Working Groups
Religion in Public
The Religion in Public working group will explore critically the intersections of religion, race, secularism, and American public life from the colonial period to the present. Its aim is to cultivate an interdisciplinary space that is open to theory and method from both the humanities and the social sciences. In addition to showcasing the research of those associated with the Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA), the working group will host visiting scholars in order to cultivate collaborations across and between disciplines. The working group is also dedicated to amplifying the work and research of those connected to the Shelter Project: a Luce Foundation funded effort between Rutgers, New Brunswick Theological Seminary, and local community partners that investigates how the pandemic COVID-19 is affecting those on the ground in local communities in and around New Brunswick. Additional programming and curricular projects connected to both the CCA and the Shelter Project will be highlighted by the Religion in Public working group.
Organizers
Colin Jager, Professor of English and Director of the CCA. Professor Colin Jager writes and teaches about romantic literature, politics, and culture, about secularism and religion, and about cognitive science and theories of consciousness. He is the author of articles on all of these topics, published in The Wordsworth Circle, Qui Parle, ELH, Studies in Romanticism, Pedagogy, Romantic Circles Praxis, Public Culture, and elsewhere. In 2017-2018 he was Interim Chair of the Department of English; in fall of 2018 he was also the Leverhulme Visiting Professor of English at Lancaster University, England. He is currently the Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers. He is the author of two books: The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (2007), and Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (2015), both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The first studies the ubiquitous presence of the argument from design in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing that its cultural and aesthetic importance undermines the familiar equation of modernization with secularization. The second emphasizes secularism rather than religion as its primary analytic category, and proposes that romantic-era literary writing possesses a distinctive ability to register the discontents that characterize the mood of secular modernity. Professor Jager is currently working on two projects. The first, provisionally titled On Not Being Reconciled, is a study of literature and religion, with particular reference to Adorno and Kierkegaard. The second is a book on the political possibilities of Romanticism, provisionally entitled Careless Steps.
Slavery + Freedom Studies
This interdisciplinary Working Group brings together faculty across departments whose work engages with the problem of slavery, freedom, and the post-emancipation world transhistorically and cross-culturally, from ancient Rome, Asia, the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. This working group will encourage and acknowledge the value of scholarship that approaches bondage and freedom within particular disciplinary conventions, amid regional or imperial or national contexts, and in specific eras. However, we also hope that this interdisciplinary space will allow participants to cross-pollinate ideas and provide comparative frameworks that will help strengthen the legibility of our work across fields, historical periods, and disciplines. Topics to be discussed include but are not limited to studies of slavery and politics, economics, gender, resistance and revolt, abolition, and emancipation, in addition to the long afterlives of slavery. More concretely, we plan to discuss classic and new works in the field, workshop works-in-progress, and invite a guest speaker each year. The Slavery + Freedom Studies Working Group looks forward to drawing and building upon the strong legacy of slavery and emancipation scholars at Rutgers, exemplified most recently by the Rutgers Scarlet and Black Project chaired by Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History, Dr. Deborah Gray White.
"Writing About Slavery? Teaching About Slavery? This Might Help"
Organizers
Nathan Jérémie-Brink (New Brunswick Theological Seminary): Nathan Jérémie-Brink is the L. Russell Feakes Assistant Professor of the History of Global Christianity at New Brunswick Theological Seminary. His scholarly and teaching interests include Christianity and slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World and the early US republic, the Haitian revolution and the Black Atlantic, the African American antislavery activism and print culture in the early 19th century, and the digital humanities. His current book project recovers the foundational contributions of African American activists, pastors, churches, and organizations to the abolitionist movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. He is also currently writing an article that recovers the experience of a cohort of African American farmers from Illinois who served as a vanguard for black emigration from the United States to the Republic of Haiti in the 1820s.
Adam Xavier McNeil (History Department, New Brunswick): Adam Xavier McNeil is a PhD Student in History focusing on African American women’s experiences in the American Revolutionary era. In his work McNeil captures specifically how Black Loyalist women understood notions of freedom, belonging, and citizenship during the war and in its aftermath. Adam regularly contributes to academic blogs Black Perspectives and The Junto and regularly interviews scholars about their newly published work for New Books in African American Studies.
Marxism and Materialism
This group aims to explore the contemporary uses across historical, humanistic, and social scientific disciplines that engage the dilemmas of political economy, power, and domination. The last ten years have seen a renewed political consciousness of economic relations. Within the academy, this turn toward political economy crossed disciplinary boundaries. Outside the academy, social movements have changed public debate—Occupy Wall Street, the Movement for Black Lives, and others accelerated and expanded wide-reaching critiques of global capitalism’s contributions to racial, gender, and social domination. These developments make the present moment a crucial one for a broad inquiry into the ways materialist thinking, broadly construed, might be applied to political and theoretical problems both within the academy and beyond.
