Working Groups

The NYU 18th and 19th Century Literature Working Group provides a venue for the promotion and advancement of the latest scholarship and research focusing on these two centuries and their continuing effects on the modern world. Students, faculty, and independent researchers from all disciplines interested in the years between 1650 and 1900 are invited to a series of lectures, seminars, and roundtable discussions that aim to celebrate, complicate, and interrogate this extraordinarily rich time period.

Anyone interested in more information regarding the group—including attending or presenting at one of our upcoming workshops—is welcome to be in touch.

Contact Corey Risinger and Isaac Robertson for more information.

The Creative Writing Working Group provides graduate students with a space to workshop their creative writing projects. The group will meet once every two weeks to read and provide feedback on members’ work. The work may include any non-academic creative project, including but not limited to poetry, fiction, personal essays etc, The group aims to strengthen members’ abilities to write compellingly and to think innovatively. We also hope to create a close-knit community that can engage in conversations about literature not just as scholars, but also as artists.

Contact Parth Chhabra and Katherine Anne Humes for more information.

The Critical Theory and Medievalisms Forum (formerly Medieval Forum) is a graduate student working group in the Department of English at New York University. The mission of our group is to cultivate and promote cross-disciplinary scholarship, while engaging the relationships between contemporary theory (including Post-Colonial Theory and Queer Theory) and Medieval Studies. Our continued aim is to advocate for the study of all literature from the Middle Ages.

Contact EG Asher and Katharine Clark for more information.

Our Research Collaborative has two main objectives:

The first is to define the role of scholars in the humanities in pursuing a rigorous theoretical, historical, and ethical account of modern war cultures across various disciplines. The second goal is to reflect on cultural policy outcomes that might address the profound social, economic and psychic challenges confronting contemporary citizens entering post-war societies around the world. In particular, the Cultures of War group will explore questions of gender, technology and political economy.

The group aims to create dialogue between academia, veterans, the military, activists, and creative artists to contribute to debates about war culture and public policy in today’s challenging global climate.  The Cultures of War research collaborative was established with the support of NYU’s Center for the Humanities and is based in the department of English at NYU.

Cultures of War Website

Contact Emily Foister and Andrew Zuliani for more information. 

The Early Modern Literature Working Group provides a place for graduate students to read and discuss primary sources and recent theory concerning the time period from 1500 to 1650. We cover drama, poetry, proto-fiction, political and historical treatises, and other less classifiable texts. We focus on diverse approaches to the era and how its content remains relevant to our present day. The group will meet regularly, host lectures with scholars working in the field, and workshop conference and term papers. All are welcome, regardless of focus period.

Contact Michael Tingley for more information.

The Marxism Working Group is a forum for reading and discussion of Marxist thought across a broad range of disciplines, periods, and political orientations. While grounded in the political-economic critique of capitalism, we give special emphasis to Marxist accounts of race and gender, and to work from or on the Third World/Global South. In addition to holding reading group meetings, we host visiting speakers and present graduate research. The group is open to all NYU students, faculty, and community members interested in Marxist perspectives on culture, economy, and society.

Contact EG Asher, Guilherme Meyer, and Colin Vanderburg for more information.

The Modern and Contemporary Colloquium (MACC) is a graduate student and faculty working group that organizes seminars, conferences, and guest speaker events broadly concerned with nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century literatures in English. Established within NYU’s English Department in 2005, MACC has as its mission to advance and promote scholarship in poetics, cultural studies, and critical theory and to host interdisciplinary research in these areas. Through its regular meetings and reading groups MACC reflects on the systems, movements, events, and ideas that created the conditions for our present moment and the shifting relations that shape our orientation toward the past, the present, and the future. For more information, please visit the MACC website.

Contact Richard Aldersley and Alliya Dagman.

The Organism for Poetic Research (OPR) is an experimental critical-poetic platform and a vehicle for the performance of research in poetics and poetic research. The OPR takes shape from its many members and contributors operating in diverse locations with current centralization in cities such as Brooklyn, NY; Providence, RI; Vancouver, B.C.; and Portland, Oregon. Propelled by poiesis (making) as its investigative method, the OPR initiates events that open a field of relations between the natural sciences, artistic practices, and research in the humanities. OPR projects take a number of forms. In addition to hosting readings and seminars throughout the year, the OPR appropriates and refashions diverse modes and objects of inquiry as instruments in a series of specific provocations that produce the print and web-based magazine, Pelt: the Organism’s epidermal organ. The OPR also produces “occasional” publications and projects called “OPR Editions” and hosts web residents whose projects actively investigate and re-describe the boundaries of disciplinary formations of knowledge. 

OPR website

Contact Zane Koss and Alliya Dagman for more information.

The PhD Writing Group is a student-led working group open to PhD students at every level of the program. The group provides a weekly space (either in-person or virtual in accordance with the schedule) for students to work on conference papers, articles, dissertations, abstracts, grants, and applications. The group schedule includes days when we will only have timed writing sessions and days when we will respond to student work. Additionally, students are welcome to receive peer feedback for mock talks or article submissions, as requested. The primary aim of the group is for its members to develop one or more conference papers, articles, or applications for submission per year. The group is also for dissertation stage students to participate in some group timed writing sessions throughout the year. While continued commitment to the group is appreciated, we also warmly welcome drop-in writers on any of the timed writing days. Feel free to stop in online or in person.

Contact Katharine Clark, Athena Pierquet, and Richard Aldersley for more information. 

The Politics of Empowerment meets every three weeks in order to discuss works that broadly fall under the fields of Women of Color Feminisms and Queer of Color Theory. We invite at least one guest speaker every semester to deliver a lecture at the university or to participate in a seminar with the group. The Politics of Empowerment also aims to foster conversations not only with other NYU groups but also with the larger NYC community–in the past we have attended events organized by The Postcolonial, Race, and Diaspora Studies Colloquium at NYU and by The Brooklyn Museum, for example. Lastly, the group seeks to provide a supportive environment in which students interested in sharing their work and receiving feedback may do so during workshops.

Contact Estefany Lopez and Alex Ramos for more information.

The Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Studies Colloquium (PRDS) aims to bring together faculty and graduate students across the New York City area for intellectual exchange in the field of postcolonial studies, American transnational studies and minority literatures, critical race studies and other related fields. The colloquium strives to provide a forum for interested students from across English, SCA, Comparative Literature, French and other departments to present their work, interact with a range of peers and scholars, and foster conversations.

Contact Alex Ramos, Saronik Bosu, and Rajgopal Saikumar for more information.