Working Groups
Religion in Public
The Religion in Public working group will explore critically the intersections of religion, race, secularism, and American public life from the colonial period to the present. Its aim is to cultivate an interdisciplinary space that is open to theory and method from both the humanities and the social sciences. In addition to showcasing the research of those associated with the Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA), the working group will host visiting scholars in order to cultivate collaborations across and between disciplines. The working group is also dedicated to amplifying the work and research of those connected to the Shelter Project: a Luce Foundation funded effort between Rutgers, New Brunswick Theological Seminary, and local community partners that investigates how the pandemic COVID-19 is affecting those on the ground in local communities in and around New Brunswick. Additional programming and curricular projects connected to both the CCA and the Shelter Project will be highlighted by the Religion in Public working group.
Organizers
Colin Jager, Professor of English and Director of the CCA. Professor Colin Jager writes and teaches about romantic literature, politics, and culture, about secularism and religion, and about cognitive science and theories of consciousness. He is the author of articles on all of these topics, published in The Wordsworth Circle, Qui Parle, ELH, Studies in Romanticism, Pedagogy, Romantic Circles Praxis, Public Culture, and elsewhere. In 2017-2018 he was Interim Chair of the Department of English; in fall of 2018 he was also the Leverhulme Visiting Professor of English at Lancaster University, England. He is currently the Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers. He is the author of two books: The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (2007), and Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (2015), both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The first studies the ubiquitous presence of the argument from design in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing that its cultural and aesthetic importance undermines the familiar equation of modernization with secularization. The second emphasizes secularism rather than religion as its primary analytic category, and proposes that romantic-era literary writing possesses a distinctive ability to register the discontents that characterize the mood of secular modernity. Professor Jager is currently working on two projects. The first, provisionally titled On Not Being Reconciled, is a study of literature and religion, with particular reference to Adorno and Kierkegaard. The second is a book on the political possibilities of Romanticism, provisionally entitled Careless Steps.
The Cliché
The CCA working group "The Cliché" cordially invites you to a lecture by Francesco Casetti (Yale University) on February 22nd, 4pm at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Greenwall Room.
Response by Tim Altenhof (University of Innsbruck)
The lecture will be followed by Q+A and a small reception
For more info contact
Artun and Regina
The event is generously sponsored by the CCA and the Department of Art History at Rutgers University
Toxic masculinity, generation X, the angry black woman, or the super rich who don´t pay taxes: Socio-political clichés threaten to limit human rights and freedom of speech as much as they trigger and frame necessary social debates. We build and consolidate these signifiers in different social spheres: In the news, on the street, and more increasingly as hashtags on social media. The foreshortening of a social identity suggested by the cliché calls for a close analysis, one that will include etymological, historical, phenomenological, as well as psychoanalytic considerations.
This working group aims at scrutinizing the term “cliché” from its roots in media archeology in order to open up the question how the arts subvert or solidify the social cliché. While the notion of the cliché calls for a critical investigation of such key aesthetic concepts as representation, image, documentation, and storytelling, our working group takes its starting point from the original usage of the term “cliché,” namely as a typecast used in early printmaking. A token of technological reproducibility, the cliché therefore suggests a specific time frame that ranges from the period around 1900 to the present. We define the “cliché” first and foremost as a medium, i.e. a container that stores and transmits a certain set of socio-political information. In other words, the cliché can be read as symptomatic of paradigmatic shifts in the history of social interaction.
Putting a strong emphasis on the contemporary era, the working group undertakes a discourse analysis of recent phenomena that witness a rising petrification of social clichés concomitant with iconoclastic tendencies in both the high and low culture of visual media. We are currently experiencing a vast stream of image production in conjunction with continual destruction and restitution of visual content, which often reduces the definition of “art” to a mere platform for documentation and identification. Further to art’s dominantly representative function, one can observe a backlash in existing debates about inclusion and diversity. Prominent examples are the various polemics around the #MeToo movement, an increasing number of lawsuits and public campaigns against artworks such as Dana Schutz's "Open Casket," or the growing attention for (post-)migrant auto-fiction on global bestseller lists. Investigating the history of the double bind between social typecasting and freedom of expression, the working group makes an effort to expose the structural shortcomings of image proliferation and sedimentation in the digital age in order to examine the symbolic foundations of community-building in the past and present.
