Announcements
Future MELUS conferences
The Executive Committee is currently seeking proposals for hosting MELUS conferences in 2007, 2008, 2009, and beyond.
If you are interested in hosting a conference please send an email to President, Fred Gardaphe at Fgardaphe@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
Interested parties will receive a copy of the Society’s conference guidelines, and will be expected to present a written proposal (details are in the guidelines) to the Executive Committee at either the annual MELUS conference Executive Committee meeting or at the annual MELUS MLA meeting.
THE PHILIP V. CANNISTRARO SEMINAR SERIES IN ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES
& WRITERS READ SERIES Fall 2005
The John D. Calandra Italian American Institute is a university-wide
institute under the aegis of Queens College of The City University
of New York.
PETER G. VELLON, PH.D., Acting Executive Director, THE PHILIP V.
CANNISTRARO SEMINAR SERIES IN ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2005
"Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America"
Thomas J. Ferraro, Duke University
On the cover of Thomas Ferraro's new book "Feeling Italian: The Art
of Ethnicity in America" (New York University Press), there is a
striking black-and-white photograph of a cook, his back to the
camera, in a restaurant window on Broadway, circa 1937. The cook,
classically dressed, holds up a generous fork of spaghetti, brightly
illuminated, lifting it to a crowd gathered in wonder - inviting
them to partake as if it were the Eucharist. Ferraro will present
this virtuoso image (so stereotypical yet so resonant) of the
Italian-American way with ethnicity, prefiguring his book while
urging his audience to join him in (debating) the vernacular style
of love-and-irony that he calls "feeling Italian."
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2005
"The Land of the Future: Changes in Italian Perceptions of São
Paulo, Brazil as an Immigrant Destination, 1880-1930" David Aliano,
CUNY Graduate Center
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some Italians
perceived São Paulo, Brazil as a vast land of the future promising
wealth and prosperity, while others saw a backward wilderness run by
cruel fazendeiros (coffee planters) who treated immigrants no better
than their former slaves. Ph.D. candidate in history David Aliano
discusses the national debate over immigration to São Paulo by
Italian government officials, journalists, and travel writers, and
the ways those perceptions changed over time as a result of
political and economic developments in both Italy and Brazil.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2005
The Buried Treasures of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Jack Zipes,
University of Minnesota
Although most folklorists are aware of the significance of the
Brothers Grimm collection of German folk and fairy tales that are
revered (wrongly) as models of folk narrative, most scholars are
unaware that the true treasures of the nineteenth century lie in
Sicily. Not only did a Swiss German woman by the name of Laura
Gonzenbach publish a highly significant collection titled Sicilian
Folk Tales in 1870, recently translated into English by Jack Zipes
("Beautiful Angiola: The Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy
Tales" and "Robber With a Witch's Head: More Stories from the Great
Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales," Routledge), but Giuseppe
Pitrè, perhaps the most brilliant folklorist, published four volumes
of extraordinary folk tales in Sicilian dialect, "Fiabe, novelle e
racconti popolari siciliani" (1875). Zipes will discuss the
importance of these collections for international folklore studies
and how difficult it is to capture their "original" meanings in
English translation. This lecture is co-sponsored by Arba Sicula.
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2005
The Mafia in the Mind of America: Attraction and Repulsion of a
Media Image George De Stefano, Independent Scholar
As evidenced in countless novels, films, and television portrayals,
the mafia has maintained an enduring hold on the American cultural
imagination, even as it continues to wrongly color our perception of
real-life Italian Americans. George De Stefano, reading from his new
book "An Offer We Can't Refuse: The Mafia In The Mind of America"
(Faber and Faber), explores how these representations illuminate the
allure of mafia stories, while discussing the rich cultural details
contained in the works. He also addresses the lamentable extent to
which the "goodfella" cliché makes it all but impossible to produce
media projects about the Italian American experience not set in
gangland.
WRITERS READ SERIES
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2005
Victoria Lancelotta reads from her novel "Far" (Counterpoint).
"Far" is a haunting exploration of what it means for a woman to be
alone in her family, her house and her body, even as they hem her
in. Martha is single, in her early 30s, and has lived in Baltimore
all her life. She is late to do what people expect her to do - marry
and have children - and is instead involved with Edward, a man
chosen precisely because she believes that he expects none of these
things from her. When she begins to suspect otherwise, she accepts a
new job in the small-town South. Martha yearns to be free of the
sense of having disappointed her family - and just about everyone.
