Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Oer / Open Pedagogy Virtual Showcase Presentation, Remi Alapo

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Invisible Inequalities: Persistent Health Threats In The Urban Built Environment, Kara M. Schlichting, Melanie A. Kiechle

Publications and Research

A city’s materiality creates health and illness. We both write about air – its movement and its temperature – as it affects human bodies. We offer two topics as case studies, heat and ventilation, and how they exacerbate the effects of each other, to illustrate the long history of seemingly new challenges posed by the novel coronavirus. The environmental inequalities of heat exposure and access to fresh air underscore that cities can only be considered ‘low impact’ on the environment from a top-down, large-scale approach. In writing about air and heat, we direct attention to the feel and the bodily …

Using Monuments To Teach About Racism, Colonialism, And Sexism, Susan Phillip

Publications and Research

This chapter examines how an interdisciplinary high-impact practice approach to teaching and learning using selected contested monuments can reveal intersections of racism, colonialism, and sexism, and lay the foundation for students’ civic engagement. In place-based and virtual experiences, students observe and investigate local and national monuments, integrating knowledge from multiple disciplines, including history, psychology, art, culture, and tourism. Students make critical analyses about how monuments reveal power relationships in our society. Students from various disciplines explore the origin of contested monuments, the evolving national and local debates around them, and their effect on students’ learning to evaluate historical, contemporary, and …

When It Comes To Racial Justice, Why Is It Wrong To Demand The "Impossible"?, Kristopher B. Burrell

Publications and Research

Asking “is what is being demanded politically realistic?” or “politically possible?” is a persistent problem with the ways many liberals who imagine themselves as progressive still think about ending systemic racial discrimination, and about protests against racism. Such questions ask us to measure “the realistic” and “the possible” prior to making political demands, and presume that the efficacy of social protest movements correlates with a tacit agreement between activists and those in power about what politics should look like. The demand for realism also betrays a particular racial and class privilege on the part of the person asking the question: …

Commemorating A Legacy Of Dissent: Revisiting Campus Activism 1968-1970, Annie E. Tummino

Publications and Research

On the heels of the student revolt at Columbia in 1968, Queens College students launched their own militant actions and demands for change on campus. Using primary source materials from the Benjamin Rosenthal Library’s Special Collections and Archives, the presentation covers the New Left and Anti-War movements, as well as an uprising led by Black and Puerto Rican students influenced by the ideologies of Black Power and self-determination. The role of archives in preserving activist history and educating current and future generations is also touched on.

Invisible Strangers, Or Romani History Reconsidered, Kristina Richardson

Publications and Research

This essay proposes that the invisibility of so-called Gypsies in Middle Eastern and Central Asian historiography derives from two linked phenomena. First, the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and North American philologists, medievalists, and ethnographers delegitimized the Strangers’ languages, along with the cultures and histories that these languages expressed. The erasure of Strangers from modern historiography was nearly total. Secondly, the category of Strangers was transformed in the wake of the Holocaust as Roma activists drew on Nazi racial categories to base Roma identity on linguistic criteria.

More Austerity Coming? Lessons From New York City's 1970s Fiscal Crisis, Marc Kagan

Publications and Research

Crises can be moments of opportunity, but it is not foreordained who will seize the ring. The Great Depression ultimately led to the New Deal/Great Society state and increasing equality. 1975 New York City fiscal crisis, on the other hand, laid the groundwork for decades of neoliberal austerity. Despite political vulnerabilities, bankers and their Washington allies acted boldly to protect imperiled assets and remake a city in which the working class wielded some power as a bastion of finance capital. Seemingly powerful unions abandoned the public they served, and followed a risk-averse strategy of concessions in exchange for junior-partner corporatism, …

For Tony Feliciano, A Friend And A Union Man, Marc Kagan

Publications and Research

My friend Tony Feliciano, transit worker 1984-2020, and a union man all his life, died a few weeks ago; he had just turned 61. While transit workers were dying this spring, he actually made it out of the 207th St. Overhaul Shop, where he worked virtually his whole career, in May; he put in his papers and retired to his house in Rockland County.

But he died of a heart attack, before he could even collect his first pension check.

Documenting Latinx Communities: Podcasting And Oral History In The Time Of Covid-19, Nelson Santana

Publications and Research

Living through a worldwide pandemic is not easy. As of June 22, 2020, more than 8.8 million cases have been confirmed and more than 465,700 people have died from COVID-19. Oral narratives are powerful tools that for audiences paint a picture of that person’s perception of an event, especially since it is the narrative of the interviewee’s unique lived experience that is captured. This paper discusses the early stages of an oral history project that documents COVID-19 through the lens of Latinx communities.

