The Center for the Humanities ANNUAL REPORT 2019 2020 Table of Contents Caption: Stephen Snyder, Rivka Galchen, and Barbara Epler at Translating the Future: "Lightning in a Bottle: A Case Study of Publishing Literary Translation," August 4, 2020. 2 ANNUAL REPORT Director's Foreword 4 Letter from the Staff 6 Student Engagement 9 Faculty Engagement 26 Public Engagement 36 About the Center for 52 the Humanities TABLE OF CONTENTS 3 Director's Foreword Worlds within Worlds salon and tour of Jacolby Satterwhite's exhibition You’re at home at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, led by curator Gabriel Florenz, followed by a conversation with essayist Garnette Cadogan, artist Rachel Rossin, cognitive neuroscientist Tony Ro hosted by the Center's director Keith Wilson and the Wellcome Trust Mental Health Curatorial Research Fellow Rebecca Hayes Jacobs, November 20, 2019. 4 ANNUAL REPORT The Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Imaginary Institute’s residency, which forced Center, CUNY works with partners across the that project to extend into a longer term. city and further afield on projects that are In the short term, last spring we focused on driven by locally grounded concerns. We share supporting cultural workers and students hit ideas about how to respond to urgent societal hard by the pandemic, alongside transitioning challenges, and we test out ideas practically and adapting our wider program. Events such and creatively with others. Working with a wide as the James Gallery’s ART • WORK • PLACE, range of individuals and groups, we extend out the Mellon Seminar’s Sancocho Live!, and the from our academic home, building interdisci- PEN America Translating the Future series have plinary teams that work together over time and been serving large, increasingly international sustain a shared focus. As our aims this year audiences, and we find ourselves working ever have so directly intersected with and been more to an international clock. The Center informed by world events, the relevance of our shined in its capacity to respond sensitively and work has become starkly manifest, inspiring us invent new forms that proved vital to making to double down on our commitment to thinking direct, person-to-person connections within a and working in publicly responsive ways. A core wider world. aim of the Center has long been interdisciplin- ary work, and this year we specifically explored Motivated by a desire to support and amplify the interconnected discourses of science and the Black Lives Matter movement, this coming the humanities. academic year will see us continuing our work across disciplines––convening, provoking, In my first years as Director, and in partnership amplifying, and advocating—toward projects with the Wellcome Trust, we helped deliver the that indict violent, oppressive, and racist New York leg of their Contagious Cities project, systems and imagine, model, and thereby help which took infectious disease as its subject create better futures. and epidemic preparedness as its purpose. Our next Wellcome-funded project will see Summer 2020 has brought stark reminders us again partnering with local organizations of how much work there still is to do at local, and international co-investigators, this time national, and international levels regarding both with a focus on mental health. I am delighted racial justice and pandemic preparedness, and to report the appointment of Rebecca Jacobs of the profound societal connections between as our Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Curatorial the two. The coming academic year will see Research Fellow, who is taking the lead on this us exploring some of these connections, for initiative. instance, through our work with Wellcome’s mental health initiative, as we build on the trag- Our entire team had to swiftly migrate our ically heightened relevance of our programming activities online, and I am pleased with just how and channel our renewed awareness to create much we have been able to deliver digitally with innovative structures for public conversation. the help of our many partners, and through the We will also prepare for the fragile return of imaginative hard work of the Center’s entire physical proximity and dream up new forms that team. For example, the pandemic lockdown hit our work together can take. New York just as the James Gallery was pre- paring to publicly launch work from the Racial Keith Wilson, Director DIRECTOR'S FORWARD 5 Letter from the Staff Brent Edwards and Fred Moten in conversation on Cecil Taylor in the James Gallery, October 2019. 