Week of April 6, 2020
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Week of April 6th

Upcoming Comp Lit Events
CALAMEGS presents: Alluvial Dreams: Africa, China, and the Aesthetics of Speculation
A webinar by Duncan Yoon (NYU Gallatin)
Wednesday, April 8th, 4-6pm
Click here to join via Zoom!

Duncan M. Yoon’s current book examines representations of China in African literature. Additional research interests are globalization, narrative theory, the Cold War, postcolonialism, diaspora, and world literature. Publications include: “Our Forces Have Redoubled: World Literature, Postcolonialism and the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau,” (2015) in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry; “Bandung Nostalgia and the Global South,” in the edited volume The Global South and Literature (Cambridge, 2018); "Cold War Creolization: Ousmane Sembène’s Le Dernier de L’empire," which is forthcoming in Research in African Literatures; and "Africa, China, and the Global South Novel: In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo Inc.," which is forthcoming from Comparative Literature. He is the co-director of The Global South Project at Cornell University and is completing a digital humanities project on the Heinemann African Writers Series. He is also an executive committee member for the Modern Language Association's (MLA) forum African Literature to 1990. Pedagogically, he is interested in the intersections between digital technology and critical thought. Yoon has an MA from Dartmouth College and a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA. Before coming to Gallatin, he was an assistant professor of postcolonial literature at the University of Alabama. His research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council and the Mellon Foundation. He served as a Fulbright Scholar to South Korea in 2004. In 2017 the Library of Congress awarded him a Kluge Fellowship for his research project, "Africa Writes China: Literature and Globalization." 
Upcoming Community Events

Online Event | CWS Series | Breve arqueología de la repatriación: Cristina Rivera Garza

Wednesday, April 8th, 7pm
To be held over Zoom: nyu.zoom.us/j/696441495

What do deportees take when they return to a country they no longer know? How do objects that cross the border help create a sense of belonging and familiarity? After the economic crash of 1929, many Mexican workers were expelled from the United States and, little by little, they rebuilt their homes on the border. This is the story of my maternal grandparents and their search for a place they could call their own, next to the cotton fields that Cardenism created on the Texas-Tamaulipas border. This event will be held in Spanish.

Cristina Rivera Garza is an author and translator. Her recent books include Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué (Random House, 2016); The Iliac Crest, trans. by Sarah Booker (The Feminist Press, 2017); The Taiga Syndrome, trans. by Susanne Jill Levine with Aviva Kana (Dorothy Project, 2018). She is a distinguished professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston and William H. Bosell Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.

Ferrante Fever Book Club
Next meeting: Sunday, April 12th, 10:30am-12:30pm
Zoom link: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/437961074

Ferrante Fever, named after the 2017 documentary by Giacomo Durzi, is a reading group dedicated to Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous best-selling Italian author. Through weekly meetings, we shall be reading and discussing selections from one of Elena Ferrante's books in English, although those who have reading knowledge of the Italian language are more than welcome to read the original in Italian. We will also be discussing the cinematic and television adaptations of her work, as well as the culture that is forming around her works. 

Meeting Description: The next meeting of Ferrante Fever will be a discussion from page 51 till the end of the book of Elena Ferrante's 2008 book, 'La Figlia Oscura,' available in its English translation by Ann Goldstein as 'The Lost Daughter.' Please make sure you purchase the book prior to the meeting. You are welcome to do the reading in either English or Italian but the discussion will be in English.

We will also be discussing our expectations of the cinematic adaptation of the book that is being done by Maggie Gyllenhaal. It is also available as an e-book online. For more information, visit the publisher's website: https://www.europaeditions.com/book/9781933372426/the-lost-daughter.
News & Announcements
MLA COVID-19 Emergency Grants

To assist part-time faculty members who have been financially affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, the Modern Language Association has established $500 emergency grants that can be used to cover unexpected expenses related to this crisis. The grant might be used to help alleviate a loss of income from canceled courses, subsidize the additional hours needed to move classes online, or pay for technology needed to facilitate online teaching.

The application deadline is May 1st. Click here to read the eligibility criteria and access the application form.
Award Announcement

Congratulations to Comp Lit Ph.D. student Alexander Miller on your Fulbright award! We are excited to hear about your research and wish you all the best!

Inklette Magazine Now Accepting Submissions!

