On Jan. 10, 7 pm, Van Alen Book Club returned with a discussion of Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos. This 1925 novel portrays a montage of New York City lives through the lens of class mobility, labor, sexuality, and the immigrant experience—topics that are increasingly relevant in our current discussions on the state of urban life.
Registration was open to new and former participants of the Van Alen Book Club. We continued our tradition of providing drinks and a light dinner.
Jeff Allred (@jballred) is Associate Professor of English and director of ACERT (Academic Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) at Hunter College/CUNY. He is author of American Modernism and Depression Documentary (Oxford UP, 2010), as well as articles and reviews on American literature, modernism, and new media studies in American Literature, American Literary History, Criticism, Arizona Quarterly, and others. He is currently working on a book project examining pedagogy and literary modernism, ABC of Modernism.
Shelly Eversley teaches literature, feminism, and black studies at Baruch College, The City University of New York, where she is Associate Professor of English. She is Academic Director of The City University of New York’s Faculty Fellowship Publication Program and founder of equalityarchive.com. She is the author of The “Real” Negro: The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth Century African American Literature as well as several essays on literature, race, and culture. She is editor of The Sexual Body and The 1970s, both special issues of WSQ, a journal by the Feminist Press. She is also editor of the forthcoming book Black Art, Politics, and Aesthetics in 1960s African American Literature and Culture (Cambridge), and is writing a new book titled The Practice of Blackness, or Integration’s Discontents in Postwar African American Literature.