Latest Past Events

Reading for Energy: Conversion, Excess, and Entropy in Leo Tolstoy (with Jillian Porter, University of Colorado)

Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia 19 University Place, 2nd Floor, New York City

Jillian Porter explores energy—the “power to make work”—as a shaping force in Tolstoy’s fictions. From the psychic “safety valves” of War and Peace to the steam engines of Anna Karenina and the excesses of The Kreutzer Sonata, the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics provided Tolstoy with a powerful store of metaphors for the workings of minds, bodies, and literary texts. How…

Collaboration as a Decolonial Practice

Hamilton Hall 1130 Amsterdam Avenue, New York City

Presenter: Shirin Ramzanali Fazel (Writer) and Simone Brioni (Stony Brook University) Respondent: Graziella Parati (Dartmouth College) Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University, Italian) Through its dialogic form, this paper presents key issues in Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s career as representative of her cohort of Somali-Italian authors’ struggles to be heard and read, including the processes of translation and self-translation in Lontano…

Sephardic Art Song: A Musical Legacy of the Sephardic Diaspora

Center for Jewish History 15 W. 16th Street, New York City

The history and culture of Sephardic Jewry can be found in the rich repertoire of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) folksongs. These folksongs reflect on Jewish traditions and stories as well as universal human themes such as love, death, and despair. In the 20th and 21st century Western classical composers such as Alberto Hemsi, Yehezkel Braun, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Joaquin Rodrigo, Wolf Simoni (Louis…

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