Core: Cultural Exploration & Analysis (CCEA-UH)

This course explores the ways in which the portrait has been used as a vehicle for artistic expression, for the construction of social identity, for self-examination, and for the representation of cultural difference. It examines many kinds of portraits and self-portraits in painting and photography from different times and cultures and encourages engagement with a range of major issues that include the nature of personhood, of private and public identities, and of art itself. The course draws upon the rich resources of London's museums and galleries, especially the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, and the Queen's Collection.

What motivates human beings to form collections? How do we select, order, preserve and display information and objects? And, what intellectual processes are involved in these activities? What does the content of these collections say about those who created them? And what kind of narratives can be traced within the display of these collections? This course surveys the phenomenon of collecting, focusing on key moments in its history, from antiquity up to contemporary times. The first section of the class explores collections of "thought," that is, how knowledge has been stored, organized and retrieved - and some of the tools we have developed to do so - including mnemonic devices, writing, codices, libraries, information architecture, and digital technologies. The second section concerns physical objects and their collection, classification, organization, and display. Finally, the course turns to the work of modern and contemporary artists who incorporate concepts of assemblage and curation. In response to the readings and to the materials covered in class, students will conceive, create, describe and display a collection of their own making.

The making of abstract visual forms is a near-universal human activity across time and cultures. Some of the earliest known cave art, dating back approximately 40,000 years, is abstract. The use of abstract forms in ornament and for symbolic communication is found at different periods of history and in different locations across the globe. And abstraction has become prominent in modern art all over the world. This course takes a comparative approach to abstraction and asks why human beings in different places and at different times have drawn and carved similar shapes, lines, and patterns. What are the meanings of these forms? Why have some cultures with long traditions of representational painting turned to abstraction? How have religious, political, and social contexts shaped this turn? What has been the role of abstraction in Islamic and other non-Western traditions and how have these traditions influenced Western art? Although the course will range widely historically and culturally, it will take the Middle East as one of its key areas of interest and will include visits to galleries, private collections, and selected centers for traditional arts in the UAE.

This course focuses on questions of religious and cultural difference through the 1001 Nights, the corpus of tales that has served as a point of encounter between Middle Eastern literary traditions and the politics of Western culture, including ''Sinbad, ''Aladdin'' and ''Ali Baba''. Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, Muslim and 'pagan' realms co-exist uneasily in the original cycle of tales that often confront protagonists with such differences as a problem. Cultural difference piqued the interest of the Arab storytellers and European translators who brought the Nights to Europe and pioneered travelogues respectively of Europe and the Middle East. Their writings would serve as points of departure for seminal works on the engagement with cultural difference and its representation, Appiah's Cosmopolitanism and Said's Orientalism.

This course examines the ways in which artists, filmmakers, and/or writers have responded to the social complexity of urban life and the difficult task of finding points of connection within the diversity of the city. How is the order and the disorder of urban space represented in their work? What intellectual frameworks do they call upon to find meaning in unfamiliar settings? How do these assumptions shape what is seen and unseen within the city? And most importantly, what do these city texts reveal about the potential for building new forms of belonging and community within the urban environment?

There is no life without law. Nature has its laws. Religions have theirs, societies theirs, families theirs. Business has its rules and contracts. How do people understand the laws that are as much a part of life as the weather? Literature - the work of the imagination - guides our great journey towards understanding. Writers dramatize the relations among law, justice, and freedom. Writers also show the effect of law on the fates, fortunes, and feelings of people. The course explores the power of literature to show us what the law is, what it should not be, and what it might be.

This course examines a variety of cultural conceptions of money and wealth, and the ethical questions that money or wealth allows a writer to probe. Is the value of people measured by the value of their money, or are there other criteria for wealth? Is someone's wealth possible without someone else's poverty? How is human ambition rewarded or punished in the "pecuniary culture"? The course looks for answers to these and other questions in key works of literature, sociology, economics, and other fields, reading classical texts ranging from Aristophanes' Plutus, Ihara Saikaku's "A Dose of What the Doctor Never Orders", and William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, to Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. Readings are supplemented by excerpts from works by Ibn Khaldun, Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber, and Alfred Hirshman.

The ethics of violence, its articulation and resistance, violence as a social problem and violence as social necessity: from the epic, to the novel, to contemporary poetry, literature has attempted to reckon with the question of violence. This includes violence in the form of divine retribution, as part of the rhetoric of patriarchy, and as necessary for anticolonial nationalism. Students will consider violence both as a theoretical problem as well an aesthetic one as they consider the work of philosophers and theorists while also considering how literary texts drawn from a diverse geographic and historical corpus have attempted to "write" violence as a problem of artistic representation. Some of the texts we may consider include Euripides' Medea, the epic Mahabharata, Dante's Inferno, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Sorel's Reflections on Violence, Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, Simone Weil's Essay on Force, Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, and the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Dennis Brutus.

Over the course of the past hundred years, jazz has been framed variously as an erotic display, a symbol of modernity, the sound of the Black avant-garde, "America’s classical music," a part of our common global cultural heritage, a decadent type of bourgeois entertainment, a virtuosic art form, a revolting noise, and a radical performance of democracy and freedom. Jazz is, in other words, complicated - its densely textured sound world is entwined with a complex social history. This course immerses students in the world of jazz through an exploration of New York City, the undisputed global capital of the genre. During our regular class sessions and a number of evening excursions, students will meet musicians, attend concerts and jam sessions, tour venues, work in archives, listen to recordings, compare notes on the music, and read a broad array of the best jazz scholarship and journalism. They will dig deep into the history of jazz, and also explore the strange and delightful new shapes jazz is taking in the 21st century. By the end of the term, your understanding of jazz and your understanding of NYC will be forever changed. No previous experience with music is required.

