Recent News

Celebrate XE Faculty Lucy Ives' new novel coming out on October 4th this fall: Life Is Everywhere, published by Graywolf Press!

Join Lucy Ives for a reading and Q&A with novelist and Atlantic editor Juliet Lapidos as part of the Brooklyn Book Fest on Tuesday, September 27th at 7pm at POWERHOUSE Arena in Dumbo. More info and sliding-scale registration here.

If you are not available to attend the event, but would like to purchase a copy of the book, Bookshop.org is another recommended place to obtain a copy of LIE. 

    -Sep. 21, 2022

 

XE student Heesoo Jung has launched CONTEMPLATIVE, a magazine philosophizing daily issues and interdisciplinary topics. 

    -Jun. 28, 2022

 

Congratulations to this year's winners of XE's Hirschhorn Master's Project Award:

Sharai Dottin, Blackgirltopia: An Exploration of the Queer, Black Feminist and Afrofuturistic Possibilities of Musical Theater to Enact Liberation

Katrina Martinez, Disastrous Empire: Puerto Rican Laborers on Hawaiian Plantations

        -Jun. 9, 2022

 

XE Faculty Lori Cole received the New York University Research Catalyst Prize for her book project The Magazine as Museum: Displaying and Circulating Art in the Americas.


        -Jun. 7, 2022
 

Congratulations to our alumni starting PhD programs in 2022, including:

Michael Castellano, University of California, Los Angeles, History
Ashley Jackson, University of Chicago, Anthropology
Maeve Kozlark, New York University, Music
Luc Marraffa, University of Amsterdam, School of Cultural Analysis
Katrina Martinez, University of Connecticut, History 
Cella Masso-Rivetti, Columbia University, Religious Studies
Em Panetta, York University, Science & Technology Studies
Genevieve Pfeiffer, University of Oregon, English Ecocriticism
Guillermo Sardi, CUNY, Political Science
Colin Stragar-Rice, Cornell University, English
Sarah Jane Weill, Sarah Lawrence College, Creative Writing
Lupita Orozco, Columbia University Law

 

        -Jun. 6, 2022

 

XE Faculty Lori Cole received a Global Research Initiative Visiting Faculty Fellowship at NYU in Paris for Summer 2022.
        -May 27, 2022

 

Congratulations to XE student Allegra Rosenberg, who has also received an NYU Center for the Humanities Digital Humanities Graduate Student Summer Fellowship! 
        -May 18, 2022

 

XE student Sylvia Juliana Riveros Torres' photo project, Toñita's: One of the oldest Latinx Club bridges generations together, was recently published in the NYU Journalism Institute's Pavement Pieces. Toñita's is also exhibited at 20 Cooper Square, 6th Floor, NYU.
        -May 17,  2022

 

XE student Gabriela D'Addario has been awarded a GSAS Summer Urban Public Humanities fellowship. For two months this summer Gabriela will be working with the Black Gotham Experience as their Archivist and Research Coordinator. Congratulations, Gabriela!
        -May 9, 2022

 

XE alum Leslie Wooden, currently a doctoral student of Art History, has been selected to receive a 2022 National Security Education Program (NSEP) David L. Boren Fellowship to study the language Twi in Ghana through the African Languages Flagship Initiative. Congratulations, Leslie!
        -Apr. 25, 2022

 

Congratulations to XE student Helen Stec, who received an NYU Center for the Humanities Digital Humanities Graduate Student Summer Fellowship! This competitive fellowship is designed to allow students to develop unique digital humanities projects over the summer term. 
        -Apr. 22, 2022

XE is thrilled to announce that Emma Heaney will be joining the faculty this fall as a Clinical Assistant Professor. Emma Heaney is a scholar of comparative literature, feminist studies, and trans studies. Her first book, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Northwestern UP, 2017) traces the medicalization of trans femininity and the uptake of the resulting diagnostic in works of literature and theory. Her forthcoming edited collection Feminism Against Cisness gathers essays by trans studies scholars that demonstrate the potential of feminist critique freed of the ideology that assigned sex determines sexed experience. Her current research derives a theory of the transformation of queer and trans identities from works of literature spanning the long twentieth century. Her fiction and essays can be found in the journals Asteri(x) and The Tampa Review.
        -Apr. 11, 2022

Congratulations to XE alum Sookyung "Vero" Chai, who has been selected to receive a 2022 Master's Award for Academic Achievement, which recognizes the most distinguished master's thesis or final project in each discipline. Vero's project is titled "Against Family Values: On Domestic Archives and Public Memories in Visual Art and Cultural Practice."
        -Apr. 8, 2022