Organizers
Slavery + Freedom Studies
This interdisciplinary Working Group brings together faculty across departments whose work engages with the problem of slavery, freedom, and the post-emancipation world transhistorically and cross-culturally, from ancient Rome, Asia, the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. This working group will encourage and acknowledge the value of scholarship that approaches bondage and freedom within particular disciplinary conventions, amid regional or imperial or national contexts, and in specific eras. However, we also hope that this interdisciplinary space will allow participants to cross-pollinate ideas and provide comparative frameworks that will help strengthen the legibility of our work across fields, historical periods, and disciplines. Topics to be discussed include but are not limited to studies of slavery and politics, economics, gender, resistance and revolt, abolition, and emancipation, in addition to the long afterlives of slavery. More concretely, we plan to discuss classic and new works in the field, workshop works-in-progress, and invite a guest speaker each year. The Slavery + Freedom Studies Working Group looks forward to drawing and building upon the strong legacy of slavery and emancipation scholars at Rutgers, exemplified most recently by the Rutgers Scarlet and Black Project chaired by Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History, Dr. Deborah Gray White.
"Writing About Slavery? Teaching About Slavery? This Might Help"
Organizers
Nathan Jérémie-Brink (New Brunswick Theological Seminary): Nathan Jérémie-Brink is the L. Russell Feakes Assistant Professor of the History of Global Christianity at New Brunswick Theological Seminary. His scholarly and teaching interests include Christianity and slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World and the early US republic, the Haitian revolution and the Black Atlantic, the African American antislavery activism and print culture in the early 19th century, and the digital humanities. His current book project recovers the foundational contributions of African American activists, pastors, churches, and organizations to the abolitionist movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. He is also currently writing an article that recovers the experience of a cohort of African American farmers from Illinois who served as a vanguard for black emigration from the United States to the Republic of Haiti in the 1820s.
Adam Xavier McNeil (History Department, New Brunswick): Adam Xavier McNeil is a PhD Student in History focusing on African American women’s experiences in the American Revolutionary era. In his work McNeil captures specifically how Black Loyalist women understood notions of freedom, belonging, and citizenship during the war and in its aftermath. Adam regularly contributes to academic blogs Black Perspectives and The Junto and regularly interviews scholars about their newly published work for New Books in African American Studies.
Marxism and Materialism
This group aims to explore the contemporary uses across historical, humanistic, and social scientific disciplines that engage the dilemmas of political economy, power, and domination. The last ten years have seen a renewed political consciousness of economic relations. Within the academy, this turn toward political economy crossed disciplinary boundaries. Outside the academy, social movements have changed public debate—Occupy Wall Street, the Movement for Black Lives, and others accelerated and expanded wide-reaching critiques of global capitalism’s contributions to racial, gender, and social domination. These developments make the present moment a crucial one for a broad inquiry into the ways materialist thinking, broadly construed, might be applied to political and theoretical problems both within the academy and beyond.
Organizers
Jackson Lears, Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History
Ian Gavigan, Doctoral Candidate
Emmet von Stackelberg, Doctoral Candidate
Contact Information:
Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice
“Environmental Humanities” designates more than the grouping together of various established concentrations within discrete humanities disciplines (literary/cultural eco-criticism, environmental history, philosophy of ecology, food studies, et cetera); it constitutes a new synthesis that seeks to change the disciplinary landscape by attending to scientific and social-scientific scholarship on environmental questions while refusing to accept the secondary importance of humanistic knowledge with respect to those questions.
Imbricated with our group’s focus on the environmental humanities is an investment in environmental justice. Environmental justice brings the experiences of human populations into the purview of environmental concerns; it seeks the inclusion of all people, regardless of nation, race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, class or caste in the movement to repair the environment or the wellbeing of the interdependence of humans and nonhumans, and insists upon the right of all people to self-determination and freedom from environmental harm. By centering environmental justice, we hope to avoid a certain tendency within environmental humanism to focus on the Global North and to highlight white populations and narrowly-conceived conservationist efforts.
