The Center for the Humanities

01/16/2025

On Anna Gréki.

01/16/2025

12/12/2024

12/06/2024

Franz Kafka has long lived in the New York imagination, from the émigré publishers who championed his work in the 1940s, to the Greenwich Village intellectuals who read him through an anti-totalitarian lens during the Cold War, to the contemporary novelists, visual artists, playwrights, translator...

11/18/2024

Read this intelligent and dynamic conversation between our Director Kendra Sullivan and poet and artist Tanya Lukin Linklater in BOMB Magazine as they discuss creative practice, poetry, and motivating institutional change. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2024/11/15/kendra-sullivan-and-tanya-lukin-linklater/

We encourage you to take a moment to read the full interview which is radiating with brilliant ideas, perspectives and quotes, too many to share, but here are a few:

"Beginning a poem is remembering birth, and ending a poem is rehearsing death." -KS

"Poems are what I call short form—a breath in a lifetime of breathing." -TLL

"I’m interested in poetry as a physiological process of resurgence, a ladder one might climb back into consciousness after a big fall." -KS

"When I wrote, “One mother’s grief grabs all mothers by the throat,” I was referring to how our common vulnerability and strength of will offer unfulfilled political power. If we organize society so that parents and infants are amply cared for, cultural repair is possible." -KS

“My work as an artist still has the potential to change institutions—to teach the museum if the museum wants to learn.” -TLL

"Iraqi beat poet Sargon Boulus says that the poetry a poet writes in their lifetime stretches out before them from birth, like a great river unraveling under a rudderless boat. Language precedes the poet’s arrival on the scene of life. If language is a destiny, it’s located in the quotation. Breath is how we connect or, to borrow your term, “stitch” the body-mind unity to the everyday." -KS

"As a writer and artist, I work with the body to access the mind. Breath is a steady physiological and conceptual practice—it can be sped up or slowed down, but it’s a form repeated 23,000 times a day." -TLL

"Writing helps me to crisscross between cooler spaces of rest and play and hotter spaces of risk and solidarity. Poetry is a deeply human expression of physiological, psychological, and even societal resilience. It doesn’t protect me, it’s not armor. But it holds me up. It’s an armature." -KS

Read the full interview here:
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2024/11/15/kendra-sullivan-and-tanya-lukin-linklater/

11/18/2024

Since the fall of 2022, World Poetry’s Colloquy event series has provided a forum for translators to engage with live audiences to explore the art of translation. Each Colloquy event presents a group of two to four translators of recently published works for short readings and extended conversations followed by Q&As with the audience. Colloquy events are broadcast on Internet radio for broader access by our collaborators at Montez Press Radio. Transcripts of the live discussions have been published in Hopscotch and Asymptote.

Colloquy #15 features readings and discussion from Madhu Kaza, Elisa Taber, and Hamid Roslan on their recent work for Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis, 2022). The event will be introduced and moderated by C. Francis Fisher.

Follow the link in bio to register!

11/18/2024

Please join us at the CUNY Graduate Center for the latest installment of Colloquy: Translators in Conversation, with readings and discussion from Madhu Kaza, Elisa Taber, and Hamid Roslan on their recent work for Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation. The event will be introduced and moderated...

11/07/2024

Join us tomorrow, Friday, Nov 8 at 7pm for the book launch for Anna Gréki’s "Algeria, Capital: Algiers" translated by Marine Cornuet. Translator Marine Cornuet will read alongside science-fiction writer Radhika Singh and translator and poet David Iaconangelo. The reading is at The Word is Change Bookstore, 368 Tompkins Ave. (at Putnam), Brooklyn, NY 11216 and is free and open to all, books will be available. https://centerforthehumanities.org/event/book-launch-for-anna-greki-algeria-capital-algiers/

Anna Gréki (1931-1966) was an Algerian poet of French descent. A member of the Algerian Communist Party, she was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned in 1957 for her participation in the Algerian liberation struggle. Algérie, capitale Alger, a collection of poems Gréki wrote while in prison, was published in 1963 in a French and Arabic bilingual edition.

Algeria, capital: Algiers, translated by Marine Cornuet with an introduction by Ammiel Alcalay, makes this work available to English readers for the first time. https://centerforthehumanities.org/event/book-launch-for-anna-greki-algeria-capital-algiers/

10/21/2024

Friends of NY, if you’re free on Tuesday, October 22, please join The Song Cave and Ugly Duckling Presse for a BELATED DOUBLE BOOK LAUNCH for REPS and Alan Felsenthal's new book HEREAFTER! 7pm at the Old American Can Factory (232 3rd Street, Brooklyn) in Gowanus. Ground floor flex space. There will be desserts. All are welcome. I would love to see you!

The Center for the Humanities Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative Ugly Duckling Presse

09/26/2024

Join The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY and our collaborators this week as we continue to activate for Climate Week NYC with events and timely resources and reports. We hope you can join us at some of our other exciting upcoming programs and events this month and next! We're also excited to share opportunities to participate and for funding, including grants for CUNY adjuncts developing scholarship or public projects in the humanities, a free virtual workshop on q***r history of housing activism in NYC workshop, and a call for papers and creative responses to the Kafka exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum to present at an upcoming symposium "Kafka in New York." Click here for info: https://mailchi.mp/gc/upcoming-events-and-news

09/20/2024

09/18/2024

We are excited to announce the release of NYC-EJA’s 2024 NYC Climate Justice Agenda, which arrives at a critical juncture. While we have seen some progress in implementing New York State’s landmark Climate Act and other climate justice initiatives since 2019, we have also seen increased resistance from fossil fuel interests and State actors seeking to undermine climate mandates and co-opt climate justice rhetoric.

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the historic People’s Climate March (as well as Climate Week), New York faces a critical moment. Our State and City have a little more than five years to meet their 40% emission reduction mandates set out by the Climate Act and Climate Mobilization Act, respectively, with mayoral and gubernatorial elections on the horizon. Our 2024 NYC Climate Justice Agenda provides strategic recommendations to address environmental burdens for frontline communities and tackle climate change with a focus on equity and health.

Full report here: https://tinyurl.com/2024ClimateJusticeAgenda