But the ache for resolution proves too strong. As Martha discovers a
growing intimacy between Edward and her sister, she is forced to
take responsibility for her isolation.
"Quite how Victoria Lancelotta manages to combine icy precision and
fiery passion as she explores her heroine's dark journey is a
mystery but the result is absolutely clear. "Far" is an exquisite
novel full of suspense and a spare, mysterious beauty."
- Margot Livesey
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2005
Paola Corso reads her collection of short stories "Giovanna's 86
Circles and Other Stories" (University of Wisconsin Press).
The ten magical stories in Paola Corso's collection are primarily
set in Pittsburgh area river towns, where Italian American women and
girls draw from their culture and folklore to bring life and a sense
of wonder to a seemingly barren region of the Rust Belt. Each story
catapults the ordinary into something original and unpredictable.
Quirky and profound, Corso's magical leaps uncover the everyday
poetry of these Italian American women's lives.
"Corso mixes myth and reality, fable and grit to illustrate the
beauty, the power, and the necessity of storytelling. She makes a
major contribution to the growing body of female Italian American
literature."
- Rita Ciresi
All events are FREE.
Presentations begin at 6:30 pm.
Light refreshments will be served.
Seating is limited.
Building management has initiated a new policy for people attending
events after business hours.
You must PRE-REGISTER with the Calandra Institute by calling (212)
642-2094.
You will need to show a photo ID to the building's concierge.
The John D. Calandra Italian American Institute is located at 25
West 43rd Street on the 17th floor between Fifth Avenue and Sixth
Avenue in Manhattan.
www.qc.edu/calandra
From: Makowsky, Veronica veronica.makowsky@uconn.edu ; Geoffrey Claroni, Esq. gclaroni@forbin.qc.edu
ATTN faculty who may be teaching a Native Studies or related course.
We have recently completed a documentary for the Life Network and now have it available for sale. The documentary deals with an Aboriginal man that was taken away from his parents at the age of 5 from a reserve in Saskatchewan by the Children's Aid Society and placed into foster care-part of the "60's scoop". Also covered is his birth mothers experience of attending a residential school. I have enclosed 2 preview links and a .pdf copy of our press release for your perusal. The film was recently featured at the Native Film Festival at the Alaskan Native Heritage Centre in Anchorage, Alaska and a silver award at the Houston Worldfest.. All videos come with onsite PPR.
http://www.novamulti.com/RedRoad-preview-1.wmv || http://www.novamulti.com/RedRoad-preview-2.wmv
ORDER FORM (PDF format) From: Dan Petrusich info@novamulti.com
ACEE Task Force on Multiethnic Courses and Pedagogy Survey
Dear Colleagues,
The MELUS (Multiethnic Literatures of the U.S.) ACEE (Action
Committee for Equity in Education) Task Force on Multiethnic
Courses and Pedagogy has devised a survey to assess the
current climate on university and college campuses for
instructors. It is focused on issues affecting faculty color
and those who teach courses that address issues of race,
gender, ethnicity as well as those who include politicized
content into their classes.
It is our goal to generate data that will help faculty
members address issues regarding teaching evaluations,
course content, academic freedom, and other important
matters of concern to the profession. Thus, there are some
questions of a personal nature (ethnicity, citizenship,
religion) which we think are important as we try to assess
how particular faculty are evaluated by students and
departments. Your particular responses and any information
you provide us will be kept in strict confidence. We will
publish only general results, and as soon as we have
codified that data, your individual survey responses will be
destroyed and will not be stored in any form. We greatly
appreciate your help with this project.
Please click on the link below to take the survey.
http://surveypro.boisestate.edu/surveys/melus/
It may also be accessed through the MELUS website (see link
below in signature). Although the survey is geared towards
people who teach in English or American studies departments,
we would love to have people outside these disciplines take
part in this survey as well. Please feel free to share this
link! with your colleagues.