Organizers
Contact Information:
Cooperation Across Domains
Cooperation occurs at all levels of biological and social organization, from the genome to the General Assembly and everything in between: eukaryotic cells, multicellular organisms, microbiomes, social groups, corporations, societies, nations, and economies. Conflict also inevitably occurs at all these levels, resulting in problems ranging from cancer to war. One of the things that make humans such an unusual - and unusually successful - species is the fact that we cooperate with each other in a greater variety of ways and on much larger scales than do members of any other species. Cooperation is such an essential part of being human that we sometimes cooperate with each other for the pure joy of it, as, for example, in music, theater, dance, and athletics. Understanding the common features of cooperation across the many domains in which it occurs is essential to enhancing cooperation and reducing conflict. The Cooperation Across Domains Working Group consists of people from across the university who share an interest in cooperation. It includes faculty and graduate students from SAS, SEBS, Bloustein, SCI, Mason Gross, SMLR, and RBHS. We plan to meet several times each semester to discuss such issues as cooperation in living systems, legislative agenda-setting as a coordination game, the management of risk through cooperation, negotiation and conflict resolution, cooperation in the performing arts, cooperation among autonomous vehicles, coalitional psychology and cooperation, the management of common pool resources through cooperation, cheating as a problem in cooperation across domains, and cooperation and conflict in labor-management relations.
Organizer
The Future of the Ancient?
This working group seeks to explore the ways in which Rutgers might develop global and inclusive approaches across disciplines to teaching, studying, and researching the ancient world. We will consider the ways in which ancient studies at Rutgers can respond to current trends, challenges, and opportunities in the academy and wider world. But we will be especially concerned with considering how the future of ancient studies might look and, in particular, what its purpose will be in the diverse community of Rutgers. To that end, we would like to spend a year reflecting critically on our own praxis in teaching, in training the next generation of teachers and scholars, and in producing scholarship ourselves. We also see this working group as an opportunity to strive to redraw disciplinary boundaries (both geographical and chronological) that have traditionally hindered scholars of the ancient world from interacting with one another.
We plan to bring together interested faculty and graduate students from departments, including (in alphabetical order) AMESALL, Asian Languages and Cultures, Classics, English, German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures, Jewish Studies, History, and Religion, across all three campuses. We intend to identify ways in which study of the ancient world across disciplinary and geographical divides will contribute to the University’s ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion.
Organizers
Debra Ballentine, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Religion
Sarah Connolly, Associate Professor of Classics
Victoria Hodges, Graduate Student
Jeffrey Ulrich, Assistant Professor
Technopolitical Natures
Technopolitical Natures draws on conceptual insights from feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, political ecology, and critical science studies to explore the politics of technoscience, material natures, and socio-environmental justice. We consider the intimate ways that matter and knowledge are politically animated and inextricably bound up in everyday configurations of social life, as well as struggles over sovereignty, public space, and citizenship. How do processes of materialization – of toxins, of waste, of resources, etc. – come to matter for political and social formations? How are these very processes inseparable from simultaneous reconfigurations of (human and nonhuman) bodies, as well as the environment broadly construed? How might this shape our conception of the “matter” of matter and its supposed fixity? And what are the political stakes of these decisions?
Organizers
Public Humanities
This working group includes scholars from across the Rutgers campuses who are interested in the Public Humanities. Cross-departmental and interdisciplinary by nature, this working group focuses on building communication between the university community, the scholarship it generates, and diverse publics. The group hosts seminars, lectures, and other events focusing on the relevance of the humanities in contemporary public life, acting as a forum for graduate students and faculty who are interested in learning more about the public humanities to be introduced to key concepts and debates in the field. Topics addressed range from community outreach, public writing, project management, experiential learning and engaged pedagogy, digital humanities and beyond. This working group is conceived of as an adjunct to graduate students’ traditional classroom instruction in the humanities, to connect them with the expertise of faculty and local public humanists, and motivate reciprocal collaboration outside of the academic sphere. Ultimately, this working group seeks to explore the variety of ways that humanities scholarship can be co-created alongside, shared with, and generated for a wider variety of audiences.
Organizers
Artwork in the 21st Century
The Artwork in the 21st Century Working Group brings together artists and scholars from a range of disciplines to explore fundamental questions of contemporary artistic and cultural production. In our current reality, artworks operate in complex fields of tension such as digitization, automation, the rise of artificial intelligence, immersive environments, stay at home orders, global warming and environmental disasters, racial reckoning, and the rise of nationalism and brazen authoritarianism. How does this impact possibilities for creativity and interaction between artworks? Which aspects of artworks are currently most salient? What role does nature play in 21st century artworks? Who is, or can be, the author of an artwork? How can artists collaborate meaningfully with thinkers from apparently distant disciplines? What kind of art works are innovative and forward-thinking and, at the same time, truly public in both scale and impact? What is the distinction and relationship between public and community-engaged art? What are the relationships, boundaries, and connections between authors and spectators? The Artwork in the 21st Century Working Group welcomes artists and scholars who are interested in exploring new and unexpected configurations for public-facing artistic and cultural production. This group of thinkers and practitioners will influence and inspire one another by sharing and discussing our own work, by studying important recent work by American and international artists and scholars, and by inviting talks from distinguished guests whose work intersects with our themes.