Few events in European history proved as globally consequential as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). In attempting to overthrow the democratically elected Spanish Republic (1931-39), General Francisco Franco placed Spain at the center of a much wider world conflict. A showdown between fascist nationalism and anti-fascist democracy; a proving ground for new technologies of death; a laboratory for avant-garde culture and its progressive and propagandistic applications: the Civil War has been called everything from a "rehearsal for World War Two" to the "Poet's War." How and why did culture prove a weapon as important as actual military munitions? How did artists use all manner of imagery - painted, printed, filmed, and photographed - to battle the spread of fascism? How did even Franco's side seduce some modernist artists and authors to is cause? In venturing answers to these questions, we will examine a number of case studies. We will begin by examining the respective ideological, propagandistic, and cultural imperatives of different totalitarian states in the early twentieth century (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Soviet Union); we will tackle basic phenomena such as nationalism, socialism, anarchism, and communism as they emerged and converged in Spain, particularly in the cultural domain. Against the backdrop of competing totalitarian ideologies, our course examines the role of culture - from painting to photography, cinema to song - in the War’s prelude, duration, and aftermath.

This course asks what dis/Ability is and considers how this concept plays out within a variety of musical contexts. Our focus is not just on musicians with disabilities, but also on a wide spectrum of human musical capabilities. Some scholars argue that our relationship to music is necessarily embodied. In other words, we bring a unique set of physical, sensory, cognitive, and affective capabilities into any musical situation. In this way of thinking, the body, with all its unique characteristics is a central focus of our inquiry. Further into the semester, there will be a unit on Deaf musicians. Students will be exposed to a cultural view of music that remains largely unseen by the hearing world. Thereafter, through self-initiated final research projects, students will work to find their own ways of making meaning of people's varied musical capabilities.

This course explores ways of listening, and of being a listener, in human experience, with attention to the role of the ear in the constitution of subjects, communities, and societies of different times and places. Topics include debates about the listening subject in Western philosophy and media studies; the role of the "ethnographic ear" in cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology; theories and methods of "soundscape research" and "acoustemology"; and aurality as an aspect of culture, explored through case studies ranging from the development of sound reproduction technologies, to deaf culture, to the ethics of sounding and listening in religious practice. Course readings, drawn from a wide range of disciplines, include foundational texts in the emerging interdisciplinary field of "sound studies." In addition to engaging critically with a range of ideas and debates through discussion, presentations, and writing, students will try their ears at specialized modes of training and data collection developed by sound-oriented researchers and artists.

From mythological figures such as Coyote in North America, Hermes of Greek myth, and Eshu in West Africa, to modern icons of global pop culture like Charlie Chaplin, Bugs Bunny, and Bart Simpson, humans have long been fascinated with trickster characters who transgress boundaries, break rules, and unsettle fixed truths. Seemingly heedless of cultural norms, these characters in their many different guises point to the important role of play and disruption in the making of culture. In this course, students consider rogues, outlaws, and outsiders of various types from around the world and their portrayal in stories, novels, dramas, songs, and films. Building a repertoire of trickster characters, types, and tropes, students examine how these characters' dynamic roles relate to central problems of art, creativity, and life.

What does it mean to be a hero? Can one still be "heroic" in times marked by intense and jarring forms of violence? How does heroism travel across diverse places and beyond the frontline to intersect with mundane questions of survival as well as more severe issues of racial, class, and gender differences? And why do tales of heroism remain so persistently appealing to us today? In this course, we will examine the concept of the hero in world literature from ancient epic to postmodern fiction and film. We will investigate how the ideals of heroism, types of heroes/heroines and antiheroes, as well as modes of heroic action change through time, across literary genres and cultural traditions. Texts may include the Epic of Gilgamesh, Sophocles' Antigone, Sīrat 'Antar, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, graphic novels, selections from the Bible, the Qur'an, and the One Thousand and One Nights, and films such as Birdman, Lord of the Rings, and 300.

To what extent can "Shakespeare" serve as the focal point for a cultural heritage that belongs to the entire globe? This course offers a comparative, interdisciplinary approach to Shakespeare's plays, considering them both as exemplary of Western literature and also as world literature, influential in many cultures. Three sets of questions ground the course: 1) In what ways was Shakespeare a "global" author in his own day, adopting a "worldly" approach that transcends his English context? 2) How do the publication, performance, and critical histories of his plays transform "Shakespeare" into a global commodity? 3) What cultural legacy has Shakespeare's work left for a variety of global media forms, including plays, films, novels, operas, and works of visual art? The course begins with two plays, Othello and The Tempest, that have inspired adaptations in a variety of contexts and genres. It then pays close attention to the global spread of Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet, from 1603 to the present. The course concludes with a creative project inspired by Shakespeare's lost play, Cardenio.

Tragic dramas from different cultures and periods have framed in memorable, though often contradictory, ways some basic questions about how human beings face suffering, violence, and death. Drawing on these broad traditions, students will explore the dramatic forms, social contexts, and rhetorical and political goals of tragedies in an attempt to understand how drama can turn catastrophe into art - and why. By what means does tragedy take horrific and often degrading experiences and transform them into artistic experiences that are (sometimes) intelligible, pleasurable, or beautiful? Should witnessing the misery of others ever be pleasurable or beautiful? Can we presume to make sense of another's suffering? How, more generally, can tragic drama help us come to terms with the violence and brutality of the human condition - or does it sometimes hinder this attempt?

