On Wednesday, May 12th at 12:30 PM EDT the Inter-Departmental Professionalization Forum will hold its second workshop of the semester.
The first session focused on preparing essays for submission to professional journals, with an emphasis on those working with materials in Arabic. The second session will be about building interdisciplinary syllabi for humanities courses that incorporate questions of racial justice and the geopolitical stakes of new and old literary fields into their critical frameworks.
Graduate students Smaran Dayal of the Department of Comparative Literature and Francisco Quinteiro Pires of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese will present for 15 minutes each, followed by an informal discussion. Francisco will approach the (geo)politics of curiosity regarding the study of race and otherness in Afro-Luso-Brazilian cultures. Smaran will speak to his work co-editing the American literature anthology Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts (2020) as well as his advocacy on the Board of the American Comparative Literature Association for deprovincializing/decolonizing English, German, and Comparative Literature curricula as well as diversifying hiring and admissions in US universities.
The forum is designed to give students in the humanities an opportunity to meet each other and to learn more about how students in other literature departments are defining fields and approaches in interdisciplinary contexts.
Francisco Quinteiro Pires is a journalist and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. His research focuses on the racialized and gendered representations of subjectivities in contemporary visual and literary cultures produced in Afro-Luso-Brazilian territories.
Smaran Dayal is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at NYU, where he is writing a dissertation on literary Afrofuturism. He is co-translator of the book The Queer Intersectional in Contemporary Germany and co-editor of the anthology of American literature, Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts.