Dear Esteemed MCA Faculty & Staff,

On Sunday night, MCA’s Jerry Carlson scored BIG. Looking dapper in a tux, he attending the Emmy ceremony and — for the 4th year in a row — took to the podium as NUEVA YORK was named the Best Magazine Show in New York. Plus, a segment on the young Puerto Rican fashion designer Auralis who makes ecologically green clothing took home an additional Emmy.

Here are the winning pieces.

Auralis
http://www.cuny.tv/show/nuevayork/PR1012338

Best of Season #6
http://www.cuny.tv/show/nuevayork/PR2000049

Nueva York is an Emmy® Award-winning series about Latino culture in New York. The 30-minute show explores the rich textures of Latino society in the city, focusing on politics, art, culture, and the traditions of Spanish-speaking populations across the metropolitan area. 

Each episode is subtitled in English so that the largest numbers of viewers may appreciate more fully the richness and diversity of the Spanish-speaking communities in the city. Nueva York premiered on CUNY TV in October 2005, and also airs on Channel 22 in Mexico, and Channel 11 in Panama. The series won its first New York Emmy® in 2009, two in 2010, three in 2011, and two more this year.

And proof that he does indeed look dapper in a tux:

Please join me in congratulating Jerry on his continued success as one of the most awarded producers at CUNY-TV.

Proudly,

nrt

We are thrilled! May this post symbolize the Ph.D. Program in French standing in ovation!

March 9th, Lang Recital Hall, 6:00-9:30pm, Free admission

With support of the School of Arts and Science and the Art Dept.

The Rub is a surrealist investigation of the frustration, anxiety, passion, complacency, self-doubt, delusion, isolation and desire that come with being heirs to a state rotting from the inside out.

Hamlet’s in the thick of it, we’re in the thick of it, you’re in the thick of it–we’re all freaking out about it. Let’s do it together!

Tickets available NOW through the IndieGoGo campaign. Click here to get your tickets!

Performances: February 10-12 at 8:00pm

Directed/Conceived by Nessa Norich

Produced by Carly Hoogendyk

Devised by Tremor Theatre Collective

Featuring – Stephen Hershey, Colin Summers, David Gerson, Daniel Wilcox, Caitlin Harrity Marguerite Van Cook, and Mica Stintson

Design – Set: Sofia Belenky, Alison Brainard

Sound: Joseph Wolfslau

Light: Mike Faba

Costumes: Joey Blaha

Produced in association with HOLE IN THE SKY

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Thanks for this notice goes to Marguerite Van Cook, who is a new student in the Ph.D. Program in French and a part of this production of The Rub.

Call for papers: As current economic woes aggravate inequities, what might we learn from the nature and impact of earlier turmoil? How in particular did the vicissitudes of feast and famine inform French art, literature, culture, and society over the course of the long nineteenth century (1789-1914)? We invite colleagues to join in this reflection, with papers on topics that may include but are not limited to:

Plenty & scarcity • Optimism & pessimism • Capital & debt • Celebrity & anonymity • Noise & silence • Geographies of feast & famine • Pauperism & misérabilisme • Plenitude & l’horreur du vide • Overstatement & understatement • Excess & restraint • Pomposity & humility • Boom & bust cycles • Festive occasions & celebratory practices • Colonialism, mercantilism, & slavery • “irrational exuberance” • Gastronomy, Gluttony, & Gourmandise • Ritual feasts & fasts • Notable feasts, banquets, dinners, & balls • Moveable feasts: expositions universelles, foires, etc. • Festive wear & costumes • Dressing & undressing • Abandon & abnegation •Debauchery & depravity vs. repression & inhibition • Boeufs gras & vaches maigres • Diets, nutrition, vegetarianism, & cannibalism • Eating disorders & disordered eating • “Food chains” (hierarchies, bureaucracies, & evolutionary theories) • La vie de Bohème: starving artists & the art of starvation •Le Siège de Paris, 1870-1871

Anniversaries & local interest: Russian Campaign • War of 1812 (French involvement in & perspectives on) • Wolves (honoring NC State Wolfpack) • Pirates • Aviation & aviators (Santos-Dumont, Blériot, les frères Wright)

Submissions: Submissions for individual papers or sessions may be in French or English and should be in the form of an abstract (250-300 words) sent as an e-mail attachment in Word to ncfs2012@gmail.com. For session proposals, a separate abstract for each paper should be included. The deadline for all submissions is March 15, 2012. Please indicate your A/V requirements on your abstract.

