About Night School

The Center for Ongoing Research & Projects (COR&P) presents Night School, an annual series of talks that will draw speakers from across disciplines and professions to discuss a single theme and how it resonates through their own research. Night School is interested not only in the subjects of the participants' research, but also the nature and process of that research. As part of COR&P's larger mission to conduct research into "research," this project seeks to examine the commonalities across disciplinary inquiries.

The logo for Night School is a pencil sharpened at both ends. This appropriate icon brings up the complex relationship between research and work. In the creative and academic worlds, is it possible to distinguish between the two? And, if so, what do we make of a series that asks us to spend time learning after hours? What is the definition of research, and how does it shift across disciplines? This reflexive line of questioning will form a substratum for the series, while exploring our topical material.

Through informal lectures, conversations, small-scale exhibitions, discussions, and an evolving online journal, the series aims to create a network of perspectives that connects ideas and people across a broad expanse of knowledge.


Night School is a COR&P project. This season is co-organized by Timothy Smith.

Current Season: Borders, Boundaries, Divisions

A border marks an end: a division between two territories. But in marking this juncture, it is also the beginning of something else. Positioned between here and there, ours and theirs, self and other, a border is a site of tension and potential, and also continual negotiation. The boundary between the sea and the sand, work and leisure, the known and the unknown, the inside and the outside are never fixed. The body's skin and the state lines are porous. Maps are continually redrawn. Borders exist to be crossed. This topic of Borders, Boundaries, Divisions seems a fitting way of launching a series intended to traverse the borders between academic disciplines— to exchange ideas across territories.

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