Join us for a one-week workshop for professors from all disciplines engaged in a writing project (whether starting or working from the middle)
The symposium is comprised of Black, Jewish, and gentile scholars who approach the symposium’s themes from a variety of methodologies, with panels entitled “Historical Intersections of Black/Jewish Relations;” “African Americans and Jews Navigating a White Christian World,” “Literary Representations and Responses to European Antisemitism and White America;” “Political and Cultural Legacies of Civil Rights.” The symposium is structured as a series of accessible conversations among panelists, respondents, and the audience.
ReWorking Communities of Practice Colloquium
The colloquium is organized by the James Gallery Institute of Art & Inquiry, Ph.D. Program in Earth and Environmental Sciences, and the Ph.D. Program in English.
“Mentorship, Apprenticeship, Pedagogy, and Expanded Forms of Teaching/Learning”
Re:Working Labor, sponsored by the International Research Center re:work - Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Galleries at SAIC, The Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice at SAIC, the Goethe-Institut Chicago, and the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
What might it mean to queer Jewish comics? In this panel, we will explore the works of comics creators who have challenged normative notions of Jewish identity and belonging, particularly in relation to gender and sexuality, by experimenting with elements like form, style, characterization, and storytelling convention. Our panelists will discuss their experiences of shaping Jewish characters and stories to expand ideas of what Jewish comics storytelling can look like, and what it can say.
MODERATOR: TAHNEER OKSMAN
BEN KAHN
SHIRA SPECTOR
BARRY DEUTSCH
MIRIAM LIBICKI
U.S. Book Show will feature a variety of keynote speakers, editor and author panels, and special timely and topical library, bookselling and industry programming.
Co-sponsored with the Center for the Humanities, the CUNY Graduate Center Ph.D. Program in English, the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies, the CUNY Graduate Center Library, The Feminist Press, and Women's Studies Quarterly.
Open to the public.
MoCCA Arts Fest
Born in Hungary during World War II, as a small child Miriam Katin escaped the Holocaust with her mother. She documented that story in her book We Are On Our Own, which returns to print in a new edition from Drawn and Quarterly this year. In Letting It Go, she chronicled a return to Germany and a reckoning with past events. Nora Krug’s graphic memoir Belonging confronted her German family’s connection to the rise of Nazism, and her most recent book is an illustrated edition of On Tyranny, historian Timothy Snyder’s series of historically-informed strategies for confronting rising authoritarianism today. They will discuss these works and more in a conversation moderated by Marymount Manhattan College Associate Professor Tahneer Oksman (How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?).
Feminists Reclaim Mentorship, an anthology of 26 essays about mentorship, is co-edited by Distinguished Professor Nancy K. Miller (English, Comparative Literature, French, Women’s and Gender Studies) and Tahneer Oksman (Ph.D. ’13, English). This event will feature a roundtable with the co-editors and four contributors: Ashna Ali, Elizabeth Alsop, Angela Francis, and Sharifa Hampton. The discussion will be followed by a reception with light refreshments.
Mentorship continues to loom large in stories about women's work and personal lives- sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. If mentors can nurture and support, they can also bitterly disappoint, reproducing the hardships they once suffered and reinforcing the same old hierarchies and inequities. The stories gathered in Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology challenge our fundamental assumptions about mentorship illuminating the obstacles that make it difficult to connect meaningfully and ethically while reimagining the possibilities for reciprocity.
PANELISTS
Melissa Coss Aquino is Associate Professor of English at Bronx Community College, CUNY, and author of the forthcoming novel, Carmen and Grace, from Willam Morrow/HarperCollins, April 2023.
Sharifa Hampton is a PhD student in English Literature at CUNY's The Graduate Center. She teaches in the Black and Latino Studies Department at Baruch College, and also works as a Diversity Consultant.
Michelle Yasmine Valladares is a South Asian American poet, educator and an independent filmmaker. Sheteaches at the City College of New York and directs their MFA program in creative wriung
Angela Veronica Wong is an educator, writer, and artist living in New York City. She is the author of two books of poetry, including Elsa: An Unauthorized Autobiography.
Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center at CUNY.
Tahneer Oksman is Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Language, and the Department of Communication and Media Arts at Marymount Manhattan College.
As the world slowly emerges from the global horrors of the pandemic and struggles with the continuing war in Ukraine, the question of how and when to talk about grief, both individual and collective, has become more urgent than ever. Though Western cultures tend to relegate open expressions of grief to the sidelines, with some notable exceptions, this roundtable is built on the premise that grief belongs in everyday life and warrants our careful, and focused, attention.
Bar-Ilan University, Department of Jewish Art
Departmental Seminar: From the Researcher’s Desk
In this talk, Tahneer Oksman will discuss her process of analyzing graphic narratives addressing grief and loss in order to think through complicated questions about grief as emotion and process. What are the connections, for instance, between individual and communal experiences of grief and loss, and their expressions? What can we learn from the shapes of narratives about grief, and their visual and verbal metrics and dialectics? A special point of interest in this talk will be the ways in which various Jewish cartoonists grapple, in their works, with intergenerational resonances of histories of grief and loss.
