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An event with the author of an important new book on criminal justice!

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MA student Mutale Nkonde published in Misinformation Review

Check out this fascinating research undertaken by MA student Mutale Nkonde about disinformation tactics deployed on Black voters in social media contexts...

#american studies #digital study

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MA Alum Nwakego Nwasike on panel with Columbia Faculty on “Systemic Racism”

Friday, September 25, 2020 8:00pm EST on Zoom.

Registration required.

"Isaac Waddell and Isabel Wilkerson"

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor

in conversation with

Yosan Alemu, CC'21

Nwakego Nwasike, Alumna, American Studies at CSER

moderated by

Brent Hayes Edwards, Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature.

#american studies #ethnic studies

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Recent Publications by MA program students and alums...

A number of current and former students have published work recently that touches on American Studies subjects.

Bud-Erdene Gankhuyag has written an excellent piece about the contradiction between US reliance on Asian American care-workers and anti-Asian racism in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic for the Asian American / Asian Research Institute at CUNY.

Tiffany Babb has started as a comics reviewer at A.V. Club, where she’ll continue to write with keen insight into the young adult culture of graphic novels. “Sometimes it only takes a misunderstanding to change your life...”

Last but not least, John Bohn just published an excellent round-up of recent academic texts about racial capitalism for the Columbia Journal, to help contextualize the recent uprising against police violence.

#american studies #publish #writing

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Upcoming Talks at the University Seminar in American Studies...

The University Seminar in American Studies will be meeting online through the fall, so look to this space for links to our sessions. As in previous years, we have invited scholars from a range of fields and disciplines associated with American Studies, to present works-in-progress in a collaborative context. We have sought to include people who are just starting out in their careers as well as those with established research records. It is an urgent moment to consider the contradictions of American culture and history, so we hope very much that you’ll join us at our upcoming meetings. Mark your calendars!

Fall:

9/22 - Westenley Alcenet is an assistant professor of History at Fordham University. His research focuses on the early Black Atlantic, abolitionism, and Reconstruction, especially narratives of African-American emigration to Haiti. His academic writing has appeared in The Journal of Haitian Studies and Politics, Religion and Ideology. He has written public historical commentary at The Root, The Immanent Frame, Black Perspectives, and Jacobin.

10/20 - Sarah Blackwood is associate professor of English at Pace University and author of The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (UNC, 2019). She is co-editor of the “Avidly Reads” short book series with NYU Press, and editor of the Penguin Classics centennial edition of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, The Hairpin, and the Los Angeles Review of Books as well as American Literature, the Henry James Review, and MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States.

11/17 - Julio Capo Jr. is associate professor of History at Florida International University and author of Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (UNC, 2017). His research centers on  the United States’s relationship to the Caribbean and Latin America, and especially how gender and sexuality have historically intersected with constructions of ethnicity, race, class, nation, age, and ability. His work has appeared in the Journal of American History, Radical History Review, Diplomatic History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Modern American History, GLQ, H-Net, American Studies, and several volumes.

12/8 - Diane Detournay is a lecturer in English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University and is currently working on a book manuscript titled “Feminism, Race, and the Category of ‘Woman’: The Civilizational Architecture of Women's Rights.” Her work has appeared in academic journals such as Parallax and Transgender Studies Quarterly as well as several anthologies.

Spring:

1/26 - Sasha Panaram is assistant professor of English at Fordham University. She received her Ph.D. in English from Duke University in 2020. Her research, which focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century African American and Caribbean literature, brings together discourses in slavery studies, Black feminisms, and geography studies. Her writing has been published in The Black Scholar.

2/23 - Autumn Womack is assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. Womack’s research is located at the intersection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literary culture, visual studies, and print culture. She is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled "Un-discipling Data: Race, Visuality, and the Making of African American Literary Aesthetics, 1880-1930." Her writing has been published in Black Camera, American Literary History, Women and Performance, J19, and The Paris Review.

3/23 - Howard Rambsy II is a professor of literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where he teaches courses on American and African American literature. He has written articles and curated mixed media exhibits focusing on literary history, poetry, and the intersections of race and technology. He is the author of two books, The Black Arts Enterprise (Michigan, 2011) and Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers (Virginia, 2020). His writing has appeared in a number of academic journals, including American Studies, The Mississippi Quarterly, The African American Review, Southern Quarterly, the Journal of Ethnic American American Literature, MELUS, and the PMLA.

