Spring 2024
Salon Talks
Once again, we have a terrific array of scholars talking about their recently-published books.
Salon Talks are an opportunity for local American Studies scholars to share their published work with an intimate audience. They tend to be small, lively, and informative.
For this semester, Salon Talks will be held at 6:30pm on zoom.
11.16.2023
Brooke Kroeger (NYU)
Undaunted: How American Women Changed Journalism
Undaunted is a representative history of the American women who surmounted every impediment put in their way to do journalism’s most valued work. It explores the careers of standout woman reporters who covered major news stories and every conflict at home and abroad since before the Civil War, and celebrates those exceptional careers up to the present. As Kroeger chronicles the lives of journalists and newsroom leaders in every medium, a larger story develops: the nearly two-centuries-old struggle for women’s rights. Here, too, is the collective fight for equity, from the gentle stirrings of the late 1800s through the legal battles of the 1970s to the #MeToo movement and today’s racial and gender disparities. Undaunted unveils the huge and singular impact exceptional women have had on a vital profession still dominated by men.
03.27.2024
Mike Hill
(University of Albany, SUNY)
On Posthuman War: Computation and Military Violence
As military and other forms of political violence become the planetary norm, On Posthuman War traces the expansion of war beyond traditional theaters of battle. Drawing on counterinsurgency field manuals, tactical manifestos, data-driven military theory, and symmetrical-war archives, Mike Hill delineates new “Areas of Operation” within a concept of the human being as not only a social and biological but also a technical one. On Posthuman War reveals how demography, anthropology, and neuroscience have intertwined since 9/11 amid the “Revolution in Military Affairs. On Posthuman War delves insights on the latest war technologies, strategies, and tactics while engaging in questions poised to overturn the foundations of modern political thought.
04.09.2024
Tanisha Ford
CUNY Graduate Centre
Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement
In Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement, Tanisha C. Ford brilliantly illuminates a little known yet highly significant aspect of the civil rights movement—the powerhouse fundraising effort that supported the movement—the luncheons, galas, cabarets, and traveling exhibitions attended by middle-class and working-class Black families, the Black press, and titans of industry, including Winthrop Rockefeller.
No one knew this world better or ruled over it with more authority than the formidable Mollie Moon, the stylish founder of the National Urban League Guild and fundraiser extraordinaire who reigned over the glittering "Beaux Arts Ball,” the social event of New York and Harlem society for fifty years—a glamorous event rivaling today’s Met Gala, drawing America’s wealthy and cultured, both Black and white.
05.06.2024
Conor Tomás Reed
(Shape of Cities to Come Institute)
New York
Liberation School
In the 1960s and ’70s—when Toni Cade Bambara, Samuel Delany, David Henderson, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Guillermo Morales, Adrienne Rich, and Assata Shakur all studied and taught at CUNY—New York City’s classrooms and streets radiated as epicenters of Black, Puerto Rican, queer, and women’s liberation.
Conor Tomás Reed is part of the next generation of insurgent CUNY thinkers nourished by these legacies. Highlighting the decolonial feminist metamorphosis that transformed our educational landscape, New York Liberation School explores how study and movement coalesced across classrooms and neighborhoods. Reed’s immersive and wide-ranging narrative brings us into the archives and up close to the stories of its main participants in order to reactivate these vibrant histories. The result is a radiant reclamation of collective history that charts a vision for liberating education and society today.