What is memory? We tend to think it will be activated when the right moment comes, but our experiences may belie our thinking, such as when we forget a name just when we need it. A variety of disciplines and theories approach the phenomenon of memory: cognitive science, computer science, biology, psychology, sociology, media theory, theory of perception, philosophy, history, cultural history and art history, trauma theory, heritage studies. And we can observe a huge variety of attempts to preserve memories: monuments, memorials, museums, libraries, archives, rituals, writing, film, and even ephemeral forms such as blog posts or status updates (nothing gets lost in the Web!). The course allows students to sample these various approaches without being restricted to any one of them as they explore fundamental questions about the relationship between memory and human identity: Is memory everything we can remember, or everything we can forget? How can we know memories from dreams or fantasies? Do we remember things as they really were or as they never were? Is memory what we take for granted and thus an impediment to creative thinking, or is it the prerequisite of creative activity?

Is anything original? Before "remixes" had that name, they went by many others, including "tradition and the individual talent," parody, pastiche, burlesque, adaptation, dialogism, collage, detournement, refunctioning, intertextuality, intermediality, transtextuality, and the carnivalesque. Asking what happens when we make something new from something old, this course explores artistic and interpretative remix practices that are both very ancient and extremely contemporary. While "remix" is a recent term that evokes studio production and Internet culture, understanding its roots obliges us to go back to long-standing traditions in arts and culture generally. Although the course focuses to some extent on film adaptations of literary works, it should be of interest to students curious about music, film, and artistic adaptation in general, but also with our mass-mediated social environment that thrives on sampling, mash-ups, memes, and adaptation.

This course explores the craft of and the market for literary translation. Why do some translators aim for familiarity and others for estrangement? What is lost, and perhaps even gained, in a text's cultural relocation? What can be accessed in translation and what are the limits of translation? Translation, and translation projects such as NYUAD's Library of Arabic Literature, play a pivotal role in shaping intercultural exchange and globalizing literary markets and canons. The course familiarizes students with practices and theories of translation from different literary traditions. Case studies include comparative examples drawn from distinct genres such as the epic, forms of lyric poetry, drama, and modern prose fiction. Not available to students who have taken LITCW-UH 1140.

Known for its beaches, sports grounds, and stunning harbor views, Sydney is also Australia's preeminent literary and cultural city. Additionally, it is the country's first settler city, a site of continuous indigenous presence, as well as port-of-entry for much of the country's vast immigrant population. Using literature and the spaces of Sydney itself as a lens, this course examines Australian culture as a place of encounters, movements, and crossings. The course begins with literary representations of indigenous histories, European invasion, and settler colonialism, paired with walking tours of Sydney's colonial architecture and indigenous art collections at the Australian Museum. It then turns to literary reckonings of the "White Australia Policy" (dismantled in the late 1960s/early 1970s) and postwar waves of migration and settlement to consider today's fragile "multiculturalism" in an age of anti-refugee policies. Treating Sydney as both a literary space - comprising a complex, contested imaginative and cultural geography - and a space for first-hand inquiry, the course will supplement discussion with immersion in Sydney's immigrant neighborhoods and vibrant cultural scenes.

Virtually unknown outside of academic discourse until recently, the term cultural appropriation has become a commonplace in social and popular media, as activists and public intellectuals have highlighted what they see as problematic uses (or abuses) of cultural symbols, artifacts, or expressive modes connected to marginalized groups. But what exactly is cultural appropriation, and under what circumstances can it be said to constitute a form of exploitation or violence? This course approaches these questions both philosophically and empirically, asking, on the one hand: What is culture, and how can it be "owned" or "stolen"? and on the other: How have practices of adopting or using culture been implicated in processes of social subjugation or marginalization? Course readings are drawn from a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, including cultural anthropology, art theory, music studies, and philosophy. By engaging with a rich corpus of ideas through in-class discussions, oral presentations, and written reflections, students will develop critical perspectives on cultural appropriation as well as the broader concepts of culture, race, and ethnicity.

This course examines a wide variety of literary texts on black-white couples, interracial families, and biracial identity, from classical antiquity to the present. Works studied include romances, novellas, plays, novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction, as well as some films and examples from the visual arts. Topics for discussion range from interracial genealogies to racial "passing," from representations of racial difference to alternative plot resolutions, and from religious and political to legal and scientific contexts for the changing understanding of "race." Focus is on the European and American traditions, and students are encouraged to supplement course discussions by introducing other literatures as appropriate.

Media depictions of the Middle East have transnational ramifications on political discourse and cultural identification around the globe. This seminar explores the cultural politics of such representations, beginning from the premise that representation itself is a contested site. Students will examine film, visual culture, and literature to ask how "the real" is mediated for various audiences. How can key dilemmas be best approached, such as the clash between theological taboos and notions of freedom of expression in recent controversies about Danish cartoons and Charlie Hebdo? Can readings of texts, films, and digital spaces see beyond familiar negative stereotypes or positive public images? The seminar will be organized around significant themes, concepts, and questions, including the exotic and the imperial imaginary; travel and the Holy Land; gender and national allegory; the representation of the "real"; religious taboo and visual representation; antiquity in contemporary popular culture; memoir and the post/colonial gaze; and dislocation and diaspora in the transnational reception of Middle Eastern cinema, art, and culture.

On May 10, 1933, students from the University of Berlin piled books from the State library onto carts, dumped them next to the Opera House, and set them alight. As Heinrich Heine had presciently observed, "Where books are burned, people will follow." How did a nation that had seen itself as the land of "Dichter und Denker" - home to artists and philosophers such as Goethe, Kant, Beethoven, and Hegel - come to commit the most barbarous crimes in human history? This central question will be examined by reading not only Hitler's Mein Kampf, but also key works by Schiller, Goethe and Wagner that inspired the German cultural nationalism of the late 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, we will explore through the writings of Kant, Moses Mendelssohn and Lessing the Enlightenment tradition in Germany which, though it proved too weak in 1933, laid the groundwork for today’s liberal democratic Federal Republic. Relevant site visits include Frederick the Great’s palace Sans Souci, the Old National Gallery on Museum Island and the Topography of Terror exhibition at the former Gestapo headquarters.