Best,
Marcy Newman
Dr. Marcy J. Knopf-Newman
Fulbright Scholar, 2005-2006
Amman, Jordan
marcynewman@mac.com
FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR PROGRAM
Applications continue to be accepted for some Fulbright Scholar awards for U.S. faculty in American literature to abroad during the 2006-2007 academic year. Opportunities include awards in Bangladesh, Chad, Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Madagascar, Nepal, Niger, and Syria.
Visit our website at
www.cies.org <http://www.cies.org/> and contact the relevant program officer for more information. For awards in Africa consult Debra Egan (degan@cies.iie.org), and for awards in Bangladesh, Nepal or Syria consult Gary Garrison (ggarrison@cies.iie.org).Added November 2005
Class
in the Classroom:
Center
for Working-Class Studies
Despite new attention to class in American
culture, it often remains on the sidelines in the classroom, even in
courses that focus on diversity and inequality. Faculty struggle to
find the right balance among race, gender, sexuality, and other
aspects of culture and inequality, and even basic definitions of
class are not clear. In teaching about difference and inequality,
class is both an essential piece of the puzzle and the most
confusing issue to discuss. Where does class fit in the
curriculum? What resources and strategies work well to help
students understand how class works? How can we integrate class
into discussions of race, gender, and sexuality?
In July, 2006, the Center for Working-Class
Studies will host a one-week institute for graduate students and
faculty interested in strategies for teaching about social class,
especially in the context of courses that address other cultural
categories and ideas about inequality. Participants will discuss
readings, presentations, and resources; share their own experiences
and strategies; and develop assignments, syllabi, classroom
activities, and/or research plans. The organizers hope to gather a
diverse group, including faculty and students from different
academic fields, geographical areas, and kinds of institutions.
For more information, visit the Center for Working-Class Studies website at www.as.ysu.edu/~cwcs, and click on “Class in the Classroom.”
American Literature Association 17th Annual Conference
American Literature Association 17th Annual Conference will be held on May 25-28 in Hyatt Regency, San Francisco. MELUS will be represented by two panels. One will be on ethnic graphic narratives, whose CFP will be issued soon by Derek Royal. The other one will be open in topic. Please send me a 250 word abstract for consideration before January 10, 2006.
Many thanks,
Wenying
Wenying Xu, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431, (561) 297-2065, wxu@fau.edu
CSA conference (April 19-22, 2006)
The CSA conference (April 19-22, 2006) will again feature a series of seminars. Seminars are small-group (maximum 15 individuals) discussion sessions for which participants write brief ''position" papers that are circulated prior to the conference. Those interested in participating in (rather than leading) a seminar should consult the list of seminars below.
In order to participate in a seminar, send an email message to csaus@pitt.edu with "Seminar Request" in the subject line. Your message should list up to two seminars, ranked in order of preference, in which you would like to participate. (Note: You will be allowed to participate in only one seminar.) Your message should also include your name, contact information, and institutional affiliation.
Seminar requests should be sent by November 25, 2005. You will be notified of your seminar assignment by December 20, 2005.
SEMINARS FOR CSA CONFERENCE, APRIL 2006
#1 - Proposed Seminar: "Cultural Studies as Cultural Praxis: Reshaping the Research University"
Seminar Description: How can we better connect academic and community-based cultural work? This seminar is designed for participants interested in discussing and critically assessing current efforts to develop and institutionalize cultural studies curricula oriented toward diverse forms of cultural praxis. We are particularly interested in hearing about initiatives aimed at building sustainable arts and cultural pathways for campus-community partnerships ? including community and participatory action research strategies, arts and performance-based research projects, and service learning or other experiential pedagogies. We are also centrally interested in the implications of this type of activist scholarship for the future of cultural research in (and outside of) institutions of higher education, and in appraisals of the current neo-liberal policy landscape that enables and encourages this institutional shift in research and teaching priorities.
The co-moderators of this seminar are involved in developing and institutionalizing community-based public humanities and cultural studies graduate curricula at the University of Washington. We envision this seminar as an opportunity to learn more about related initiatives elsewhere and to open a conversation about this type of work to participants who may not be currently involved in such initiatives (and/or may be skeptical about them). We hope to conclude with suggestions for further collaboration among the seminar participants, as appropriate.