6 ANNUAL REPORT The Center for the Humanities has long been to support our own CUNY community has a robust and transformational research envi- deepened over the past several months through ronment in which the best of humanities work small and mid-sized relief grants that support has thrived, even in the most challenging times. student and contingent faculty impacted by That mission continued throughout this past COVID, alongside new professional, writing, academic year, even as we responded to the research fellowship opportunities for Graduate ongoing pandemic, taking on new shapes, Center and CUNY students. appearances, and audiences for our work. We Our core values are best exemplified in the have a long commitment to providing dialogi- nature of our collaborations and the projects cal, interdisciplinary, public, and collaborative we support and develop. We have organized research opportunities that complement the our annual report to reflect our extraordinary foundational work of the subject-specific range of collaborators, including students (p. programs here at the Graduate Center, CUNY 9), faculty (p. 26), and wider publics (p. 36). We alongside the vibrant creative activity of New champion work that bridges disciplines, ques- York City. Together, we address urgent issues tions social constructs, and creates new models of global resonance with innovative, collabora- for how scholarship can serve social justice. In tive, and responsive research. our collaborations, researchers, practitioners, At this time of deep uncertainty, it has become artists, and community members use their ever more urgent that we reaffirm our commit- expertise to articulate and tackle urgent civic ment to public inquiry––by continuing our drive issues. to make our activities accessible and by ampli- In these pages, you’ll find out about many of our fying the voices of the scholars, activists, and exciting projects this year, including: artists who have become a part of the Center’s family, both past and present. ܰ The Center’s appointment of the Wellcome Trust Curatorial Research Fellow, Rebecca As we have made the transition to hosting Jacobs, who is working with Wellcome to programming online for larger and more geo- develop future programming related to graphically dispersed audiences, our events mental health; have continued to be free and open to the public, and dialogue with our audience has ܰ In-development projects led by faculty remained an essential part of our panels, and students from across CUNY through screenings, exhibitions, performances, and the Seminar on Public Engagement and conversations. Collaborative Research on topics includ- ing the role of public syllabi in fostering One of our most central missions remains to social change, the educational activism of connect work coming out of the Graduate Black mothers in Harlem, care collectives Center with the greater CUNY community, of interdependent disability communities, which is as diverse and varied as New York undocu-immigrant-led initiatives devised City itself. Our work involves the participation in the wake of COVID-19, and activating of senior- and community-college faculty, communities and participatory budget- adjuncts, and undergraduate, master’s, and ing toward resilience and climate justice, doctoral students at all 25 CUNY campuses among many others; across all five boroughs. Our commitment LETTER FROM THE STAFF 7 ܰ Lost & Found Light Relief, which provided at the James Gallery; Amie and Tony James small stipends for students and poets for their support of all the James Gallery affected by the pandemic to publish their programs, research and artist residencies, as short-form digital work that engaged or well as the Object Library and the Mae West expanded archives and/or archival theory; residency project; the Engaging the Senses Foundation, Margo and Anthony Viscusi, and ܰ The continuation of the Object Library’s the Early Research Initiative for their support artist-in-residence program and the creation of Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document of an interdisciplinary student research team Initiative; the Sylvia Klatzin Steinig Fund and to support the production of a docu-fiction the Gittell Collective for their support of the film on the comedienne Mae West; CUNY Adjunct Incubator; the Wellcome Trust ܰ Projects developed as part of the CUNY for their support of the Postdoctoral Curato- Adjunct Incubator, along with other funding rial Research Fellowship; Max Palevsky for his opportunities for contingent faculty; endowment of the Irving Howe Lecture and the ܰ The James Gallery's collaborative research family of Stanley Burnshaw for their endowment and programs such as "On Nationalism" of the Stanley Burnshaw Lecture, established with poet Claudia Rankine and the Racial by Professor Morris Dickstein and hosted every Imaginary Institute in their first year in other year by the Harry Ransom Center for residence at the James Gallery; exhibitions Research in the Humanities at the University of new research of international importance of Texas, Austin; World Poetry Books, Bread examining Refugee Modernism and Loaf Translators Conference, Tess Lewis, ARC, Tricontinentalism; the Zoom discussion Middlebury College, LTI Korea, Princeton Univer- series ART • WORK • PLACE, which sity, Amazon, Boston University, Institut Ramon stemmed out of seminars led by Graduate Llull, The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center Center students examining the institutional for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public work of museums and responded to the Library, the Yiddish Books Center, Polish Cultural crises of economic and racial inequality Institute, PEN America, and the Martin E.