Inklette Magazine will be accepting poetry, narrative and creative nonfiction, fiction and visual arts submissions for its tenth issue via Submittable from April 1, 2020 to April 30, 2020. To submit and know more, visit our website at www.inklettemagazine.com
Comp Lit COVID-19 Dashboard: Recent Updates
  • Adding your pronouns to your Zoom display name
  • Pass/fail options for undergraduate majors/minors
  • Information about office access
  • NYC food security resources
  • NYC eviction moratorium FAQ
Please visit the dashboard to access this information and check back regularly for more updates!
Podcast Episode Featuring Ulrich Baer and Jenny Davidson (Columbia University)

Why read books in dark times? Daniel Defoe, known to most as the author of Robinson Crusoe, published A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722, about the plague that decimated London's population in 1665. The gripping account is presented as a survivor's story who confronts his world being ravaged by an invisible and extremely contagious disease. But Defoe survived the plague as a five-year-old by leaving London. The book he published some fifty years later is a fictional recreation of a period when most certainties and routines held dear by Londoners crumbled around them. Why did people not heed the first warnings and prepare better? How did they behave once the pandemic devastated neighboring parishes? Did the crisis bring out the best in people? And how did Defoe's narrator account for his choice to stay in the city when he had the chance to escape, only to realize that protecting his property was a vain concern when faced with imminent and gruesome death all around him. 

Why read such a book right now, during the COVID-19 global pandemic? Jenny Davidson, a literary scholar, novelist and extreme athlete, is an expert on Defoe and novels in general. She explained how reading fiction can give us the experience of deepened time destroyed by a 24-hour cycle of catastrophic news, how reading can be an escape into a quieter yet deeper state of mind, and why Defoe's book is not only a brilliant historical document but ushers in the genre of the novel we take for granted today. 

I personally was inspired and uplifted by this conversation with Jenny, after reading Defoe's Journal twice in a week. The book allowed me to process the jumble of panic, denial, fear, frustration, confusion, anger, sadness, and paralyzing mania that has gripped me for weeks now. By reading Defoe's incredibly vivid description of people's responses to the plague, I could cycle through these responses via another setting, and thus let my brain and heart come to rest for a moment. Jenny explained why reading creates this space of deeper quiet for our mind. 

We ended the conversation with suggestions of what to read now that so many listeners are in quarantine: books that will let you escape reality without denying it, and give you a sense of being in the world while the world as we know it falls apart around us. 

Jenny Davidson is a Professor of English and American literature at Columbia University in New York City. A voracious reader, novelist, and brilliant scholar, she is the author of four novels, several books of literary scholarship and an avid blogger. She also competes in ultra-marathons, triathlons, and all sorts of other completely astonishing athletic competitions. 

GREAT BOOKS 30: Frighteningly Relevant: Albert Camus's The Plague, with Caroline Weber

Professor Ulrich Baer spoke with Caroline Weber, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College within Columbia University, about how brilliantly Camus shows the wide range of human responses to extreme conditions, and how literature provides a model for making sense of and getting though our current crisis- of living in a pandemic- without losing hope or our humanity. Click here for more information and to listen!
CAS Proud to Be First Faculty Connect Program now accepting applications!

Proud to Be First’s Faculty Connect program facilitates the development of meaningful academic, research and pre-professional connections between second-year, first-generation students and NYU faculty. This year, we invite faculty and students to consider, in particular, how research can shape their academic, co-curricular, and pre-professional journeys here at CAS and beyond.

It is our pleasure to invite you to participate in Faculty Connect for the 2020-2021 academic year. The time commitment is about three hours over the fall semester: a one-hour meeting in the faculty member’s office in the first half of the semester (funds for coffee and pastries provided by Proud to Be First), and lunch at NYU’s Torch Club in the second half of the semester (also courtesy of Proud to Be First). We are going into the third great year of this vibrant program and hope you are interested in joining us for 2020-2021!

Please complete this form by Sunday, August 16, 2020 if you would like to participate in Faculty Connect for 2020-2021.

Welcoming Mariano López Seano as Visiting Professor for AY 2020/21
Mariano will offer a mix of undergraduate and graduate courses contributing to our Latin American curriculum and will work closely with all our graduate students on a number of events and projects related to contemporary Latin American art, film, queer studies and critical theory. 
To learn more, visit this page:
https://as.nyu.edu/complit/about/news/news-for-2019-2020/we-welcome-mariano-lopez-seoane-as-visting-professor-for-the-upc.html
Job and Fellowship Listings
NYU WE Trust Fellowship in Multidisciplinary Classics
Deadline: April 24, 2020
Conferences & Calls for Papers
NeMLA 52nd Annual Convention
Conference date: March 11-14, 2021
Deadline for session proposals: April 29, 2020
Deadline for paper abstract proposals: September 30, 2020
To submit an event or announcement, please email tara.hardy@nyu.edu. We welcome notice of conference papers as well as recent publications or talks by NYU faculty or students in Comp Lit or elsewhere that you would like highlighted. Please also submit any recent awards or recognitions that you would like shared with the department!

All submissions are due on Thursdays at 6pm for the following week's newsletter.
This email is presented by the NYU Department of Comparative Literature. 

If you have an event that you would like included on our website or our social media pages, please contact tara.hardy@nyu.edu
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