The Graduate Center's 50th Anniversary Celebration

Mary Ann Caws

Mary Ann Caws was born and grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. Her father was Harmon Chadbourn Rorison, of Scottish heritage (McDonald of the Isle of Skye), her mother, Margaret Devereux Lippitt, was the only daughter of the painter Margaret Walthour Lippitt. Professor Caws attended the National Cathedral School, and went on to get her B.A. (cum laude) at Bryn Mawr in 1954, her M.A. at Yale University (1956), her doctorate from the University of Kansas in 1962; she holds an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Union College (1983).

Professor Caws is currently Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, and on the faculty of the Women's Studies and Film Certificate Programs. Professor Caws was co-Director of the Henri Peyre French Institute from 1980 to 2002. She is an Officer of the Palmes Académiques (awarded by the French Minister of Education) and a former Trustee of the French Institute of Washington.

Wayne Koestenbaum

Wayne Koestenbaum: Poet and literary critic whose works include The Queen's Throat and The Milk of Inquiry.

William Kornblum

William Kornblum is a professor of sociology at the City University of New York.

He is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Chicago and was among the nation's first Peace Corps volunteers. He is the author of numerous scholarly books and articles on the people of New York.

David Nasaw

David Nasaw is an author, biographer, and the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of American History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is also chairman of the Center for the Humanities. He received his PhD from Columbia University.

He is also the author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, which won the Bancroft Prize and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

His other books include Andrew Carnegie, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements, Children of the City: At Work and at Play, and Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States. 

Joan Richardson

Joan Richardson is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and American Studies at The Graduate Center. Author of a two-volume biography of the poet Wallace Stevens, she coedited, with Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997). 

Jane Schneider

In 1965, having completed a PhD in political theory at the University of Michigan, Jane Schneider embarked on two years of anthropological fieldwork in Sicily, then became an anthropologist. Her career has been an interdisciplinary one, in which she has self-consciously considered the political, social, cultural and economic dimensions of whatever problem she undertook to study.

The problems she has wrestled with fall into two categories: those related to the modern transformation of Sicilian society, and those related to selective strands of world history -- textiles, in particular. Her interest in the latter grew out of invitations, in the mid-1970s, to critically review and teach on Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World System. Concerned to demonstrate, but also to understand, what she perceived to be a Euro-centric bias in this path-breaking work, she went on to examine in the history of cloth important challenges to the triumphalist story of the "rise of Europe." Her essays, "Peacocks and Penguins, the Political Economy of European Cloth and Colors," "Was There a Pre-capitalist World System?" and "Spirits and the Spirit of Capitalism" explore these challenges.

The fieldwork project that took her to Sicily in 1965 lasted for two years and initiated for her, as for her collaborator, Peter Schneider, a deep involvement with this region of Italy. Several periods of residence and research in a rural town of the Western interior led to two co-authored books: Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily (1976) and Festival of the Poor; Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class in Sicily (1996).

During the last phase of the research for Festival of the Poor in the early 1980s, Sicily was convulsed by the entry of several prominent mafiosi and their allies into the global traffic in heroin. This development, and the responses to it, in the form of a police-judicial crackdown and the emergence of an antimafia social movement, have been the foci of her most recent research.