LLC30: Culture and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century New York

Collaborative Goals

Our goal for 2024-25 is to engage in conversations that support ongoing archival work at each of our host campuses. One of the key members of the group, Derrick Spires, will be curating an exhibit at the Kroch library at Cornell University. Scheduled to open Thursday, September 19, 2024, this exhibit will offer the opportunity to engage members of the group including faculty and graduate students at different institutions in the corridor. We propose to offer two follow through panel discussions on Friday, September 20, 2024 with a lunch offering ahead of time and a reception afterwards. We will be able to house these activities in the department lounge at Cornell.

The topic of the exhibit is "Black Print, Black Speculation in the Nineteenth-Century U.S." The exhibition will highlight the many ways Black Americans have used print as a space for speculation and as a technology for actualizing Black freedom dreams. It draws on Cornell Library's rich collections of rare books and archives to showcase imaginative worlds African descended people generated through print and how that process of imagining enabled them to make material change. African American literature and Black aesthetic sensibilities will be featured through poetry, autobiographies, photographs, newspapers, and more, offering a snapshot of a robust community of writers thinking actively about Black art—the beautiful and the sublime, politics and popular culture—and doing so primarily through periodicals and the forms most conducive to that medium.

In Memoriam

We are very sorry to announce the passing of one of our initial group organizers, Ezra Tawil, a Professor at the University of Rochester. Ezra has been an important part of our group from the beginning. His research on nineteenth-century contexts and crises has been inspirational for many of us. Books such as The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (Cambridge University Press, 2006) have established key terms for nineteenth-century studies. We have attached a tribute from a graduate student at the University of Rochester, Seth Murray.

Ezra Tawil was the finest teacher I had in graduate school. In the classroom he could field a conversation like no other. He had a unique gift for making every student feel as if their contributions were interesting, urgent, and fresh. He was excited and filled with joy, week in and week out, that we were all there to read and talk about books with him. During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he and I were undertaking an independent study on the early American novel. Each week, logging in to Zoom to see him there, smiling and laughing in the midst of so much chaos, remains one of the few bright spots of life from that difficult period. That odd virtual space was the crystallized form of what he could do as a teacher: turn the classroom into a kind of asylum from the world, not where it might be escaped but instead where it became more bearable, more livable.

As a scholar, he was a particularly graceful writer. He had a knack for managing a style that was both conversational and clear, while also not sacrificing any intellectual rigor. He was both generous and incisive in his work – and above all, curious. While specializing in the early American period, his work spoke just as intelligently about a vast range of topics, including Renaissance rhetoricians, Borges, and James Baldwin. At the time of his death, he was hard at work on a project about Judaism, religious violence, and Clarel – the culmination of a lifetime spent passionately reading Melville.

May his memory be a blessing.