4/20 -Benjamin Balthaseris associate professor of English and author of Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Michigan, 2015). His research focuses on the relationships among social movements, racial identity, and cultural production. His critical and creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and publications such as American Quarterly, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Reconstruction, Criticism, In These Times, Cultural Logic, Minnesota Review, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.

#american studies

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M.A. Grads Starting Ph.D. Programs This Fall...

Several of the M.A. program’s recent graduates are starting at Ph.D. programs in the fall...

Rojeen Harsini will head off to the University of Southern California’s Ph.D. program in American Studies and Ethnicity, where she’ll continue work she began here on relations between the U.S. and Iran, and especially on the Persian community in Southern California. 

Tim Barnicle will go to Harvard’s African American Studies Ph.D. program, where he’ll work on anti-Black racism in contemporary conservative political media.

Andrew Hernandez will also start at U.S.C. in the History Ph.D. program, where he’ll explore in particular the history of Latino suburbs, as well as continuing his research on ethnic student activism in higher education.

Finally, Molly Harris will start this fall at Yale University, also in the History Ph.D. program, where she’ll expand her research on the politics of public health in Southern and Appalachian communities. 

We at CSER are very grateful to have gotten to see these exceptional students’ work at its inception and we wish them best of luck! 

#americanstudies #phd #history

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#asian american studies #american studies #comedy #ethnic studies

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“Translating Blackness”

a talk by Lorgia García Peña

Tuesday, February 11

754 Schermerhorn Extension

Columbia University

6pm - 8pm

cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the Institute for Research in African American Studies

--------------------------------

What historical, cultural, and intellectual processes explain the transnational migration of blackness through other ethno-racial identifications since the nineteenth century?

How do these communities of color translate hegemonic terms into networks of inclusion that can help them challenge the colonial legacies of oppression?

Join CSER and IRAAS in welcoming professor Lorgia García Peña as she presents Afro-Latinidad as a framework for understanding the historical intersections of race, ethnicity, migration, and citizenship that have led to the present-day production of minoritized citizens of color.

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Stan Thangaraj on Kurdish American Youth Culture!

The Columbia University Seminar in American Studies presents... "Evoking 'Woman' in Kurdish Diasporas: Managing Racializations and Performing Kurdish Identity."

A talk by Stanley Thangaraj, City College of New York February 25, 2020

7:30-9pm Columbia University Faculty House

(64 Morningside Drive, New York, NY 10027)

Abstract:

My newest project is on Kurdish diasporas in Nashville, TN and the northeastern United States.  In particular, I discuss the gendered dynamics of the racialization of refugee Muslim women while accounting for how their own epistemologies aid in their negotiation of their racialization, state violence, the global war on terror, and histories of colonialism.  In particular, I am interested in understanding how both Kurdish diasporas in the United States and a wide set of political and non-political entities (such as nation-states and NGOs) engage with interpellations of the “Muslim woman” and “Kurdish woman.”    I want to actively decipher how this category of “woman” is put to use by a variety of parties with different, sometimes common, and very contradictory interests.  Kurdish diasporas emphasize the difference between how women are treated in Kurdish cultures versus Islamic cultures, which is part of their strategy for statehood that is useful during this period of the global war on terror.  By underscoring Islam and femininity as a point of foregrounding Kurdish-ness, Kurdish diasporas create the contours of Kurdish identity by depicting Islam and Arab societies as backward, uncivilized, and violent.  It is both a way to navigate histories of Arab state violence, a way to make indigenous claims to the land and to their rights as rightful heirs to the land, and a way to engage with the dominant racial cartographies in the United States.  To manage their own racializations, they racialize Arab societies and Arab states through race, religion, gender, and ethnicity.  Instead of centering race as just between west/non-west, my paper highlights how race and its colonial logics operate in West Asian/Middle Eastern diasporic communities where one’s notion of “womanhood” is not centered by western epistemologies and western femininities.  

Speaker Bio:

Stanley Thangaraj is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the City College of New York (CUNY).  His interests are at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.  He studies immigrant and refugee communities in the U.S. South to understand how they manage the black-white racial logic through gender.  His monograph Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity (NYU Press, 2015) looks at the relationship between race and gender in co-ethnic-only South Asian American sporting cultures.  His newest research is on Kurdish America which received the 2015 American Studies Association “Comparative Ethnic Studies” award.  