Join us for a panel discussion on the new book, Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders, an innovative collection of essays, interviews, and artwork examining Jewish women’s comics.
The Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities
Columbia University
New Books in the Arts and Sciences
By: Jeremy Dauber
Comics have conquered America. From our multiplexes, where Marvel and DC movies reign supreme, to our television screens, where comics-based shows like The Walking Dead have become among the most popular in cable history, to convention halls, best-seller lists, Pulitzer Prize–winning titles, and MacArthur Fellowship recipients, comics shape American culture, in ways high and low, superficial, and deeply profound.
In American Comics, Jeremy Dauber takes readers through their incredible but little-known history, starting with the Civil War and cartoonist Thomas Nast, creator of the lasting and iconic images of Uncle Sam and Santa Claus; the golden age of newspaper comic strips and the first great superhero boom; the moral panic of the Eisenhower era, the Marvel Comics revolution, and the underground comix movement of the 1960s and ’70s; and finally into the twenty-first century, taking in the grim and gritty Dark Knights and Watchmen alongside the brilliant rise of the graphic novel by acclaimed practitioners like Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel.
Dauber’s story shows not only how comics have changed over the decades but how American politics and culture have changed them. Throughout, he describes the origins of beloved comics, champions neglected masterpieces, and argues that we can understand how America sees itself through whose stories comics tell. Striking and revelatory, American Comics is a rich chronicle of the last 150 years of American history through the lens of its comic strips, political cartoons, superheroes, graphic novels, and more.
About the Author:
Jeremy Dauber is the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture and director of Columbia's Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies. He is the author of Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (2004); In the Demon's Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern (2010); The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem (2013); and Jewish Comedy (2017). His research interests include Yiddish literature; comparative Jewish literature; the Yiddish theater; American Jewish literature and popular culture; and American literature and popular culture.
About the Speakers:
Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her work combines feminist theory with memory studies, particularly the transmission of memories of violence across generations. Her recent books include School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference, co-authored with Leo Spitzer (2020), and the co-edited volumes Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photograpahy(2020) and Women Mobilizing Memory (2019).
Rachel Adams is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century literatures of the United States and the Americas, disability studies and health humanities, media studies, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, and food studies. Her most recent book is Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery, published by Yale University Press in 2013 and winner of the 2014 Delta Kappa Gamma Educators' Award.
Tahneer Oksman is a writer, teacher, and scholar. She is Associate Professor of Academic Writing at Marymount Manhattan College, where she teaches classes in writing, literature and comics, and journalism. Her interests revolve around comics and visual narrative, contemporary feminist literature, and memoir studies as well as twentieth- and twenty-first century Jewish American literature and culture. She is the author of "How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (2016).
Victor Lavalle is Associate Professor of Writing at Columbia University. His most recent novel, The Changeling, was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 by Time Magazine and USA Today, and was a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and more. He is also the author is Slapboxing with Jesus, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the writer/creator of a comic book, Destroyer. His awards include the Whiting Writers Award, a USA Ford Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shirley Jackson Award and a British World Fantasy Award, among others.
Roundtable at the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference 2022
Zoom event: Sunday, 9 January 2022, 10:15AM - 11:30AM EST
Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus has had an outsize influence since its publication thirty years ago. Scholars in memory studies, Holocaust studies, memoir studies, Jewish studies, and comics studies discuss the development of teaching strategies and scholarship related to Maus over the past thirty years, across the United States and beyond.
Family, History, Memory: Notes on Some Jewish Graphic Novels
Why dig into the past—communal, familial—particularly when it is likely to yield dark, horrible truths? What’s the connection between visual storytelling, especially in the form of comics, and the piecing together of events from long ago? In this talk, Tahneer Oksman will discuss four graphic memoirs (or, in other words, non-fiction graphic novels): Rutu Modan’s The Property, Nora Krug’s Belonging, Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch, and Miriam Katin’s Letting It Go. Despite their differing plots and perspectives, these visual works all powerfully evoke some of the most important, related questions about the Holocaust and other 20th and 21st century atrocities. Ultimately, these texts investigate what it means to adequately, and ethically, address the past, including untold, and unseen, histories.
Sunday, 12 December, 8 pm Israel / 6 pm UK / 1 pm EST
The National Library of Israel
My talk, “Visual // Grief,” will take place on Zoom from 5:15-6:30 GMT. For more information, see the attached flyer or contact me.
Drawing Their Lives: Jewish Women & Comics, with Tahneer Oksman, writer, teacher, and scholar of literature and visual culture
Part of Global Day of Learning, run by the Jewish Women’s Archive
Sunday, June 27 and Monday, June 28
Join JWA as we celebrate the launch of the expanded and renamed Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. Six webinars presented by expert scholars will showcase the evolution of the Encyclopedia and provide a taste of the new content. Register once and attend as many sessions as you’d like.
