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Faculty Accomplishments

Spring 2025
 

Leila Ben Abdallah - Adjunct Assistant Professor

  • Lecturer: Eros and Ecos: On Indigenous Materialist Methodology (Indigenous Politics, Settler Colonialism, and Political Theory Workshop, The University of Alberta)
    • Abstract: Scholarship on colonial racial capitalism has illustrated the importance of the triangulation of capitalism, race, and colonialism to grapple with contemporary reverberations of dispossession, forced migration, racialization, imperialism, and anti-Blackness. While more work informed by decolonial thought, Indigenous Studies, and the Black radical tradition has emerged in the last fifteen years, interest in colonial racial capitalism as an analytic has ignored 20th century contributions from Indigenous activists, organizers, and intellectuals. Building on Simón Ventura Trujillo’s study of Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape scholar, activist, and writer Jack D. Forbes, this paper explores how (1) we might engage Forbes’ critique of colonial racial capitalism for the study of settler colonialism and (2) how it might advance and challenge methodological commitments in political theory. Reading Forbes’ 1978 comparative analysis of imperialism, exploitation, and terrorism in the United States and Israeli occupation of Palestine, I reconstruct a materialist critique of colonial modernity and aesthetic redescription of colonial, capital, and imperial terror that highlights the psychic and material roles desire, spirituality, and habitation play in shoring up and resisting capitalist violence.


William Germano - Professor of English Literature


Atina Grossmann - Professor of History

  • Guest: Sara and Asa Sharpiro Scholar in Residence (Center for Advanced Genocide Research, USC)
     
  • Lecturer: Jewish Refugees in the Global South: New Approaches to Global Transit During the Holocaust (Center for Advanced Genocide Research, USC)
    • Abstract: As Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany traveled throughout the colonial and quasi-colonial Global South, they encountered highly diverse local populations and authorities. Always shadowed by the emerging European catastrophe, uprooted Jews were also precariously privileged as white Europeans in non-western, colonial, or semi-colonial societies. In this distinguished lecture, Professor Atina Grossmann shares exciting new work by herself and a transnational cohort of Holocaust scholars on the ambivalent, paradoxical, and varied experiences, emotions, and memories of Jews who found refuge from National Socialism and the Holocaust in India and Iran after 1933. 

      From wartime Nazi Berlin throughout the global diaspora, family correspondence and memorabilia of German Jews – as well as archival, literary, visual, and oral history sources – illuminate refugees’ everyday lives in the changing context of interwar fascination and contact with the “Orient,” the global war against fascism, anti-colonial independence movements, and gradual revelations about the destruction of the European world they had escaped.
  • Lecturer: The Surviving Remnant Documents on Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany 1945–1950 (Center for the Study of Antisemitism, NYU)
    • Abstract: Book talk with editors: Avinoam Patt, Atina Grossmann, and Alexandra Kramen

      This new volume features 72 documents (in Yiddish, English, Hebrew, and German) created between 1945 and 1949, that complicate standard representations of the highly variegated community of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) in Allied-occupied Germany, who came to be known as the surviving remnant or She’erit Hapletah. These documents shed light on efforts to organize Jewish DPs upon liberation, attempts to cope with displacement and trauma, relations with the Allied occupation authorities, and the organization of relief and rehabilitation in the weeks, months, and years after liberation. They highlight the DPs’ struggle to organize political responses to their situation and their remarkable cultural creativity with examples on literature, sport, theatre, humor, education, history, and religion.


Megan Kincaid - Adjunct Assistant Professor

 

Emmanuel Velayos Larrabure - Adjunct Assistant Professor


Fall 2024


Sean Griffin – Adjunct Assistant Professor

  • Author: The Root and the Branch: Working-Class Reform and Antislavery, 1790-1860 (University of Pennsylvania Press)
    • Abstract: The Root and the Branch examines the relationship between the early labor movement and the crusade to abolish slavery between the early national period and the Civil War. Tracing the parallel rise of antislavery movements with working-class demands for economic equality, access to the soil, and the right to the fruits of labor, Sean Griffin shows how labor reformers and radicals contributed to the antislavery project, from the development of free labor ideology to the Republican Party’s adoption of working-class land reform in the Homestead Act. By pioneering an antislavery politics based on an appeal to the self-interest of ordinary voters and promoting a radical vision of “free soil” and “free labor” that challenged liberal understandings of property rights and freedom of contract, labor reformers helped to birth a mass politics of antislavery that hastened the conflict with the Slave Power, while pointing the way toward future struggles over the meaning of free labor in the post-Emancipation United States.