Agency And Contemporary Recording Production, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Recording production is a complex, multistep, typically collaborative process that entails a shifting set of individuals inhabiting changing roles within spaces that house consider­ able amounts of specialized technology. As these roles and technologies feature promi­ nently in the aesthetics of Anglophone and Francophone popular music, they have been studied within such milieus for the longest period. This scholarship tends to understand the creative act as either the result of a prominent individual or something determined by the technologies used within studios. However, recent ethnomusicological scholarship has shown it is much more difficult to clearly situate agency within recording production, …

Contesting Circuits Of Empire: Afro-Caribbean Migrant Labor In Cuba, 1899-1958, Samuel Finesurrey

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

The Case For Early Arabia And Arabic Language: A Reply To The New Arabia Theory By Ahmad Al-Jallad, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

A reply to an article published on May 23rd, 2018, in The New Yorker magazine by Elias Muhanna, titled A New History of Arabia, Written in Stone, introducing a new theory by Ahmad al-Jallad, a Harvard trained scholar of ancient Near East languages and scripts, asserting that the Arabic language (and presumably the Arabs) was originated in the south Levant desert and migrated southward. This theory would reverse the established conclusions set forth by the esteemed work of numerous Islamic Arab linguists and historians, over more than a thousand years, who believed the Arabs and the Arabic language originated in …

From Brooklyn To “Brooklyn” The Cultural Transformations Of Leisure, Pleasure, And Taste, Emily Holloway

Publications and Research

To tell the story of Brooklyn’s complex history in hospitality and cuisine is to tell a story about the tensions of high and low culture, of the mobility of capital and residents, and of the tremendous influence yielded by macroeconomic change. A sleepy bedroom community for the eighteenth and much of the early nineteenth centuries, Brooklyn’s waterfront (both historically and today) is deeply tied to its nineteenth and twentieth-century industrial heritage. The ad hoc economies that supported factory and dock workers, included boardinghouses, saloons, brothels, food carts, and amusement parks and drew a stark contrast to those of factory and …

The Borders Of Dominicanidad—Interview With Lorgia Garcia Peña, Nelson Santana, Amaury Rodríguez

Publications and Research

Dr. Lorgia García Peña is associate professor of Latinx Studies at Harvard University and the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, Fall 2016). Lorgia García Peña’s book delves deep into Dominican society and history by dissecting foundational myths and state-sponsored propaganda. Lorgia García Peña also looks at Dominican alternative cultural production and the socio-political resistance found in performance art and Afro-Dominican popular religions. In the most recent roundtable installment from the Ethnic Studies Rise initiative that celebrates the work and legacy of García Peña's scholarship, translator and scholar Kaiama Glover argued that [Lorgia …

I Was Called, Too: The Life And Work Of Coretta Scott King, Kristopher B. Burrell

Publications and Research

I thought it both appropriate—and overdue—to discuss the significance of Coretta Scott King. And not just as the wife, and eventual widow, of Martin Luther King; but as an important activist and shaper of Dr. King’s ideas. Mrs. King was a significant figure in her own right, but as with many female historical figures her historical importance has often been minimized or negated; and that can lead to erasure, even in plain sight. This has largely been the case with Mrs. King and with black women in the civil rights movement more broadly.

Setting The Terms Of Our Own Visibility A Conversation Between Sam Feder And Alexandra Juhasz On Trans Activist Media In The United States, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

In the summer of 2016, I sat down at my computer and Skyped with my friend and fellow queer media activist Sam Feder about their film, Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen. What follows is a highly edited transcript of our conversation, paying particular attention to Sam’s core research findings about trans representational history and how their findings might align with their processes and goals as a trans activist media maker committed to telling this complex story.

Ancient Snakebite Literature: The Brooklyn Medical Papyrus And Nicander’S Theriaca, Montgomery Q. Stewart

Publications and Research

The Brooklyn Papyrus is an Egyptian medical treatise on the subject of snakebite cures. It is a part of the Brooklyn Museum’s Charles Edwin Wilbour collection (47.218.48 and 47.218.85). In the 1960s, the papyrus was translated into French by Egyptologist Serge Sauneron. This research paper includes the first full translation of the Brooklyn Papyrus, as well as an introductory essay, which analyzes the structural and religious elements of the work. It also compares the Brooklyn Papyrus to another notable work on snakebites, Nicander of Colophon’s Theriaca.