XE student Ruqaiyah Zarook was awarded the Fall 2021 Student Writing Fellowship from The Nation magazine. Over the course of the eight-week fellowship, she wrote and published an article for The Nation, titled "Abolish the Debt Sentence," which can be found here.
        -Mar. 23, 2022

Congratulations to the XE Research Award winners! Spring awards are announced in March. This year's recipients include:

  • Seth Majnoon (Fall)
  • Luc Marraffa (Fall)
  • Achille Wangam (Fall)
  • Guillermo Sardi (Spring)
  • Mays Smithwick (Spring)
  • Ruqaiyah Zaroook (Spring)
            -Mar. 22, 2022

 

XE student Ruqaiyah Zarook co-wrote an article about how prison telecom giants profiteered off of incarcerated individuals and their families during the pandemic, titled "How Corporations Turned Prison Tablets Into a Predatory Scheme" which was published in Dissent Magazine and The Appeal.
        -Mar. 10, 2022

In the February 2022 issue of Artforum magazine, Professor Lucy Ives writes about the art of Toyen, a revolutionary and little-known Surrealist. Ives's long essay, "Mythic Being," describes Toyen's gender nonconformity as well as Toyen's engagement with pornography and that which escapes visual representation.
        -Feb. 16, 2022

XE student Sonia Epstein was selected as one of 200 film professionals from 70 countries to participate in the 20th anniversary of Berlinale Talents, the annual talent development platform of the Berlin International Film Festival for outstanding creatives from the field of cinema.
        -Feb. 12, 2022

Director Jennifer Jacquet wrote about new interdisciplinary research using genetic matches and other kinds of data to learn more about trafficking networks in illegal African ivory, released today in Nature Human Behaviour: "Clues to Crime in Ivory DNA."
        -Feb. 10, 2022

 

XE's Director, Professor Jennifer Jacquet, is featured in a New York Times video opinion piece on the power of the American agriculture lobby, and the many damanges it works to conceal. The piece can be viewed here: "Meet the People Getting Paid to Kill our Planet."
        -Feb. 1, 2022

 

Professor Lori Cole will be speaking at the virtual symposium for the exhibition "Surrealism Beyond Borders" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thursday Jan. 20th at 1pm.
        -Jan. 18, 2022

XE alum M. Leona Godin's book There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness was published in June by Pantheon. Reviewed with much acclaim, this genre-defying work reveals just how essential blindness and vision are to humanity’s understanding of itself and the world.
        -Nov. 23, 2021

XE student Dylan Barclay wrote a Letter to the Editor as an assignment for Professor Lori Cole's "Correspondences" class--and got it published in the New York Times! You can read the letter here, if you scroll to the bottom.
        -Nov. 12, 2021

 

XE student Youngbin Song has been awarded the Academic Fellowship at The Center for Black, Brown and Queer Studies. The fellowship is a year-long program that supports individual research and writing projects, collectively explores the intersections of critical race, postcolonial, indigenous and queer theory, and builds intergenerational and interdisciplinary communities of scholars.
        -Nov. 11, 2021

Professor Lucy Ives has a feature in the November 2021 print issue of Artforum magazine examining artist Meret Oppenheim's iconic surrealist object, Fur Cup. She writes, "Yet in spite of the artist’s reservations, something intimately hers had gone into the furred table setting—which appears sensitive to the touch, as if frilled with thousands of fine antennae."
        -Nov. 3, 2021

Professor Peter Lucas' latest film, Before the Close of Day: Passages from Dante's Purgatorio, has opened as the first of three films that comprise The Dante Project. Each film is an imaginative aural and visual landscape complimenting Dante’s Cantos, which are designed into each film and spoken.
        -Nov. 1, 2021

XE student Ruqaiyah Zarook received a 2022 Grant-in-Aid Award from the Immigration History Research Center Archives (IHRCA) at the University of Minnesota Libraries. These awards support travel to the IHRCA at Andersen Library to advance awardees’ research. The IHRCA provides access to immigrant and refugee assistance organization records, ethnic identity and fraternal organization records, personal papers, and print collections of periodicals and rare books.
        -Oct. 25, 2021

Recent graduate Razielle Aigen’s debut book of poetry, “A Future Perfect” has been published by Talonbooks. Copies are available here, or from your local bookstore. The virtual book launch will be on November 4th at 8:30 p.m. EST, to register visit Talonbooks's event page here.
        -Oct. 21, 2021

Faculty Elaine Gan has been awarded a 2022 fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. The RCC Society of Fellows is a prestigious and competitive international program that supports scholars undertaking major research and writing projects in the fields of environmental humanities, arts, and sciences.
        -Oct. 19, 2021
 

