Nico Israel on Robert Smithson

Nico Israel is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of two books--On Spirals: Metamorphoses of a Twentieth-Century Image (forthcoming from Columbia University Press) and Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora (published by Stanford UP in 2000) –and has numerous academic essays, catalogue essays, reviews, and articles for Artforum and other magazines. He will be speaking on Robert Smithson, about whom he has published two essays, the first a travel piece on visiting the Spiral Jetty site in 2001, when the jetty was underwater, and the second, which appeared earlier this year in The Journal of Beckett Studies, on the relation between Smithson and the Irish novelist, playwright, and filmmaker Samuel Beckett.