Fall 2011 Salon Talks
NYMASA is proud to announce our Fall 2011 series of Salon Talks. Once again, we have a terrific array of scholars talking about their recently-published books. Salon Talks are an opportunity for local American Studies scholars to share their published work with an intimate audience. They tend to be small, lively, and informative. This semester all Salon Talks will be held at 6:30pm (note new time!) in the Faculty/Staff Lounge, 8th floor of the West Building at Hunter College (Lexington Avenue and 68th Street).
Space is limited, so to RSVP or for more information, contact Sarah Chinn at sarah.chinn@hunter.cuny.edu
Wednesday, September 14
Themis Chronopoulos (Postdoctoral Fellow, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis)
Spatial Regulation in New York City: From Urban Renewal to Zero Tolerance (Routledge)
In this book, Themis Chronopoulos dramatically demonstrates how the regulation of urban space became one of the most important ways to reverse the decline of New York City in the post–World War II period. As New York began to lose its status as a leading global city, the perception of urban disorder, whether that disorder was physical (e.g., slums, shabby streets, crumbling infrastructure) or social (e.g., homeless people, hustlers, rowdy teenagers), represented a threat to the middle class and investors and thus to the financial and political viability of the city government. As a result, city mayors and other elected and nonelected leaders mounted initiatives such as urban renewal, exclusionary zoning, anti-vagrancy laws, and order-maintenance policing to control, if not erase, disorder. These initiatives were part of a class project that deflected attention from the underlying causes of poverty, eroded civil rights, and sought to enable real estate investment, high-end consumption, mainstream tourism, and corporate success. Tracing a historical trajectory from slum clearance to the “broken windows” theory, Chronopoulos argues that policies to regulate space mirror ideological shifts in the city’s history.
Thursday, October 13
William Gleason (Princeton University)
Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature (NYU Press)
Sites Unseen examines the complex intertwining of race and architecture in nineteenth and early-twentieth century American culture, the period not only in which American architecture came of age professionally in the U.S. but also in which ideas about architecture became a prominent part of broader conversations about American culture, history, politics, and—although we have not yet understood this clearly—race relations. This rich and copiously illustrated interdisciplinary study explores the ways that American writing between roughly 1850 and 1930 concerned itself, often intensely, with the racial implications of architectural space primarily, but not exclusively, through domestic architecture.
In addition to identifying an archive of provocative primary materials, Sites Unseen draws significantly on important recent scholarship in multiple fields ranging from literature, history, and material culture to architecture, cultural geography, and urban planning. Together the chapters interrogate a variety of expressive American vernacular forms, including the dialect tale, the novel of empire, letters, and pulp stories, along with the plantation cabin, the West Indian cottage, the Latin American plaza, and the “Oriental” parlor. Making sense of the relations between architecture, race, and American writing of the long nineteenth century—in their regional, national, and hemispheric contexts—Sites Unseen provides a clearer view not only of this catalytic era but also more broadly of what architectural historian Dell Upton has aptly termed the social experience of the built environment.
Tuesday, Nov 1
Mathilde Roza (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
Following Strangers:The Life and Literary Works of Robert M. Coates (University of South Carolina Press)
Tracing the intriguing and often-overlooked life and career of Robert M. Coates (1897–1973), Following Strangers brings much deserved attention to the accomplishments of this twentieth-century fiction writer, essayist, critic, and poet. Mathilde Roza's biography is based on extensive archival research and impressively documents Coates's life from his Connecticut boyhood to his final publications. Along the way Roza surveys Coates's many literary achievements as well as his personal interactions with iconic writers and thinkers of his era, including Gertrude Stein, Peggy Guggenheim, Reginald Marsh, Ernest Hemingway, Robert McAlmon, Malcolm Cowley, Kenneth Burke, James Thurber, E. B. White, and Nathanael West.
Roza grounds her study in Coates's time at Yale University and his participation in the evolution of literary modernism that occurred between the end of the nineteenth century and World War I and his expatriate years in Paris, where he was influenced by the Parisian Dada movement while socializing with writers such as Stein and Hemingway. Roza delves into Coates's return to New York City and his thirty-year association with the New Yorker as a critic and short story writer, as well as his work as a novelist.
In this first book-length study of Coates, Roza effectively balances the diverse interests and cultural occupations of this man of many talents, suggesting he deserves recognition for his strikingly idiosyncratic fiction, which tests the boundaries between modernism and postmodernism, and for the originality and diversity of his entire body of work.
Wednesday, November 16
Tanya Sheehan (Rutgers University)
Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (Penn State University Press)
In Doctored, Tanya Sheehan takes a new look at the relationship between photography and medicine in American culture, from the nineteenth century to the present. Sheehan focuses on Civil War and postbellum Philadelphia, exploring the ways in which medical models and metaphors helped strengthen the professional legitimacy of the city’s commercial photographic community at a time when it was not well established. By reading the trade literature and material practices of portrait photography and medicine in relation to one another, she shows how their interaction defined the space of the urban portrait studio as well as the physical and social effects of studio operations. Integrating the methods of social art history, science studies, and media studies, Doctored reveals important connections between the professionalization of American photographers and the construction of photography’s cultural identity.
Monday, December 12
Doris Friedensohn (Emerita, New Jersey City University) Cooking for Change: Tales from a Food Service Training Academy (The Writing Center)
Growing out of her experiences researching and writing Eating as I Go: Scenes from American and Abroad, Doris Friedensohn explores the work of the Food Service Training Academy of the FoodBank of New Jersey, which couples the dream of rebirth through education with the inherent magic of the kitchen. Cooking turns ex-cons and recovering addicts into savvy artisans who exercise professional taste and judgment in executing ambitious menus. A food bank's simple lunchroom becomes an arena for performance art and transnational culinary tourism. Writing about their personal food experiences, high school dropouts become lyrical poets. Food scholars write about commensality (how dining together binds families, communities, and alliances), the food voice (how people express themselves through cooking), and madeleines (how particular foods trigger poignant memories). All of these are served up in ample, tasty portions in Cooking for Change.