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Saturday, December 3, 2016

2016 American Studies Senior Symposium & Party | Tuesday, December 13th • 11-4pm Presentations • 4pm Annual Party

Join the American Studies Program for the 
2016 American Studies Senior Thesis Symposium and Annual Party!

Tuesday, December 13th: 11am-4pm, Thesis Presentations | 4-6pm Annual Holiday Party
Walsh Library, 4th Floor, O'Hare Special Collections Room, Fordham Rose Hill Campus

This year's senior thesis projects take up widely varied topics, among them,  the role of racist tropes in the demise of Ohio's shopping malls; the history of the rainbow flag in LGBTQ rights movement; faith and identity development; feminism and Disney's Frozen; social criticism in The Wire; the power of prison education; mobilizing NYC's Asian American communities; labor unions, the New Left in the Vietnam War era; and the impact of rent stabilization on NYC apartment maintenance.

11-12:15  Identities in Context

Brendan Caulfield: “O’er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Gay”:
The Rainbow Flag and the Construction of LGBTQ Nation

Katherine Mobilia: Frozen and Feminism: Why Bloggers Can't 'Let it Go'

Marlena Gutierrez: My Mothers’ Daughter: Voicing Identity through Lived Catholicism

1:00-2:15  Alternative Narratives

Rebecca Sinski: Imagination and Narrative as Reform: Social Criticism in The Wire

Tyler Tagliaferro: The Mall Killers: Racism & Rumor in the Demise of Three Ohio Shopping Malls

Madelyn Murphy: Our Stories Plant Seeds: The Transformative Power of Prison Education

2:30-3:45 Policies & Politics

Shelley Wu: Asian Americans for Equality: Mobilizing Asian American Communities in New York City

Melanie Sheehan: Exploding Mines: The Rank-and-File, the New Left, and Vietnam-Era Militancy in the UMWA

Ben St. Clair: Broken yet Stabilized
Repairing NYC’s apartments goes deeper than removing rent regulations

4-6: Annual Party and Celebration of our Seniors, the American Studies Class of 2017!

For more information, contact amerstudies@fordham.edu.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration: Citizenship in Campaign 2016 and Beyond


Join the American Studies Program, the Latin American and Latino/a Studies Institute, the Department of African and African-American Studies, and the Center for Race, Law, and Justice for a public conversation on Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration: Citizenship in Campaign 2016 and Beyond. 

Thursday, November 3rd
7:00-9:00pm (doors open 6:30)
Fordham University, Lincoln Center
Law Building - LAW-3-20
150 W. 62nd Street, New York, NY 10023

This event is free and open to the public and features:

Afua Atta-Mensah, Executive Director of Community Voices Heard, a member-led multi-racial organization, principally women of color and low-income families in New York State that builds power to secure social, economic and racial justice for all.

Arlene Dávila, Professor of Latino/Latina studies at NYU, has written seven books on issues ranging from media depictions of Latinos, marketing to Latinos, cultural politics in Puerto Rico, and the Latinization of the United States.

Angelo Falcón, Executive Director of The National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP), a nonpartisan center established in 1982 in New York City, originally as the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy (IPR).

•     •     •

The American Studies CAMPAIGN 2016 series is made possible by the generous support of the Associate Vice President and Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences; the Dean of Fordham College Rose Hill; and the co-sponsorship support of the Center for Race, Law and Justice; Fordham’s McGannon Communication Research Center; Latin American and Latino/a Studies; the Department of Communication and Media Studies; and the Department of African and African-American Studies.

Thursday, October 20, 2016

10/26 Panel: Who Gets to Vote? And Who Votes? Francis Fox Piven, Ari Berman & Zachary Roth on Voter Suppression



Join the American Studies program for a wide-ranging conversation on two of the most critical issues in American political life: Who gets to vote? And then, who does vote?