“You are what you eat.” We have all heard this truism in one form or another. A more productive approach follows the French gastronome Brillat-Savarin’s famous statement, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” We are how we eat, how we think about what we eat, and how we procure the foods that we eat. Food relates intimately to who we are as individuals and members of families and broader communities, and as a species. What can analysis of food teach us about the construction of meaning, order, and values in our lives? How do patterns in the production, distribution, and consumption of food promote social categorizations such as gender, ethnicity, religion, education, race, status, and class? This will also be a course about the bond between immigrants and street/cheap food and the significance of Abu Dhabi's many cafeterias. It will also be a conversation about bodies, how they move (through music/sport/work/even food), and why they move the way they move. We will go to art spaces, attend public lectures, and take a movement workshop. By the second week, each student will research, design and present a street-related three-course menu as their final project.

This course traces the theme of migration from the sixth century B.C.E. to the present and examines foundational, modern, and contemporary versions of migration experiences. Readings include scripture, epic and lyric poetry, epigrams and aphorisms, autobiography, reportage, documentary photography and film as well as fiction and examples of creative work in photography, film, and the visual arts. How has the process of migration been imagined and how have migrants and migration been represented in literature and visual arts, whether produced by migrants themselves or by others? What are the commonplaces (topoi) associated with migration, from fearing to yearning to be elsewhere and from nostalgia for the home (nostos) to making a home elsewhere? How has the emergence of migration literature (at times located between countries and languages) affected both national literary histories and notions of world literature? Works and even words (including the term "migration") have also migrated, and so the course will pay some attention to "wanderwords" and to translation as an intrinsic part of the cultural history of migration.

The history of falconry is not a hunting story. It's a story of human imagination of self, society, and the natural world. Approaching falconry as a "social fact" and as an example of what specialists refer to as "intangible heritage," this course asks what human engagements with these birds of prey, across time and culture, reveal about relationships between humans and nature - relationships of ethics and respect, but also of desire and domination. How might a close examination of falconry help explain the emergence and transformation of social categories such as nobility and poverty, male and female, believer and pagan, citizen and foreigner? How might it require us to confront human fragility - our bodily, intellectual, and spiritual limits, our experiences of joy, love, youth, death, faith, science, and more? Engaging with texts, images, and films, students will ask how humans use non-human species to understand and define ourselves, our civilizations, and our aspirations across a range of ethnic, religious, historical, and geographical differences.

Do new media change the way we think and perceive the world around us? What does it mean to live in an era after film has reshaped our capacity for documentation and visual expression? In order to explore such fundamental questions, this course focuses on artistic developments during the Weimar period (1918-1933), when Berlin became a vibrant cultural center after World War I. As the emergence of German film provided new aesthetic principles of artistic production and reception, traditional art forms such as literature, theater, painting, photography, and music were reframed by a new "cinematic imagination." Engaging with the work of cultural theorists who first witnessed the impact of film, photography, radio, and gramophone, the course also explores recent interdisciplinary scholarship in media studies to understand how new technologies shape social and political concerns. A hands-on film project allows students to explore Abu Dhabi's urban cityscapes to create a remake of Walter Ruttman's 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a City. How can this reflection on modernity and modernization in 1920s Berlin help us understand the cinematic imagination's mediation of urban spaces today?

Pandemics in Iberian History: What does disease mean, and how should we respond to it? This course will examine this question by focusing on how Muslims and Christians in Iberia dealt with pandemic disease during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. It will draw on religious studies, history, ethics and medicine to contextualize Muslim and Christian communities' varied responses to the challenge of contagious disease. Abrahamic communities shared a medical heritage and an ethical imperative to care for the sick while also possessing their own unique religious traditions when it came to defining the significance of pandemic disease. The class will read plague treatises, studies of the social, economic, and political effects of plague, as well as considering the history of public health in the premodern world. The course will include a trip to Toledo. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

Students in this course study representations of selves - their own, others', collectives, and non-selves -- in literature, art, film and music. Examples come from around the world; mostly contemporary and Modern but we won't ignore ancient and pre-Modern. A kernel-question guides our investigations: can selves/not-selves be known in artistic expressions, and if so, how and why? Autobiography, self-portraiture, and self-referential music and films will be primary texts, classified into four different voices: confession, accusation, aggregation, and nomothetic. Expect to read works by Whitman, Kincaid, Woolf, Gandhi, Borges, Xun, and Stein. Examples of portrait artists to be studied include Rembrandt, Leyster, van Gogh, Kahlo, and Warhol. Filmmakers who practice self-representation will include Deren, and Varda. Music by Beyoncé, Ono/Lennon, ali-Khan, and Marvi will be studied.

The garden is one of the oldest modes of human intervention in the environment, but what has made it such a productive and enduring symbol and practice? This course explores the garden as a major art form by focusing on pictorial and spatial representations of the Garden of Eden. The Edenic Paradise of Genesis and the Qur'an where Adam and Eve transgressed against God gives access to thought about gardens in the ancient Middle East. As a foundational idea in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic theology, the Garden of Eden spawned a history of interpretation that helped differentiate these religions. The history of Eden in the art of the Peoples of the Book is closely entwined with that of garden design, and this seminar examines both. The course introduces fundamental methods of art history as students examine gardens in ancient Mesopotamia, Medieval Christianity, Arabian courtyards, Renaissance altarpieces, Enlightenment cities, Persian court miniatures, Mughal tomb complexes, and early American towns. Field trips, once public health regulations allow, include outings to gardens and collections in the United Arab Emirates, and the seminar concludes with a collaborative garden design project in Abu Dhabi.

