25
Jul 16

CFP: I <3 Pop

I <3 Pop

An interdisciplinary conference of the PhD Program in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY

Call for Papers

Dates: November 10-11, 2016
Location: The Graduate Center, CUNY
Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2016
Keynote Speaker: TBD

“If I had to choose between the Doors and Dostoyevsky, then—of course—I’d choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?” –Susan Sontag

 

The information about the conference below has been provided by the “I <3 Pop” organizers:

 

There seems to be no end to the anxieties, fantasies, pleasures, and possibilities of pop culture—how we consume it, avoid it, appreciate it, and allow it to inform our identities.

Yet, can we theorize pop today? And if so, to what extent are we obligated to do so?

Conceptions of pop culture are marked by continuous change, constant revision, and ongoing re-appropriation. Pop can be a stabilizer of the canon, with its distinction of high and low, while also a way to subvert the canon’s very foundations through a critique of elitism. If, as Adorno argued, mass culture is a deception, an industry that reproduces passivity and perpetuates the reification of social life, is there a way to escape this repetition? Or can we conceive of pop culture as a potential space of resistance, following the work of Stuart Hall and other British Cultural studies? Furthermore, are mass culture and pop culture coterminous?

Pop culture and literary studies have maintained a sometimes-uneasy yet necessary kinship. Thus, Elizabethan popular culture becomes the foundation of the English literary canon, while ephemeral magazine columns and stories become permanent fixtures in the literary landscape. The height of modernism makes reference to “The Wasteland” of mass culture and everyday life, at the same time as it elevates the everyman to Ulysses. The pattern continues today in media forms such as TV, which now displays narrative and artistic complexity rivaling art film of international acclaim.

Twenty-first century pop culture presents new questions for consideration: who are we when we absorb or participate in pop culture? The interactive nature of our contemporary forms of pop culture promotes and engages a rhetoric of listening that may in fact imply a dialectical agency for the receiver, rather than blind consumption. However, the politics of this engagement are troubled by various global contexts of reception. Does a study of pop involve universalization and standardization that could pander to dangerous types of political populism or does it engage various registers that foster a productive sense of difference?

We invite papers and presentations from all disciplines focusing on works from any historical period and geographical region, including literature, theory, philosophy, visual arts, film, television, social sciences, technology, and alternative media. Traditional papers are welcome, as well as multi-modal presentations and performances.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

  • Art, advertising, brands, products, food, consumption and the consumer
  • Identity within pop culture, including race and gender
  • Music
  • Technology
  • Comic books, Anime, and narrative forms across media
  • Television
  • Film, including Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood, YouTube
  • Popular magazines, journals, sports, and news media
  • Video games and gaming culture
  • Image, the body, and pornography in various media forms
  • Myth and mythology
  • Camp and kitsch
  • The internet and social media
  • Questions of discourse and intellectual property
  • Science fiction, fantasy, horror
  • The taboo, banned media, subcultures, and cult classics
  • Popular language, hybrid language, idioms, text language, and slang
  • Fashion, style, and lifestyle
  • Imitation, appropriation, adaptation
  • Questions of social class and social capital
  • Self-referentiality, pop culture icons and iconography
  • Relations between pop culture and political populism
  • Popular psychology
  • Popular science

 

Please submit a 300-word abstract to cunypop@gmail.com for a 15-20 minute paper, performance, or presentation by September 1st. Proposals should include the title of the paper, the presenter’s name, a 50-word bio including institutional and department affiliation, the form that your presentation will take (if it is not a traditional paper), and any technology requests.


25
Jul 16

Summer Series on Fall Teaching (SSOFT): Resource Repositories

Each Monday from now until the beginning of the school year, the HLBLL blog will feature a Summer Series on Fall Teaching (SSOFT), with brief writeups and links to resources in the CUNY world and beyond to help you prepare for the upcoming semester of teaching in CUNY.

This week, SSOFT features two resource repositories at CUNY: CUNY Academic Works and the CUNY Syllabus project.