Wednesday, October 26th: On Voter Participation and Voter Suppression" — a conversation with Francis Fox Piven, Ari Berman, and Zachary Roth

7:00-9:00pm | Fordham University, Lincoln Center, Lowenstein Hall, 12th Floor Corrigan Lounge, 113 W. 60th Street, New York, NY 10023 | Admission is free. Open to the public.

Who gets to vote? And then, who does vote? These two questions are fundamental to any democracy. But given the shape of the 2016 presidential election cycle, and the Supreme Court's 2013 decision to roll back many provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the question of voter franchise takes on renewed importance this year.

Fordham's American Studies Program will host a public discussion with nationally-recognized experts on voter suppression and voter participation in the United States.

Ari Berman, author of the Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015), a history of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is a contributing writer for The Nation magazine and a fellow at The Nation Institute.

Francis Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of twelve volumes, including the groundbreaking Why Americans Don't Vote (1988) and Why Americans Still Don't Vote (2002), and Suppressing the Black Vote (2009).

Zachary Roth, author of The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy (2016), is a reporter for MSNBC and a widely published journalist.

Moderator: Christopher Dietrich, Associate Professor of History and American Studies, is also a 2016 Nancy Weiss Malkiel Junior Faculty Fellows at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Please note: Thanks to the generosity of our speakers, a limited number of complimentary copies of their recent books will be available.

The American Studies CAMPAIGN 2016 series is made possible by the generous support of the Associate Vice President/Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Dean of Fordham College Rose Hill; and the co-sponsorship support of the Center for Race, Law and Justice; the McGannon Communication Research Center; Latin American and Latino/a Studies Institute; the Department of Communication and Media Studies; and the Department of African and African-American Studies.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Collaboration and Community at the Futures of American Studies Institute

— a report from the 2016 Futures of American Studies Institute (FASI) at Dartmouth College by Callie Gallo, GSAS-American Studies Summer Institute Fellowship Winner, 2016

The Futures of American Studies Institute
is an annual program at Dartmouth College
The 2016 Futures of American Studies Institute (FASI) at Dartmouth College welcomed scholars and graduate students from around the world for a week of programming featuring up-and-coming research in the field. As a fourth-year PhD candidate in the English Department at Fordham, I arrived in Hanover, New Hampshire on a warm and sunny day in June ready to learn about the latest areas of study, meet a cohort of unique professionals, and develop my own research project.

Less than a week later, I walked away from FASI with a new appreciation for the diverse and cutting-edge work of new and established scholars, including program directors Donald Pease (Dartmouth University) and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Northeastern University), as well as my peers. It was a great privilege to receive the GSAS-American Studies Summer Institute Fellowship and be given the opportunity to represent Fordham at such an innovative and prestigious event.

One of the unique features of FASI is the collegiality and collaboration between the featured speakers and attendees. Graduate students, junior faculty, adjuncts, writers with book projects, and senior faculty were all encouraged to share, debate, and exchange ideas in Q&A sessions, workshops, and on our down-time. All of the individuals who ran the Institute, as well as my session leader Winfried Fluck of Freie Universität in Berlin, encouraged me to network with scholars and talk about our projects in a friendly and supportive environment. We met in daily seminars where we became acquainted with other works in progress, gave feedback, and discussed the content of the daily plenary presentations. By fostering a collegial atmosphere, FASI gives scholars at all levels a way to learn from each other and exchange ideas that simply doesn’t happen at a typical conference.

This year, each plenary session at FASI was organized around a “Question Worth Asking” in the field that engages with issues or topics that American Studies scholars are or should be talking about right now. Some of these questions included “Why (not) surface reading now?,” “Afro-pessimism? Afro-optimism?,” “Affirmative biopolitics?,” and “How has digitization changed the archive of American Studies?” In addition to lively Q&A’s after each presentation, attendees also exchanged reactions and questions on twitter using the hashtag #FASI16.

Each plenary had a distinct focal point, but all sought to attend to re-think current critical and theoretical approaches. Yet as the event took place shortly after the mass shooting tragedy in Orlando at Pulse nightclub, and in the wake of a year marked by a series of high-profile police shootings of African Americans, many were eager to incorporate more discussion of those events and how to address them meaningfully through scholarship.

