Book Talk: Middlemen
March 26, 2026
5:00PM-6:30PM
Rifkind Center (NAC 6/316) or Virtual via Zoom

Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (forthcoming in April from Princeton UP) takes readers behind the scenes to show how agents influence what we read. Weaving together archival research, data analysis, and interviews with scores of publishing professionals, it shows the work of agents —eighty percent of whom are in fact women— as advocates, matchmakers, negotiators, and tastemakers, who balance artistic values with the commercial imperatives of publishing conglomerates.

Laura B. McGrath is an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University. Prior to that, she worked as the Associate Director of the Literary Lab at Stanford. She has written on books, publishing history, and data for academic venues as well as for The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Please use this link to join via Zoom.

Truth, Memory and Accountability for Mass Atrocity: Comparative Perspectives

April 23, 2025
5:00PM-6:30PM
Rifkind Center (NAC 6/316) or Virtual via Zoom

Across the globe, survivors, activists, and nations search for productive ways of moving forward in the aftermaths of mass atrocities. Louis Bickford and Eduardo González have worked in many such areas. In conversation with Prof. Mikhal Dekel, they will talk about their lived experiences: challenges, successes, and the ideas and ideals that animate them.

Louis Bickford has worked on the collective memory of past episodes of violence, conflict, genocide, or crimes against humanity for over 20 years in countries as diverse as Bosnia, Cambodia, Canada, Ghana, Morocco, Peru, and the United States, among others. He is currently consulting with the Ukrainian Institute for National remembrance (UNIR).

Please use this link to join via Zoom.

The MFA in Creative Writing Presents: Chai and Chat Reading Series
MFA Director Michelle Valladares in Conversation with Rosanna Young Oh

April 7, 2025
6:30PM-7:30PM
Rifkind Center (NAC 6/316)

Rosanna Young Oh is the author of The Corrected Version (Diode Editions, 2023), which won the Diode Editions Book Prize and the North American Poetry Book Award. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books, Beloit Poetry Journal, Graywolf Lab, RHINO Poetry, Literary Hub, Best New Poets, and Rain Taxi Review of Books, among other publications. She is a graduate of Yale (B.A.), the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins (M.F.A.), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.A.). She was an artist in- residence at the Queens Historical Society, and is currently The Bill & Doris Lippman Visiting Poet at the City College of New York, CUNY.

This event is sponsored by The Bill & Doris Lippman Fund and The Rifkind Center.

Free and Open to the Public.

Prof. Amr Kamal in conversation with Prof. Bettina Lerner

March 26, 2025
5:00PM-6:30PM
Rifkind Center (NAC 6/316) or Virtual via Zoom

Prof. Amr Kamal will speak about his new book, Emporialism: Department Store Fictions and the Politics of the Mediterranean. The book looks at the convergence between emporia (department stores) and spaces and imaginaries of empires, in the context of a modern Mediterranean divided between the British, French, and Ottoman empires.

Amr Kamal is Associate Professor of French, Arabic and Comparative Literature at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Bettina Lerner is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at The City College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Inventing the Popular: Printing, Politics, and Poetics (Routledge 2018).

Click Here to Join Via Zoom

The Petro-State Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago

with Professor Ryan Cecil Jobson 

December 3, 2024
5:00 to 7:00 pm

Hybrid event: In-person in NAC 6/316 and virtually via Zoom

Join us for a book talk with Professor Ryan Cecil Jobson where he revisits this equation of fossil fuels and political power through one of the oldest and least talked about theaters of petrocapitalism: the twin-island Caribbean republic of Trinidad and Tobago.

Ryan Cecil Jobson is an anthropologist and social critic of the Caribbean and the Americas. His research and teaching engage issues of energy and extractivism, states and sovereignty, climate and crisis, race and capital.

