CURRICULUM: An initial project the Curriculum Committee undertook this year was to compile a directory of lesbian/gay-themed courses currently being taught at CUNY and other universities in the area. The list was distributed to CUNY graduate students to help them plan their schedules for the Fall term. The committee intends to prepare another directory for the 1994 Spring semester and will continue to provide this service to CUNY students. To acknowledge the faculty members teaching these courses, the Curriculum Committee will host a reception in late Spring 1994.
Wanting to push the premise of the course listing to its logical end, committee members felt that CLAGS should take a pro-active stance with regard to faculty and curriculum development. Toward that end, the committee set its most challenging goal: to organize seminars and workshops for the CUNY teaching staff — appointed faculty and graduate students alike — where instructors can craft syllabi that are based upon or incorporate lesbian and gay themes, text, and theories. The committee hopes to have these seminars ready by Fall semester 1994 and believes this will increase the number of classes CUNY graduates and undergraduate students can take. Together with our colloquium series and public program offerings, these faculty seminars promise to further CLAGS’s mission to sponsor first-rate scholarship and teaching about lesbian and gay history and culture.
DEVELOPMENT: Perhaps the most important task facing the Development Committee is finding a replacement for Eli Zal, who has served as CLAGS’s excellent development consultant for the past three years. Eli is stepping down in the spring of 1994 to pursue his new career as a psychotherapist. Replacing him will not be an easy task. Interviews with potential consultants are currently underway. The Development Committee is also looking for individuals who are interested in hosting fundraising parties in their homes for CLAGS. Over the past year a number of very successful parties were thrown by generous hosts. Several more are now in the planning stage. If you would like to sponsor such a party, please contact David Kahn, Chair of the committee, at 128 Pierrepont St., Brooklyn, NY 11201 or 718-624-0890.
FELLOWSHIP: The Fellowship Committee has worked on facilitating the competition for the second year of the Rockefeller Residency Fellowship in the Humanities. For 1994-95, the theme is “Self-Concepts in the Lesbian and Gay World.” Two awards will be made in the amount of $35,000 each, plus a $2,000 stipend for relocation expenses. The CLAGS office has received over 300 inquiries; thus we anticipate a very difficult and timeconsuming selection process. A multidisciplinary sixmember jury of outside experts has been assembled and will meet in late March to select the two winners. Two new initiatives have been undertaken this year. First, a Graduate Student Paper Award has been established, open to students enrolled in any master’s or doctoral program with in CUNY. Second, a special fundraising effort has begun, in conjunction with the Development Committee, seeking to identify and link potential donors with special interests with specific graduate students whose dissertations relate to those interests. This effort will provide encouragement and financial support to young scholars whose projects rarely receive support from traditional sources.
PROGRAM: The Program Committee has completed its plans for the Spring of 1994. In February Jeff Escoffier is coordinating a planning conference on “Families, Values, Curriculum, and the Role of CUNY Educators.” In this endeavor CLAGS is working with the other CUNY Centers also receiving grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in promoting multicultural studies. The Foundation has separately funded this conference.
On April 21 CLAGS will cosponsor with GMHC a conference on addiction in the lesbian and gay world. On April 29, CLAGS will cosponsor with ALGFAS (NYU) a panel, plus two speeches on “Pre-Stonewall Greenwich Village.” To complete the Spring program, Jeff Escoffier has organized for May 7th a day-long conference on the economic life of lesbian and gay organizations. CLAGS will begin the 1994-95 year with a threeday conference on October 7-9 on “Queer Nations, Black Nations,” dealing with the African American Diaspora. The planning committee for this conference is led by Board members, Jacqui Alexander and Kendall Thomas. On October 14th, CLAGS will cosponsor with SAGE and the American Society on Aging a one-day conference on aging in lesbian and gay communities.
The annual CLAGS benefit is scheduled for early November and the annual Kessler lecture will be in December — the speaker still to be announced. In the Spring of 1995, CLAGS has two conferences on the planning board. In February there is to be a two-day conference on health issues, organized by Board members Ann Pollinger Haas and Richard Elovich, and finally, in April, Board members Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla are preparing a conference on lesbian and gay theater.
PUBLICATIONS: After some problems with setting up an appropriate data base for both the individual records and the bibliographic information, work on the Scholarly Directory has moved ahead smoothly. The Directory, with some 600 entries, will be going to the printer by February 1, 1994. Details for the purchase of the Directory will be announced in the next newsletter.
The Publications Committee has begun to discuss the possibility of putting together a CLAGS anthology of papers and presentations given at its many conferences over the last few years. To this end, CLAGS has received a small grant to begin transcribing tapes from its events.