Callie's seminar group included, from left: Tim Salzer,
Katrina Kelly, Isil Özcan, Winfried Flick, Stephen Pasqualina,
Callie Gallo, Jesse Raber, Silke Schmidt, Sally Anderson
Boström, Greg Chase, and Joe Varghese Yeldho.
 
Eric Lott (CUNY Graduate Center) and Sandy Alexander (MIT) displayed some of the ways American Studies scholars are analyzing racial violence in their presentations on responses to racial divisions in popular culture and through black protest. Soyica Diggs Colbert (Georgetown University) and Hortense Spillers (Vanderbilt University) also gave stirring talks about the artistic practices of African American women and the possibilities for optimism amidst racial strife.

Two of my favorite presentations were delivered by Patricia Stuelke (Dartmouth College) and Annie McClanahan (University of California, Irvine), who responded to the question “Was … a neo-liberal fantasy?”. Stuelke looked at the “antiblack acoustics” of the US occupation of Panama and analyzed the military’s selected playlist of 90s pop and rock (e.g. “Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee” by Tom Petty, and “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley) that blared through General Noriega’s abandoned Presidential Palace.

In contrast, McClanahan examined endless economic growth as a neo-liberal fantasy that rejects the prospect of long-term stagnation, even as economists from the eighteenth century onward have predicted its onset. They both gave eye-opening and accessible presentations that resonated because of their unique case studies.

Being surrounded with such innovative and thought-provoking work at FASI gave me new perspectives from which I can approach my dissertation and find ways to be in conversation with scholars in my field. Additionally, the Institute professionalized me by pushing me to network and engage with scholars and to make connections with fellow graduate students. I left Dartmouth College feeling reinvigorated and excited about my research. Given the immersive and collaborative environment I found myself in at FASI, it’s easy to see why any scholar would jump at the opportunity to return time and time again.

Editor's Note: Callie Gallo was a recipient of the 2016 GSAS-American Studies Summer Institute Fellowship which provides support for Fordham graduate students to attend American Studies summer institutes both in the U.S. and abroad. For information on this the 2017 GSAS-American Studies Summer Fellowship, contact amerstudies@fordham.edu with "2016 GSAS-American Studies Summer Institute Fellowship" in the subject line!

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

”Man Enough?" – Scholar-Activist Jackson Katz to Speak Th•9/29•7pm on masculinity and the 2016 Presidential Campaigns

Internationally-recognized gender scholar and activist Jackson Katz to speak at Fordham (9/29, 7-9pm) on masculinity and the 2016 Presidential Election!

Please join American Studies for the kick-off event of our CAMPAIGN 2016 public programming series: "Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity" - a multimedia presentation by award-winning scholar-activist Jackson Katz.


In this richly illustrated talk — just days after the historic first debate of the 2016 general election campaign — Jackson Katz will explore the role that white male identity politics are playing in the race to elect potentially the first woman president of the United States.
Thursday, September 29, 7-9:00 P.M. (doors open at 6:30)
Fordham University Law School, Room 3-02
150 W 62 Street, NYC (Broadway/Columbus; A, C, D, B or 1 train to Columbus Circle) Free and open to the public.
Jackson Katz, Ph.D., is an educator, author, filmmaker and cultural theorist who is internationally renowned for his pioneering scholarship and activism on issues of gender and violence. He is co-founder of the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program; creator of the award-winning educational documentaries Tough Guise and Tough Guise 2; and author of The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help, and Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity. He lectures widely in the U.S. and around the world on violence, media and masculinities.

This event is the kick-off event of the American Studies Fall CAMPAIGN 2016 Speaker Series. Stay tuned for news of our upcoming programming.

Sponsored by the American Studies Program, with the McGannon Communication Research Center and the Department of Communications and Media Studies,  Fordham University.