To reserve a seat, or receive the Zoom link, register via Eventbrite here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1071743045299?aff=oddtdtcreator

Thursday, November 14th
6:00-7:30 pm
Shepard Hall 95 

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of the Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the Jerusalem Prize. She is the author of Butcher (Knopf, May 2024) as well as the national bestsellers We Were The Mulvaneys, Blonde, The Falls, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, and The Accursed. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. 

Mark J. Mirsky is an award winning author of thirteen books including five novels and a book of stories and novellas, and many critical studies. He has been the editor of FICTION since its founding in 1972. He is a Professor in the English Department, teaching literature and creative writing at CCNY for over 50 years. 

Sponsored by The David Dortort Fund for Creative Writing 

MFA in Creative Writing at the City College of New York presents the Chai and Chat Reading Series

MFA Director Michelle Valladares
In conversation with 

Kima Jones

Author, Professor, and Literary Agent

Wednesday, November 6th
6:30PM-7:30PM
Rifkind Center, NAC 6/316

Join us as we discuss the stages of literary publishing and book advocacy from sending out the query letter to evaluating contracts. Please come with your most eager questions about what it means to work with an agent and publish a book!

Free and open to the public

Kima Jones is a poet, and the founder of Jack Jones Literary Arts, a Los Angeles-based book publicity agency for black and brown writers. In 2017, Kima founded the Jack Jones Literary Arts retreat—a two-week respite and book incubator for black and brown nonbinary and women writers. 

Kima joined Triangle House Literary as an agent in 2021. Her clients include David Haynes and Rochelle Spencer. She’s a developmental editor who brings more than a decade of marketing and publicity experience into her agenting negotiations. Kima is at work on her first book, Butch, a memoir, forthcoming from Knopf.

download flyer

The Rifkind Center – For the Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York

Sponsored by The David Dortort Fund for Creative Writing

 A book talk by NYU historian Stefanos Geroulanos

September 17

5:00 - 7:00 pm
NAC 6/316 and via Zoom

We have been obsessed with prehistory for three hundred years, and books about the origins of humanity continue to dominate bestseller lists. Prof. Geroulanos will tell us why, arguing that claims about the earliest humans have not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but given rise to our modern world.

Photos from the Event

February 29
5:00PM-6:30PM
Rifkind Room, NAC 6/316

Adam Shatz will discuss his latest book, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, with Youssef Ben Ismail.

Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books and a visiting professor at Bard College. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso, 2023) and The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (FSG, 2024). Educated at Columbia University, he has written about politics and culture for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications. In 2021 he was awarded a Chevalier de l'ordre des arts et de lettres by the French government in recognition of his writings on French culture.

Youssef Ben Ismail is a lecturer of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and a Fellow at the Society of Fellows, SOF/Heyman at Columbia University.

February 15
5:00PM-6:30PM
Rifkind Room, NAC 6/316

Join historians Daniel Pick and Andreas Killen as they discuss how political tensions from the Cold War era to the present contributed to the enduring fantasy of brainwashing and, in so doing, also shaped our understanding of the brain, mind, and the human condition.

Daniel Pick is the author of Faces of Degeneration, the edited volume Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism, and, most recently, Brainwashed (2022). From 2014-2021, he was the senior investigator of a research project at Birkbeck on the history of ideas about mind control during and since the Cold War.

Andreas Killen is Professor of History at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has published widely on the history of psychiatry and the human sciences, including, most recently, Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War (2023).

Tuesday, February 6th, 2024
5:00-6:30 pm
Rifkind Center, 6/316 NAC building

Brian Tart will discuss the publishing industry with emerging writers.

Free and open to the public
Sponsored by The David Dortort Fund for Creative Writing

Brian Tart was named president and publisher of Viking in January 2015, and Penguin Books in 2020. He started his career as an editorial assistant at Bantam Books before moving to Dutton in 1998 and eventually becoming the president and publisher of Dutton for nine years. Brian continues to edit both fiction and nonfiction, working with Ken Follett, John le Carré, Elizabeth George, Craig Johnson, Andrew Roberts, and Timothy Keller, among others.

