Category Archives: American University

The Humanities Truck

How do we transform the landscape around us through stories, images, memories, and experiences? In this discussion, Professor Dan Kerr introduces an innovative project for truly mobilizing the humanities!


The Humanities Truck 

Dan Kerr, Nina Shapiro-Perl, Juliana Martinez
Wednesday April 8, 2014, 1 p.m.
Battelle-Tompkins 228

 

 

How do we mobilize the humanities, and connect with the community in ways that are innovative, uncharted, and truly on the move? Functioning as a mobile workshop, recording studio, and exhibit space, the Humanities Truck will document experiences, start conversations, and share the stories of diverse, underserved communities in the Washington, DC, region. For this lunchtime roundtable discussion, the interdisciplinary team of faculty behind this exciting project will present their first projects and aims. As an experimental mobile platform for collecting, preserving, and expanding dialogue around the humanities, the Humanities Truck will work with specific micro-communities throughout the region, in order to recognize and enhance the existing cultural creativity in communities that are typically devalued, and foster imaginative new ways of addressing community challenges in the midst of rapid urban change.

 

Update, 2018: The Humanities Truck Project began as an idea that was cultivated by one of the Humanities Lab’s very first working groups.  Today the Lab and the Truck work closely together to mobilize the humanities at American University and throughout Washington, DC.  To find out more about the current initiatives and projects related to the Humanities Truck  please visit their new website:

http://humanitiestruck.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geocaching

How do we transform the landscape around us through stories, images, memories, and experiences? Join us for a lecture by David Pike on new urban geographies.


Geocaching: An Interdisciplinary Community Project

Wednesday, February 11th, 2014

12 p.m.
Battelle-Tompkins 228

 

 

 

 

For this project Professor Pike is introducing the AU community to geocaching, a collaborative project that connects physical and virtual space. Using mobile apps and maps, students from participating classes will “seed” the American University campus and other locations in the DC area with geocaches, and invite the community to find and respond to these hidden treasure troves. In addition to physical artifacts, historical materials, and clues for more interaction, geocaches will include stories, poems, and artwork, and elements that are real, imaginary, past, or lost. After the introductory lecture and workshop, follow-up events will extend this project throughout the semester— with the participation of graduate and undergraduate students and faculty from multiple departments and programs including literature, public history, world languages and cultures, art history, creative writing, arts management, college writing, film and visual media, philosophy and religion, graphic design, and computer science.

 

 


About our speaker:

 Geocachingtalk2Feb2015300x3003David Pike is a professor of literature at American University, and the author of major books in urban studies, modernism, cinema, and comparative literature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pike_slide 3 Pike_Slide1 Pike_slide2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where is the Internet?

Join us for a lecture by Professor Laura DeNardis on the material and geographical resources that power the internet.


Where is the Internet?  

Wednesday January 21, 2014, 3 p.m.
Battelle-Tompkins 228

How do technologies once imagined as disembodied or dispersed become local? Laura DeNardis is one of the world’s foremost Internet governance scholars and a professor in the School of Communication at American University. In this talk she discusses current debates about internet infrastructure and neutrality, and traces how the internet has evolved from a dispersed and ethereal technology to a global everyday utility and a local, and fiercely debated, political resource.

 


About our speaker

Laura PictureDr. Laura DeNardis is a scholar of Internet architecture and governance and a tenured Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C.  She is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and serves as the Director of Research for the Global Commission on Internet Governance. She is an affiliated fellow of the Yale Information Society Project at Yale Law School and served as its Executive Director from 2008-2011. She is a co-founder and co-series editor of the MIT Press Information Society book series. She has previously taught at New York University, in the Volgenau School of Engineering at George Mason University, and at Yale Law School. Her expertise and scholarship has been featured in Science MagazineThe EconomistNational Public Radio (NPR), New York TimesTime MagazineChristian Science MonitorSlate MagazineReutersForbes, the Washington TimesEl PaisLa RepubblicaThe Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Laura DeNardis at United Nations Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland

Her books include The Global War for Internet Governance (Yale University Press 2014), Opening Standards: The Global Politics of Interoperability (MIT Press 2011); Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance (MIT Press 2009); and Information Technology in Theory (2007).

