Cullman Center Institute for Teachers Past Programs

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 Wolff and A. M. Homes 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. 

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. 

 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. 

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.

THIS IS A WEEK-LONG SEMINAR (MONDAY JULY 30 - FRIDAY AUGUST 3)

RIVKA GALCHEN, Instructor

Shakespeare wrote soliloquies in iambic pentameter; Freud composed some of the 20th century’s best writing in the form of medical case histories; Elvis turned gospel into rock ’n roll; and Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet that he could write a book using just fifty different words. A narrow passage allows the wind to whistle-- at least sometimes! We’ll read texts by Kobo Abe, Roberto Bolaño, Anthony Burgess, and others, identifying the constraint under which each operates and noting when the author violates that constraint. Participants will complete several writing exercises before composing their own short fiction in a constraint of their choosing.

THIS IS A WEEK-LONG SEMINAR (MONDAY JULY 23 - FRIDAY JULY 27) 

LAURA SHAPIRO, Instructor

A wide range of literary genres is open to writers who are deeply curious about food and who find it a peerless– in fact, irresistible – window onto history, experience, and character. This seminar will be held in conjunction with “Lunch Hour: NYC,” a major exhibition of food-related items from the Library’s collections, and will examine the work of such influential culinary storytellers as MFK Fisher, Anthony Bourdain, and Laurie Colwin. We will also draw on contemporary voices from the online world and discuss the importance of culinary research in The New York Public Library and beyond. Throughout the week, participants will compose their own food histories, criticism, and reportage. 

THIS IS A WEEK-LONG SEMINAR (MONDAY JULY 16 - FRIDAY JULY 20)

ADAM SHATZ, Instructor

From the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, New York below 14th Street was home to a thriving -- and increasingly politicized -- black bohemian scene. Black writers, painters, and jazz musicians moved downtown in search of cheaper rents and a more tolerant racial atmosphere, and were soon mixing with their white counterparts in bookshops, taverns, and jazz clubs. By 1965, the scene had imploded, with the assassination of Malcolm X and the rise of black nationalism. This course will chart the rise and fall of this passionate but volatile experiment in interracial collaboration, with a focus on the life and work of the poet, critic, and playwright LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Readings will include memoirs of the period, plays, poetry, and criticism; we will also listen to music by jazz musicians who participated in the scene.

KATE WALBERT, Instructor

Using Eudora Welty’s memoir One Writer’s Beginnings, this workshop examines ways in which a life’s beginnings can be mined to shape and inform fiction, with particular emphasis on T.S. Eliot’s notion of the ‘objective correlative.’ Participants will conduct related writing exercises, creating short fiction from their own early pasts.

Kate Walbert is the author of the novels Where She Went, The Gardens of Kyoto, Our Kind, and A Short History of Women, which she is currently adapting for the stage. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. 

BEN KATCHOR, Instructor

Through a series of writing and drawing exercises, we will explore the possibilities of expression that arise when text and image are combined on the page. Participants will discover and amplify, through their writing, the stories suggested by their drawings, and analyze, through their drawing, the descriptive passages in their written texts. No previous drawing experience is necessary, but everyone will be asked to make the attempt.

Ben Katchor’s latest graphic novel is The Cardboard Valise. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” Fellowship, Katchor has drawn and written several books, including Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer and The Jew of New York. He teaches at Parsons School of Design.

This seminar is by application only and the deadline to apply has passed.

EVAN HAEFELI, Instructor

Using the famous case of Henry Hudson’s ‘discovery of New York,’ the seminar will reflect on this crucial moment in American history. We will use primary and secondary sources, both European and indigenous, to build perspectives on this foundational experience and illustrate how interpretations of the past belong to our present.

Evan Haefeli teaches history at Columbia University. He is working on a book that draws on the diversity of peoples, languages, beliefs, and politics in colonial America, and on the relations – religious and violent, friendly and legendary, personal and imperial – between them.

DARRYL PINCKNEY, Instructor

The Autobiography of Malcolm X has surprisingly wide appeal as a coming-of-age story, perhaps because of its message of spiritual growth and intellectual change. But Malcolm X also became an icon of militant defiance. How can his book represent such a contradictory legacy? What about this controversial tale continues to fascinate? What would young women find in it? Does it carry the same message for black youth as for white?

An essayist and novelist, Darryl Pinckney is the author of the novel High Cotton and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. His writing appears frequently in The New York Review of Books. He teaches creative writing at The New School.

This seminar is by application only and the deadline to apply has passed.

SHAMUS KHAN, Instructor

Relevant for history as well as English teachers, this seminar will focus on the social world portrayed in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald set his novel at the end of the Gilded Age, a time of staggering new wealth, staunchly-held prejudices, deep underlying inequalities, and a heady sense of promise. Will the bubble of the 1920s collapse? Will anything ultimately change?

The author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, Shamus Khan teaches sociology at Columbia University. He is working on a new book to be called Exceptional: Elite New York and the Story of American Inequality. 

This seminar is by application only and the deadline to apply has passed.

ADAM SHATZ, Instructor

As a prominent poet, critic, essayist, playwright, and editor, LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), bridged the worlds of the Beats, the New York School, and avant-garde jazz, and did more than anyone to define the new black aesthetic. Readings will include several essays and poems as well as Jones’s short play, Dutchman. Seminar participants will also listen to samples of music by jazz artists who were close to Jones, and look at paintings by Bob Thompson, who documented that world in his tragically short, dazzling career.

A contributing editor at the London Review of Books, Adam Shatz served as literary editor of The Nation magazine from 2003 to 2007, and has written about jazz, literature, and politics for The New York Review of Books and The New York Times.

CHRIS ADRIAN, Instructor

This workshop will examine the unconventional language used in a number of stories, including short fiction by Donald Barthelme and Judy Budnitz, to create a drama of romantic attachment that resists and overcomes cliché. Participants will also engage in a writing exercise that incorporates some of these elements to produce an affecting piece of writing about love. 

Chris Adrian is the author of three novels – The Great Night, Gob's Grief, and The Children's Hospital –  and a collection of stories, A Better Angel. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, and other publications. Adrian is a practicing pediatric oncologist and holds a divinity degree from Harvard. 

Mary Gaitskill, one of America’s master short story writers, leads a seminar on four brilliant stories: The 5:48 by John Cheever; Vandals by Alice Munro; Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor; and The End of FIRPO in the World by George Saunders.