Andrew Whitacre
Announcements from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
Coco Fusco
The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) is honored and excited to welcome Coco Fusco to the MIT community for the 2014-15 academic year.
Fusco will serve as a visiting associate professor in Comparative Media Studies/Writing. She will be hosted by Edward Schiappa, the John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities and head of CMS/W, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz, the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing.
Established in 1991, the MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars Program honors the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. While at MIT, MLK visiting scholars and artists enhance their scholarship, enrich the intellectual life of MIT, and are deeply engaged in the life of the Institute through teaching and research.
Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer who is the recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright fellowship, a 2012 United States Artists fellowship, and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Her performances and videos have been presented in two Whitney Biennials (1993 and 2008), BAM’s Next Wave Festival, the Sydney Biennale, the Johannesburg Biennial, the Kwangju Biennale, the Shanghai Biennale, InSite O5, Mercosul, Transmediale, the London International Theatre Festival, VideoBrasil, and Performa 05.
Fusco received her B.A. in semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in modern thought and literature from Stanford University (1985), and her Ph.D. in art and visual culture from Middlesex University (2007). She has taught at the Tyler School of Art, Columbia University School of the Arts, Parsons The New School for Design, and the Fundacão Armando Alvares Penteado in Brazil.
Marjorie Liu
Marjorie Liu is an attorney and New York Times bestselling author of over seventeen novels. Her comic book work includes X-23, Black Widow, Dark Wolverine, and Astonishing X-Men, for which she was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for outstanding media images of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
Liu received her B.A. at Lawrence University (2000) and her J.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2003). A guest lecturer at Stonecoast and the Asian American Writers Workshop, she currently teaches popular fiction at the Voices of Our Nation workshop.
Some of her other widely known work include the two series Dirk & Steele and Hunter Kiss.
This fall, Liu will teach our Genre Writing Workshop, framed this semester by Liu as “The Sweet Art of Comic Book Writing”:
In our class we will read a wide range of comics, corporate and independent, print and web, but our primary text will be your writing. Participants will be responsible for creating short scripts and full-length comic book narratives across a wide range of genres. Drawing skills are unnecessary, though if you wish to illustrate or storyboard your scripts, all the better—but scripts will be our focus. In both our critical and creative work special attention will be paid to questions of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality.
The class features not just readings from the likes of DC Comics but seminal texts like Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. (McCloud is a friend of CMS/W going back to 2006.) The class is limited to just fifteen students.
You can follow Marjorie Liu on Twitter at @marjoriemliu.