CUNY Academic Works

Screen Shot 2016-07-24 at 2.02.12 PMCUNY Academic Works is an open-access institutional repository for the CUNY community, coordinated by the Office of Library Services at CUNY Central. CUNY faculty, professional staff, and graduate students can upload their open-access materials, including articles, conference presentations, theses and dissertations, and materials prepared for teaching courses. Committed to the ideas of a public university and open access, anyone with an internet connection can download materials from CUNY Academic Works for free.

The repository is growing, with nearly 12,000 CUNY-wide submissions since its recent launch, and over 2,000 submissions from the Graduate Center community alone. Downloads of CUNY Academic Works materials total over a quarter of a million! Among other benefits, adding your work to the repository will result in greater visibility for your scholarship on search engines such as Google.

Browse CUNY Academic Works by CUNY school or by discipline, or use the search tool to narrow your search.  Prepare for the 2016-2017 year in your Spanish language classroom with “The politics of normativity and globalization: which Spanish in the classroom?” by Professor José del Valle. The article appeared in the Modern Language Journal in 2014, and is now also housed on CUNY Academic Works.

Follow Academic Works on Twitter for updates.

CUNY Syllabus Project

The CUNY Syllabus Project (CSP) is a syllabus repository collecting syllabi from all CUNY instructors across all campuses and disciplines. The project was launched this year by Laura Kane, a Phd Candidate in Philosophy, and Andrew McKinney, a PhD candidate in Sociology. The goal of the project, according to its organizers, is to “become a robust resource providing a way to search, compare, and visualize syllabi across institutions, disciplines, and departments at the City University of New York.” This goal can only be accomplished, however, through a critical mass of syllabus contributions from CUNY’s instructors.

The CUNY Syllabus Project is currently in its collection phase and is seeking contributors to upload current or past syllabi. Contributors can also allow for their syllabus to be publicly available for searches on the site under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

Follow the CSP on Twitter for updates.


23
Jul 16

CFP: Representations of fashion and clothing in Hispanic Literatures

The Spanish section of the Department of Languages and Literatures of Lehman College, CUNY

invites proposals for its 2017 Symposium

Representations of fashion and clothing in Hispanic Literatures

Dates: April 7 and 8, 2017
Location: Lehman College, CUNY
Paper/Panel Proposals Deadline: October 15, 2016.

The information that follows has been provided by the conference organizers and is also available on the symposium’s website.

 

The Spanish section of the Department of Languages and Literatures of Lehman College of the City University of New York, is currently accepting submissions for the Symposium “Representations of fashion and clothing in Hispanic Literatures.” This event will take place on the 7th and 8th of April, 2017. The symposiums will bring together scholars interested in exploring, from diverse theoretical approaches, the topic of dress, fashion, and clothing in different genres and periods of Hispanic literatures.

The Call For Papers is open but not restricted to the following topics:

  • Clothes and costumes in theatre
  • Clothing, costumes and masks
  • Clothing and identity
  • Clothes and the question of genre, class, race…
  • Clothes as elements of subversion
  • Clothing and nakedness
  • Clothes, erotism and fetiche
  • Poetics and politics of clothing
  • Fashion in the figure of the dandy and the flanneur
  • Dress, clothes and ceremonies
  • Dressing, maurophilia and exotism
  • Dress, satire and parody
  • The clothes as carnavalesque elements
  • Clothing and consumerism

Those interested in participating should send a proposal to the following email address:
symposium.spanish [at] lehman.cuny.edu

In order to submit your proposal, please use the attached document providing your personal information and a 300 words abstract:

Individual proposal document

Closed panels proposals will also be welcomed. All panels must have three participants. In order to send a proposal, the chair of the panel must fill out the following form including the information of all the participants:

Closed panel proposal 

The length of each presentation should not exceed 20 minutes. Papers may be presented in English or in Spanish. Papers will not be read in absentia.

The deadline for sending proposals is October 15, 2016. The Organizing Committee will acknowledge all submissions. Notices of acceptance from the organizing committee will go out by December 15, 2016. Once a proposal is accepted, participants should pay a registration fee of $150 (the fee for graduate students will be of $100).

A selection of papers will be published in a special issue of the online academic journal Ciberletras. The papers considered for publication will be peer reviewed by the Editorial Board of the journal.