The CT-NJ-NY tri-state region is one that bridges some of the most urbanized landscapes on the planet with more agricultural and natural ones. Rutgers, one of this region’s major public R-1 universities, consists of students from diverse local, regional and global contexts that all face some level of environmental and ecocultural damage. We therefore believe that this institution has an important role to play in addressing these questions with and within its diverse academic and public communities.
The working group is composed of faculty and graduate students from a number of departments and is open to all. It will intersect with new campus initiatives such as ISJGR Signature Labs (The Black Ecologies Lab), the SAS Environmental Humanities initiative, the interschool Minor in Creative Expression and the Environment, the SAS Major/Minor in Environmental Studies, the MGSA Environmental Arts initiative, the Rutgers Climate and Energy Institute, the Rutgers Climate Action Group, etc.
For more information contact Dana Luciano (
Organizers
Dana Luciano, Associate Professor of English
Jorge Marcone, Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
The Fanon Research Collective
What does it mean to revisit the contentious legacy of Frantz Fanon in the context of contemporary culture, politics, and poetics? The Fanon Research Collective (FRC) seeks to address the frequently overlooked and ongoing inquiries into Fanon’s extensive work across various contexts. The FRC aims to reevaluate Fanon’s cognitive, poetic, polemical, political, and prolific contributions through monthly discussions informed by a diverse range of readings, including poems, short essays, films, documentaries, interviews, panels, and plays. The primary objective is to explore how we can interpret Fanon’s ideas from multiple perspectives so that he remains relevant.
How can we develop innovative approaches to engage with scientific, poetic, and philosophical Fanon’s ideas in a way that resists fragmentation and the reduction of his poetic voice in his writings? How do we preserve his critical insights, imaginative freedom, and radical methodologies of world-building and connection, while simultaneously ensuring his relevance in today’s landscape of knowledge production? What theories can be revisited to better understand Fanon as we mark the centennial of his influence, enabling us to reorient, reground, and expand the critical discourse around his work? Are new models required to reinterpret and rethink the significance of Fanon’s poetic voice today? What poetic frameworks and avenues exist for studying and discussing his contributions? Can poetic Fanon truly become a global figure, or should we resist such categorizations?
The Fanon Research Collective (FRC) seeks to delve into an interdisciplinary understanding of the whole of Fanon. It aspires to create a community of scholars and writers dedicated to examining the emergence, evolution, and complex interplay of Fanon’s paradoxical nature beyond and outside the confines of academia, where his intellectual and poetic contributions initially took shape.
Organizers
Baba Badji is a Presidential Postdoctoral Associate in The Department of French and Department of English. He was the Inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow at Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and Comparative Literature.
Email:
Stéphane Robolin is the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of English.
Email:
Sophie Ziner is a PHD candidate in The Department of English. She writes about public reading and reception, disability, and white supremacy. She’s a Graduate Assistant at the Center for Cultural Analysis and a working artist.
Email:
Strike!
Ariela Aisha Azoulay, following Alex Gourevitch’s view of strike, writes that the right to strike is derived from the right to resist oppression. “Alongside the radical conception of strike, and by no means as its replacement,” Azoulay proposes “to consider the strike not in terms of the right to protest against oppression, but rather as an opportunity to care for the shared world…Going on strike is to claim one’s right not to engage with destructive practices, not to be an oppressor and perpetrator…”. The working group’s primary interest would be to reimagine and reconceptualize the ontology and aesthetics of strike under regimes of surveillance, censorship and arbitrary expulsions during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In terms of location, the working group shall invest in discussions on strikes and archives with practices, methods, and examples from all parts of the world. The aim is to first make historical observations of strikes in specific geographical regions, and then to reflect broadly on questions of transnational comparison and how strikes have or have not been archived in history and literature. In so doing, the members of the working group shall engage in scholarly conversations on literary and visual culture, literary history, historiography, labor studies, and decolonial theory through the subject of strike across diverse contexts. A strike can signify a halt, a cessation, collective dissent, and/or exit(s). By looking at the works of current scholars, artists, and workers, the working group would try to trace the innovative approaches towards archiving such striking moments in history through interdisciplinary lenses.