Racial Integration, White Appropriation, And School Choice: The Demise Of The Colored Schools Of Late Nineteenth Century Brooklyn, Judith R. Kafka, Cici Matheny

Publications and Research

This study examines school desegregation in late-nineteenth-century Brooklyn from a spatial perspective, analyzing enrollment data and policy debates within the context of the shifting racial and geographic contours of the city. We argue that “choice” on the part of black families only partially explains the demise of designated-black schools during this period. White interests also played a role in the closing of these institutions, as white families and developers sought, and ultimately acquired, control over formerly black spaces. This study contributes to a growing body of research on school desegregation in northern U.S. cities by exploring the perceived benefits of …

Lost In Translation, Presumption, And Interpretation: Adam, Noah, And The Ancient Mesopotamian Mythology Of The Creation And The Flood, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

The common, biblical believes in an initial, single human creation, and a subsequent survival of a punishing, catastrophic flood were among the key forming pillars of the Near East monotheist religions. The other key pillar was, arguably, the belief in the existence of a one, supreme god and creator. However, neither the two stories of human creation and catastrophic flood, nor the belief in one supreme god, were originally introduced by these monotheist religions. Key inscriptions from ancient Mesopotamia have clearly indicated that various versions of these beliefs were commonplace for thousands of years before. Despite the differences in details, …

Book Review: Hatians, The People That Will Not Go Away, François Pierre-Louis Jr.

Publications and Research

Reviews three books:

• Matthew J. Smith. Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica after Emancipation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

• Toni Pressley-Sanon. Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017.

• Victor Figueroa. Prophetic Visions of the Past: Pan-Caribbean Representations of the Haitian Revolution. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015.

The Querelle Des Clés: An Episode In Francisco Frontera De Valldemosa's Exuberant Life, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

In 1858, Francisco Frontera de Valldemosa published a peculiar music theory treatise in Madrid under the title Equinotación ó Nuevo sistema musical de llaves. It has two parts. The first (pp. 11-20) is an explanation of the invention (namely, the reduction of all clefs to only three) detailing the perceived actual need for it (that is, most clefs are unnecessary, and they impede or delay the creativity of the avid music learner). The second part (new pagination, pp. 2-83) is a curious anthology of music in many genres and styles. On the left page of each spread, there is a …

Rethinking Early Modern Sexuality Through Race, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

When English Literary Renaissance launched in 1971, early modern sexuality studies did not exist. Then again, neither did the feminist, new historicist, post-colonialist, or other “political” approaches that have significantly reshaped early modern literary studies (and the humanities) over the last forty years. Yet whereas feminist and new historicist essays began thickly to populate the pages of Renaissance journals in the early 1980s, studies of sexuality—and of lesbian, gay, or queer sexualities in particular—were slow to arrive. During the 1980s, ELR published only a handful of essays that centered on sex or eroticism. The first explicit treatment of homoeroticism in …

Mabou Mines’ Dead End Kids And Performing Artists For Nuclear Disarmament, Hillary Miller

Publications and Research

Performance studies scholar and theater historian Hillary Miller offers a new study of the 1980 production of Dead End Kids: A History of Nuclear Power by the New York-based avant-garde theater collective, Mabou Mines. Through a close reading of the play, Miller explores the relationship between this production and the little researched organization, Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament (PAND), revealing the correlations between collaboratively-generated theater practices and concurrent protest movements.

"Review Of Stephen Huggins America's Use Of Terror: From Colonial Times To The A-Bomb," 2020. Journal Of Interdisciplinary History 51(2): 328--29., Zachary C. Shirkey

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Confucian Thought And Contemporary Western Philosophy, Andrew Lambert

Publications and Research

This chapter explores the encounter between the traditional Confucian thought and contemporary Anglophone philosophy. It explores the evolution in philosophical methods and heuristics employed by Anglophone thinkers in the past fifty or so years, often with the aim of extracting Confucian thought from its specific social and historical roots. Unlike the disciplines of intellectual or literary history, these philosophers have articulated dimensions of Confucian philosophy not explicit in traditional texts, developed critiques of Western modernity, derived solutions to problems in Western philosophy, and sought to reimagine Confucian thought for an East Asian modernity. Analyzing how contemporary philosophers have engaged the …