FACULTY NEWS | Oct 5, 2020
Professor Suzanne Maria Menghraj is one of six creatives-in-residence in a year-long Brooklyn Public Library program designed to create opportunities for artists across genres to experiment with new forms, collaborate with other artists, and share their creative processes with the public. The program was lauched in December 2019 in an event led by renowned South African artist William Kentridge and his Johannesburg-based Centre for the Less Good Idea, an arts incubator that encourages improvisation and collaboration. The narrative project Professor Menghraj proposed at the event and continues to develop construes photographs, letters, recordings, slave registries, ship manifests, maps, and other archival materials as traces of global migration to the island of Trinidad. As part of the ongoing creatives-in-residence program, Professor Menghraj has since presented her work-in-progress at the library’s annual Night of Philosophy and Ideas; produced an essay-film titled “Northern Range,” which was screened on the façade of the central library at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn in August; and recorded readings of her writing for the upcoming Whispering Libraries project, which will soon broadcast audio recordings from libraries across Brooklyn. Professor Menghraj says her participation in the program reinforces her commitment to encouraging Liberal Studies students to experiment in their writing and other creative work: “My collaborations with the library and with fellow creatives-in-residence reinforce in me the idea that experimentation across genres is essential to global studies, a field of inquiry that requires students to cross borders and seek unexpected connections.”