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 2024 - 2025 is “Infrastructure”

Infrastructure determines the most intimate details of our daily lives: how fast we can travel; the digital routes taken by our communications with friends, family, and work; the availability of water, gas, and electricity in our homes. At the same time, it saturates our perception on a large scale, especially (but not only) in the city, in so-called charismatic megastructures like bridges, dams, tunnels, wind turbines, and power plants. Some forms of infrastructure escape our notice until they break down; others force themselves into our awareness. In all cases, though, infrastructures are the material substrates that enable the reproduction of social, political, economic, intellectual, and biological life. On the one hand, infrastructure indexes modernity, inclusion, and circulation; on the other, the breakdown, decay, and uneven distribution of infrastructure index racism, poverty, abandonment and exclusion. This seminar aims to bring together faculty from across disciplines to build on recent developments in the study of infrastructure in fields ranging from architecture to literary theory, media studies to anthropology. Potential topics could include housing and the built environment, infrastructures of media and communication, publishing and art institutions, public goods, the technologization of landscape, ideologies of modernity and development, transit systems and urban planning, infrastructure as colonial practice, literary and aesthetic interventions in and depictions of infrastructure, exclusionary and inclusive architectures, the infrastructures of scholarship, pedagogy and learning, and many others. The shape of the seminar will be determined with input from participants, and monthly meetings will be organized around selected readings, guest speakers, and, potentially, circulated work by seminar members.

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.