Seminar Requirements: Seminar participants will be asked to read three short essays (by Stuart Hall, Ien Ang, and Handel Wright) and to provide a brief (2-3 page) written response in which they raise one or more central questions or concerns. Ideally, these responses should balance a critical assessment of the readings and a description of the participant's institutional experience (if any) with praxis-oriented forms of cultural studies scholarship. The questions and concerns raised in the responses will serve as a jumping-off point for our discussion.
Response papers should be sent to the seminar moderators by March 21st, and will be distributed to all seminar participants by April 1st. The seminar moderators will also develop and circulate a summary of key questions and concerns raised in these response papers.
Seminar moderators' names and contact info:
Miriam Bartha, , Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington, Box 353710, Communication Building, Suite 206, Seattle, Washington 98195-3710, mbartha@u.washington.edu, 206-543-3929
Bruce Burgett, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program University of Washington Box 358530, 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA 98011-8246, burgett@u.washington.edu, 425-352-5403
Brief bios of the seminar moderators:
Miriam Bartha joined the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington in 2004 as Assistant Director, having earned her Ph.D. in American Literature from Rutgers University in 2002. She has taught literary, cultural, and feminist studies at Rutgers and San Francisco State Universities. She previously worked as an administrator at the P.E.N. American Center, an international nonprofit writers' advocacy organization based in New York, as coordinator of the Poetry and the Public Sphere series at Rutgers, and as project manager for the electronic archiving of HOW(ever), a historic journal of feminist experimental writing. In 2005, she co-directed (with Bruce Burgett) the Simpson Center's "Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students."
Bruce Burgett is Professor of American and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program at the University of Washington-Bothell (UWB), and graduate faculty in the English Department at the University of Washington-Seattle. He co-directed the "Placing the Humanities: New Locales, New Meanings" tri-campus faculty development workshop series in 2004-2005, currently co-directs the follow-up activities of the "Cultural Studies Praxis Collective," and is involved in developing a community-based M.A. in Cultural Studies at UWB (planned to begin in 2007). He is the author of Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton, 1998), and is working on two books: American Sex: Cultures of Sexual Reform in and Beyond the Antebellum U.S. (Chicago) and Keywords of American Cultural Studies (NYU, co-edited with Glenn Hendler). He has taught, researched, and published widely in the fields of American Studies, Cultural Studies, and Queer Studies. He serves on the editorial boards of American Quarterly and American Literary History.
#2 - Proposed Seminar: Seminar on Biopower
The paradigm of biopower first elaborated by Michel Foucault has gained steadily as a means for thinking simultaneously a host of vital political and cultural issues: race and sexuality, empire and globalization, governmentality and the state, post-humanism and eco- politics, technoscience and human capital. The goal of this seminar will be to compare different applications of, and problematics raised by, the biopower analytics. Participants should re-read one of the following texts in preparation for the seminar: Foucault's The History of Sexuality (Volume One), Foucault's Society Must Be Defended, Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer, or another major theoretical statement. Participants will also be asked to share 2-3 page abstracts for whatever research project brings them to the question of biopower (if they have such a project). We will aim to move back and forth between our theoretical readings and the research projects with the aim of generating a deeper knowledge of what is at stake (and also what are the risks) in bringing this model to bear on our respective objects of critical inquiry.
Leerom Medovoi, Associate Professor of English, Portland State University, medovoi@pdx.edu
#3 - Proposed Seminar: Beyond Biopolitics: bodies affect and media
The seminar will explore what Michel Foucault described as 'the demonic mix' of biopolitics and sovereignty to rethink bodies, affect and media. By weaving together theories of 'new media' and 'biomedia' that have been deeply influenced by Gilles Deleuze among others, we will explore the status of political economy, ideological analysis, semiotics, the concepts of culture and language in and for critical theory. We will draw out the relationship between digital video technologies (database, compositing, surround sound, digital animation, and digital 'proprioception') and entertainment (video games, TV shows, blockbuster cinema, websites). We will take as a larger context the fraught connectivities developing between homeland security, the encrypted security of biomedia, entertainment and racism as exemplified in counter/terrorism, mass incarceration, war and massacre.
Amit S. Rai, Department of English, Florida State University, Williams 226, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580, Office: 850-645-1459, Fax: 850-644-0811
Patricia Ticneto Clough, Sociology and Women's Studies, The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, New York 10016, 212 817 8896
Updated September 2005
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