Laura DeNardis holds an A.B. in Engineering Science from Dartmouth College; a Master of Engineering from Cornell University; a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech (Phi Kappa Phi); and was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

____________________________________

Have a look at Laura DeNardis’ books:

 The Global War For Internet Governanceoffers a fresh perspective on both familiar and under-theorized questions and topics animating the field of contemporary critical and cultural theory. It provides a full account of the history and scope of the field, focusing on the most pressing questions and problems that occupy and impel contemporary theoretical discourse. GatThe Internet has transformed the manner in which information is exchanged and business is conducted, arguably more than any other communication development in the past century. Despite its wide reach and powerful global influence, it is a medium uncontrolled by any one centralized system, organization, or governing body, a reality that has given rise to all manner of free-speech issues and cybersecurity concerns. The conflicts surrounding Internet governance are the new spaces where political and economic power is unfolding in the twenty-first century. This all-important study by Laura DeNardis reveals the inner power structure already in place within the architectures and institutions of Internet governance. It provides a theoretical framework for Internet governance that takes into account the privatization of global power as well as the role of sovereign nations and international treaties. In addition, DeNardis explores what is at stake in open global controversies and stresses the responsibility of the public to actively engage in these debates, because Internet governance will ultimately determine Internet freedom

Protocol Politics examines what’s at stake politically, economically, and technically in the selection and adoption of a new Internet protocol. Laura DeNardis’s key insight is that protocols are political. IPv6 intersects with provocative topics including Internet civil liberties, US military objectives, globalization, institutional power struggles, and the promise of global democratic freedoms. DeNardis offers recommendations for Internet standards governance, based not only on technical concerns but on principles of openness and transparency, and examines the global implications of looming Internet address scarcity versus the slow deployment of the new protocol designed to solve this problem.

_______________________________________

Please click on the book title below to learn more about Laura DeNardis’ works: 

    

Car Culture in Africa

Join us for a lecture by Professor Lindsey Green-Simms (Department of Literature, American University) on how luxury cars and car culture inform notions of cultural and social mobility  in Africa.


Cruising the Petro-state:  Car Culture and Nigerian Cinema

Wednesday November 2, 2016, 1 pm, at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

 

nollywood-web1-master768

This talk examines car culture and the status of the private automobile in post oil-boom Nigeria by reading popular video films that are a part of the now-famous “Nollywood” industry.  In particular, it will discuss how luxury cars like the Hummer or Mercedes Benz are paradigmatic and contradictory objects through which one can assess both the pleasures and anxieties of global modernity in Nigeria.  Though these cars are highly coveted objects, typically filmed driving down paved roads in posh neighborhoods, they are often a sign of wealth that is acquired through criminality, witchcraft, magic, or fraud.  Any discussion of car culture therefore requires an engagement with the complexities of the moral economy of Nigeria and assessment of what it means to be a capitalist consumer in a highly stratified oil-producing country.

 

 


About our speaker

Green-Simms-Lindsey-300Lindsey Green-Simms’ teaching and research focuses on African and post-colonial film and literature. Her particular interests include globalization, technology, gender and sexuality studies, and Nollywood video-film production. Professor Green-Simms’ forthcoming book, Postcolonial Automobility: Cars, Cultural Production, and Global Mobility in West Africa, examines how the contradictions of globalization are embedded in the commodity of the automobile and in the ideals of automobility. She is also working on a second book, provisionally titled Unbelonging Bodies: Same-Sex Sexualities and African Screen Media. Professor Green-Simms completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, and has previously taught at Duke University, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in Women’s Studies, as well as at the College of Charleston. She has published articles in Camera Obscura, transition, Journal of African Cinemas, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing and has book chapters in Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (Ohio U. Press) and Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory (Rodopi Press).

____________________________________

Read more:

Lindsey Green-Simms, “Hustlers, Homewreckers, and Homoeroticism: Nollywood’s Beautiful Faces”
PDF: Hustlers_Homewreckers_and_Homoeroticism
Lindsey Green-Simms, “Occult Melodramas: Spectral Affect and West African Video-Film”
PDF: Occult_Melodramas_Spectral_Affect_and_W


 

Understanding Fuel

What can critical theory, literature, and film help us understand about fuel?