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38ème Colloque annuel des études françaises du 19ème siècle
du 11 au 14 octobre 2012
à Raleigh, Caroline du Nord

Appel à communications : Notre époque d’inégalités sociales aggravées par les troubles économiques peut-elle tirer des leçons de la nature et des conséquences d’un passé tumultueux? Et surtout comment les vicissitudes des fastes et des famines ont-elles affecté l’art, la littérature, la culture et la société françaises au cours du long 19ème siècle (1789-1914)? Nous vous invitons à participer à cette réflexion, en nous proposant des communications sur des thèmes pouvant inclure les sujets suivants, sans toutefois s’y limiter.

Abondance et pénurie • Optimisme & pessimisme • Capital & dette • Célébrité & anonymat • Bruit & silence • Géographies des fastes & famines • Paupérisme & misérabilisme • Plénitude & horreur du vide • Exagération & euphémisme • Excès & retenue • Pomposité & humilité • Cycles de prospérité et de faillite • Occasions de fêtes & pratiques célébratoires• Colonialisme, mercantilisme, & esclavage • “exubérance irrationnelle ” • Gastronomie, Gloutonnerie, & Gourmandise • Fastes & carêmes rituels • Fastes, banquets, dîners, & bals notoires • Fêtes mobiles : expositions universelles, foires, etc. • Tenues & costumes de fête • Habillage & déshabillage • Abandon & abnégation • Débauche & dépravité vs. répression & inhibition • Boeufs gras & vaches maigres • Régimes, nutrition, végétarianisme, & cannibalisme • Troubles de l’alimentation & alimentation troublée • “Chaînes alimentaires” (hiérarchies, bureaucraties, & théories évolutionnaires) • La vie de Bohème : artistes affamés & l’art de l’inanition • Le Siège de Paris, 1870-1871

Anniversaires & intérêt local: La Campagne de Russie • La Guerre de 1812 (participation de la France & perspectives) • Les Loups (en l’honneur de la Meute des Loups de NC State) • Pirates • Aviation & aviateurs (Santos-Dumont, Blériot, les frères Wright)

Soumissions de propositions : Les propositions de communications ou de séances (résumés de 250 à 300 mots en français ou en anglais) sont à envoyer électroniquement d’ici le 15 mars 2012 à l’adresse suivante : ncfs2012@gmail.com en format Word. Pour des propositions de séance, veuillez inclure un résumé de chaque communication. Prière d’’indiquer sur votre résumé le matériel audio-visuel requis.

Jérôme Deschamps directs and acts in a series of delightful short plays by the witty French satirist and dramatist Georges Courteline, a contemporary of Georges Feydeau.

Joined by the acclaimed stage actor Michel Fau, Deschamps pokes fun at human imperfection and the triviality of everyday life. Packed with banter and inane arguments, this performance promises to be a comical, often insightful study of human nature.

In French without English supertitles.

Reviews

“Alternately funny and naughty, always mischievous, polished, the plays that slam human failings are hilarious thanks to two clowns, Jérôme Deschamps and Michel Fau.”—Le Figaro, June 2011

“Characters, situations, texts, lines, all make the audience burst out laughing. This Reading owes a lot to two performers, unique and united.”—Figaroscope, June 2011

Venue
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street
New York, NY 10022

Ticket Prices
FIAF Members $35
Non-Members $45

Graduate Center students and faculty are invited to contact Kathryn Appleton (Marketing Coordinator, FIAF) to arrange pre-sales tickets or for discounts on groups of ten or more:

Kathryn Appleton
T: 646-388-6696
F: 212-644-0135
E: kappleton@fiaf.org

Presented in partnership with the Center for French Civilization and Culture, New York University, supported in part by Hodgson Russ with additional support from the Institut français. FIAF Winter 2012 Season Sponsors: American Airlines, the official airline of FIAF; the Cultural Services of the French Embassy; Florence Gould Foundation; Institut français; National Endowment for the Arts; New York State Council on the Arts; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; Robert de Rothschild

A seminar with…

Prof. Evelyne Ender, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Hunter College and at the Graduate Center, CUNY

James Melo, ERC’s musicologist and Senior Editor at RILM

The encounter between the adolescent Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) and the already celebrated poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) was like a spark that ignited an explosion leading to the birth of modern poetry. In a span of only four years, from when he was 17 years old until he abandoned poetry at age 21, Rimbaud changed forever the nature of poetry. His love affair with Verlaine, a tragic and self-destructive relationship on both sides, will be examined in the context of poetic, literary, and musical developments in France in the late 19th century, particularly the culture of decadence and aestheticism. Debussy’s music, which by the composer’s own assessment was profoundly indebted to the aesthetics of Verlaine’s exceptionally musical poetry, will be discussed in relation to its own groundbreaking characteristics and its contribution to musical modernism.

Tuesday, January 24
5:30-7:30
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., Skylight Room, 9th floor

FREE ADMISSION
For more information:
jmelo@gc.cuny.edu; 212-817-8606

Presented by the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation, CUNY, and the Ensemble for the Romantic Century in connection with ERC’s series of theatrical concerts Portraits.

To find out more about ERC’s theatrical concerts, visit our website: www.romanticcentury.org

Evelyne Ender is currently Professor of French and of Comparative Literature at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is also appointed in the Women’s Studies program. She is the author of Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria (1995) and Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography (2006 Winner of the Scaglione Prize in Comparative Literary Studies). From her training at the University of Geneva, where she obtained her doctorat ès lettres, she has retained a lasting interest in the connections between literature and a history of mentalities. She has published widely in French and in English in the areas of poetics, narrative, gender, and memory studies, and on such authors as Nerval, George Sand, Proust, H. James, and Woolf. She is working on two books: one on the art of reading and the meaning of literary studies for contemporary culture, and the other on changing paradigms of writing and issues of creativity. She spoke at the recent MLA on George Sand and Chopin – on music and text and issues of romantic aesthetics.

James Melo has written extensively for scholarly journals and music magazines in Brazil, Uruguay, Austria, and the United States, and has been invited to participate as a panel discussant in conferences in Indiana, New York, and Canada. He has written program notes for several concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and for over 60 recordings on the Chesky, Naxos, Paulus, and Musikus labels, among others. He is the New York correspondent for the magazine Sinfonica in Uruguay, reviewer of music iconography for the journal Music in Art, and senior editor at RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) at CUNY. In March 2005, he chaired a session in the conference Music’s Intellectual History, organized by the Barry Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation (CUNY), and presented a paper on the history of musicological research in Brazil. He received a grant from the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, where he conducted research on the manuscripts of Anton Webern. Mr. Melo is the program annotator for the recording of Villa-Lobos’s complete piano music and Camargo Guarnieri’s complete piano concertos on Naxos. He has written program notes for all of ERC’s original productions and authored several scripts. In 2006, Mr. Melo began collaborating with the Montréal Chamber Music Festival as musicologist and program notes writer. In March 2008 he chaired a session on music iconography in Brazil and Portugal in the conference Music, Body, and Stage: The Iconography of Music Theater and Opera at CUNY Graduate Center.

The first ever Haiti Film Fest, sponsored and organized by Haiti Cultural Exchange, will take place in Brooklyn next week.

Opening Night Reception & Fundraiser at the Brooklyn Museum
Friday, November 18: 6-10 PM

This evening will feature:
A special performance by the legendary Orchestre Septentrional followed by a screening of When the Drum is Beating, a film by Whitney Dow

Opening Night Tickets: $75.00 (purchase here!)
Special Student Discount: $20.00

FREE Film Screenings
Saturday November 19th & Sunday November 20th, 12-9PM

Long Island University: Brooklyn Campus in the Spike Lee Screening Room (Entrance on Dekalb Avenue and Hudson Street: 1 University Plaza, Brooklyn, NY 11201). Subway: 2,3,4,5 to Nevins Street Station. B, M, Q, R to DeKalb Avenue Station. A, C, G to Hoyt Schermerhorn Street Station.

