About
2010-11 Seminar at Macaulay Honors College at CUNY
“From Bestiary to BioCulture: Constituting the Human”
Co-Directors: Lee Quinby and Sylvia Tomasch
Welcome to the third annual Macaulay Seminar to be held at Macaulay Honors College at CUNY during the 2010-11 academic year. The Macaulay Seminar seeks to generate lively discussion on a topic vital to our time, to enrich teaching, and to help facilitate research toward publication.
The seminar meets once per month on Thursday evenings throughout the year. Each member of the seminar will also present a paper at the conference on the same topic to be held April 8-10, 2011 at Macaulay. Participants have been selected from departments across academic divisions to encourage wide-ranging discussion.
Both the yearlong Seminar and the Spring Conference focus on systems of knowledge that draw boundaries around what it means to be—and be seen as—human and what comprises human community. While current debates tend to polarize these issues between theological and scientific definitions, this interdisciplinary seminar draws on art, history, anthropology, theology, literature, political science, philosophy, law, biology, and cognitive science to investigate the intricate ways in which the human has been distinguished from other forms of existence, from animal to android, and to consider the hopes and anxieties that emerge when the boundaries become blurred.
Co-Directors:
Lee Quinby is a Distinguished Lecturer at Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York City. The author of three books, Millennial Seduction (1999), Anti-Apocalypse (1994), and Freedom, Foucault, and the Subject of America (1991), she is also editor of Genealogy and Literature (1995) and co-editor of Feminism and Foucault (1988), Gender and Apocalyptic Desire (2006), and Reel Revelations: Apocalypse and Film (forthcoming 2010).
Sylvia Tomasch is Professor of English at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Recent publications include articles on the history of medieval studies, Chaucer, medieval antisemitism, historical cartography, and medieval postcoloniality.