Join us for a lecture by Professor Karen Pinkus (Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University) on the concept of “fuel” in western culture and philosophy, and the ways in which our understanding of energy has structured modernity.


Fuel: History of a Strange Concept

Monday September 26, 2016, 1 pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

fuel_image

In this talk, professor Pinkus will discuss the concept of fuel in human culture and philosophy, from antiquity to the present day.
Part of her new book, Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), the talk examines different types of fuel, from everyday fossil and renewable fuels to fantastical fuels found in science fiction and speculative literature. This work was inspired by professor Pinkus’ concern about the environment, and her sense that that the humanities can bring a critical research component to solving the problems of climate change.
Pinkus uses tools from the humanities, such as critical theory, philosophy, and literary analysis, to separate fuel from energy, and to examine our relationship with fuel itself. Is fuel a form of pure potentiality, that is, power, but before it is used (up)?  She proposes that fuels are materials that have “very complex relationships with our own thought structures, fantasies, narratives, or ways of being in the world.”

 

Cultures of Energycultural-histroy-of-climate-changeFind out more:

Listen to a podcast about her work on Cultures of Energy, where she talks about Jules Verne as her greatest inspiration, her new research on geoengineering, and why the future belongs to small people.

Read an article she recently published in the new collection The Cultural History of Climate Change, titled “Fuels and humans, bíos and zoe”

Read and download the PDF here: pinkusculturalhistory

 

 


About our speaker

pinkusKaren Pinkus is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University.  She is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, and a member of the Climate Change Focus Group. She has published many articles on topics ranging from literary theory and the internal combustion engine to the temporality of carbon management. Professor Pinkus has published widely in Italian culture, literary theory, cinema, visual theory, and environmental theory.  Aside from Italian she also works with French, Latin, German, Spanish, and is learning Swedish.

She has several ongoing research projects:
1) a new book tentatively titled Autonomia/ Automata: Machines for Writing, Laboring and Thinking in 1960s Italy, that explores issues around labor, automation and repetition in Italian art, literature, design, and film of the 60s.  In part, this work is in dialogue with contemporary Italian thought, especially as regards the question of the Autonomia movement, the refusal to work, and the question of wages.

2) Her new book Fuel (November 2016) thinks about issues crucial to climate change by arguing for a separation of fuel (perhaps understood as potentiality, or dynamis, to use the Aristotelian term) from energy as a system of power (actuality, use).  Fuel follows a series of literary, filmic, and critical texts through the form of a dictionary (from “air” to “zyklon D”).  Fuel engages with literature, art and critical theory as they are central to analogy and in turn, to fuel itself.

For about the past ten years, most of her work has been directed toward thinking about the humanities in relation to climate change. Professor Pinkus is on the editorial boards of diacritics and World Picture Journal. For diacritics, she edited a special issue on climate change criticism (43.1), thirty years on from the influential issue on nuclear criticism.

You can find out more about Karen Pinkus on her website

 ____________________________________

Have a look at Karen Pinkus’ books:

pid_16330How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy’s ubiquity? We think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually lead) into gold, but “alchemy” is a word in wide circulation in everyday life, often called upon to fulfill a metaphoric duty as the magical transformation of materials. Almost every culture and time has had some form of alchemy. This book looks at alchemy, not at any one particular instance along the historical timeline, not as a practice or theory, not as a mode of redemption, but as a theoretical problem, linked to real gold and real production in the world. What emerges as the least common denominator or “intensive property” of alchemy is ambivalence, the impossible and paradoxical coexistence of two incompatible elements. Alchemical Mercury moves from antiquity, through the golden age of alchemy in the Dutch seventeenth century, to conceptual art, to alternative fuels, stopping to think with writers such as Dante, Goethe, Hoffmann, the Grimm Brothers, George Eliot, and Marx. Eclectic and wide-ranging, this is the first study to consider alchemy in relation to literary and visual theory in a comprehensive way.

