The premier issue of The Conversation initiates what we hope will be a continuing engagement with the ideas that animate our lives. The articles and notes herein suggest the breadth of the Liberal Studies program, but we are far from running the gamut of disciplines that the MALS program offers, including American Studies; Approaches to Modernity; Bioethics, Science and Society; Film Studies; International Studies; Landmarks of Western Thought; Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies; Urban Education; Women’s Studies; as well as a new track, Biography, Autobiography and Memoir, introduced in a news note by Dr. Rachel M. Brownstein.
Certainly the civil-rights movement has engaged Robert Wechsler (MALS ’09), whose article on ground-breaking films of the 1950s shows how popular culture laid the foundation for Barack Obama’s historic campaign for the presidency. William Warner (MALS ’09) is engaged in international affairs and has written about the surprising success of Soviet science during the height of Stalin’s repression. And Christopher Ian Foster (MALS ’08), who wrote his master’s thesis on colonial and post-colonial cartography and is now continuing his studies in the Graduate Center’s doctoral English program, has written on the ways in which 18th- and 19th-century cartographic expeditions furthered imperial ambitions.
As part of the on-going Conversation, we invite your comments and contributions. In addition to articles, we welcome reviews, notes, poems, photos, illustrations. Most of all, we value good writing, the clear exposition of considered thought. And if your considered thought is not weighted down by a thousand citations, so much the better. Academic writing has its place, but we encourage writing that makes its case the simplest way, through appeals to reason rather than a preponderance of scholarly opinion.
The Conversation encourages the contributions of students currently enrolled in the MALS program and of MALS alumni, but we also solicit work from faculty and others whose work we find stimulating. As members of a fragmented society, with infrequent opportunities to interact socially and interpersonally, we hope The Conversation will unite us in a virtual community promoting the fertile exchange of ideas.—The Editors