News and Events
Graduate Center scholars innovate, advance social justice, and promote public debate through their work. Our hundreds of free, public events with prominent GC scholars and artists as well as guests are designed to spark conversation, inspiration, and action.
Featured News

March 20, 2023
A new job yields an unexpected alumni network
- GC Stories
- Alumni News

March 8, 2023
End of the English Major? Hardly!
- GC Stories
- Faculty News

March 8, 2023
Student Shows What’s ‘Fresh, Fly, and Fabulous’ About Hip-Hop Style
- GC Stories
- Student News
Upcoming Events
Join us for an upcoming event.
Monday, March 27, 2023
“Dissertation Futures” Online Roundtable Discussion
12:30 pm — 2:00 pm
Online
Tuesday, March 28, 2023
Collective Bargaining Rights, Policing, and Civilian Deaths with Rob Gillezeau
12:00 pm — 1:30 pm
Online
Tuesday, March 28, 2023
The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy
5:30 pm — 7:00 pm
Hybrid (see description for details)
Wednesday, March 29, 2023
DANIEL IMMERWAHR ON GUNS, GERMS, AND WOOD: THE LANDSCAPE OF U.S. SETTLER COLONIALISM
6:30 pm — 8:00 pm
9100: Skylight Room
Recent Books

Men As Friends
From Cicero to Svevo to Cataldo
Neither a cautionary tale nor a polemic, Men as Friends is about a variety of male friendships and a variety of men. A “coming-of-old-age story,” it speaks to an audience of men who love or have loved other men but are too embarrassed to say so, opening the reader to the deep sadness of loss as well as the joy of its acknowledgment.
Published May 2023
Köehler Books

American Born
An Immigrant's Story, a Daughter's Memoir
An incisive memoir of Rachel M. Brownstein’s seemingly quintessential Jewish mother, a resilient and courageous immigrant in New York.
When she arrived alone in New York in 1924, eighteen-year-old Reisel Thaler resembled the other Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe who accompanied her. Yet she already had an American passport tucked in her scant luggage. Reisel had drawn her first breath on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1905, then was taken back to Galicia (in what is now Poland) by her father before she turned two. She was, as she would boast to the end of her days, “American born.”
Published March 2023
University of Chicago Press

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley
A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence
A paradigm-shattering biography of Phillis Wheatley, whose extraordinary poetry set African American literature at the heart of the American Revolution.
Admired by George Washington, ridiculed by Thomas Jefferson, published in London, and read far and wide, Phillis Wheatley led one of the most extraordinary American lives. Seized in West Africa and forced into slavery as a child, she was sold to a merchant family in Boston, where she became a noted poet at a young age. Mastering the Bible, Greek and Latin translations, and the works of Pope and Milton, she composed elegies for local elites, celebrated political events, praised warriors, and used her verse to variously lampoon, question, and assert the injustice of her enslaved condition. “Can I then but pray / Others may never feel tyrannic sway?” By doing so, she added her voice to a vibrant, multisided conversation about race, slavery, and discontent with British rule; before and after her emancipation, her verses shook up racial etiquette and used familiar forms to create bold new meanings. She demonstrated a complex but crucial fact of the times: that the American Revolution both strengthened and limited Black slavery.
In this new biography, the historian David Waldstreicher offers the fullest account to date of Wheatley’s life and works, correcting myths, reconstructing intimate friendships, and deepening our understanding of her verse and the revolutionary era. Throughout The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, he demonstrates the continued vitality and resonance of a woman who wrote, in a founding gesture of American literature, “Thy Power, O Liberty, makes strong the weak / And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak.”
Published March 2023
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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