51PW1EWHY7L._SX388_BO1,204,203,200_Early on a windy morning in April 1953, the body of a young woman washed up on a beach outside of Rome. Her name was Wilma Montesi, and, as the papers reported, she had left her home in the city center a day earlier, alone. The police called her death an accidental drowning. But the public was not convinced. In the cafés around the Via Veneto, people began to speak-of the son of a powerful politician, lavish parties, movie stars, orgies, drugs.

How this news item of everyday life exploded into one of the greatest scandals of a modern democracy is the story Karen Pinkus tells in The Montesi Scandal. Wilma’s death brought to the surface every simmering element of Italian culture: bitter aspiring actresses, corrupt politicians, nervous Jesuits in sunglasses, jaded princes. Italians of all types lined up to testify-in court or to journalists of varying legitimacy-about the death of the middle-class carpenter’s daughter, in the process creating a media frenzy and the modern culture of celebrity. Witnesses sold their stories to the tabloids, only to retract them. They posed for pictures, pretending to shun the spotlight. And they in turn became celebrities in their own right.

Pinkus takes us through the alleys and entryways of Rome in the 1950s, linking Wilma’s death to the beginnings of the dolce vita, now synonymous with modern Roman life. Pinkus follows the first paparazzi on their scooters as they shoot the protagonists and gives us an insider’s view of the stories and trials that came to surround this lonely figure that washed up on the shores of Ostia. Full of the magnificent paparazzi photos of the protagonists in the drama and film stills from the era’s landmark movies, The Montesi Scandal joins true crime with “high” culture in an original form, one true to both the period and the cinematic conception of life it created. More than a meditation of the intricate ties among movies, paparazzo photography, and Italian culture, The Montesi Scandal narrates Wilma’s story and its characters as the notes for an unrealized film, but one that, as the reader discovers, seems impossible to produce.

 

41Dy1szlNKL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_                    417l33LqMfL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_

After Oil

How can we imagine a transition to new energy sources? Join us for a lecture by Professor Imre Szeman (University of Alberta) on the way interdisciplinary perspectives can inform our understanding of energy uses and forms. Drawing from his work in the field of Energy Humanities, Professor Szeman will explore the social, cultural, and political changes needed to make possible a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy.


After Oil 

Tuesday, November 15, 2016, 3 pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

AfterOil

 

About our speaker

IImre Szemanmre Szeman is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, and Adjunct Professor of interdisciplinary Studies at OCAD University. He conducts research on and teaches in the areas of energy and environmental studies, literary and cultural theory, social and political philosophy (esp. 19th and 20th left theory, globalization and nationalism), and Canadian studies. Szeman is the recipient of the John Polanyi Prize in Literature (2000), the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award (2003), the Scotiabank-AUCC Award for Excellence in Internationalization (2004), an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2005-7), the President’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision at McMaster University (2008), a Killam Annual Professorship (2013), and the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research (2015), the U of Alberta’s most prestigious research award that recognizes research excellence in humanities, social sciences, law, education and fine arts. He is the founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies and a founding member of the US Cultural Studies Association. He is currently finishing up work on On Empty: The Cultural Politics of Oil.

You can find out more about Imre Szeman on his website

Please Click on the link below for a full download of Imre Szeman’s book After Oil :

PDF: After_Oil

____________________________________

Have a look at Imre Szeman’s books and articles:


