Charity Scribner teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center and English at LaGuardia Community College. She is a Mellon Resident Fellow at the Center for the Humanities, CUNY. Scribner has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Humboldt Foundation, and the DAAD. She is the author of Requiem for Communism (MIT 2003) and scholarly articles for the New Left Review, Critical Inquiry, and Grey Room. Her second book, Beyond Militancy: Culture and Gender after the German Autumn, will be published by the Columbia University Press in 2014.
Scribner’s project for the Mellon Seminar stems out of this research. In 2013-14 she will write two essays on “postmilitant culture”—the charged field of art, literature, and criticism that arises the aftermath of militant and terrorist acts. Scribner will undertake a semiotic analysis of the terms “militant,” “militancy,” and “terrorism,” tracing their evolution up through the present in an attempt to register the differential meanings of the broader repertory of resistance, including new concepts such as “ethical militance” and “cyberterrorism.”