"There is that great proverb," the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe once said, "that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." Is history inevitably written by the winners? Who decides which stories are told and heard, or how they shape collective memory? Can artists effectively act as historians, with the agency to shape counter narratives? This course explores contemporary art that draws on documentary and archival material - the stuff of "history" - to create performance, films and installations that tell stories otherwise lost, forgotten, suppressed or displaced. Special attention is paid to how these stories may participate in the process of decolonization, shape understandings of postwar realities, and generate debates in the global art world and society at large. Through artist and curator talks, screenings and virtual exhibition visits, students engage with the work of artists from Japan, South Asia, and Southeast Asia who explore the mechanisms of postcolonial history at the intersection of fiction and nonfiction, poetry, and testimony. Texts include work by Spivak, Hobsbawm, Césaire, Butalia, Chakrabarty, and Prashad.

Narrating Migration: How do media and cultural practices shape and reflect our political and social understandings of migration? Stories about migrants and migration are told in various registers, genres and media forms. Inflected by geopolitical and historical contexts, migration is perceived and narrated variously as a national or global crisis, a humanitarian emergency, an ideological and racialized minefield or as accounts of individualized trauma or success. As borders and mobility have become contested topics on the global stage, media platforms and practices profoundly shape the circulation and the contours of migration narrative. Berlin offers a particularly rich site to study both historical and contemporary issues concerning diaspora, mobility and Otherness. Through a critical engagement with public discourse, scholarly readings from interdisciplinary sources and field trips, the course will examine the political and cultural imaginaries that construct and surveil the lives of migrants in the specific cityscape of Berlin. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

How do speculative genres speak to their own times, even as they imagine faraway futures? This course considers the metaphors and parables science fiction films create about present societies and the future of the human condition to explore such works negotiate the anxieties and fears of the present in imagined space and/or time. It focuses specifically on film - an art form that has had dramatic reach across global audiences, with technological advances allowing us to visualize increasingly complex alternative worlds. Drawing on films and television from the USA, Germany, India, Korea, the Middle East and elsewhere, many inspired by literature, the course allows students to consider what universal values these filmic narratives project and what solutions they offer to social, psychological, and environmental dilemmas. The course puts film in context with earlier forms of speculation about the future. Through the course, students will also consider what the science fiction of the future may look like by creating short narratives from which they will develop a podcast episode, short story or a treatment for a science fiction film or series.

How do works of art capture, hold, and train our attention? We live in a time when attention and attention disorders have captured both the scientific and the popular imagination. Turning their "attention to attention," like never before, scientists are identifying the rich variety of attentional modes our brain is capable of, as well as a contemporary addiction to "narrow-focus attention." This course plumbs the rich offerings of literature and the visual arts when it comes to engaging, training, and enriching our ways of attending to the world, to ourselves, and to others. Class readings combine poetry and short prose with attention-related studies from psychology, as well as cognitive and environmental studies. Carefully designed attention exercises will take the students on out-of-campus forays.

How did the familiar, powerful, and problematic narratives of civilizations emerge that pit the "East" against the "West"? What are their consequences? Where and how have they been resisted? The course will analyze texts, events, images, and places that were influential in shaping these representations of the Orient/East, as well as key efforts, including Edward Said's, to outline the political consequences of such narratives. How was the Orient first encountered, written about, and even "produced" by European adventurers, travelers, and artists who "discovered" and "described" the people and places of the "East" in the 18th and 19th centuries? How did the travel writings, paintings, photographs, monuments, and museums that resulted both narrate the Other and simultaneously construct the "West" as well? Carefully considering Said's important theorization of Orientalism and a range of responses to it, the course will extend the applicability of these concepts to regions beyond the Middle East, especially South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, and will also consider such topics as gender, ethnography, aesthetics, and the shaping of post-colonial identities.

Between the myths of shipwrecked sailors and the history of camel caravans transporting frankincense, myrrh, and gold to the archaeological expeditions at the crossroads of the Empty Quarter, "Arabia Felix" - a name given to the southern Arabian Peninsula by Classical historians, meaning "Happy" and "Fortunate" - has captivated the minds of ancient and modern-day explorers. But what is Arabia Felix? Why, after this imagined place has enlightened and eluded so many according to its myths, is it still identified today as the land of happiness, the land of builders? Where is the source of Arabia's happiness at the intersection of its myth and history? In this seminar, we will explore the idea of Arabia Felix inside Abu Dhabi's Island of Happiness, where oil has developed a prosperous cultural-heritage, religiously tolerant, ecotourism landscape. By learning to read accounts of travelers, archaeologists, expatriates, politicians, clergy and poets, the aim is to produce interdisciplinary essays on Arabia today.

Between the myths of shipwrecked sailors and the history of camel caravans transporting frankincense, myrrh, and gold to the archaeological expeditions at the crossroads of the Empty Quarter, "Arabia Felix" - a name given to the southern Arabian Peninsula by Classical historians, meaning "Happy" and "Fortunate" - has captivated the minds of ancient and modern-day explorers. But what is Arabia Felix? Why, after this imagined place has enlightened and eluded so many according to its myths, is it still identified today as the land of happiness, the land of builders? Where is the source of Arabia's happiness at the intersection of its myth and history? In this seminar, we will explore the idea of Arabia Felix inside Abu Dhabi's Island of Happiness, where oil has developed a prosperous cultural-heritage, religiously tolerant, ecotourism landscape. By learning to read accounts of travelers, archaeologists, expatriates, politicians, clergy and poets, the aim is to produce interdisciplinary essays on Arabia today.