Download flyer PDF

The 45th Annual Langston Hughes Festival

Honoring 2024 Medal Winner and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author 

Colson Whitehead 

Roundtable Discussion, Film Screening and Award Ceremony

February 1, 2024 at Aaron Davis Hall 

The Symposium

12:30PM-1:45PM EDT

Roundtable Discussion featuring The Paper
Film Screening of The Five Demands following the symposium

The Ceremony 

6:00PM-8:00PM EDT 

Musical Performance by 

Ariel Reign , Memphis Music Ambassador 

RSVP

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/45th-annual-langston-hughes-festival-honors-colson-whitehead-tickets-798761456017

Contact Info

Black Studies Program 
160 Convent Avenue, NAC 4/149
New York, NY 10031

TEL: 212-650-8117
WWW.CCNY.CUNY.EDU/LHF

On December 5, from 12:30 to 2:00 pm, Professor Hillel Cohen will speak via Zoom about the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Professor Cohen is a historian of the Middle East, an expert in Jewish-Arab relations, and the former chair of the Department of Islam and Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University. He is the author, among other books, of Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929.

View the video on youtube

https://youtu.be/ltN3n-HUOxs

Or download / listen to
audio only from Soundcloud

https://on.soundcloud.com/EBVkc

November 30th
5:00PM-6:30PM
Rifkind Room, NAC 6/316

Also accessible via Zoom — see link below

 Asian Americans are conventionally described as “middle-man minorities,” outside of dominant racial paradigms of white and black, adjunct to white privilege and exempt from the brunt of systemic violence directed against black people. Historical accounts of the in-betweenness of Asian Americans trace their origins to how Asian coolie labor has served to triangulate white capital and African slavery over the course of European modernity. If this is the material history of in-betweenness, what is the psychic corollary of the middle-man thesis?

Through an analysis of the Netflix dark comedy series Beef, as well as case histories of Asian American patients and students, I argue that the psychic effects of occupying a racially intermediate position implicate an unexplored terrain of racial rage and racial guilt that Asian Americans are insistently socialized to hold on behalf of others.

You can also access this event as a Zoom meeting:

https://ccny.zoom.us/j/9176842970?pwd=WnVDdWEvUjRnNmx4cmZlZnBrS3Iydz09&omn=82412389268

Bio: David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where is also Professor in the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory and the Program in Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. Eng is the author of several books and edited collections. His most recent monograph is Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (co-authored with Shinhee Han, Duke UP, 2019). His current book project, Reparations and the Human (Duke UP, forthcoming), investigates the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation in Cold War Asia.

​The Archives and Special Collections Division of the City College Libraries, in collaboration with the Rifkind Center for The Humanities and Arts, invites you to the second Club Hour Conversation of the Fall 2023 series.

On Tuesday, November 14, at 12:30, Robert Higney (English) will discuss international literary magazines spanning the interwar period through the Cold War. Beyond the Library’s holdings of modernist “little magazines” from England, such as The Thrush (1909), Rhythm (1912), and Coterie (1919), we have substantial runs of some of the colonial and post-colonial publications “whose political or cultural projects,” according to the critic Simon Gikandi, “were enabled by modernism, even when the ideologies of the latter were at odds with decolonization.” These include Présence Africaine, founded in 1947 in Paris and Dakar; Black Orpheus, founded in Ibadan, Nigeria in 1957; and Marg, published in Bombay beginning in 1946. These publications—each of them visually striking in ways best grasped in person—present a fascinating journey through international literature and politics across the twentieth century.

​As usual, we will be meeting on Tuesday from 12:30-1:30pm, in the Archives Reading Room, 5-301, on the 5th floor of Cohen Library. Refreshments will be served courtesy of the Rifkind Center.

The lineup for the rest of the semester:

December 12: Niel Shell (Mathematics) on Nathaniel Shilkret: Archival traces of a star of the early 20th-century music industry

The series will continue in the Spring.

For each occasion, librarians and faculty will select items from the rich Archives and Special Collections holdings of Cohen Library, and give short, informal presentations introducing these materials, allowing the audience a hands-on encounter with archival materials, rare books, and other special collections items on paper.