Participating Members:
Lu Biltucci, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Aj Boyd, History
Avigyan Banerjee, History
Sarah Coffman, History
Elliot Frank, English
Preetha Mani, AMESALL, Preetha Mani
Suddhadeep Mukherjee, Comparative Literature
Aditi Saraswat, Comparative Literature
Organizers
Preetha Mani is Associate Professor of South Asian Literatures in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures and Core Faculty Member in the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research interests include modern Hindi, Tamil, and Indian literatures; South Asian feminisms and women’s writing; literary multilingualism; world literature; translation studies; realisms, modernisms, and literary form; and postcolonial studies.
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Suddhadeep Mukherjee is a third year PhD student in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He currently works as the graduate assistant for the Global Asias Initiative at Rutgers. Suddhadeep has pursued his BA and MA in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. His areas of interest are South Asian women’s literatures, orality, indigeneity, translation, visual studies, and archival theory.
Email:
Cooperation Across Domains
Cooperation occurs at all levels of biological and social organization, from the genome to the General Assembly and everything in between: eukaryotic cells, multicellular organisms, microbiomes, social groups, corporations, societies, nations, and economies. Conflict also inevitably occurs at all these levels, resulting in problems ranging from cancer to war. One of the things that make humans such an unusual - and unusually successful - species is the fact that we cooperate with each other in a greater variety of ways and on much larger scales than do members of any other species. Cooperation is such an essential part of being human that we sometimes cooperate with each other for the pure joy of it, as, for example, in music, theater, dance, and athletics. Understanding the common features of cooperation across the many domains in which it occurs is essential to enhancing cooperation and reducing conflict. The Cooperation Across Domains Working Group consists of people from across the university who share an interest in cooperation. It includes faculty and graduate students from SAS, SEBS, Bloustein, SCI, Mason Gross, SMLR, and RBHS. We plan to meet several times each semester to discuss such issues as cooperation in living systems, legislative agenda-setting as a coordination game, the management of risk through cooperation, negotiation and conflict resolution, cooperation in the performing arts, cooperation among autonomous vehicles, coalitional psychology and cooperation, the management of common pool resources through cooperation, cheating as a problem in cooperation across domains, and cooperation and conflict in labor-management relations.
Organizer
Public Humanities
This working group includes scholars from across the Rutgers campuses who are interested in the Public Humanities. Cross-departmental and interdisciplinary by nature, this working group focuses on building communication between the university community, the scholarship it generates, and diverse publics. The group hosts seminars, lectures, and other events focusing on the relevance of the humanities in contemporary public life, acting as a forum for graduate students and faculty who are interested in learning more about the public humanities to be introduced to key concepts and debates in the field. Topics addressed range from community outreach, public writing, project management, experiential learning and engaged pedagogy, digital humanities and beyond. This working group is conceived of as an adjunct to graduate students’ traditional classroom instruction in the humanities, to connect them with the expertise of faculty and local public humanists, and motivate reciprocal collaboration outside of the academic sphere. Ultimately, this working group seeks to explore the variety of ways that humanities scholarship can be co-created alongside, shared with, and generated for a wider variety of audiences.
Organizers
Meredith L. McGill, Professor of English
Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan, Instructor of Public History
Swathi Gorle, Art History
Political Education and Popular Culture
Join us for an expansive discussion centering on political education, hip-hop culture, rap music, activism, and political organizing. We will explore the complicated relationship between political education and pop culture with the intention of unpacking the unique opportunities and challenges that arise when celebrities and popular artists engage with contemporary social movements and, conversely, when out social movements embrace celebrity and other popular cultural forms.
Organizers
Kevin L. Clay, Assistant Professor of Black Studies in Education
Tamara Lee, Assistant Professor, Labor Studies and Employment Relations
