The present work of Naomi Schiller, associate professor of anthropology at CUNY's Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, rises to meet climate change struggle by focusing on her own neighborhood of the Lower East Side, Manhattan. I first heard about Professor Schiller's work through the the Center for the Humanities' Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research for which we were both fellows in the "blue humanities." This past semester, I had the privilege to sit down with Professor Schiller and learn more about her approach to climate activism, which blends academic scholarship with community organizing. -Eric Dean Wilson
On the 30th of March, the exhibition, “Inter-Rituals: Between Materiality and Performances” took place at the Caelum Gallery in Chelsea. Curated by Jin Wang, Ph.D. student in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, the exhibition featured works by three Chinese female artists working in the US, Kun Hong, Yin Zhang, and Yinglun Zhang. Hui Peng and Dohyun Gracia Shin, both Ph.D. candidates in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center, reviewed the three performances on the opening night of the exhibition.
The Letters of Rosemary and Bernadette Mayer, 1976–1980 documents a connection between sisters. But further, it documents a period of unrivaled intellectual exchange between them, where physical distance from one another and major periods of personal artistic development conspired to produce letters that were vulnerable, adventurous, and inspired. Editors Gillian Sneed and Marie Warsh spoke with me about how the project developed, how the letters served the Mayers as a means of both communication and creative practice, and how they serve readers as documents of pivotal moments for late 70s art and literary history.
The breadth and depth of our environmental crises encourages us to think beyond the bounds of traditional academic disciplines. As part of our series exploring the Environmental Humanities, Claire Donato and Audrey Lindsey discuss Speculating the Environment, their new seminar at Pratt, which invites collaboration between the arts, humanities, and sciences as a way to imagine radically new perspectives on and relationships to climate change.
Vanessa S. Troiano, a Ph.D.
candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, reflects upon working with American artist Susan Weil to document her nearly
40-year practice of synthesizing art and poetry into daily poemumbles. Supported by an archival
grant from Lost
& Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Troiano’s research
forms part of her dissertation, “Susan Weil: Artistic Trailblazer,” the
first scholarly monograph
to survey Weil’s career.
Celina Su is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies—through which she anchors the Gittell Urban Studies Collective—and an Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York. This interview was conducted by Kendra Sullivan.
For the first of a series of essays exploring the environmental humanities, Eric Dean Wilson reflects on his experience as the writer-in-residence at the University of Bern’s 2022 Transhumanities Summer School, themed “The Ecological Imperative.” Meeting artists and scholars who were similarly concerned with how the humanities might play its part in progressive climate action, Wilson elaborates on the idea that, for the humanities to become truly environmental, it might take a total re-structuring of the disciplines.
In this post, Mindscapes Graduate Research Assistants Helena Najm, Nawal Muradwij, Dunni Oduyemi, and Alexandra Rego discuss the event they organized with Kamau Ware, a storyteller and founder of the Black Gotham Experience, in May 2022. The event was organized as part of the Center's collaboration on Mindscapes, Wellcome's international cultural program on mental health and well being.
In this essay, artist/translator/educator Marina Romani details her experience translating the poem ‘Route 1095’ by CUNY faculty member Celina Su, a longtime collaborator of the Center for the Humanities and the Lost and Found series. Romani details translation as a site of friendship and sociality, and as a way to interrogate one’s position in a globalized world. As Romani writes, “Our collaboration is a way to highlight margins and subtexts of our cultural and linguistic experiences. It’s a way to live across / with rather than in / on, to inhabit a different kind of belonging.”
Wrapping up her role as Writer-in-Residence at Distributaries, Queenie Sukhadia meditates on who the ‘public’ in ‘public humanities’ is, and how we might go about identifying the many publics our work addresses.
Mindscapes researchers Helena Najm and Dunni Oduyemi speak with teens at the Brooklyn Museum about their experience developing a Healing Room to accompany Guadalupe Maravilla’s Tierra Blanca Joven exhibition.
Lost & Found Editor Ammiel Alcalay interviews Lost & Found Editor Mary Catherine Kinniburgh on the origins and journey from CUNY Graduate Center student and Lost & Found scholar to her present position as partner with Granary Books—and the book that she wrote along the way. Her new book Wild Intelligence: Poets' Libraries and the Politics of Knowledge in Postwar America published by UMass Press in collaboration with Lost & Found Elsewheretakes up case studies of four poets and their libraries: Charles
Olson, Diane di Prima, Gerrit Lansing, and Audre Lorde.
Archives in Common
is a collaborative project radically situated in the space-time of the
pandemic as it has been lived in the South Bronx. The project and
website can be thought of as a living archive of mutual aid initiatives
and other collaborative and creative efforts devised since April 2020 by
the Saavedras, an undocumented immigrant family of Mixtec origins. Conceptually, “Archives in Common”
has sought to answer: How does one create an archive in common that is
consistent with the mutual aid ethics, especially during a pandemic? This has been our guiding question for the past two years—and
continues to be.
Michelle Fine, co-founder of the Public Science Project at The Graduate Center, speaks with Queenie Sukhadia about about the work that the Public Science Project does, Critical Participatory Action Research as an epistemology shaping publicly engaged research commitments, as well as how the task of collaborating with communities demands researchers to center their accountabilities.
Linda Martín Alcoff, co-director of the Mellon Public Humanities Program at Hunter College, speaks with Queenie Sukhadia about encouraging students to think about publicly engaged work early in their educational trajectories, while also emphasizing that publicly engaged humanities projects are not necessarily funnels into graduate school.
Anne Valk, Executive Director of the American Social History Project, speaks with Queenie Sukhadia about ASHP’s mission and work, oral history as a public humanities methodology, and how public humanities centers have navigated the climate of perpetual austerity.
Rosamond King, Director of the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College speaks with Queenie Sukhadia about her goals for the institute, the mission undergirding their work, as well as Dr. King’s own public practice—as scholar, teacher, leader and poet.
In anticipation of the 2022 Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival which takes place Friday, March 18th to Sunday March 20th, and is now in its third year, organizer and creative director Leah Batstone offers an update on Ukraine's musical landscape since the inaugural Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival in 2020.
In this conversation with Queenie Sukhadia, PublicsLab Director Stacy Hartman and Faculty Lead Bianca Williams discuss how they are working to transform doctoral education to be more publicly engaged, as well as the meaning and role of public humanities within CUNY and beyond.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Eric Dean Wilson, author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort, and Teaching Fellow in the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research through the Center for Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Eric gave insight on the fascinating intersections of environmental humanities, discussing his recently published book from conception through publication.
Kendra Sullivan, Director of the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research, speaks with Queenie Sukhadia about the potentials and practices of public humanities including how they break down the binary of inside/outside academia, integrating the manifold expertise each person brings toward this work, and building institutional structures that support publicly engaged scholarship.
In this post, Mindscapes Graduate Research Assistants Helena Najm and Dunni Oduyemi introduce the Mindscapes project and the rest of their cohort at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Author, researcher, administrator, and educator, Katina L. Rogers, and Queenie Sukhadia discuss the public humanities as ways of listening to and amplifying ongoing engagement, understanding the architecture of academic systems and structures, and creating possibilities for graduate students to envision alternative career paths.
In this blog post, Aurash Khawarzad describes a creative mapping project, The Public Humanities Map, which charts the scope and relationships among publicly engaged humanities work across CUNY and our Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.
