Working Groups

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 our website at https://nyumodernworkinggroup.wordpress.com/.

Please contact Richard Aldersley or Alliya Dagman for more information.

Faculty Advisors: Patrick Deer and John P. Waters

The Organism for Poetic Research (OPR) is a critical-poetic platform for making and studying. The OPR takes shape from its many members, often operating semi-autonomously and spontaneously, and its contributors. The OPR operates primarily out of Brooklyn, NY and Providence, RI.

The OPR works through writing, visual art, group discussion, and performative events to explore ideas—materially and generatively—across disciplines, e.g. “science,” “philosophy,” “history,” or “painting,” “poetry,” “music,” etc. OPR projects take a number of forms: readings, seminars, installations, books, digital residency projects on our website, and Pelt, a sporadically published (in print and online) magazine organized around an invented concept that is further articulated through the collective work of the issue. For more information, please visit https://organismforpoeticresearch.org/

Please contact Alliya Dagman or Louise Akers for more information.

Faculty Advisors: Lytle Shaw, Urayoan Noel

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.

Please contact Katie Clark or Richard Aldersley for more information.

Faculty Advisors: Maureen McLane and Martha Rust

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.

Please contact Colin Vanderburg or Guilherme Meyer for more information. 

Faculty Advisors: Jini Kim Watson, Lenora Hanson

As scholars and students of literatures in English, we study the ways that the linguistic meanings of writing are supplemented by culturally, historically, and materially specific contexts. Some contexts have to do with ideas about literacy and the ways that writing differs from speech as well as from other forms of expression like gesture and the graphic arts. Additional contexts have to do with bibliographic meanings, with the ways that readers have learned to experience the variable size, layout, design, and format of texts as they use them. Still more contexts have to do with the different ways that media—including print—have been developed and mobilized.

Our research, writing, teaching, and learning center variously on inquiries in book history and media theory, including Medieval manuscript culture and Renaissance writing arts; eighteenth-century theories of orality and literacy; reading and readers in the nineteenth-century U.S. and the British Empire; African-American readers and authorship; nineteenth-century British radical print, serialization, and periodical formats; the history, present, and future of digital media; intersections of words and images; the role of genre in shaping rhetorical action; the organization of knowledge and theories and histories of writing and literacy across places and periods.

Please contact Alijan Ozkiral and Samriddhi Agrawal for more information. 

Faculty Advisors: Paula McDowell, Lisa Gitelman

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 fields of postcolonial studies, American transnational studies and minority literatures, critical race studies, and other related areas. 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.

Please contact Anh Nguyen, Raj Saikumar, or Alex Ramos for more information. 

Faculty Advisors: Crystal Parikh, Sonya Posmentier, Jini Watson

Since its formation in 2013 The NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar Research Collaborative https://wp.nyu.edu/culturesofwar/ has aimed to contribute to the debates around war culture and to produce concrete outcomes for post-war cultural policies which bridge the divides between academia, veterans, the military, activists, writers and creative artists in today’s challenging global climate.

Please contact Emily Foister or Andy Zuliani for more information.

Faculty Advisors: Patrick Deer & Crystal Parikh

Officially recognized by the Modern Language Association as a "division of study" in 2005, the field of Disability Studies is a burgeoning academic discipline that centers on the intersection of critical theory and praxis. The aims of this working group will be to introduce disability studies as a theoretical mode of analysis and inquiry to our community of students, faculty, and colleagues; to broaden our understanding of the field through selected readings and discussions; and to facilitate conversations regarding disability advocacy in our classrooms and communities. 

Please contact Margaret McCurry or Alijan Ozkiral for more information. 

Faculty Advisors: Leona Godin (English Department) and Mara Mills (co-director of the Center for Disability Studies and professor of Media, Culture, and Communication)

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.

Please contact Katharine Clark or E.G. Asher for more information.

Faculty Advisors: Hal Momma and Martha Rust

We are the NYU local chapter of The Consortium Medievalists, a collection of 40+ Ph.D. and M.A. scholars from the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium  (NYU, Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton, CUNY Graduate Center, The New School, and Stony Brook) as well as Yale and Hunter College. Each semester, we host two social events in New York City for scholars interested in medieval topics in the tri-state area. Each spring, we organize a symposium focused on the shared scholarly interests of our communities.

Please contact Katharine Clark, E.G. Asher, and Margaret McCurry for more information. 

Faculty Advisors: Hal Momma and Martha Rust