Center Multi-Purpose Room
7:00-9:00 PM
Peter Maass has worked as a prizewinning war correspondent for nearly two decades, covering conflicts ranging from Bosnia to Iraq, for periodicals including the Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. He has also written two books chronicling his experiences, most recently "Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil," published by Knopf. His first book was "Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War." His talk at Rutgers will cover the evolving nature of conflict journalism, as both war and media are transformed by emerging technologies.
October 14th 2011
Disillusions: Gender & Contemporary Caribbean Art Across Borders Symposium
A symposium in conjunction with an Exhibition at the Middlesex County College Studio Theater Gallery on women artists from the Caribbean and its diasporas.
October 26th 2011
Career Night or What Can I do with an American Studies Degree?
Ruth Adams Building, Room 001, Douglass Campus
7:15 PM
“Help! I’m majoring in American Studies!” Don’t worry: your training is solid career preparation. Find out how such a degree helps make you marketable. “What are you going to do with a degree in that? Do you want to be a teacher?” If you major in American Studies, you probably hear questions like those. But there are more options than you realize, even if your career choices are not as apparent as those for students of nursing or engineering. American Studies majors have skills that are in demand—and they can qualify for many different kinds of jobs. Find out for yourself at Career Night, where we invite back actual students from past years who majored in American Studies at Rutgers, yet still found interesting, fulfilling, and rewarding careers.
October 27th 2011
Everson-Broad Daylight and Other Times
Visual Arts Department
Mason Gross School of the Arts
Room CSB110/117
4:30-6:00pm
"My films and artwork are about responding to daily materials, conditions, tasks and gestures of people of African descent. These materials, systems, tasks and gestures are repositioned through a variety of mediums such as photography, film, sculpture, artist books and paintings. The results usually have a formal reference to art history and resemble objects or images seen in working class culture. This strategy invites the work to be interpreted by a variety of communities."
--Kevin Jerome Everson
November 10th 2011
Geographies of Identities Lecture Series: Knowing Sex: A History of U.S. Sexuality and Knowledge since World War II
Van Dyke Hall - Room 301 College Ave Campus
4:30 PM
Leisa Meyer Class of 1964 Distinguished Associate Professor of American History | College of William and Mary
Leisa Meyer from the College of William and Mary, is the author of Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women's Army Corps during World War II and associate editor of the Encyclopedia of American Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History & Culture. She will be talking on her upcoming work, "Knowing Sex: A History of U.S. Sexuality and Knowledge since World War II."
November 15th 2011
Race, Ethnicity and the Right Wing
1:30pm at the CRE offices, 191 College Avenue, 1st Floor, College Avenue Campus.
A roundtable discussion featuring scholars from American Studies, History and Africana Studies, this panel will look at the role race and ethnicity play in Right-wing politics, as well as how they are mobilized by the right.
- Kathleen Belew, History/Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis
- Jefferson Decker, American Studies/Political Science
- Ann Fabian, History/American Studies
- Louis Prisock, Africana Studies/American Studies
Spring 2012
February 23, 2012
Geographies of Identity Lecture Series: Between the Magic and Edge: Queer Representation and Black Masculinity Before Stonewall.
Van Dyke Hall - Room 301 College Ave Campus
4:30 PM
Kevin Mumford Associate Professor | History | University of Iowa
Kevin Mumford's work on the intersection of race, sexuality, modernism, and urbanization is well known from his book Interzones : Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early 20th Century . His latest research is on the rise of Black gay identity and the overlap between struggles for civil rights and sexual equality, which he will be speaking and conversing on. He is also currently conducting an oral history project to incorporate Black queer contributions into the civil rights movement
February 23, 2012
Lauren Berlant - "Structures of (Un)feeling : Mysterious Skin"
Alexander Library - Teleconference Room
4.30-6pm followed by a reception
Dr. Berlant will visit Rutgers as a part of the programming of the CCA-sponsored working group "Economies of Affect" which runs during the AY 2011/12.
March 1, 2012
Disorientations: IRW Working Group Speaker Series: Cathy Schlund-Vials (University of Connecticut) Daughters of Cambodia: Genocide, Biopolitics, and Cambodian/American Life Writing
Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Buildiing Seminar Room
Reception: 4:00 pm / Lecture: 4:30 pm
Organized by Asians in the Americas and the Diaspora. Between 1975 and 1979, under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, it is estimated that 1.7 million Cambodians died as a result of execution, starvation, and forced labor, constituting roughly 21% to 25% of the extant population. Now in 2012, this history of genocide – commonly referred to as the period of “The Killing Fields” for those outside Cambodia – remains contested and unresolved. The legacy of the genocide, the absence of state-sanctioned justice, and the memory of “the Killing Fields” are primary reference points for this talk, which examines the ways in which Cambodian American life writing is rooted in political and politicized projects of genocidal remembrance. (read more)
March 22, 2012
Reception and Book Presentation by the IRW for Nancy Hewitt and Dorothy L. Hodgson
Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Building
162 Ryders Lane
4:00 P.M.
As part of its core programming, the Institute for Research on Women (IRW) organizes an interdisciplinary research seminar for faculty and graduate students based upon an annual theme. This year, the IRW is celebrating the recent publication of two anthologies produced as a result of the weekly seminar: No Permanent Waves, edited by Nancy Hewitt and Gender Culture at the Limit of Rights, edited by Dorothy L. Hodgson.