A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory
culture/imre offers a fresh perspective on both familiar and under-theorized questions and topics animating the field of contemporary critical and cultural theory. It provides a full account of the history and scope of the field, focusing on the most pressing questions and problems that occupy and impel contemporary theoretical discourse. Gathering together some of the most widely read and innovative theorists working today, this Companion offers thirty-nine essays designed to illuminate the topics that dominate theoretical debate today and, we anticipate, for some time to come. By framing its chapters around the problems and issues animating the field today, A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory offers a theoretical framework within which crucial questions, traditions, approaches, and concepts in critical and cultural theory take on newly generative valences. Capturing the dynamism of contemporary theory, the essays collected in this book will provide a comprehensive account of the ways in which the study of literature and culture has been, and continues to be challenged and energized by critical and cultural theory.
Contemporary Marxist Theory: An Anthology brings together major texts in late twentieth century Marxist thought, focusing on work written Marx/Imreduring the past two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It takes as its point of departure the strong sense that—contrary to rumours of its death in conjunction with the end of state socialism—the influence and impact of Marxist theory is today stronger than ever, and has become even more essential for understanding our historical conjuncture than during the Cold War. The crisis-ridden world produced by global capitalism requires theoretically sophisticated and critically sharp analyses of political and economic systems and structures, and of the social and cultural imaginaries which inflect and shape their formation. It is impossible to ignore the fact that the voices dominating critical and cultural theory in the past two decades have belonged to thinkers identified with the ideas of Marxist thought and its intellectual heritage. This book fills a significant gap in the contemporary world of ideas by showcasing an area of scholarly analysis whose impact on intellectual thought and political action will only grow in coming years.

 

 

 

 

 

Please click on the book title below to learn more about Imre Siezman’s works: 

9780847693887    9780801868030   978-0-8223-4416-2_pr   9780823273911

Black Lives Matter

Join us for the launch of the Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies Collaborative at American University, with a special event discussing the importance, challenges and impact of the Black Lives Matter movement.


Wednesday, April 6, 2016, 4-7 pm
Battelle-Tompkins Atrium

Black Lives matter event

4 -5 pm: Conversation with AU student activists involved with Black Lives Matter and AU Alumna Marita Golden

5-6pm: Talk – Erika Totten (BLM Activist in DC): “We are accountable when we are specific”

6-7pm: Talk – Marcia Chatelain (Associate Professor, History, Georgetown University – #fergusonsyllabus):

“What #BlackLivesMatter Teaches Us: Woke Pedagogies, Social Media, and the Academy”

 

This event is free and open to the public.

Cosponsored by the Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies Collaborative and the Humanities Lab.


About the Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies Collaborative 

The Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies Collaborative (CRGC) is a vibrant and inclusive community of faculty and students that explores diverse voices, histories, and experiences through socially engaged scholarship.

The collaborative houses six interdisciplinary programs that offer bachelor’s degrees, minors, and certificates:

Our courses discuss race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, culture, religion, and more from a critical perspective. We encourage our students to research complex problems and explore interdisciplinary interests.

Responding to Homelessness in DC

In this presentation, Jay Melder discusses the challenges of responding to homelessness in DC, a city that has been radically transformed in recent years by new urban developments and changing demographics.


Responding to Homelessness in DC

Wednesday April 13, 2016, 1 pm, at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

Responding to Homelessness in DC AU Slider

Jay Melder, Chief of Staff, DC Department of Human Services, discusses the challenge of homelessness for the future of DC. Our city has experienced incredible change and growth in the last decades, but still struggles with poverty, gentrification, the displacement of long-time residents, and urban homelessness. Find out more about how city agencies, organizations, and officials take on the challenges of chronic homelessness in this engaging and timely conversation.


 

About our speaker

Screen Shot 2016-03-14 at 12.40.59 PM

Jay Melder is Chief of Staff  of the District of Columbia Department of Human Services. He has served as Director of Communications and External Affairs on the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, and has also worked for the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2010-2011 he was Poet in Residence at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.  He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University.
Jay Melder was part of a conversation on ending homelessness aired on NBC, February 19, 2016, hosted by Aaron Gilchrist. The guests — Jan-Michael Sacharko, director of Development of New Hope Housing; Renee Pope, assistant director, Community Services, Prince George’s County Department of Social Services; and Jay Melder, chief of staff, DC Department of Human Services — offer different insights into homelessness in the Washington Metropolitan Region.

Click on the image below to view this segment.

