The ESA is a student-run organization that seeks to improve living and working conditions of students in the Program by representing the interests of the students in the Graduate Center English Department. Representation includes expressing the concerns of the students to the faculty and administration as well as relaying information back to the students. The primary tasks of the ESA are to provide a forum for student concerns, sponsor a network of student mentors, oversee course evaluations, and run the student election process. In addition, the ESA runs an annual conference (with faculty participation) open to ESA members as well as students form other institutions.
- For more about how the ESA operates see ESA by-laws.
- To get involved, please attend one of our meetings.
ESA Committee Members 2009–2010
ESA Co-chairs
Mia Chen & Leila Walker
Admissions & Financial Aid Committee
James Arnett
Alison Powell
Shawn Rice
Tracy Riley
Alternative: Linda Neiberg
Alumni Committee
Louis Bury
Seamus O’Malley
Alternative: Emily Stanback
Course Assessment Committee
Diana Colbert
Anne Donlon
Robert Machado
Molly Pulda
Judd Staley
Curriculum Committee
Sari Altschuler
Kate Broad
Alternative: Allyson Foster
Elections Committee
Jason Schneiderman
Emily Sherwood
Executive Committee
Angela Francis
Lindsey Freer
Neil Meyer
Carrie Shanafelt
Alternative: Anne McCarthy
Faculty Membership Committee
Jill Belli
Allyson Foster
Alternative: Zach Samalin
Fundraising Committee
Louis Bury
Jenn Holl
Alec Magnet
Judd Staley
Emily Stanback
Placement Committee
Diana Colbert
Anne McCarthy
Jen Mitchell
Jason Schneiderman
Alternative:Szidonia Haragos
Recruitment Committee
Kate Broad
Colleen Cusick
Josh Schneiderman
Melissa Dennihy
Website Committee
Margaret Galvan
Jesse Merandy
Ben Miller
ESA Conference Chair & Topic
Margaret Galvan & Tracy Riley
“Spanking and Poetry”: A Conference on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Eve lovingly, if none too gently, slapped open the sphincter-tight boundary rings of critical scholarship on the sexual and affective relations between bodies. This conference invites continued play with the tools she created for examination of “all the different surfaces that make a self for most of us, printed pages, ‘our’ ideas, institutional relations and activism, vibrations of a voice, the gaping abstractions and distractions of creativity, the weird holographic projections of our names and public personae, the visible and impressible extent of the parts of our bodies” (Tendencies 104-05). We welcome paper proposals on any aspect or application of her critical, literary, and artistic work, inviting scholars to broadly consider and reconsider Sedgwick’s intersections with and influences upon their fields. In the spirit of her own perversion of academic style, we particularly encourage proposals that expand the boundaries of the conventional conference paper through experimental or creative critical methods.
Some suggested topics to explore include:
Affect
Axiomatic Difference
Body Studies
Camp
Cognitive Diversity
Coming Out
Dalai Lama
Depression
Epistemology Outside the Closet
Experimental Critical Writing
Fags and Hags
Fat Studies
Fisting-as-écriture
The Gothic
Geometries of Desire
Hermeneutics of Suspicion
Homosociality
Historical Search for a Great Paradigm Shift
How to bring your kids up gay
L. Austin
Knowledge and Ignorance
Love
Marcel Proust
Memoir
Masturbation
Melanie Klein
Michel Foucault
Mortality/AIDS/Breast Cancer
Non-Freudian psychoanalysis (Tomkins/Klein)
Other “closets,” other “epistemologies”
Paranoia
Pedagogy
Performativity
Poetry and Poetics
Positions
Queer Theory
Reader Relations
Relationship with “Real America”
René Girard
Sentimentality and Ressentiment
Shame
Spatiality
Speech Acts
Sylvan Tomkins
Taking One to Know One
Texture
Therapeutic/Rebellious/Reparative Readings
Tibetan Buddhism
Victorian Writing
War against Western Civilization
Zen Buddhism