Working Groups

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. Work may be poetry or prose. 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 mmi262@nyu.edu and at3907@nyu.edu

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 emf387@nyu.edu and cnh277@nyu.edu

The Digital Culture/s Colloquium seeks to offer a space for faculty, graduate students, and other scholars and humanities practitioners to think critically and collaboratively about the study of culture in a digitally-saturated moment. By hosting conversations with intellectuals within and beyond the academy, we seek to explore how literary studies — and humanities work more broadly — engages with notions of the “digital” through driving concepts like digital pedagogy, cultural heritage and archives, digital communities and placemaking, interaction and user interface design, and digital activism. Among our events are guest lectures, offsite field trips, roundtable conversations, and a “digitizing culture” hackathon.

Contact gam351@nyu.edu and ef1621@nyu.edu

The Early Modern Working Group invites graduate students to share their own research informally on the early modern period (c. 1500-1700); workshop papers; discuss recent work by scholars within and outside the department; host discussions with invited speakers; and go together on trips to theater productions or to various archives. Email RaNelle Bradley (rkb337@nyu.edu) or Alliya Dagman (ad4549@nyu.edu) to join at any time!

Contact rkb337@nyu.edu and ad4549@nyu.edu

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. Website: http://organismforpoeticresearch.org

Contact zk421@nyu.edu and adz235@nyu.edu and ad4549@nyu.edu

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.

anr362@nyu.edu and mt2372@nyu.edu and hj1082@nyu.edu and gij203@nyu.edu

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.

Contacvt kec511@nyu.edu and egm318@nyu.edu

The Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Studies Colloquium 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 anr362@nyu.edu and sb5749@nyu.edu and rs5607@nyu.edu and hj1082@nyu.edu and gij203@nyu.edu

The Quantum Reading Group offers a space for literary historians to develop new modes of explanation that reflect the epistemological and ontological implications of quantum mechanics and computation. While the currency of the “digital” has grown in literary studies in step with greater computational methodology and theorization, we remain at a lag behind the latest incarnation of computational understanding that has arrived with the qubit, or quantum bit—a much more nebulous and challenging concept with compellingly subversive and spectral implications for the fabric of all manner of binaries in political, economic, historical, and cultural objects of study. Through reading sessions and talks, the Quantum Working Group seeks to tailor an understanding of the contours of quantum computation, without any presupposition of expertise in physics or mathematics, for applications in literary study that can properly absorb the stakes of our prevailing physical account of reality and information.

Contact jrh375@nyu.edu and ala454@nyu.edu

The Queer Studies Forum meets to read and discuss foundational texts in queer theory as well as current works in gender and sexuality studies, with particular interest in putting queer studies in conversation with theories of race, disability, and postcoloniality. In addition, QSF invites established and emerging scholars in the field to discuss their work. We aim to support graduate and faculty scholarship on queerness while encouraging trans-historical, cross-regional, and interdisciplinary research and dialogue in order to both interrogate and enrich the discipline. We welcome participants with various academic interests and experience and do not assume prior knowledge of the reading materials, emphasizing a collaborative and conversational model for working through the texts. Visit https://wp.nyu.edu/qsf/ for more information and our event calendar.

Contact hj1082@nyu.edu and sls949@nyu.edu

The Sanctuary Working Group aims to explore the intersections between social justice practice, the study of literature and culture, and the politics of migration. We look forward to conversations among faculty, undergraduate, and graduate students with interests in literature and immigration, migration, asylum, refuge, sanctuary, decolonization, and activism. We believe that scholarship and practice can be mutually supportive. Consequently, we aim to curate events each semester in which we will put NYU faculty and students into conversation and collaboration with activist groups working on immigrant and migrant rights and issues of detention in New York, and provide opportunities to  discuss the theories behind the different practices of these activist groups, as well as vice versa (the practices behind the theories). We hope that the group will serve as a hub for communication and collaboration among undergraduate, graduate student and faculty groups doing activist work on campus and those doing related work outside of the university.

Please contact us if you are doing related work and wish to collaborate - Kat Addis at kma410@nyu.edu

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 contact Jeremy Culver at jcc684@nyu.edu