Faculty Elaine Gan received a book subvention grant from NYU Center for Humanities for her project on the extinction and de-extinction of the American chestnut tree (Castanea dentata). The project began as an XE course funded by a Bennett-Polonsky Humanites Lab fellowship.
        -Oct. 19, 2021

 

XE faculty Sonia Werner's article "Anachronism & Idiocy: History, Literature & the Aesthetics of Verisimilitude" was recently published in the journal Diacritics.
         -Oct. 5, 2021
 

For Berlin Science Week 2021, Juan Ferrer (director of Museo del Hongo, XE student), together with the digital artists Natalia Cabrera and Javier Garay Mena will give a tour of the virtual exhibition "Gira: Affective Strategies in the Digital Exhibition Space," revealing the details on how the space was conceived and the infinite possibilities these new tools represent for scientific engagement through the arts. The tour will be on Nov. 4th, 2021.
        -Oct. 4, 2021
 

"Surrealism Beyond Borders" opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Associate Director Lori Cole was on the Curatorial Advisory Committee for the exhibition and contributed to the catalogue.
        -Oct. 4, 2021

XE's outgoing Director, Una Chaudhuri, and friend of XE Marina Zurkow, operating as DEAR CLIMATE, built a whale fall installation at the PUTTING GREEN Mini Golf at River St. and North 1st St. in Williamsburg, New York. The Putting Green is an 18-hole minigolf course designed to highlight the greatest climate challenges--and solutions--of our time.
        -Sept. 01, 2021

 

Professor Nadja Millner-Larsen has reviewed the Walker Art Center's Living Collections Catalog on "Collaborative Artistic Practices in the United States, 1960s-1980s" for CAA Reviews, available here.
        -Jun. 30, 2021

 

XE alum Vero Chai's article "Editing the Archive: Alexandra Bell’s Annotation, Redaction, and Epistemic Resistance in Counternarratives" has made made the cover story of the summer 2021 issue of Art Journal CAA (Volume 80, Issue 2). This paper first developed through Professor Cole's graduate seminar "The Copy." Vero is thrilled to continue their research and writing as a doctoral student at Rutgers Comp Lit starting this fall.
        -Jun. 23, 2021

Congratulations to XE student Katrina Martinez, who recently received NYU's Cities Collaborative Fellowship. The NYU Cities Collaborative and the GSAS Public Humanities Initiative, with support from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, have launched the Summer Urban Public Humanities Fellowship for graduate students interested in exploring multi-disciplinary aspects of urban life and experience.
        -Jun. 17, 2021

 

Professor Peter Lucas' latest film, Before the Close of Day, won a prize for best experimental film at a virtual film festival in Florence, Italy and will be screening at the Manhattan Film Festival on the 25th of June at 5:00 p.m.  Tickets can be found here.
        -Jun. 9, 2021

 

Alum Matthew Zundel was awarded the Dean's Dissertation Fellowship for Academic Year 2021-2022, which will allow him to complete his dissertation titled, "Perversion, Polemic, Affect: Sexual Dissidence in 1970s Italy," in NYU's Department of Italian Studies. This Fellowship will be paired with an Honorary Fellowship from NYU's Center for the Humanities, giving Matthew the opportunity to develop his work with colleagues at the Center over the course of the academic year.
        -Jun. 8, 2021

 

Director Una Chaudhuri presented Dear Climate as part of the Madison Square Park Conservancy's annual symposium "Greening Public Art" on June 4th, 2021. Inspired by Maya Lin's Ghost Forest, this year's virtual event considered why artists, curators, journalists, and cultural and environmental leaders are advancing public art, dialogue, and activism to address inextricable crises facing the environment. More information on the event can be found here.

        -Jun. 4, 2021

Professor Lucy Ives's next novel, Life is Everywhere, will be published by the beloved independent press Graywolf, currently scheduled to be published in Fall 2022.
        -Jun. 3, 2021

Professor Elaine Gan's essay on "Diagrams: Making Multispecies Temporalities Visible" is coming out in June, as part of a collection titled Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis, co-edited by Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross Winthereik, published by Duke. Cover by Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes. Book intro now available here.
        -May 21, 2021

XE's Incoming Director, Professor Jennifer Jacquet, has a new article out in the Washington Post. "The meat industry is doing exactly what Big Oil does to fight climate action" (May 14, 2021) can be found here. 
        -May 17, 2021
 

Congratulations to XE student Katrina Martinez on being selected as one of The Latinx Project's inaugural Public Humanities Fellows! This group of graduate students from NYU & the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium will be collaborating respectively with El Museo del Barrio, El Clemente Soto Velez Center, Pregones/PRTT, Lazos, Mil Mundos, Toppled Monuments Archive, and Museo de Los Sures.
        -May 7, 2021

XE is excited to share that current student Colin Stragar-Rice has been selected as a finalist in this year's GSAS Threesis Academic Challenge. Colin was elected as one of six finalists out of the competition's record 101 participants! Colin will be presenting their Master's Project, "Ontology of the Page: Towards a Critique of its Logic of Raciality" at the Threesis Final Round later this month.

