Spring 2019 Workshops, Conferences & Book Talks

The Princeton Mellon Initiative is pleased to announce the following workshops, conferences and book talks for Spring 2019.

February 22 - 23 / Betts Auditorium
Superlative City: Experimental Urbanity in São Paulo

Superlative City is the third meeting of an interdisciplinary working group concerned with relationships between the built environment, aesthetics, and urban identity in the city of São Paulo, Brazil.  First convened as The São Paulo Symposium in 2013 with support from the University of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies and the Consulate General of Brazil in Chicago, this binational research group reconvened in March 2018 at Tulane University to critique essays for an edited volume and refine our theme. 

The 2019 gathering will be dedicated to workshopping chapters by Adrian Anagnost (Tulane), Leonardo Cardoso (PLAS Fellow), Reighan Gillam (USC), Daniel Gough (Tulane), Aiala Levy (Princeton Mellon Fellow),  Marcio Siwi (Bowdoin), Joseph Jay Sosa (Bowdoin), and Marcos Steuernagel (University of Colorado Boulder). Commentators include João Biehl (Anthropology), Daniel Aldana Cohen (IAS), Cristina Freire (PLAS Fellow), Sarah Townsend (Penn State), and Barbara Weinstein (NYU).

All sessions are free and open to the public. Attendees are strongly encouraged to register in advance to receive the pre-circulated papers. Click on spsymposium.blogspot.com for more information and to register.

Superlative City is sponsored by the Princeton Mellon Initiative; the Program in Latin American Studies; Brazil LAB; the Center for Collaborative History; and the Departments of African American Studies, Anthropology, Art & Archaeology, and Spanish and Portuguese. 
 

February 26 / 12 pm / SoA South Gallery
Book Talk: Cartographies of New York and other Postwar American Cities

Please join us for a conversation with Monica Manolescu (University of Strasbourg), Joshua Kotin (English), and Aaron Shkuda (Princeton Mellon Initiative). 

Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities: Art, Literature and Urban Spaces explores phenomena of urban mapping in the discourses and strategies of a variety of postwar artists and practitioners of space: Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Rebecca Solnit, Matthew Buckingham, contemporary Situationist projects. The distinctive approach of the book highlights the interplay between texts and site-oriented practices, which have often been treated separately in critical discussions. Monica Manolescu considers spatial investigations that engage with the Historical and social conditions of the urban environment and reflect on its mediated nature, reading cartographic procedures that involve walking and surveying as subversive possibilities of representing and navigating the postwar American city. The book posits mapping as a critical nexus that opens up new ways of studying some of the most important postwar artistic engagements with New York and other American cities.

The book talk is co-sponsored by the Departments of English and Art & Archaeology.  
 

March 1 / 9 am - 6 pm / Green Hall
Urban Diversities in the Gulf States and Beyond

At the crossroads of migration studies, urban studies, and global studies, this workshop explores the dynamics of coexistence, inclusion and exclusion in the Gulf cities and to contribute to theoretical debates over various ways of experiencing and managing urban diversity in other “global cities,” belonging both to integrative and non integrative contexts. We have adopted a large definition of the Gulf, as a geographical interface between the northern and southern shores, that includes also Iranian cities although current issues of urban diversities/ social exclusion in the Arab Countries of the Persian Gulf differ from those in Iran. We will pay special attention to the role of cultural and artistic practices in the urban development of these cities.

The conveners are Amin Moghadam, Princeton Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies; Aaron Shkuda, Princeton Mellon Initiative; and Delphine Pagès-El Karoui, Arabic Studies Department at National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations, Paris.
 

April 16 / 5 - 7 pm / SoA
Collective Facilities / Collective Research: French Experiments after 1968

In the 1970s, groups of interdisciplinary researchers affiliated with CERFI and CORDA obtained funding from the French state to develop and theorize “collective facilities,” new infrastructures for care. In a political climate hostile to large-scale change, these micropolitical interventions were highly ambitious, and included French New Towns, day care centers, historic preservation and reuse plans, mental hospitals, new forms of institutional psychology, as well as a set of theories about infrastructure and ideology  currently being translated into English. Speakers, including Camille Robcis (Columbia), Godofredo Pereira and Susana Caló (Royal College of Art, London), Anne Kockelkorn (ETH, Zurich) and Meredith TenHoor (Princeton/Pratt Institute) will present a selection of this work and speak about its relevance to interdisciplinary urban research and activism today.

A closed workshop will be held prior to the event; please email Meredith TenHoor if you are interested in participating. This event is co-sponsored by CAUI and the Department of French & Italian.