Organizers
Scott Ordway (Music) is a composer and multimedia artist who has become recognized for his boundary-defying, mixed-media projects, creating widely-acclaimed work that has been called “exquisite” (The New York Times) and “arresting” (Gramophone), “hypnotic” (BBC) and “a marvel” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). Drawing on his deep interest in literature, languages, and the humanities, Ordway’s remarkably diverse works fuse his music with text (frequently his own), video, digital soundscape, photography, and experimental theater to explore an array of contemporary, often urgent themes about ecology, architecture, protest and revolution, and urban life. Hailed as “an American response to Sibelius” by The Boston Globe, Ordway’s compositions are heard on major stages around the world. They have been commissioned or performed by the Hong Kong and Buffalo Philharmonics; Tucson Symphony; Hong Kong Arts, Beijing Modern, and Aspen Music Festivals; Tanglewood New Fromm Players; Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler; Sweden’s Norrbotten NEO; Yale Institute of Sacred Music; The Thirteen; Lorelei and SOLI Chamber Ensembles; Jasper, Momenta, Daedalus, and Arneis String Quartets; University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology; Haverford College’s Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities; and many other renowned ensembles and institutions. His music is also heard on the Acis and Naxos labels. His current projects include an in-progress opera on the Arab Spring, with an original libretto by the Algerian author, scholar, and journalist Meryem Belkaïd, workshopped by American Opera Projects, as well as The End of Rain, a multimedia symphony for Roomful of Teeth and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, featuring landscape photography alongside crowdsourced texts from hundreds of Californians impacted by wildfire and drought.
Anette Freytag (Landscape Architecture) focuses on the history and theory of designed landscapes from the 19th century to the contemporary landscape with a particular focus on topology and phenomenology. Her latest book The Landscapes of Dieter Kienast (Zurich: gta publishers 2021) shows how this influential Swiss landscape architect sought a synthesis between design and ecology amidst a striking change in societal understandings of nature between the 1970s and 2000s. Kienast designed spaces to make the dissolving opposition between city and countryside legible and to enable aesthetic experience to help citizens cope with increasingly complex everyday life. In the edited volume The Gardens of La Gara (editor and main author), Anette Freytag takes an 18th-century manor as a case study to show how garden art, horticulture, social and religious history, the renovation and preservation of historical ensembles, as well as landscape management to enhance biodiversity, are all interlinked. Her current research focuses on how walking can prompt social and formal change. Together with Julia Ritter, Professor of Dance at Rutgers, Anette Freytag founded the AIR Collaborative (Arts Integration in Research) which prioritizes creative placemaking to foster spatial justice through multidisciplinary research and curricular agendas that benefit and strengthen the Rutgers-New Brunswick campus and surrounding communities. Their first project is the #March2RUGardens2021, a festive two mile-long walk from Cook Campus to Rutgers Gardens with multiple performances that advocates for pedestrian accessibility to Rutgers Gardens. Anette´s research has received multiple awards, such as the European Garden Book Award 2018, the German Garden Book Award 2016, the DAM Architectural Book Award 2016, the Theodor Fischer Prize 2012 and the ETH Medal for Outstanding Scientific Research 2011.
Global Asias
This working group brings together scholars across Rutgers in order to foster ongoing conversations aimed at building a University-wide endeavor to advance the study of Global Asia at Rutgers. This initiative recognizes that Asia is home to two-thirds of the world population and the center of twenty-first century challenges, ranging from trade wars to nuclear proliferation, refugee crises to environmental disasters. Solutions to these problems require a renewed, integrative focus on Asia’s place in the world – and the world’s place in Asia. While the growing policy and academic emphasis on global processes and transnational relations challenges a traditional area studies model of scholarship, recent trends show nationalism and regionalism to be on the rise, due in part to globalization itself. Because Rutgers is home to a wide diversity of scholars actively engaging in research on Asia, we are uniquely positioned to take a leading role in reshaping conversations on the region. Our goals are to transform Rutgers into a hub of expertise on Asia and its diasporic and hemispheric locales by leveraging existing, but scattered, faculty expertise, as well as existing academic programs across the University, to better respond to and engage the Asian and Asian American communities at Rutgers and beyond. We will work towards integrating existing faculty collaborations, programs, and student/alumni organizations focused on Asia and Asian America. We seek to move beyond traditional area studies models, which grew out of policies responding to a Cold War era world order. Instead, we will foster deeper examination of the fundamental intellectual underpinnings of area studies in a new era of globalization and workshop new ways of framing regional and transregional conversations. This working group grows out of several years of ongoing discussion, aimed at identifying and developing areas of research collaboration across schools and departments. Our theme for this year is gender and mobility, which takes on a particularly pressing relevance given the current crisis surrounding migration, borders, and climate change, particular in light of our society's ongoing efforts to grapple with a global pandemic.
Organizers
