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Nanette Shaw
Conference Celebrates Publication of New Ralph Ellison NovelRalph Ellison may be dead, but his writings live on. On the eve of the publication of his posthumous novel, Juneteenth, the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center will host a daylong conference to examine Ellison's outlook and his influence on American culture. Organized by Professor Morris Dickstein, Director of the Center for the Humanities, the conference will feature lectures, discussions, and presentations led by Ellison scholars from the CUNY Graduate Center, Harvard University, Columbia University, and other educational and cultural institutions. "Ralph Ellison and American Culture" will be held in the Proshansky Auditorium at the CUNY Graduate Center, 33 West 42 Street, from 9:45 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Friday, May 7. The conference is made possible by a gift from Edith and Henry Everett, and it is free and open to the public. Participants will include writers Albert Murray, Ellison's oldest friend, John Callahan, his literary executor, and leading scholars of African-American literature, such as Robert O'Meally of Columbia, Arnold Rampersad of Stanford, and Robert Stepto of Yale. The keynote speaker is Gerald Early, a critic and essayist who teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-1994) is considered one of the most influential American authors of the twentieth century. He is best known for his 1952 novel Invisible Man, a work which explores issues of race, self-awareness, and American cultural history. Upon the publication of Invisible Man, literary critic Irving Howe wrote, "No other writer has captured so much of the confusion and agony, the hidden gloom and surface gaiety of Negro life." In addition to Invisible Man, Ellison published a number of short stories and two collections of essays, Going to the Territory (1986) and Shadow and Act (1964). He received an honorary doctorate from the CUNY Graduate Center in 1993. The Graduate School and University Center (GSUC) is the doctorate-granting institution of the largest urban university in the U.S. The only consortium of its kind in the nation, GSUC draws its faculty of more than 1,700 members mainly from the CUNY senior colleges and cultural and scientific institutions throughout New York City. Established in 1961, GSUC has grown to an enrollment of nearly 4,000 students in 31 doctoral programs and seven master's degree programs in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. GSUC also houses 23 research centers and institutes and administers the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. According to a recent National Research Council report, more than a third of The Graduate School's rated programs rank among the nation's top 20 at public and private institutions, nearly a quarter are among the top ten when compared to publicly supported institutions alone, and more than half are among the top five programs at publicly supported institutions in the northeast. |