Due to increasing concerns about attending a large gathering with food while Covid-19 variants are rapidly spreading, we have regretfully decided to once again postpone our 76th Annual Dinner. We have rescheduled for November 16, 2022.
2022 Tannenbaum Lecture
Hecuba’s Howl: Poetry as Feminist Lament
This talk includes a reading from my newly published poetry collection, Year of the Dog, a Latina chronicle of the Vietnam War era, and a discussion of the tradition and function of feminist elegy during times of disaster and atrocity. The talk interweaves my perspective as the daughter of a Mexican immigrant Vietnam veteran with other stories of historical and mythic women responding to Vietnam and other forms of warfare—as warriors, widows, antiwar activists, and witnesses of violence. Drawing from the mythic figure of Hecuba, who committed herself so fully to her grief in response to the horrors of war that she was transformed into a howling dog, I explore how female figures have brought about transformations in the private and public realms as a result of their acts of lamentation.
DEBORAH PAREDEZ is a poet, performance scholar, and an Associate Professor of Professional Practice in the School of the Arts’ Writing Program and in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. Her writing and teaching explores the workings of memory, poetry of witness, and Black and Latinx performance. She is the author of three books: the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke 2009), and the poetry volumes, This Side of Skin (Wings Press 2002), and Year of the Dog (BOA Editions 2020). Selenidad was the recipient of the 2010 Latin American Studies Association Latino Studies Book Award Honorable Mention and the 2011 National Association of Chicana/o Studies Book Award Honorable Mention. Year of the Dog, a New York Times’ New and Notable Book, was awarded the 2020 Writers’ League of Texas Poetry Book Award. Her poetry and essays have appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR, Boston Review, and the anthology, Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (Norton 2018). Her book of literary nonfiction, American Diva, is forthcoming from Norton. She is the Co-Founder of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latinx poets, and serves on the board of the literary nonprofit, CLMP: Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.
2022 Tannenbaum-Warner Award
MARIANNE HIRSCH, who co-directs the University Seminar on Cultural Memory with Andreas Huyssen, is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, including Guggenheim, ACLS, Mary Ingraham Bunting, Bellagio, Bogliasco and Stellenbosch fellowships, Hirsch is a former President of the Modern Language Association of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is one of the founders of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference and of its global initiative “Women Creating Change.” Hirsch’s scholarly work combines feminist theory with memory studies, particularly the transmission of memories of violence across generations. Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012), (Spanish edition, 2015 and Russian edition 2021), School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference and Ghosts of Home and The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010), both co-authored with Leo Spitzer and the co-edited Women Mobilizing Memory (2020). Hirsch co-curated a 2020 exhibition on “School Photos and Their Afterlives” at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. With a group of artists, activists and scholars, she is currently working on the “Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair,” a community based Covid project in Upper New York City.