the young people's professor

outside of nyu's tisch school of the arts: home, sweet home.

Is it really fall already? Ugh. Two weeks into September, and already I'm feeling the PhD "back to school" blues. This month officially marks the beginning of my fourth year as a graduate student in NYU's department of performance studies. We all know what that means: Dissertation Time!
Believe it or not, technically I'm only about a year and a half away from being "Dr. Frank Leon Roberts" (a point my advisor reminded me of last week). I dont know who should be more frightened by this title--me, or my future, unexpecting students and colleagues!

This semester I am a teaching assistant in NYU's undergraduate department of film and television for a course on literature and cinema. The course, which is taught by the Vice Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts, focuses on filmic adaptations of classic literary works. The students read William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molière’s Tartuffe, Sophocles’s Antigone, etc. You know, the “classics.” Each week the readings are approached alongside a filmic adaptation of these texts. The course has about twelve students and is primarily comprised of juniors and seniors majoring in cinema studies and film. Basically all I do is grade their papers and weekly responses. Oh Joy. Oh Rapture.

In addition to T.A.-ing, I’m also the graduate assistant to Daphne Brooks, an Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University, who is visiting faculty in the department of performance studies. Daphne is the author of one of my favorite recent studies, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performance of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Duke University Press, 2005). Folks outside of academia might be familiar with Daphne from her fabulous review of Beyonce’s D-Day CD published last year in The Nation as “Sugar Mama, Politicized.”

She is teaching a graduate course entitled “Bring the Pain: Performing Black Satire and Critical Humor from Williams and Walker to Wanda Sykes.” The course consists of students from performance studies, a few kids from American Studies, and a PhD student in Ethnomusicology up at Columbia. It’s absolutely wonderful. As the title suggests, the course focuses on the history of "politically insurgent black humor," ranging from minstrel acts like Bert Williams to Chris Rock and Richard Pryor. We pay particular attention to the ways in which black comedic performances rely on, undermine, and/or critique the social construction of race and the socio-political condition of black people in the United States. We also pay attention to the ways in which black feminist comedy has often launched powerful critiques on the politics of black women’s physical and affective labor (hence the emphasis on Wanda Sykes). According to the syllabus, " course participants will explore multiple modes of satirical performance in relation to critical aesthetic movements and historical periods from the 19th century to the present day. Special emphasis will be placed on interrogating the politics of African-American blackface minstrelsy as satire. The seminar will also emphasize an examination of post-Civil Rights black satire in theatre, film, sketch comedy programs, visual art, political cartoons, novels, and popular music culture. Course participants will place theories of humor and signifying (by Ellison, Gates, Watkins, Freud and others) in conversation with the performances of Williams and Walker, Nina Simone, Richard Pryor, Kara Walker, Paul Beatty, Suzan-Lori Parks, Chris Rock and others. "

Great. I’m actually not in the class---just sitting in on it as Daphne's G.A. It’s fun.

In my other "academic" news, I'll be presenting at three conferences this fall, two of which are academic events and one of which is public health related. The first two conferences are the American Anthropological Association Conference in Washington, D.C from November 28 to December 2nd and the Performance Studies International Conference in New York City from November 8-11. The third event is the Center for Disease Control's National HIV/AIDS Prevention Conference in Atlanta, Georgia from December 1st to 3rd. I'll post the abstracts and panel descriptions for those events in another thread.

In terms of my media, creative, and "public" life, a few things are poppin this month.