The Cullman Center Institute for Teachers

DÁNIEL MARGÓCSY, Instructor

How did Europeans make sense of the expanding globe in the Age of Discoveries? This seminar explores the impact of the printing revolution on Europeans’ perceptions of America, Africa, and Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will examine how, in the absence of first-hand evidence, Europeans attempted to make sense of the contradictory accounts of travelers. And we will look at early maps, broadsheets, paintings, and printed texts to see how a highly stereotypical image of exotic worlds developed in Europe in this period. Readings will range from Montaigne through Purchas his Pilgrimage to secondary literature in cultural history and art history.

Dániel Margócsy is Assistant Professor of History at Hunter College, CUNY. He has published articles on cabinets of curiosities, the commercialization of science, the development of taxonomy, and the art of the Dutch Golden Age. He co-edited States of Secrecy, a special issue of the British Journal for the History of Science, on scientific secrets. At the Cullman Center, he is working on a book that examines how the creative arts influenced the development of modern science.

 SHIMON DOTAN, Instructor

This seminar, helpful for global history teachers as well as any teacher who uses film in the classroom, looks closely at one of the most influential political films in history. The Battle of Algiers (1966), by Gillo Pontecorvo, recreates the Algerian struggle for independence from the French in the 1950s. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. The film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Pontecorvo’s film has astonishing relevance today. The class will explore how the film is constructed politically, aesthetically, and ethically.

Shimon Dotan is a film director and screenwriter whose films include Hot House, The Smile of the Lamb, and You Can Thank Me Later. He has won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance, the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, and two Israeli Academy Awards, among others. Dotan is a professor at New York University and The New School University, where he teaches Political Cinema and Film Directing, respectively. At the Cullman Center, he is working on a script for a feature film about Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. 

This seminar is during spring break

GARY PANTER, Instructor

Starting a sketchbook can seem intimidating. This workshop will address the activity of regularly drawing in a sketchbook. People at any skill level will benefit from this workshop, but it is aimed at those who don’t draw but would like to. Participants will do easy, satisfying exercises designed for the beginner. Bring in a favorite poem or two — at the end of the workshop you’ll draw illustrations for the poems.

Gary Panter is a painter, cartoonist, and designer whose awards include a Chrysler Design Award and three Emmys. His work has appeared in Time, The New Yorker, Esquire, Raw, Rolling Stone, Artforum, and Art In America, among other publications. His graphic novels include Jimbo's Inferno, Jimbo in Purgatory, and Invasion of the Elvis Zombies. At the Cullman Center, Panter is exploring imagery and texts relating to ideas of the afterlife and Paradise, especially as they appear in Dante's Paradiso and Milton's Paradise Regained. 

This seminar is during spring break

SAЇD SAYRAFIEZADEH, Instructor

How exactly do you take those raw, unwieldy—often embarrassing—personal experiences (also known as your life) and fashion a compelling narrative? By studying the various strategies that established writers such as Tobias Wolf and A. M. Holmes have employed in writing memoir, we will explore the genre in relation to traditional storytelling—character, plot, arc, and resolution. And we’ll ask the essential question: does everyone have a story worth writing about? In the afternoon, participants will take part in a memoir-writing exercise.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh won a Whiting award for his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New York Times Magazine. His first book of short stories will be published this spring. At the Cullman Center, he is working on a book of stories based on the New York City draft riots of 1863. 

IAN BURUMA, Instructor

This seminar, which will interest both English and history teachers, examines how the world emerged from the wreckage of World War II. The immediate postwar period had its horrors, including civil war, revenge, and starvation, but there was hope as well of building a better world in which another global conflict would be unthinkable. People who had sacrificed a great deal – among them soldiers, women, black people, and Asian-Americans – demanded more equality and better opportunities. 1945 also saw the birth of the United Nations, the welfare state, and the first moves towards a European union. How much of this world created in 1945 is still left today? We will read from a variety of texts, including memoir (Harold MacMillan, John Foster Dulles), fiction (Heinrich Böll), reportage (Edmund Wilson, Stephen Spender), and history books (Mazower, Dallas, Bessel). 

Ian Buruma is a writer, journalist, and professor at Bard College. He was educated in Holland and Japan, where he studied history, Chinese literature, and Japanese cinema. His essays, covering a broad range of political and cultural subjects, have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Il Corriere della Sera, and NRC Handelsblad. His current project, 1945: Life in Ruins, is a book about the immediate aftermath of World War II in Europe and Asia. 

MAE NGAI, Instructor

Based on The Lucky Ones, Ngai’s 2010 biography of three generations of a Chinese American family, this seminar will consider what it was like to live in California during the racially volatile period after the gold rush and under the legal regime of Chinese Exclusion from the 1880s to World War II. In the afternoon, teachers will discuss how they might incorporate this material into their classrooms.

Mae Ngai is Professor of History and Asian American Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America. At the Cullman Center, she is working on a book about the gold rushes in Pacific settler-colonies, focusing on Anglo-American racial politics and the circulations of Chinese miners. 

RUTH FRANKLIN, Instructor

When "The Lottery" was published in 1948 in The New Yorker, it generated an unprecedented number of letters. Some readers were furious, some were simply puzzled as to what the story meant, others assumed it was a work of nonfiction and wanted to know where they could witness such lotteries. We'll look at the story itself and a selection of these letters, as well as some responses from Jackson and her editors. Questions to be considered: Where does “The Lottery” fit in the context of Jackson’s other work? Is it uniquely a product of its time, or is it better viewed as a version of ancient mythic archetypes?

Ruth Franklin is a literary critic and senior editor at The New Republic. She has also been published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and Salmagundi. Her book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, was a finalist for the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature. At the Cullman Center, she is writing a biography of Shirley Jackson.