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Professor Seaton Pioneers New Directions in Teaching English Literature
The emergence of New Media -- methods of communicating in the digital world including blogs and the internet -- has sparked the birth of a new breed of English professor, for whom the written word is just the beginning.
Citizen journalism, racial identity, poetry, jazz, fiction, film, psychology, conceptual art, dub music, feminism, aesthetics, politics, law -- City Tech English Professor Annie Seaton has explored them all, synthesizing these and more in her work, in explorations ranging from Shakespeare to digital media.
Dr. Seaton urges students to start blogs and use online resources for her spring 2008 course, “Topics in Literature,” which focuses this semester on “Race and Vision.” It examines visual constructions of race, such as blackness and Jewishness, via literature, literary theory, psychoanalysis and film. She will reach a wider audience on May 3 at the College, when she and colleague Dr. Aaron Barlow present the first-ever conference specifically on “Race and New Media,” funded by City Tech, co-sponsored by Blackplanet.com, and open to the public.
Despite the seeming irrelevance of racial identity in cyberspace, where people can be anonymous or construct various identities, Seaton says, “Cyberspace is no more colorblind than any other space.”
Both professors view New Media as an opportunity for community building, social networking and exploring whether race works differently there than in “old media” such as network news. The City Tech conference will include a panel on “Virtual Racism” and will focus on how video games, blogs, chat rooms, other New Media forms, and digital or virtual spaces create or reflect ideas of race.
“There’s no better time to do this,” declares Seaton, who is using Facebook to help organize the conference. “Presidential candidates are using New Media in their campaigns, discussing issues of race and politics -- it’s the American topic right now.”
She is excited about the participation of minority-run BlackPlanet.com, the fifth highest trafficked networking site, according to Wikipedia. Launched in 1999 by Brooklyn-born Omar Wasow, with 16.5 million members it is the leading website for African Americans. Wasow will be the keynote speaker at the City Tech conference.
Beyond New Media, Seaton is involved in developing a curriculum for a proposed technical writing major. She sees City Tech, with its strengths in entertainment technology and design, as a natural place for New Media studies. "The College's diverse student body gives students the very diversity that schools like Harvard spend a lot of money to obtain. This is truly a form of cultural capital.”
In any media, Seaton applies the lens of racial identity to forge new insights into the work of figures as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frantz Fanon, Leni Riefenstahl and Jacques Lacan.
“City Tech students are amazing," she explains. "My own readings of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, the legal theorist Patricia Williams, Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison, among others, have been vitalized by the insights of my students. They often far exceed what I have asked of them, and I am pretty demanding!”
Currently, Seaton, an award-winning poet and fiction writer, is working on a book proposal, tentatively titled American Scenes: Reading Lacan and Freud in Black and White, supported by a City University of New York (CUNY) Faculty Fellow Publication Program grant. With Barlow, she is writing “Web Journalism: A New Form of Citizenship,” a chapter on race and New Media, as the basis of a book-length, co-authored Seaton/Barlow project.
Perhaps her most unusual work is a Professional Staff Congress-CUNY grant-funded multimedia art project, “The Perfect Machine.” Seaton describes it as “a conceptual art project of inter-disciplinary discovery. It’s about sexuality, power, the link between human and non-human, control of human life and breeding. Human ‘machines’ always wanted more control than their masters intended, both inside and outside of literary works. I use sculpture, text, image and New Media to create an iconography of the black body as a “Perfect Machine.” Seaton will present a preview at the May 3 conference.
Iowa-born Seaton, who grew up in Michigan, now lives in both Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Somers, New York. She acquired her love of literature naturally -- both parents are professors, her father at Michigan State (he also writes for The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard); her playwright mother, recently retired, at Central Michigan State. But perhaps the strongest influence has been her time as a PhD student and Fellow at Harvard’s English Department/DuBois Center for Research on Afro-American Culture, where she was mentored by renowned scholar Henry Louis Gates.
Seaton, who joined the City Tech faculty in 2006, is passing along her own legacy, as a mentor for both the College's Emerging Scholars program and for the CUNY BA program. She not only talks to students about their work and encourages them to apply for CUNY funding and scholarships, but also gets to know them well. “When you’re in the classroom, you’re directly connected to what’s most important in the world and what’s most hopeful. In fact, the students are what inspired the Race and New Media conference.”
4/22/08
