Faculty Symposium on the Public Humanities

The Mellon Public Humanities and Social Justice Scholars Program invites the Hunter College community and general public for a faculty symposium on March 15, from 12pm to 2pm. Our speakers will discuss their research and work in the public humanities, covering a diverse range of topics. After our panelists speak about their research, there will be a Q+A segment.

Featured Speakers:

• “On the Challenges of Studying New York Exceptionalism” – Professor Jacqueline Brown, Anthropology Department

Dr. Jacqueline Brown is an associate professor and undergraduate advisor in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College. Some of the courses she teaches include The Anthropology of Black America, Cultural Diversity in the U.S., and The Anthropology of Race. She serves on the Academic Senate and the Curriculum Committee and actively mentors students in various fellowship programs.

As an alumna of Hunter College, Dr. Brown developed a love of academia and an appreciation for how transformative the classroom can be. Returning to Hunter College to participate in the education of thousands of students has been one of her proudest moments. Before returning to Hunter, Dr. Brown taught at Emory University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she received an Excellence in Teaching award. She is deeply committed to teaching students the value of understanding their society and the rest of the world through an anthropological lens. Dr. Brown finds inspiration in the opportunity to interact with and learn from people of all ages and backgrounds as they navigate the crucial social institution we call college.

Dr. Brown's research concerns the intersection of race, place and nation as axes of power and identity in the U.S. and the UK, as is highlighted in her first book, Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. She is also interested in diaspora—or the transnational dimensions of culture and identity—in the Black Atlantic. Dr. Brown's current book project examines the politics of New York City exceptionalism or the view that the city is totally unique within the U.S., addressing questions like how is the category of the New Yorker culturally constructed, what role does race play in these dynamics and how do these politics play out in everyday life?

• "Lessons of Defeat: Destructive & Emancipatory / Coriolanus & Lumumba" – Professor Jeremy Glick, English Department

Jeremy Matthew Glick is an Associate Professor of African Diaspora literature and modern drama and the new editor of Situations: A Journal of the Radical Imagination. He is currently working on long-form essays on Frantz Fanon, Sam Greenlee's Black Power Detective Fiction, and Century-Methodological Approaches to African American Literature. His second book project is entitled Coriolanus Against Liberalism/ Lumumba & Pan-Africanist Loss.

Professor Glick has recently received the Nicolas Guillen Philosophical Literature Prize for his 2016 book, The Black Radical Tragic.

• "Beyond Ethics and Economics: Feminism Returns to the Family" – Professor Robyn Marasco, Political Science Department

Robyn Marasco is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research has focused on the distinctive contributions of critical theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis to the study of politics. Her first book, The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel (Columbia UP, 2015), reconstructs the emancipatory project of critical theory around the idea of negative dialectics. Her articles have appeared in leading journals in the humanities and social sciences, including Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, New German Critique, boundary2, Philosophy & Social Criticism, and Constellations. Professor Marasco was the guest editor of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “The Authoritarian Personality” and guest co-editor, with Banu Bargu, of a special issue of Rethinking Marxism on “The Political Encounter with Louis Althusser”. Prior to coming to Hunter College and the GC, Professor Marasco taught political theory at Williams College. More recently, she was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and a Fellow at the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale University. Her current book project, Toward a Political Theory of the Family, explores the distinctly political concept of the family in twentieth-century critical theory. Professor Marasco is co-editor of Polity, Journal of Political Science.

• “Did Teddy’s Statue Have to Go?: Reckoning with Tainted Monuments” – Professor Sandra Shapshay, Philosophy Department

Sandra Shapshay is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College & the CUNY Graduate Center (City University of New York). Her research areas are aesthetics and ethics in the 19th c, with focus on Schopenhauer and Kant, and environmental aesthetics, especially theories of the sublime. With Levi Tenen, Shapshay edited a special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, “The Good, the Beautiful and the Green” (2018). She is also working on the Oxford Guide to Schopenhauer's WWR.