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Meet the HISB 2023-2024 Faculty Fellows
Lena Burgos-Lafuente, Hispanic Languages and Literature Department
Project: “What’s Left of the Left?: Communist Poetry Networks and Cosmopolitanism in the Caribbean, Spain and New York City, 1925-1956”
This project examines Left radical aesthetics in the shifting archipelago created by the Hispanophone Caribbean, Spain and New York City, from early to mid-20th century. Lena Burgos-Lafuente traces transnational poetic and political networks, specifically communist networks, and explore the tense and, at times, contradictory relationship between signal intellectuals and poets and the official left-wing party or movement organs in which they published. She reveals another geographical imagination of the mid-century Left than the one drilled into students and scholars alike, who often do not know that these publications hotly debated the relationship between aesthetics and politics.
Lecture: Cosmopolitanism and its Limits: The Caribbean Communist Left
Date: Tuesday, October 29, 2024 4:30–6:00pm in 1008 Humanities
Summary TBA
Lena Burgos-Lafuente is Associate Professor in Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University, and former director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center. She specializes in Caribbean literatures, poetry, Latin American essay writing, sound studies, and transatlantic literary crossings in the first half of the twentieth century. Burgos-Lafuente is the author of A la escucha del destiempo: poéticas de la posguerra en el Caribe transatlántico (Iberoamericana Vervuert), editor of Untendered Eyes: Literary Politics of Julia de Burgos (CENTRO Journal, 2014), co-editor of María Zambrano in Dialogue (Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2015) and Cartas a Consuelo (Folium, 2014), Julia de Burgos’s unpublished correspondence to her sister. She is also co-editor of The Puerto Rico Reader: History, Culture, Politics, under contract to Duke University Press. Burgos-Lafuente was named the 2019-20 Wilbur Marvin Scholar of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University for her current project, A la izquierda de la izquierda: Cosmopolitan Communisms in Early to Mid-Twentieth Century Caribbean (1920-1959).
Kevin C. Holt , Music Department
Project: “Yeeking, Getting Crunk and the Cathartic Performativity of Atlanta Hip-Hop Party Music”
Kevin C. Holt’s research project centers Atlanta hip-hop party music, more specifically crunk and yeeking. Crunk is a subgenre of hip-hop that rose to prominence in the early 2000s coinciding with the establishment of the south as the “third coast” of the national hip-hop scene. Rather than lyrical virtuosity and vivid word painting, the vocal performance of crunk was primarily structured around extended chants performed by real or digitally constructed crowds. Crunk is further distinguished by its signature dance style, which bears more similarity to the moshpits of punk than the breakdancing normally associated with hip-hop. His current book project is an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation, Get Crunk! The Performative Resistance of Atlanta Hip-Hop Party Music.
Lecture: TBA
Date: Spring 2025
Summary TBA
Kevin C. Holt is Assistant Professor of Music at Stony Brook University. He is an ethnomusicologist whose research interests include American popular music and issues of race class and gender as they manifest in popular culture. In addition to ethnomusicology, Holt’s disciplinary specialties include Africana studies, hip-hop studies, performance studies, and women’s, gender and sexuality studies. Holt’s work has been featured in the journal Current Musicology and The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music. Holt was also selected as a featured contributor to the inaugural Transcultural Hip Hop Conference hosted by the University of Bern (2021). His current book project is an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation, Get Crunk! The Performative Resistance of Atlanta Hip-Hop Party Music. This research has direct implications for analyzing contemporary hip-hop subgenres like trap and political movements like #blacklivesmatter.
Ken Weitzman, English Department
Project: “The Theatre of Well-Being”
Ken Weitzman’s “The Theatre of Well-Being” theatricalizes the latest research from the psychology of well-being via experiential, immersive theatre. This is a live event in which audiences engage with the research by participating in a curated slate of theatricalized, evidence-based well-being practices. He created a trial run of this event with students here at Stony Brook University in Spring 2023. With a producer in place, Weitzman will travel to Berkeley, California to install and run a professional version of the production.
Lecture: The Theatre of Well-Being
Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024 4:30–6:00pm in 1008 Humanities
This presentation will engage with the formation of the Positive Psychology movement (currently referred to as flourishing or well-being) and chart the process and outcomes of transforming this research into an immersive, participatory, theatrical event.
Ken Weitzman is Associate Professor of English and Theatre. His plays have been produced nationally and internationally at theatres such as The Denver Center, Atlantic Theatre Company, and Humana Festival. He’s a Weissberger Award winner (among others) and has been commissioned by organizations such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Arena Stage, and South Coast Repertory. Ken is affiliated faculty with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science for whom he develops storytelling and interdisciplinary programs.
Download the Faculty Fellows Fall 2024 lectures poster
Learn More about the HISB Faculty Fellows Program