The Arabian Peninsula is remembered throughout the ages on account of its smell. Characteristically laden with types of oudh, frankincense, myrrh, musk, jasmine, agarwood and bakhur, Arabian perfumes are branded traditionally as scents with robust odors and medicinal properties to beautify, purify, and fumigate the body from malodors and infection. In this course, we will ask the following questions: What do our noses really know and love? How are our emotions intertwined with scents and memories personally and noetically? How are innovative local and global technologies changing our olfactory perceptions by blending traditional elements with modern ones? When and where are the lines blurred between medicine and perfumery and for what purposes? Using Abu Dhabi and the entire UAE as a heritage landscape of scent, we will look for the origins of the perfumery tradition in the Arabian Peninsula, and investigate how the industry has changed globally in time.

How can music provide a framework for understanding conflict, as well as protest and peace movements, across a wide range of historical and cultural contexts from the twentieth century to the present? This seminar examines the role that diverse musical traditions and practices play in shaping the complex sociological rituals of war. Whether hearing John Lennon's song "Give Peace a Chance" as the anthem of the peace and protest movement against the Vietnam War during the 1960s or engaging with music as a basis for cultural and heritage preservation in post-conflict contexts, this seminar draws on scholarship from musicology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, and sociology, among other fields, to explore music as a contested practice during times of conflict.

By default, you are a consumer of immersive experiences if you’re been to a 3D or IMAX movie; if you’re tried a virtual reality headset; if you’ve listened to surround sound music; if you’ve explored an interactive website or visual album; or if you’re attended Burning Man or Disneyland. One of the main drivers of culture and technology, immersion is the process by which one or more senses become saturated, as environmental objects surround, envelope, or come in closer proximity to us. In the 21 st century, immersion has become a multi-billion global business. But it is not new. Theorists and artists have long been concerned with theorizing sensory aspects of media spectacle. Why have human beings long been driven to push the boundaries of reality and spectacle? In this class, students will explore the history and culture of immersive and investigate how emergent technology has impacted immersion. We especially look at immersion in popular culture—from Satie to Björk; to ambient music and panoramic sound; to theme parks and escape rooms; to the rise of holograms and the metaverse.

How has the current migration crisis transformed understandings of nation and nationality and what role have the performing arts played in this transformation? What ethical considerations come into play when venues represent migrants or incorporate migrant performers in works of art? This class examines recent work by and about political and economic refugees in the performing and visual arts, with an emphasis on French theatre. With over 65 million displaced people, the world is in the throes of the worst migration crisis since the Second World War. In the midst of new barriers to displaced people, arts institutions have opened their doors to migrant artists and representations of migrants. The work has ranged from adaptations of classic works, verbatim theatre pieces, film projects, migrant ensembles, drama therapy projects, and political activism combining live performance and social media campaigns. Class materials will include plays by Wajdi Mouwad, Wael Qadour, Koffi Kwahulé, Marwan Bulbul, and Ian Soliane, and critical works by Arjun Appadurai, Éric Fassin, Emile Chabal, and Stephan Scheel and Vicki Squire. There will be class visits to the Institut du Monde Arabe, Le Centre Pompidou and two dance performances at the Théâtre National de Chaillot.

What is the relationship between citizenship and culture? When and how do they overlap? How do the rituals by which our identities are conferred and regulated relate to either or both of these concepts? Are we simply born into citizenship? Into culture? When and how do these categories evolve? To what extent can works of art be said to "belong" to a country or culture or to contribute to the work of shaping national or cultural identities? Emergent literatures from what we might call nation-spaces are often subjected to simple deeds of ownership, albeit not without contestation. Indeed, the same texts, examined more carefully, may negate such casual attributions. What happens when memory exerts its brooding influence, upsetting the categorical claims of citizen that derive from the cultural field? This seminar draws on diverse genres of literature from a range of times and places - from ancient Greece to the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary Turkey, from eighteenth-century England to the unfinished business of the Biafra war of secession – to ask if there are any inherent and permanent values to be placed on household expressions such as Nation, Culture, and other like terms.

The Global Bible: The Bible - in different versions - is sacred to Jews and Christians and plays an important role in Islam. It is similarly influential in modern politics, philosophy, literature, and art. Because of its sacred status, religious communities have constantly interpreted the Bible in order to renew its meaning for new and diverse settings. Non-religious communities read and interpret the Bible stripped of its sacred status, but with an awareness of its significance for so much of the world population. How do groups and individuals interpret and reinterpret an authoritative text in order to adapt it to new social and cultural circumstances. We explore this central question through our examination of the reception of the Bible among diverse communities of Jews, Christians, Muslims and other ancient and modern groups. The course invites students with and without prior knowledge about the Bible to reflect critically on its origins and how its reinterpretations have varied in time and place. Co-curricular opportunities allow students to engage with biblical interpretation in unique settings. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Music and Society: Fostering Belonging and Becoming: We often think of movements in music as the self-contained parts of a composition, but music also moves society through its ability to foster belonging and becoming. How are new music scenes and movements constituted within societies? How do cultural diversity, narrative building and cultural strategies facilitate the development of contemporary music movements? How can urban contemporary music create greater social and economic inclusion? This course will use music in Morocco as a case study for understanding how vibrant contemporary music scenes are created and sustained in the context of cultural diversity and migration, and how urban youth draw inspiration from a cultural heritage at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, and the Arab world. The case study will initiate debate and stimulate research about the possibilities for developing a vibrant music scene in Abu Dhabi. Students will have the opportunity to conduct a comparative field visit in Morocco and learn from artists, music industry professionals as well as experts from cultural institutions from the UAE and Morocco. The course will culminate in students’ developing proposals for a thriving urban contemporary music scene in Abu Dhabi. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Morocco. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

What stories do you know and how do you know them? How have you lived with these stories over the span of your life? What stories will you tell in the future? In this course, "Once Upon a Time," we will consider storytelling as a complex human phenomenon by focusing on the rich heritage of folk and fairy tales that have been recorded around the globe. Students will be introduced to a wide range of methodological approaches drawn from diverse fields evolutionary biology, cognitive science, psychology, literary approaches, and media studies.