        -Apr. 2, 2021

 

Alum Yvonne C. Garrett successfully defended her dissertation for the Ph.D. in History & Culture, Drew University (degree to be awarded May 2021). Dissertation title: "(Re)Constructing Identity: Structures of Female Empowerment in 1980s American Punk."
        -Apr. 1, 2021

Professor Kimon Keramidas and alum Fiona Haborak recently presented the talk "Geeks at the Heart of the Sci-Fi Classroom" at the Geek/Art CONfluence, an online comic con that included cosplay, gaming, art, panels, and presentations. The talk covered their article "Context, Cosplay, and (Re)configurations: Centering the Geek at the Heart of Science Fiction Pedagogy," which was recently published in the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.
        -Mar. 20, 2021

XE Director Una Chaudhuri collaborated on the event dramaturgy for Bodies in Peril: A Collaborative Dwelling, an installment in the Performance in Critical Times series that asks the community to create connections and shared experiences for post-pandemic habitation. 
        -Mar. 19, 2021

XE student Sonia Epstein has curated Proceed with Caution, a new series at the Queens Drive-in, in Flushing Meadows Park, that pairs popular films with introductions by public health experts. The series begins on April 9 with Terry Gilliam's sci-fi classic 12 Monkeys and Chris Marker's 1962 La Jetee, introduced by epidemiologist Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo who will speak about what we can learn from the past to apply to pandemic preparedness. More information can be found here.
        -Mar. 18, 2021

XE faculty Elaine Gan's podcast, Multispecies Worldbuilding, is entering its second season with a new episode out featuring anthropologist and science studies scholar Lesley Green. The episode can be found here or wherever podcasts are found. 
        -Mar. 8, 2021
 

XE faculty Nadja Millner-Larsen has received a book subvention grant from NYU Center for the Humanities for her book Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
        -Mar. 1, 2021


Alumna Yvonne C. Garrett has two book reviews published in the February issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Garrett's reviews can be found here and here.
        -Mar. 1, 2021

Alumna Jamia Wilson has recently assumed the position of Executive Editor at Random House, detailed here. Wilson was featured in this week's NY Magazine in an article titled "The Group Portrait Big-five publishing’s new power players."
        -Feb. 22, 2021


Professor Kimon Keramidas helped organize and taught three workshops during the 7th annual NYCDH Week. This year's DH Week brought together over 1500 registrations to more than 30 sessions offered virtually including workshops offered by researchers and scholars in the Middle East. The week's theme was Care and Repair and focused attention on NYCDH as a community that provides spaces for caring for one another and developing practices of repair at the personal and institutional level.
        -Feb. 8, 2021

XE faculty Peter Lucas was the creative / editing consultant on Nanfu Wang’s new film In the Same Breath which was the opening night film at the Sundance Film Festival on January 28th.  Using on the ground citizen footage, the film covers Wuhan in the early days of the Covid-19 outbreak and China’s attempt to censor what really happened.  The film will be streaming later in the spring on HBO. A review by The Guardian can be found here.
        -Feb. 4, 2021

Student Genevieve Pfeiffer has had her recent works published in two editions of the literary journal About Place. Links to her work can be found here and here. 
        -Feb. 4, 2021

 

XE faculty Lucy Ives, along with artist Paul Chan, will discuss the writing, architecture, and life of Madeline Gins (1941–2014), a visionary interdisciplinary thinker and artist for Printed Matter’s Virtual Art Book Fair. Chan and Ives will explore related themes in critical theory, philosophy, and contemporary arts practice, as well as the editorial process for The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, a collection of Gins’s long out-of-print or unpublished writings. Saturday, February 27 ~ 3:30–5pm EST. More information here.
        -Feb. 2, 2021

Professor Lori Cole will be giving a talk at the Institute of Fine Arts on February 18, 2021 as part of the panel New Approaches to Fanny Sanín: Women Artists and Geometric Abstraction. The link to RSVP for the event can be found here. 
        -Feb. 1, 2021