Video / Audio

Elliot Ross received his PhD in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His dissertation examines narratives of the Kenyan War of Independence and its afterlives, and considers questions of historical reparation, anti-colonialism and human rights. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Al Jazeera, Washington Post, and many other publications. He worked for five years as senior editor of the website Africa is a Country. As a Public Humanities Fellow, Elliot faciliated a series of podcasts in which New York public high school students interview scholars on a politically meaningful topic of their expertise.

Reconfigurations (Moderator: Gundula Kreuzer) Nina Sun Eidsheim (UCLA): “Opera on Voice/Voice on Opera: Afterword, an opera and ‘Accidental Meaning’” David Levin (University of Chicago): “Yesterday’s Experiments in Opera Today”

Genres and Institutions (Moderator: David Gutkin) Joy Calico (Vanderbilt University): “Chaya Czernowin's Infinite Now” Will Robin (University of Maryland, College Park): “Opera for the 80s and Beyond, the Orchestra Residencies Program, and Institutional Experiments in American New Music in the 1980s”

Opera’s Systems (Moderator: Lydia Goehr) Jeanine Oleson (Parsons School of Design) Franck Leibovici (Paris) Yuval Sharon (The Industry, Los Angeles)

Composing and Performing (Moderator: Matthew Ricketts) Joan La Barbara (NYU) Du Yun (Peabody Institute) George Lewis (Columbia University)

Beyond the Opera House (Moderator: Arman Schwartz) Minou Arjomand (University of Texas at Austin): “Radio Opera” Jelena Novak (New University of Lisbon): “Opera beyond Itself: Installing the Operatic”

Retrospective—Robert Wilson (Moderator: Heather Wiebe)  David Gutkin (Peabody Institute): “Universal History, Posthistory, and Globality in Robert Wilson’s the CIVIL warS” Arman Schwartz (King’s College London): “Opera and Objecthood, from Einstein to Klinghoffer"

Essays are central to students’ and teachers’ development as thinkers in their fields. In Crafting Presence, Nicole B. Wallack develops an approach to teaching writing with the literary essay that holds promise for writing students, as well as for achieving a sense of common purpose currently lacking among professionals in composition, creative writing, and literature. Wallack analyzes examples drawn primarily from volumes of The Best American Essays to illuminate the most important quality of the essay as a literary form: the writer’s “presence.” She demonstrates how accounting for presence provides a flexible and rigorous heuristic for reading the contexts, formal elements, and purposes of essays. Such readings can help students learn writing principles, practices, and skills for crafting myriad presences rather than a single voice.