Museums, public sculptures and even theatrical performances all produce memory and construct history. As memorials, both living and frozen in time, whether officially endowed and given a place of honor or makeshift to mark a moment, they can provoke healing, political action, education, and controversy. Through visiting select museums, touring the sculpture in Central Park, visiting the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan and attending theater we will study the ways memorials trigger affect across generations. We will ask fundamental questions about how history is felt and how the past made present in memorials. How are memorials imbued with meaning? Do they express community, nation and religion? Are memorials a kind of haunting that make places, times and people long gone present again? Are they places where we experience ghosts or is it just their material reality that produces meaning? Our reading will be from the fields of performance studies, art history, memory studies and urban studies.

A bottle of olive oil, a basket of warm bread, platters of fresh produce, grilled fish: these are stock images of the Mediterranean diet. Cuisine is an integral part of Mediterranean foodways - attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors associated with food production, preparation, and consumption. How do foodways relate to forms of social difference, including ethnicity, gender, class, and nationality? How do Mediterranean foodways engage with the political, economic, and cultural processes of globalization? What have been the effects of mass migration across the Mediterranean on its foodways? What are some lessons about sustainability that we can learn from the Mediterranean? Students will explore the intersections of food, culture, and politics through analysis of the Mediterranean diet, food markets, the Slow Food movement, and the challenges of global food production, including sustainability and the problem of food waste. Case studies from around the Mediterranean as well as film viewings and field excursions (including food tastings!) will enable students to appreciate of the multiple and contradictory ways traditions are created and recreated in a globalized Mediterranean.

Faith and Finance How do ideas about the future affect our attitudes towards risk-taking? How is a central religious value and practice of faith historically related to financial notions of debt, credit, and money? This course examines the ways in which a new idea of the future in Renaissance Italy, as undetermined and distinct from providence, gave shape to a speculative financial and commercial culture. These have shaped, in their turn, modern financial institutions, including the global market. which has in their turn generated contemporary financial institutions including the global market, and political economy. We will examine the role of Renaissance bankers and merchants as patrons of the arts, as well as artists, philosophers, and theologians in shaping and evaluating commercial and political cultures of speculation and risk. Topics and texts include: the notion of Fortuna in Machiavelli's milestone book The Prince, the first public debt fund; charity funds; merchants conducting transnational trade.

A booming multinational industry that plays a critical role in the global economy, tourism is among the most powerful mediums of transnational encounter. Tourism is implicated in the histories of pilgrimage, colonialism, and ethnography, successfully retracing their itineraries and replicating their discourse. Before the industry ground to a halt worldwide due to the pandemic, we were at a tipping point in many destinations, from UNESCO World Heritage sites in European cities such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Prague, and Venice to ancient cities like Machu Pichu in Peru or Angkor Wat in Cambodia. "Overtourism" has once again become common parlance as the industry rapidly returns to pre-pandemic levels - from backpackers to mass tourists. The need to rebuild sustainably for a new era of travel responsibility is imperative. The course will explore the political economy and the cultural and environmental impact of tourism through an ethnographic examination of actual sites. Particular emphasis will be placed on travel stories circulating in print, social media, and exhibitions spaces such as museums, cinema, and TV - exploring their role in shaping our experiences and destination perspectives.

This is a course that explores the relationship between ideas, the body and the way that fashion can be understood to mediate between the two. Through a range of disciplines and media this course considers the body as an aspect of not only medical and scientific exploration, but crucially as a vital element of culture and society. Bodies affect the ways in which the social world and power relations are organized, and they even arguably condition the way that we understand reality itself. Our physical form is constantly shaped according to both philosophies and fashions. Body ideals and broader ideals often interrelate strongly through bodily practices and with what we wear. There are meanings and fashions in all bodily forms (skinny, buxom, muscular, ideas of 'whiteness') and body practices (dieting, hair management, cleansing rituals, plastic surgery and genital cutting). Different cultural forms (literary, visual, material etc) will provide the focus of our discussions as they all engage with the different ways that we make meaning out of our bodies. Students will be invited to investigate in their written work set texts from class in addition to primary material of their own choice.

French films and French culture, examined by situating the films in their social, historical, and philosophical context. Topics include the relationship between the Avant-garde artistic movements of the early 20th century (futurism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism) and the cinematographic Avant-garde (Buñuel, L'Herbier, Cocteau), the echoes of classical French theatre (Marivaux, Beaumarchais, Musset) in the cinema of Renoir, the troubled period of the German Occupation and the work of filmmakers who deliberately chose to stay in France to continue their calling (Clouzot, Carné), and the influence of the existentialist circles of Saint Germain des Prés (Sartre, Camus) on the Nouvelle Vague.

The course will tackle questions of sexuality in the Middle East from a historical perspective. Applying methodologies of queer theory, it will discuss the complex history of sexuality in the Middle East, and sketch the genealogy of Western attitudes towards both Arab and Jewish sexuality. Relying on theorists and historians like Michel Foucault, Robert Aldrich, Khaled El-Rouayheb, Samar Habib, and Joseph Massad, we will explore the essential role that the queer issue plays in the contemporary politics of the region.

Is Israel a multilingual or a monolingual country? This is a question with which many educators, linguists, politicians and laypeople have been struggling. In this course we will explore several issues of language use and practice in Israel, language ideology and language policy. We will start by learning the orthographies (spelling systems) of Hebrew and Arabic and practice them through the methodology of Linguistic Landscape. We will tour Tel Aviv-Jaffa and other places and study public signs and their use in Hebrew and Arabic as well as in other languages. We will look at signs, advertisements, instructions, buildings, streets, billboards, etc. This exercise will teach us much about the public space, who controls it and what cultural and political messages it sends us.