We look forward to see many of you there!

With questions, please contact the organizers (Professors Sydney van Nort, Ellen Handy, and András Kiséry) at akisery@ccny.cuny.edu or ehandy@ccny.cuny.edu

Conversation With Bruce Robbins about His Recent Book, Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction

October 31 at 5 pm
Rifkind Room Na 6/316

Join us on October 31 at 5 pm for a conversation with Bruce Robbins about his recent book, “Criticism and Politics: a Polemical Introduction” (Stanford, 2022). https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=34344 

What conflicts and what aspirations have animated literary criticism over the past sixty years? Why is politics inherent to the project of criticism? What can we expect from literary studies in our present moment? These are some of the questions Robbins will help us explore. 

Bio

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He previously taught at the universities of Geneva and Lausanne as well as Rutgers University. He is the author of ‘Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture’ (1993), ‘Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence’ (2012), ‘The Beneficiary’ (2017), and ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, co-edited with Paulo Horta (NYU UP, 2017), among others. He is the director of two documentaries, “Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists” and “What Kind of Jew Is Shlomo Sand?”

Given the recent tragic events and the inability of our speakers to come to New York, the October 24th event, The War Over a Democratic Future in Israel, is cancelled. Let us hope for better days.

The War over a Democratic Future in Israel (CANCELLED)

A View from the Ground with a Glance to the Rest of the World.

October 24, 2023 5PM

The Rifkind Room 6/316

Since its election in November 2022, Israel's first ever exclusively conservative government has attempted to restrict and control the judiciary, the media, the universities, the public schools and the police. Against these attempts, a large-scale, broad coalition protest movement has emerged as a counterforce.

Professors Sagi and Ben Yishai have both written about abuses of governmental power and are also deeply involved in this protest movement. They will be in conversation with CCNY's Mikhal Dekel, who also holds degrees in Law and literature. 

Ayelet Ben Yishai holds degrees in both law and literature and is currently Chair of the English Department at the University of Haifa, where she specializes in postcolonial and Victorian literature and culture. Her latest book, Genres of Emergency: Crisis and Continuity in Indian Writing in English (Oxford 2023), is a cultural and literary history of the 1975 Emergency in India.

A seminar with Csaba Olay on Lukacs's 1923 book.

Lippman Room NAC 6/308

Dr. Csaba Olay, Head of Department of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, has written extensively on 19th-20th century continental philosophy. 

This September, he co-organized the international conference 100 Years of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness in Budapest, and he will be leading a shared reading of the book. 

On Thursday, October 19, he will be leading a discussion of this book, focusing on the chapter about "Reification" (pp. 83-109 in the MIT Press edition). 

You can download the chapter here:
Lukács History And Class Consciousness Selection.pdf

The Archives and Special Collections Division of the City College Libraries, in collaboration with the Rifkind Center for The Humanities and Arts, announces the Fall 2023 series of Club Hour Conversations.

​For each occasion, librarians and faculty will select items from the rich Archives and Special Collections holdings of Cohen Library, and give short, informal presentations introducing these materials, allowing the audience a hands-on encounter with archival materials, rare books, and other special collections items on paper.

​As usual, we will be meeting Tuesdays from 12:30-1:30pm, in the Archives Reading Room, 5-301, on the 5th floor of Cohen Library. Refreshments will be served courtesy of the Rifkind Center.

This semester's lineup:

October 17: William Gibbons (Library) on the Harlem Development Archive

November 14: Robert Higney (English) on Modernism, Magazines, and the Cold War

December 12: Niel Shell (Mathematics) on Nathaniel Shilkret: Archival traces of a star of the early 20th-century music industry

We look forward to seeing many of you there.

With questions, please contact the organizers (Professors Sydney van Nort, William Gibbons, Ellen Handy, and András Kiséry) at akisery@ccny.cuny.edu or ehandy@ccny.cuny.edu