Organizing Committee

Carmen Saen-de-Casas
Marco Ramírez Rojas
Daniel Fernández
Oscar Martín
Carmen Esteves
Gerardo Piña-Rosales
Beatriz Lado
Evelin Duran

Contact Information

For any question regarding the symposium please contact:
Marco Ramírez – marco.ramirez [at] lehman.cuny.edu
Carmen Saen – carmen.saen [at] lehman.cuny.edu
Oscar Martín – oscar.martin [at] lehman.cuny.edu
Daniel Fernandez – daniel.fernandez1 [at] lehman.cuny.edu


21
Jul 16

CFP: XII International Conference of Literature at St. John’s University

XII International Conference of Literature: Memory and Imagination of Latin America and the Caribbean Through the Oral and Written Paths

and

The International Conference of Romance Literatures of the DLL at St. John’s University

Convened by:

The Department of Languages and Literature (DLL) and the Graduate Program in Hispanic Literature at St. John’s University (New York), The Center for Research for Latin America and the Caribbean (CIALC) of the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM), La Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Perú) and Pontificia Universidad Católica (Ecuador)

 

Conference Dates: October 12-14, 2016
Location: St. John’s University, Queens Campus (New York)
Main Topic: Literature and Languages: Crossing Frontiers and Finding Diversity in Culture
Abstract Deadline: July 23, 2016

The conference will also include a special tribute on the 70th Anniversary of Gabriela Mistral’s Nobel Prize in Literature

 

The information below has been provided by the conference organizers. Find out more about the conference on their Facebook page and on their website.

Subtopics:

  • Literature and its relationship with history, politics
  • Oral and written expression, memory, and literacy
  • Development and reform in the fields of science and technology
  • Ethnicity and cultural diversity
  • Literature, ecology, environment
  • Referential genres (fiction/ no fiction)
  • Gender and body
  • Literature and the arts (film, theater, music, etc.)
  • Literature and science
  • Pop culture and innovations
  • Digital proposals
  • Global migrations
  • Linguistics and acquisition of a second language
  • Creative writing

New proposals of subtopics, as well as initiatives for creating workshops and committees, are welcome. Presentations (to be given be in English, French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese) shall not exceed a 15 minute duration.

In order to be considered, participants should include: Name of the presenter or name of the workshop coordinator, name of the academic association, title of essay, an abstract (250 words max), and a brief curriculum vitae. The information should be sent to the Academic Committee at St. John’s University before July 23, 2016. Contact email: conferenceunamsju16@gmail.com

Contact:
Professor Milton  Fernando Romero Obando: conferenceunamsju16@gmail.com
Professor Marie-Lise Gazarian: gazariam@stjohns.edu

 


16
May 16

Jennifer Prince Receives Vice Chancellor’s Award for Student Leadership

Jennifer Prince (left) and Christina Nadler at the Excellence in Leadership Awards luncheon, May 13, 2016.

Jennifer Prince (left) and Christina Nadler at the Excellence in Leadership Awards luncheon, May 13, 2016.

On Friday, May 13th, Jennifer Prince was awarded with a CUNY Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Leadership. Two students from each CUNY college are chosen to receive the award each year. The award was presented at a luncheon ceremony at the Great Hall at City College.

Jen is a PhD candidate in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages and a Program Social Media Fellow in her sixth year as a Graduate Center student. She is writing her dissertation—under the supervision of Professor Paul Julian Smith–on representations of the Spanish Civil War in multi-generic texts written by American and Spanish women.

For the HLBLL program, Jen was one of three organizers of the 18th Annual Graduate Student Conference. She also has been a member of standing and ad-hoc committees on faculty membership, social media, and alumni engagement. For two years she served as HLBLL’s elected representative to the Graduate Center’s Doctoral Students’ Council (DSC).

Jennifer Prince (right) and Christina Nadler after receiving their Excellence in Leadership Awards, May 13, 2016.

Jennifer Prince (right) and Christina Nadler after receiving their Excellence in Leadership Awards, May 13, 2016.