HCX|Haiti Film Fest Schedule

HCX|Haiti Film Fest Schedule/PDF

                                                                                “Autrement dit, la littérature ne se produit pas
                                                                                dans une suspension, ce n’est pas une
                                                                                suspension en l’air. Elle provient d’un lieu…”
                                                                                                              — Édouard Glissant

                                                                                “The personal vocabulary, the individual
                                                                                melody whose metre is one’s biography, joins
                                                                                in that sound, with any luck, and the body
                                                                                moves like a walking, a waking island.”
                                                                                                              — Derek Walcott

When, during the Arab Spring, the journalist Hamid Dabashi wrote that, “The world is giving birth to a new geography of itself,” he touched upon a crucial area for exploration that goes beyond the narrowly political and presents rich possibilities both within and beyond French studies. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we ask how changing conditions of identity and technology have inflected geographical definition, not only as a new set of cartographies emerges but also as these conditions influence networks of emotion and affect. Considering the influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial metaphor of the rhizome, as well as Édouard Glissant’s more recent theorizing of la Relation and the totalité-monde, how might a new understanding of geography relate to, or even help to articulate, emotional or affective experience? Given the rapid social and political transformations of this century, what different poetic and artistic articulations reveal themselves in this nexus of emotion, affect, and place?

The multilingual poetics and theories of the Caribbean, for instance, give us assertions like that of Glissant, wherein “L’Inde est imaginaire, mais sa révélation ne l’est pas”; Derek Walcott writes of a “walking…waking island.” How is geographical space transformed, through affective and/or aesthetic processes, into artistic site or public space? What are the problems raised by such a binary reading? What are the implications of situating the artist, or artwork, in terms of geographical identity? We welcome submissions that focus on poetics, politics, and/or the visual in relation to the geographical, beginning with a focus on French and French studies but extending into other disciplines of art history, poetry and poetics, political studies, and translation. Questions raised by papers might include (but are not limited to) the following:

Political identity;
Relationship between identity and place;
Conceptual practices in art and writing (historically and today);
Visual/poetic representations of place/landscape;
Questions of and/or Hybrid articulations of genre;
Sexualities, the body, and desire;
Movement of people/s;
The place of affect in poetic or artistic movements.

Abstracts of 200 words should be submitted as Microsoft Word attachment (.doc) to GCFrenchConference@gmail.com by 1 December 2011.

PhD Program in French

You are cordially invited to a ROUND-TABLE organized by the French Ph.D. Program at CUNY Graduate Center, with the support of the Institut Henri Peyre on the subject of

POETRY WITHOUT BORDERS
La poésie au-delà de ses frontières

extra-territorialité               extra-territoriality
          femmes et poésie                      women and poetry
outremer/outre langues      crossing frontiers (of languages & geographies)
          essor vers les autres arts          poetry and the arts

With the participation of Marlène Barsoum (Associate Professor, Hunter College), Mary Ann Caws (Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center) Jean-Patrice Courtois (poet, essayist, and maître de conférence at Paris VII), Christine Planté (Professor, Lyon II, specialist in literature and gender, author of La petite soeur de Balzac).

MONDAY 31st OCTOBER, Room 4202, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm

This event will be preceded by a reading by Jean-Patrice Courtois from his most recent volume of poetry, Jungles Plates. Professor Peter Consenstein (CUNY Graduate Center, director of the PhD Program) will be the leading the discussion. A reception will follow. Presentations in French, discussion in English and French.

NOTE: DES EXEMPLAIRES DE JUNGLES PLATES (Jean-Patrice Courtois) ET DE LA PETITE SOEUR DE BALZAC (Christine Planté) sont à votre disposition dans le bureau de Carole Kulikowski. / COPIES OF JUNGLES PLATES (Jean-Patrice Courtois) AND OF LA PETITE SOEUR DE BALZAC (Christine Planté) are available in Carole Kulikowski’s office.