Rifkind Seminar

The Rifkind Center Arts & Humanities Faculty Seminar was created by Mikhal Dekel, Emily Greble, and Andras Kisery in 2014. The goal of the Interdisciplinary Rifkind Faculty Seminar is to enhance scholarly life on campus; create a greater sense of community among the faculty; expose students to the breadth of their professors’ research and creative activities; raise the public profile of research in the Humanities and Arts at CCNY; encourage interdisciplinary collaboration; and develop new research opportunities for Humanities and Arts faculty.

Seminar topics are broadly defined so as to attract the greatest number of participants from within the Division of the Humanities and the Arts. 10-12 faculty members of all ranks and specializations participate in the year-long seminar. They read a shared group of texts, meet with guest speakers, and present their own works in progress.

The theme for 2026 - 2027 is “The foreign and what resembles it”

Published in 2000, Derrida and Dufourmantelle’s Of Hospitality (OH) continues to pose questions worth revisiting – also worth supplementing – about the possibility, value, and danger of absolute hospitality.

In OH, the quest for justice in hospitality implicates our conception of law, for hospitality presupposes a legal code extending to classify and to welcome or bar an arrival even before that arrival comes within the purview of the law. The law of immigration is the law that prepares for viewing and treating one not yet subject to the laws. Hence the predicament personified by Oedipus at Colonus (as discussed in OH), who comes to Athens asking its laws to admit him despite his past as violator of sacred laws.

OH identifies issues of law, citizenship, language, and translation in hospitality. Interrogating OH, we may additionally ask about individuals’ knowledge, inasmuch as conceptions of the foreign range from the ignorant to the secretly knowledgeable. Oedipus enters Athens unaware of its religious practices, but entrusts its king with the protective secret of his grave’s location. We also wonder what the circumstances are under which a fellow citizen is perceived as foreign. Once ignorance and expertise become estranged from one another, a neighbor takes on the look of the étranger.

Other disciplines and art forms join philosophy in drawing out consequences of hospitality and in seeking instabilities in the distinction between foreign and domestic. Historically speaking, hospitality can be seen to work in synergy with a state’s expansionist policies. A landmark film like Breathless simultaneously marginalizes and centralizes its ambiguous American character, naïve and ignorant yet also representing the source of gangster narratives the film pays tribute to. Literary utopias portray their utopian population isolated from literal foreigners but still turned against itself with a self-regard that finds strangers in the house. Or we can consider the precarious process by which arts in one culture are appropriated by another after first being identified as participating in the “art” system even if their home culture possesses no such thing.

See previous seminar themes & topics

The seminar leader is a full-time research-active faculty member who is selected in rotation from all departments in Humanities and the Arts. He or she collaborates with the following year’s leader to develop the upcoming theme and jointly select the subsequent year’s participants.

The seminar invites one or more speakers whose work is central to the given year’s topic. Speakers join the seminar for a meeting, and usually also give a public lecture to the larger college community. Guests speakers have included Stanley Fish, Timothy Snider, Tara Zahra, Akram Khater, Jesse Printz, among others.

The Rifkind Center posts its theme for the following year around April 1st. After the theme has been announced, interested faculty submit a short bio and a 1-2 page proposal in which they describe their current research or creative project and how the seminar might enhance it.