Jen is a four-year member of the DSC—two years as a program representative and two as an at-large representative. She has been elected to serve as an at-large representative for the 2016-2017 school year. Currently, Jen is in her second year elected as the Co-Chair for Business of the DSC. Prior to being elected co-chair, Jen also was elected to the DSC’s Steering Committee and served as Officer for Health and Wellness for one year. Within the DSC, Jen was a member of several committees, including the Governance Task Force, the Grants Committee, the Constitution and Bylaws Committee, the Knowledge Grants Committee, and the Health and Wellness Committee. She is currently co-chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Tuition Remission.

Outside of her commitments to her program and to the DSC, Jen also has been a member of the Graduate Council’s committees for Information Technology and for Library. She currently serves on the Auxiliary Enterprise Board and the College Association, and was a student member of the Strategic Plan’s Finance Task Force during the current school year. She also participated as a member on the search committees for the Vice President for Communications and External Affairs and for the Provost.

The other student recipient of the award in 2015-2016 was Christina Nadler, a PhD candidate in Sociology.


10
May 16

This Friday: Presentation of Los Bárbaros 7 and Launch of the LL Journal!

This Friday!

Presentation of Los Bárbaros 7

and

Launch of the new LL Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1

The PhD Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages invites you for an afternoon and evening of language and literature launches and celebrations this Friday, May 13th, in our lounge (room 4116)

Los Bárbaros 7At 5:00, we welcome founders, editors, and contributors to the literary magazine Los Bárbaros as they launch the 7th edition, specializing in science fiction and fantasy writing. Los Bárbaros 7 is a project very much dependent on the various talents of student in the HLBLL program, including Alexis Izaguirre, Sara Cordón, Mariana Graciano, and, of course, Ulises Gonzales.

Additional reading/listening: Pliego Suelto‘s PDF of the first three numbers of Los Bárbaros; La trova neoyorquina podcast featuring Ulises Gonzales and Sara Cordón, along with Los Bárbaros contributor Mayte López.

LL Journal LogoAt 6:00, we launch the LL Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1! The LL Journal is a multi-disciplinary, open-access, electronic journal dedicated to the investigation of various realms of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian studies including literature, language, and culture. A collaboration of HLBLL’s students as editors, readers, and designers, the LL Journal has contributors from all over the world and invites us all to engage in reflection and discussion. Recent numbers of the LL Journal also include a creative writing section.

Additional reading: All previous LL Journals are open access and available online in their archives!

 

After the launch, please join us for the best end-of-the-year party at the Graduate Center, the envy of all other programs.

HLBLL holiday party

 


30
Apr 16

Teach@CUNY Day is May 2nd! Space Still Available!

The Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center invites the CUNY community to Teach@CUNY day, taking place May 2nd, 2016 from 9am-4pm on the Concourse Level of the Graduate Center.

The day-long event includes a keynote address from Dr. Stephen Brier (Urban Education), six different tracks of workshops, and conversations within disciplinary clusters. Lunch will be provided.

Registration (for all or part of the day) is open to all across CUNY. Please register here.

The workshop tracks include:

  • New to the Classroom
  • Technology in the Classroom
  • Working with the Library
  • Writing Across the Curriculum
  • Experiential Learning
  • Diversity in CUNY’s Classrooms

Read more about the entire day’s events here. And view the complete schedule for Teach@CUNY day here.

The Program Social Media Fellows will be live-tweeting Teach @ CUNY Day. Follow the conversation using the hashtag #tcuny and on the HLBLL Twitter account.


07
Apr 16

Our 21st Annual Graduate Student Conference Is Nearly Here!

21st Annual Graduate Student Conference

The PhD Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages

at the Graduate Center, CUNY

The City: Voices and Creations

Poster #HLBLL21stNext week our 21st Annual Graduate Student Conference will welcome scholars from around the country and the world to the Graduate Center for two packed days of panels, keynotes, and plenty of food. The amount of work it takes to pull off such an endeavor is enormous, and the entire HLBLL community wishes to thank the eight organizers of this year’s event: Gabriel Alvarado, Sara Cordón, Isabel Domínguez Seoane, Charlotte Gartenberg, Alexis Ipaguirre, Nancy Ortega Álvarez, Rebeca Piñeda-Burgos, and Rojo Robles.

