We’re pleased to announce the full schedule for our conference Lost New York, 1609-2009, to be held at NYU on 2-3 October 2009. All sessions are free and open to the public.
Has New York always been a lost city?
Lost New York marks the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage for the Dutch and the 200th anniversary of Washington Irving’s legendary reimagining of this New World encounter in his Knickerbocker’s History of New York. A wide array of conference participants will explore the dynamics of creativity and destruction, nostalgia and invention, that have for centuries marked efforts to “Do New York,” as Henry James advised Edith Wharton. Lectures and panels will address the relationships between literary imagination and the archives, between migrations and displacements, between loss and remembrance, and between preservation and development in the long and storied history of one of the world’s greatest cities.
FRIDAY, 2 OCT
4:00 PM — OPENING PLENARY: RECLAIMING THE DUTCH (Fales Library, 70 Wash Sq South, 3rd floor)
Joanne van der Woude (Harvard University), “Knickerbocker’s Archive: How Writings from New Netherland Shaped American Literature”
Elizabeth Bradley (New York Public Library), “The Great Knickerbocker Hoax: Washington Irving and the Creation of Old New York”
Lytle Shaw (New York University), “New Amsterdam’s Chadwijks”
5:30 – 6:30 PM — RECEPTION AND EXHIBITION OPENING: “LOST NEW YORK” (Fales Library Gallery)
SATURDAY, 3 OCT.
All Saturday sessions will be held at 13-19 University Place, room 102
9:00 AM: Coffee and tea
9:15 AM – 10:45 AM: FROM ADRIAEN VAN DER DONCK TO RICHARD HELL: REFLECTIONS ON CURATING “LOST NEW YORK”
John Easterbrook (New York University) on Adriaen van der Donck’s New Netherland
Kristen Doyle Highland (New York University) on the history of “Gotham”
Jane Greenway Carr (New York University) on myth and performance in bohemian Greenwich Village
John Melillo (New York University) on Lower East Side poetics, 1960-1980
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM: MORNING KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Daphne Brooks (Princeton University), “‘Blue Light ‘Til Dawn’: Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley’s Showtime at the Apollo”
12:30 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM: BLOGGING THE APOCALYPSE: NEW MEDIA, NEW GENRES, AND THE LITERATURE OF A LOST CITY
Sukhdev Sandhu (New York University), moderator
Panelists:
Lost City
Ephemeral New York
Flaming Pablum: Vanishing Downtown
Bowery Boogie
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM: AFTERNOON KEYNOTE CONVERSATION: DAVID FREELAND AND MARSHALL BERMAN IN DIALOGUE
Marshall Berman (City College of New York and Graduate Center of the City University of New York), author of All That Is Solid Melts into Air and co-editor of New York Calling
David Freeland (independent writer, New York City), author of Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville
5:30 PM – 6:30 PM: Closing reception
Conference sponsored by the Department of English and Humanities Initiative at New York University. Organized by Cyrus R. K. Patell and Bryan Waterman
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