For the second time in five years, Mark Noonan, a Professor in City Tech’s English Department, has won a prestigious and substantial grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to direct a Summer Institute. “City of Print: New York and the Periodical Press” is a collaborative and interdisciplinary project that will bring distinguished faculty from diverse fields to New York City for two weeks (June 21-July 3, 2020).

Twenty five faculty participants in the City of Print Institute will have the opportunity to explore both the influence of place on publications and the influence of publications on place. They will take part in discussions led by cultural historians, archivists and experts in the fields of American literature, art and urban history, and periodical studies; participate in hands-on sessions in the periodicals collection of the New-York Historical Society and New York Public Library; visit sites important to the rise of New York’s periodical press, such as Newspaper Row, Gramercy Park, and the Algonquin Hotel; and work collectively using digital mapping software.

Sessions will be held throughout New York City including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New-York Historical Society, City Tech, the Brooklyn Historical Society and John Jay College.

As Noonan explains, “New York and its publishing institutions have influenced the writing styles and careers of a range of writers and artists such as Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, John Sloan, Dorothy Parker, W.E.B. Dubois and Norman Mailer. Its periodical press has also helped mold the professional identities of successive waves of artists, editors and writers, while generating new genres and conventions that not only changed the face of journalism, literature and the graphic arts but at times influenced world events in significant ways.”

Publishing in New York City is a “continuing story,” with periodicals and their contents representing the diverse, shifting cultural politics of the City. City of Print will focus on new interdisciplinary approaches for researching and teaching periodicals that take into account the important site of their production, as well as relevant cultural, technological, aesthetic and historical considerations.