Session 1, 4:00–6:00 p.m.: Kaiama Glover, French, Barnard College; Saidiya Hartman, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University; and Ann Stoler, Anthropology and Historical Studies, The New School for Social Research. Moderated by Richard Perez, English, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY.

Session 2, 6:00–8:00 p.m.: Gavin Jones, English, Stanford University; José E. Muñoz, Performance Studies, New York University; and Rob Nixon, English, University of Wisconsin. Moderated by Joseph Entin, English, Brooklyn College, CUNY.

How can the humanities contribute to a better understanding of poverty? These two panels will engage key questions raised by this year’s Mellon seminar on poverty to consider how visual and literary representations of poverty shape how we think about it and how we articulate its so-called “solutions.” What is the role of photography, photojournalism, cinema, documentary, performance, literature, and 
critical theory and philosophy in addressing what often seems to be a reductive binary between representations of poverty and solutions to poverty? What is at stake in the aesthetic choices made in 
representations of poverty in art, literature, and other cultural media? What new types of archives might we create and what types of questions might we formulate to deal in a more complex way with poverty as a social, political, and subjective state of being?

Cosponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the MA program in the Study of the Americas at City College, CUNY.