Please note:

If you would like to attend, please make sure to RSVP to the seminar rapporteur, Rebecca Stout ([email protected]). It is necessary to RSVP even if you are attending the talk only, since rooms are assigned based on the expected number of attendees. Below, please find the schedule for the 2019-20 Columbia University Seminar on American Studies, co-chaired by Matt Sandler (Ethnic Studies, Columbia) and James Kim (English, Fordham): September 17 - Tim August (Stony Brook University) October 15 - Karen Inouye (Indiana University, Bloomington) November 19 - Ezra Tawil (University of Rochester) December 3 - Paul Nadal (Princeton University) January 28 - Angela Reyes (Hunter College) February 25 - Stan Thangaraj (City College of New York) March 24 - Ben Balthaser (Indiana University, South Bend) April 21 - Sarah Blackwood (Pace University)

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“‘Til Victory is Won” at Brooklyn Public Library, Oct. 26th

Hi all, 

So I helped organize on this extraordinary event at the Brooklyn Public Library coming up this Saturday, October 26th, centered on the history and legacy of slavery, with the goal of supplementing the blindspots of conventional history curricula through lectures and performances... 

Come check it out!!! 

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MA student Sam Davis directs a documentary film...

A student in the program, Sam Davis, is screening his documentary on campus next week. Go check it out and support!  

"In Our Own Words: On Being Trans at Smith" 

Directed by Sam Davis

October 17th, 6pm 

Barnard's Sloate Media Center (Milstein 1)

Join Ratrock in collaboration with the Sloate Media Center for a screening of In Our Own Words: On Being Trans at Smith, an auto-ethnographic documentary directed by Sam Davis. The film will be followed by a Q&A panel with trans and non-binary CU/BC students: Aydan Shahd, Galen Hawkins, Spencer Douglas, and Sabina Jones--moderated by Sam Davis. Film Description: As society’s definition of who constitutes a gender-minority evolves, how do traditionally all-female colleges decide to or not to adapt? Over the span of one year, Sam Davis (Smith '17) interviewed up to 40 current Smith students and alumni who identify as trans and/or non-binary to create the first trans archive at Smith College. This film is a collection of footage from these interviews-- it examines the relationship between Smith and their trans and non-binary students through the lens of one trans student. "In Our Own Words" asks-- how do these trans students fit into Smith’s vision of “women for the world”?How are trans students supported or unsupported by the administration and their fellow students? This film explores erasure, hypervisibility, transphobia, views about trans students within all levels of the institution, and the ongoing debate of who does and does not “belong” at Smith.

#trans #american studies #barnard #smith college

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#americanstudies #columbia #asian american studies #native studies

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Coming up tonight!

#american studies #native studies #indigenous studies

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2019-2020 Columbia University Seminar in American Studies

We have a great slate of speakers coming to visit the University Seminar in American Studies this term. All the events are at 7:30pm in the Faculty House at Columbia University, and open to the public. These are informal talks from works-in-progress, and a great opportunity for students to meet and talk to scholars about their work...

September 17 - Tim August (Stony Brook University) October 15 - Karen Inouye (Indiana University Bloomington) November 19 - Ezra Tawil (University of Rochester) December 3 - Paul Nadal (Princeton University) January 28 - Angela Reyes (Hunter College) February 25 - Stan Thangaraj (City College of New York) March 24 - Ben Balthaser (Indiana University South Bend) April 21 - Sarah Blackwood (Pace University)

#american studies #American literature #american history

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MA grads off to PhD programs!!!

The MA program in American Studies proudly congratulates three recent graduates headed to PhD programs in the fall: 

Owen Clow is headed to the History Department of Fordham University here in New York, to continue his work on the Atlanta Olympic bombing and domestic terrorism.

Brennan McDaniel is headed to the American Studies at Yale University, to continue his work on the Melungeon community of the Appalachian Mountains.

Ediz Ozelkan is headed to the Media Studies Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder, to continue his work on the hip-hop community organizing. 

We’re wishing you all the best of luck, and looking forward to hearing where your researches take you.

#american studies #phd life

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MA Student Molly Harris will present her thesis research at Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy! It’s open to the public and there’s food, come by!

#american studies #opioid crisis

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Come on by tomorrow, recent ASA president Kandice Chuh will be talking about her new book in the CSER conference room!

#american studies #asian american studies #columbia