On NBC


Find out more about these organizations:

United States Interagency Council on Homelessness

https://www.usich.gov/

District of Columbia Interagency Council on Homelessness

http://ich.dc.gov/

DC Coalition for the Homeless

http://www.dccfh.org/

 

Find out more about recent developments in how the DC City Government responds to homelessness:

“D.C. Claims Huge Progress Moving Homeless Families Into Housing”

Washington City Paper, April 10, 2015

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/housingcomplex/2015/04/10/d-c-claims-huge-progress-moving-homeless-families-into-housing/

“Mayor Bowser Releases Plan To Close D.C. General With Shelters In Each Ward”

DCist, February 9, 2016

http://dcist.com/2016/02/mayor_bowser_releases_plan_to_close.php

 

The Global Environmental Crisis

Grass_closeupIn this talk, Professor Paul Wapner,  from the Environmental Politics Program at the School of International Services at American University, will examine the relationship between crisis and response in reference to the global environmental crisis. Should the world adopt a politics of crisis to address global environmental challenges?

 


The Global Environmental Crisis 

Wednesday March 23rd, 2016, 1 pm, at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

20151009_163243

For decades, environmentalists have been sounding the alarm about the environmental “crisis.”  They warn that the earth’s ecosystems are in acute danger and that injustices abound as people exploit each other through the medium of nature.  How useful is the concept of “crisis” to describe environmental degradation?  It is certainly the case that climate change, freshwater scarcity, loss of biological diversity, and other factors are undermining the planet’s life-support systems, and that untold numbers of people and creatures are affected.  But does labeling these phenomena as a “crisis” help or hinder humanity’s ability to respond?  In this talk, Professor Paul Wapner will examine the relationship between crisis and response.  Should the world adopt a politics of crisis to address global environmental challenges?

 


 About our speaker

Paul WapnProfessor Paul Wapner’s research focuses on global environmental politics, environmental thought, transnational environmental activism, and environmental ethics. He is particularly concerned with understanding how societies can live through this historical moment of environmental intensification in ways that enhance human dignity, compassion, and justice, and come to respect and nurture the more-than-human world. His books include: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics, Principled World Politics: The Challenge of Normative International Relations, Living Through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism, and, most recently, Global Environmental Politics: From Person to Planet (co-edited with Simon Nicholson). He is currently editing a book titled, Reimagining Climate Change, and continues to lead workshops for professors that explore contemplative practices and environmental engagement.

 

Click on the images below to find out more about Paul Wapner’s books.

 

 41-57GVVFQL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_  41Qtq-2JT3L._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_  51JDc3OCz6L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_  51vNoLwj9OL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_

 

 

 

Eradicating Domestic Violence

Can a new approach respond more effectively to the crisis of domestic violence?

In this lecture Rachel Louise Snyder presents her groundbreaking investigation into domestic violence, and offers her insights about how new methods of evaluation and new collaborative practices can make a difference in curbing domestic homicide. Featured in The New Yorker and other major publications, her research is also informing discussions of policy, and changing law enforcement and social programs that respond to domestic violence today.


Eradicating Domestic Violence: The Invisible Origin of All Violence

Wednesday March 2, 2016, 1 pm, at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

 

Snyder-The-Unseen-Victims-of-Traumatic-Brain-Injury-from-Domestic-Violence-690x459-1451324907                        domestic-violence-300w

Click here to read “A Raised Hand” and “No Visible Bruises” by Rachel Louise Snyder.


 About our speaker

Snyder, Rachel300x300

Rachel Louise Snyder is a writer, professor and public radio commentator. Her first book Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade was published in 2007 by WW Norton. An excerpt of the book aired on This American Life and won an Overseas Press Club Award. Her second book, a novel set in Oak Park, Illinois and entitled What We’ve Lost is Nothing was published in January, 2014 by Scribner.
Snyder’s print work has also appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Slate, Salon, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Men’s Journal, Jane, Travel and Leisure, the New Republic, Redbook and Glamour. She hosted the nationally-syndicated global affairs series “Latitudes” on public radio, and her stories have aired on Marketplace and All Things Considered.
Snyder has traveled to more than 50 countries and lived in London from 1999 – 2001 and in Phnom Penh, Cambodia from 2003 – 2009. In the summer of 2009, she relocated to Washington, DC, where she is currently an associate professor in the MFA creative writing program at American University.

 

You can find out more on her website.

1757129121230-fc-a