March 28, 2012
Sincerity, Cynicism and Society: Thinking about Slave Heritage in Cape Town
Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Building
Conference Room
4:30 pm
Nicola Cloete is a lecturer in the Division of Dramatic Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines the gendered memory politics in representations of slavery in post-Apartheid South Africa. She is the recipient of a Harvard South Africa Fellowship for 2011-12 where she is currently researching feminist methodologies and memory politics.
March 29, 2012
Geographies of Identity Lecture Series: Crossing the Line: The Strange Career of Guillermo Eliseo
Van Dyke hall - Room 201 College Ave Campus
4:30 PM
Kevin Mumford Associate Professor | History | University of Iowa
Kevin Mumford's work on the intersection of race, sexuality, modernism, and urbanization is well known from his book Interzones : Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early 20th Century . His latest research is on the rise of Black gay identity and the overlap between struggles for civil rights and sexual equality, which he will be speaking and conversing on. He is also currently conducting an oral history project to incorporate Black queer contributions into the civil rights movement.
April Events for Collective Asian American Scholarship
Celebrate Asian American Heritage Month, "Gaypril," and Undergraduate Research Month and join us at three exciting events in the first week of April! Everyone welcome!
Contact: Rick H. Lee | This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
April 2, 2012
Rainbow Writers Reading Series: Justin Chin
Plangere Writing Center (Murray Hall, 3rd Floor)
4:30 – 6:00 pm
Justin Chin is a queer Chinese-Malaysian American writer and performance artist. He is the author of three books of poetry: Bite Hard (1997), Harmless Medicine (2001), which was a finalist in the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Awards, and Gutted (2006), which received the Thom Gunn Award for Poetry by the Publishing Triangle. He has also written two collections of non-fiction, Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes, and Pranks (1999) and Burden of Ashes (2002). In the nineties, he created and presented seven full length solo-works as a performance artist; these pieces are collected in Attack of the Man-Eating Lotus Blossoms (2005). He recently published his first short story collection, 98 Wounds (2011). Chin was born in Malaysia, and raised and educated in Singapore. He studied in Hawaii and currently resides in San Francisco.
April 3, 2012
“Hendrix to Hip Hop: Afro-Filipino Poetics in the Work of Jessica Hagedorn and Patrick Rosal” - Martin Joseph Ponce (The Ohio State University)
Plangere Writing Center (Murray Hall, 3rd Floor)
3:00 – 6:30 pm
This talk explores literary connections between Filipinos and African Americans constructed through the medium of black music. While the history of black-Filipino contact extends at least as far back
as the Philippine-American War at the turn of the twentieth-century when African American soldiers were dispatched to fight an overseas imperialist war, I focus here on two contemporary examples:Hagedorn’s engagements with such figures and styles as Miles Davis, Motown, and Jimi Hendrix in her novel The Gangster of Love (1996), and Rosal’s uses of hip hop as a formal model in his poetry collections Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003) and My American Kundiman (2006). Neither exploiting black authenticity nor glamorizing Afro-Asian affiliation, these texts offer us rich instances of cross-racial expressive practices and social formations that fall outside of assimilationist trajectories of upward mobility and normative domesticity.
April 5, 2012
“Pinoy Posteriority” - Martin Joseph Ponce (The Ohio State University)
Institute for Reseach on Women (IRW) Disorientations Working Group Lecture Series
Mabel Smith Douglass Room, Douglass Library
4:30 – 6:00 pm
This talk converses with queer of color and queer diasporic studies by analyzing two novels—Ricardo Ramos’s Flipping (1998) and Han Ong’s The Disinherited (2004)—through the frames of racialized and neocolonial queer embodiments and temporalities. These texts pose serious challenges to some of the commonsense political values that have arisen out of critical engagements with empire and diaspora over the past two decades. Premised on critiques of colonialism, imperialism, dictatorship, and capitalist globalization, this work has explicitly and implicitly privilegeddiscourses, actors, and institutions that advance anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-capitalist movements. What do we do, then, with novels whose queer protagonists emphatically donot abide by such values and tenets? Napoleon Ramos in Flipping is an unabashedly anti-black,Filipino “bottom” living in 1970s San Francisco who single-mindedly attempts to secure a whiteAmerican “top” for a husband. Pitik Sindit in The Disinherited is a fifteen-year-old erotic dancerin 1990s Manila who similarly seeks a wealthy white older American man to ferry him away from his impoverished life to an idealized America. Rather than view them as objects of righteous scorn, I attempt to read the politics of their “wrong” desires—those that seem complicit with hegemonic forces—through the concept of “Pinoy posteriority.” Connoting a sexual position, a racial and class-coded social stratum, and a temporal marker of sexual-political regression, the term provides ananalytical framework for apprehending such subordinate subjectivities vis-à-vis the structural and affective forces that constitute them.
April 16, 2012
Project Civility Lecture - Kenji Yoshino (New York University)
Busch Campus Center Multipurpose Room
8:00 – 10:00 pm
April 18,2012
New Jersey Folk Festival Information Session
RAB 105 Douglass Campus
7:00 pm
Free pizza & information on how to join the Neew Jersey Folk Festival Team for Spring 2013.
April 25, 2012
Workshop on South Jersey Folk Art
Livingston Student Center
8:00 pm
Clarence Fennimore will be directing a training workshop for students interested in the art of duck decoy carving. At this session, students will learn about the significance and process of decoy carving and will work individually on developing, sanding, and painting ducks that may be taken home at the end of the night. Clarence says that registration is not required but that the workshop will be limited to 30 students (first come, first served).
Ruth Adams Building