This year, the Congreso welcomes Dr. Urayoán Noel (New York University) and Dr. Bonnie Urciuoli (Hamilton College) as our two keynote speakers. Dr. Noel’s keynote address will take place on Thursday, April 14th, at 6:30pm in the Segal Theatre. Dr. Urciuoli’s address will be Friday, April 15th, at 5:00pm in the program lounge, room 4116. Find out more about our two incredible speakers and their keynote addresses here.

Presenters and moderators for our conference hail from nearly 20 different universities and centers from around the world. Under the conference theme, “The City: Voices and Creations,” 13 different panels will be held on topics in film, literature, publishing, and linguistics. The complete schedule of the two days’ events can be found here.

We encourage conference attendees to contribute to and follow along with the conversation around our conference on social media. We will be using #HLBLL21st on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Follow/Like our accounts for the latest updates!


26
Feb 16

CFP: “Forging Linguistic Identities” at Towson University

Forging Linguistic Identities

a conference of

The Department of Foreign Languages
Towson University

Conference Dates: March 16-18, 2017
Location: Towson University; Towson, Maryland
Keynote: Dr. Jennifer Leeman, Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at George Mason University and Research Sociolinguist at the US Census Bureau
Deadline for Abstracts: October 1, 2016

The information below has been provided by the conference organizers:

The conference seeks to examine language as socially embedded within historical and geographical contexts.   Possible topics might include, but not be limited to:

  • Dialects/diglossia and their role in group identity formation
  • The standardization of national and/or majority language(s) and its impact on national or regional politics
  • Multi-lingualism in states and regions and its negotiation and practice by the communities of use.
  • Use(s) of indigenous languages under transnational states
  • National reception of dialect/minority-language literature and verbal culture
  • Migration
  • Translation studies

The scope of the conference is not limited by region, language, or time period.  Proposals involving languages taught by the Department of Foreign Languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Ancient Greek, Biblical and Modern Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish) are especially encouraged.  Proposals are welcomed across disciplines, from scholars of languages and literatures, education, geography, history, psychology and sociology.  Please send an abstract of 250 words by email to: Prof. George McCool (gmccool [at] towson [dot] edu).  Please include your name, full address, institution affiliation, day telephone, fax and email address.  Please note that Conference papers must be limited to 20 minutes.

Faculty at all ranks are encouraged to participate. We will offer discounted hotel rooms near campus, and a graduated scale of conference fees.

 


25
Feb 16

Funding: ARC’s Student Research Praxis Awards

The Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC)

invites applications for the

Student Research Praxis Awards

Deadline for applications: March 31, 2016
Award Amounts: $4,000

Please see the ARC website for more information about the Advanced Research Collaborative.

The information below has been provided by ARC.

 

As part of its effort to encourage student research, the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) will be offering a number of Research Praxis Fellowships for the coming academic year 2016-2017. The Awards are valued at $4,000 each and are for one semester only.

To be eligible, you must be a full time registered doctoral student who has completed the First Exam but not yet completed the Second at the time of the tenure of the award. Preference will be given to those who have been enrolled for no more than three years and who are in the early stages of the formulation of a research idea/proposal.

Students who accept this award will join an ARC student/faculty research cluster led by ARC Distinguished Visiting Fellows from within and without the CUNY system working in related areas and will be required to attend three (3) research praxis sessions during the semester. Preference will be given to students whose research interests are congruent with the research themes of the Distinguished Fellowship Program for 2016-2017.  The themes are:

Immigration
Inequality
Multilingualism

In addition to attending the three sessions above, Awardees will be required to do the following:

  • Submit a research statement of approximately 10 pages to their ARC student/faculty research cluster at the end of the semester of their tenure.
  • Attend the weekly ARC seminars for the semester of their tenure (approximately 15 seminars each Thursday 4:30 – 6:30 pm throughout the semester)
  • Post a 400 word blog on the ARC student research website commenting on the issues raised in one of the seminars which they have attended.

Deadline for applying is March 31, 2016.   Students will be notified of the selection committee’s decision by April 15th.

Applications for this award should be sent to: fellowshipapps@gc.cuny.edu. [Please see your Graduate Center email for the application form.]


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