  • Lecturer: Labor Movement Ideology and Government Intervention in the Pre-Lochner Era (Organization of American Historians)
    • Abstract: Workers’ demands for hours of labor laws and other state interventions in the workplace have typically been considered to be a post-Civil War phenomenon, with such struggles mostly marked by defeat before the New Deal, thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment as typified by the decision in Lochner v. New York. This paper attempts to shift that chronology by showing how labor reformers and ordinary workers fought for, and occasionally won, a variety of government interventions on behalf of workers, including ten-hours’ laws, government-sponsored employment on public works, and free homesteads on the public domain. It will also explore the apparent contradictions between the ideology of the early labor movement, usually construed to be an iteration of a “Jacksonian” ideology grounded in ideas of limited government, free trade, and anti-monopoly, and the more expansive “free labor” ideology embraced by figures associated with organizations and movements like the National Reform Association, Industrial Congress, Fourierism, and ten-hours and protective union movements. By transcending the boundaries of both liberal free labor ideology and Jacksonian anti-monopoly, I argue, the pre-Civil War labor movement laid the groundwork for a robust tradition of labor support for state intervention, with ramifications for the Progressive Era, New Deal, and beyond.


Rachel Hutcheson – Adjunct Assistant Professor

  • Author: Coming Attraction: The Event of Color, Techniques of Screening and Filtering in Early “Natural” Color Film and Photography (Grey Room)
    • Abstract: The article describes technologies of color reproduction in photography and film that are known as "Natural Color" that date from the 1890s to the 1920s. Rather than hand-coloring or color tinting, these technologies reproduced color by means of the camera. Beyond describing these technologies, the article uses the cultural technique of "filtering" to unite the operations of the technology with the mechanization of human perception in private viewing experiences as well as spectacular displays of color separation and fantastic "full-color" recombination. Finally, the principle of filtering extends beyond mimetic color to that of the perception of 3D through anaglyph color in Plastigram films of the 1920s as well as color as information in the clever print advertisements for these 3D films.


Megan Kincaid – Adjunct Assistant Professor


Nada Ayad – Acting Dean

  • Author: Tasting Revolutions: Food, Gender and Class in Egyptian Women’s Narratives (Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics)
    • Abstract: This article examines the call for food in a historical context by turning to three Egyptian women’s political memoirs: Huda Sha’rawi’s Mudhakkirat Huda Sha’rawi: Ra’idat al-mar’a al-‘aribya al-haditha chronicling the 1919 Egyptian Revolution; Salwa Bakr’s short story “Om Shehta Triggered Off the Whole Affair” detailing the Bread Riots of 1977; and the graphic novel The Apartment in Bab El-Louk, narrating the post-2011 Tahrir Revolution. Analyzing episodes of sharing food reveals how this domestic act not only serves as political resistance but also allows us to excavate gendered and classed politics and portends revolutions to come.
  • Author: The Ambivalence of Revolutionary Cleaning in Mona Prince’s Revolution is my Name (Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies)
    • Abstract: Egyptian writer Mona Prince’s self-published 2012 memoir Revolution is My Name abounds with descriptions of transferring Tahrir Square into a domestic space during the 2011 Revolution: people nurturing fellow visitors and protestors; sharing of blankets, warm clothing and mattresses; cooking and eating; distributing Coca-Cola, endless cups of tea, cigarettes; and nursing the injured who clashed with the police. In one point in her chronicling of her political participation, she describes moving one of her friend’s mattresses out into the square and accepting food from whoever is offering it to her. She also details the square being cleaned by women of the elite class, heralding, in Prince’s imaginings, “a new people.” Focusing on descriptions of the cleaning of the square, this article argues that Prince expands domesticity’s political function while overlooking class and religious biases and blindness that undergird her theorizations of it. This blindness, I argue ultimately undermines the revolution’s attempt at total rupture from the unjust state regime of the past and extends insights into the entanglement of power, oppression and political resistance. Given that theorizations of cleanliness have been mobilized by the colonial project as an alibi for the gendered and racialized inequality of colonialism (and neocolonialism), cleaning here raises the specter of colonialism and highlights its mobility to function as a tool to measure complex class ambivalences.

 

 

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.