In this seminar, designed for undergraduate instructors teaching in all disciplines, participants will discuss, learn, and practice strategies for integrating writing, critical thinking, and active reading at a variety of levels, and into various disciplinary and interdisciplinary subjects, with particular focus on research in an age of disinformation.
On the surface, Rutu Modan’s "The Property" and Nora Krug’s "Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home" are two very different graphic novels. Modan’s fictional book follows a grandmother and granddaughter as they fly from Israel to Warsaw on a quest to find out what happened to the family’s “property” after World War II. Nora Krug’s visual memoir—a combination of comics, archival documents, and sketches—features Krug, a German artist now married to an American Jew, who narrates her journey as she tracks her family’s past to find out more about her relatives’ involvement in Nazi Germany. Despite these differing plots and perspectives, both visual works powerfully evoke some of the most important questions about the Holocaust and other 20th and 21st century atrocities. What roles do the next generations play in thinking through horrific events? What might it look like to adequately address the past, including untold, and often unknown, histories? This talk by Tahneer Oksman will address these and other issues as they are explored through the flexible and capacious medium of comics.
___
The Great Jewish Books Lecture Series gives learners of all ages the opportunity to delve into great works of Jewish literature with top scholars in the field. Each month, a speaker presents a virtual talk focusing on an author or work, followed by a Q&A with the audience. These talks span a wide variety of literary subjects, presenting works written in many languages from classic Yiddish texts to contemporary Jewish American writing.
The Great Jewish Books Lecture Series is made possible with the generous support of the Salkind Family Foundation in memory of Marilyn Salkind.
Registration link here (free).
Saturday, January 9, 2021 | 10:15-11:30am
Medical Humanities and Health Studies Forum
Lisa Diedrich will be presiding over a session at the MLA conference in 2021 that will demonstrate graphic medicine in action using a keywords and keyimages framework. We will have six lightning presentations on examples of verbal and visual tropes illustrating the formal elements, theoretical concepts, practical and pedagogical tools, and health and illness politics of the field of graphic medicine.
Presentations:
‘And None of It Fits inside Panels’: Graphic Silence in Graphic Medicine (Briana Martino, Simmons University)
The Therapeutic Performance in, and of, Ian Williams’s The Bad Doctor (Anna Mukamal, Stanford University)
Dialogic Diagnostics (Elizabeth J. Donaldson, New York Institute. of Technology, Old Westbury)
Sustainable Wellness in Seven Generations (Rosemary J. Jolly, Penn State University, University Park)
Assembly: The Work of Grief (Tahneer Oksman, Marymount Manhattan College)
‘Birthgiving’ Comics and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Korea (Haejoo Kim, Syracuse University)
An online lecture with cartoonist Amy Kurzweil (FLYING COUCH), moderated by Tahneer Oksman, at The American Academy in Berlin.
Cartoonist Amy Kurzweil’s first book, Flying Couch (2016), tells the story of her maternal grandmother’s escape from the Warsaw ghetto and her family’s inheritance of this Holocaust story. Her work-in-progress, Artificial, documents the life of her paternal grandfather—a Viennese musician who escaped the Nazis in 1938—and examines her scientist father’s quest to resurrect his late father’s identity through artificial intelligence. In this talk, Kurzweil shares her approach to the genre of graphic memoir and the process of hand-crafting family narratives and personal memories. What, she wonders, does the hand-drawn-line communicate that the machine cannot? What does the machine preserve that the body forgets?
Here’s a link to the recorded talk plus Q&A afterwards: https://www.americanacademy.de/videoaudio/graphic-memoirs-and-the-art-of-resurrecting-the-past/
To celebrate the releases of Gabrielle Bell’s Inappropriate (Uncivilized Books) and Liana Finck’s Excuse Me: Cartoons, Complaints, and Notes to Self (Penguin Random House), the cartoonists will engage in a conversation moderated by Tahneer Oksman on their artistic styles and use of illustration to tell stories about themselves.
Oksman will show how visualizing grief can be a means of teaching us how to pay attention to those living in grief and to seeing the connections between individual and communal losses.
Book launch for The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell, edited by Tahneer Oksman and Seamus O’Malley. Printed Matter, NY, NY.
Holding Lines: Comics confront AIDS (roundtable participant). Queers & Comics Conference, School of Visual Arts (SVA), NY, NY.
“Drawing on Grief” (presentation and Q&A). NY Comics & Picture-Story Symposium at Parsons The New School, NY, NY
“Comics and the Teaching Artist,” a conversation with Ivan Brunetti, James Sturm, and Tom Hart (moderator). Museum of Comics and Cartoon Arts Festival, NY, NY
“Women in Comics: The State of Scholarship and Opportunities for Professionalization” (panelist). PHD Program in English, The Graduate Center at CUNY.
