Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., January 16, 2012 – The Williams College English department will host a colloquium titled “Literary Magazines and Intellectual Life” on Monday, Jan. 23, at 4 p.m. in Griffin Hall, room 3, on the Williams campus. Sina Nijafi, editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine and the editorial director of Cabinet Books; Rob Spillman, editor of Tin House magazine and executive director of Tin House Books; and Nikil Saval, editor at n+1 magazine will discuss the role of their journals in American intellectual life. This event is free and open to the public.
“Each of these highly regarded small press journals was founded, and has flourished, in the past decade or so, precisely at the same time that obituaries for print journalism and cultural writing began to appear in the popular press,” says Gage McWeeny, associate professor of English. “On the evidence of these journals and others, one might plausibly claim even that we are living in a golden age of journals devoted to visual art, culture, and intellectual life,” he says. The panel will be devoted to a discussion of the role journals such as these have in the broader scene of American intellectual life and how they position themselves both alongside and outside the university and high profile culture organs such as The New Yorker.
In a moderated conversation, the three editors will discuss the conditions of public intellectual discourse today, how these journals are producing new forms of cultural engagement that blur boundaries between publication and art project (Cabinet, for example, operates an event and exhibition space), and the nuts and bolts of journal editing, including the persistence of print alongside these journals’ digital lives on the web.
Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine and the editorial director of Cabinet Books. Najafi has also curated or co-curated a number of exhibitions, including “Philosophical Toys” (Apex Art, 2005), “The Museum of Projective Personality Testing” (Manifesta 7, Trento, 2008), “Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates” (White Columns and Queens Museum of Art, 2005), and the traveling exhibition “The Paper Sculpture Show” (2003-2007). He has taught at Cooper Union, Yale, and Rhode Island School of Design, and studied comparative literature at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University.
Rob Spillman is editor of Tin House magazine and executive editor of Tin House Books. He was previously the monthly book columnist for Details magazine and is a contributor of book reviews and essays to Salon and Bookforum. He has written for The Baltimore Sun, The Boston Review, British GQ, Connoisseur, Details, Nerve, The New York Times Book Review, Premiere, Rolling Stone, Spin, Sports Illustrated, SPY, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Worth, among other magazines, newspapers, and online magazines. He has also worked for Random House, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.
Nikil Saval is an editor at n+1. His work has appeared in Slate, The New York Times, and The London Review of Books. He is the co-editor of Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America (Verso, 2011), and is currently writing a history of office spaces and white-collar work.
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Published January 16, 2012
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