Slow Looking: What happens when we decide not to move on to the next thing, but to stay with a work of art for long periods of time, longer than we ever thought possible? In this course we approach visual art as an invitation to slow looking, an adventure of observation and thought based in receptivity rather than preformulated ideas. Besides learning a protocol for sustained observation, students will receive intensive training in analytical methods. How do we gather observations without immediately harnessing them into schemas? How do we pass from observations to a set of questions, and then explore those questions? We will, however, explore not only what slow looking can let us see but also what it cannot let us see. In repeated visits to major museums in London we will do slow looking in person. Students will engage in discussion of works of art and write frequent short writing assignments. We will also read and analyze essays that exemplify the art of slow looking. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Religion and Cultural Encounter at African Crossroads: What happens at a cultural and religious crossroads? How have African societies articulated responses to the historical forces that have converged on the continent? In many parts of Africa, the crossroad is understood as a liminal space from which the spirit world can be accessed. It is therefore where offerings and sacrifices for the gods are left. The African marketplace is also a crossroad where goods and ideas are exchanged with neighbor and stranger alike. This course borrows the African crossroad as a metaphor for cultural encounter and explores the ways in which Africans have been inspired to create new religions and transform old ones when they come into contact with new people and ideas. Introducing a series of contact zones where these interactions are readily accessible - the coast of West and West Central Africa, the Caribbean, the Sahel, and the Swahili Coast - this course will center present day Zanzibar as a site for ethnographic reflection. The course will deploy a multi-disciplinary approach that includes engagements with ritual objects, performances, and architecture, as well as art and film. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Tanzania. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

What is the relationship between law and narrative order? The course explores the interaction of law, culture, and society through the medium of film, both how cultural norms, social conventions, and political power create formal law and how the same forces influence its implementation in practice. We analyze the films not only as visual representations of law at work, but also as narrative, dramatic, symbolic, and allegorical illustrations of how it is comprehended and lived by ordinary people. Can films guide courtroom drama? Our central concerns will be the conflicts between the concrete and the abstract; between the customary and the positivistic; and between the moral and ethical sense of justice and its realization (or not) in the legal process.

The Ancient Monastery of Sir Bani Yas: Exploring Christian Heritage in a Muslim Nation: Nobody expected to discover a Christian monastery in a Muslim country thirty years ago. The archaeologists working on the site, located on the remote desert island of Sir Bani Yas in the western region of Abu Dhabi, assumed it was pre-Islamic. But, as work progressed, it became clear that the primary occupation lay between the mid-seventh and mid-eighth centuries CE. This raised more questions than it answered. Why would a Christian monastery be established in the Arabian Peninsula during the first century of Islam, and what does this reveal about the relationship between different cultures and religions in the region at that time? For some, this was a clear indication of the tolerant nature of Islam and was embraced as a model for modern societies. And yet the complexities of the site continue to intrigue. This course will explore the archaeology of Sir Bani Yas and the wider phenomenon of Gulf monasticism, including the newly discovered monastery on Siniya Island in Umm al-Quwain. It will further examine our relationship with the past and its many and varied uses in the present, considering ultimately the place of the Christian monasteries in the national history of the UAE. This course will take place off campus on Sir Bani Yas Island for the entirety of the J-Term, including the weekend. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

How do we get to know another culture? How does one’s personal experience translate into meaningful social analysis? Can we avoid bias, in particular Western bias, in our representation of Others? In this course students, will engage in ethnography, a method that emphasizes the utility of first-hand personal experience – of standing in or near other people’s shoes – to interpret and explain social life. The primary goal of the class will be learning how to write a paper based on ethnography and every student will accomplish that by the end of the course. It is hoped that the skills learned in doing do will be applicable to larger projects including capstones. We will explore such topics as the politics and poetics of ethnographic writing, ethnography and social theory, scientific inference, feminist methodologies, immigration and nationalism, and the potential role of ethnography in public policy. Students will immerse themselves in the daily life of Dubai and/or Abu Dhabi as a way to learn the ethnographic method, its promises and its pitfalls. Critical skills for doing ethnography will be developed by teaching students techniques including triangulation, reflexivity (including standpoint theory), deconstruction, linking macro-micro, and variation. Through designing independent and group research projects, students will grapple with how to use ethnography to make visible the social forces of the times, including local labor markets, policy regimes, and forces like migrant exclusion, capitalism, and globalization.

How have immigrant artists "remade their worlds" in conditions of exile? In turn, how have their experiences abroad impacted culture in their homelands? How do past migrations compare to current migrations, especially for artists? What are the implications of transnational migration for artists, especially regarding constructions of race, gender, and belonging? This seminar analyzes the experience of African American artists in Paris, from the early 20th century until today. Students will explore the conditions that precipitated the migration of African American artists to France and analyze the cultural impact they had on Paris, and of Paris on their art. We will also examine how African American expats reconciled their newfound status with that of migrants from France's former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. Through readings, films, and visits to museums, monuments and other cultural sites, we will explore the indelible mark African American artists left on their adopted city, and on global visual, literary and intellectual culture.

How does noise affect the way we perceive the world? How do writers translate their acoustic environments through their work? This course explores the vexed and vexing concept of noise in literature and culture. Students will consider the creative value of noise in literature across time and space through depictions of bustling cityscapes, the din of warfare, clattering factories, and grinding machinery. What types of sonic cues are gendered, racialized, or class-coded? Students will place literary representations of noise in their broader cultural and historical contexts, as they put close readings in dialogue with larger phenomena. Theoretical and critical readings will complement literary texts, music, and sound art, allowing students to blend literary analysis with the interdisciplinary field of sound studies. In addition to reading, hearing, and discussing how authors translate sound into text, students will explore their own acoustic surroundings through "soundwalks" and write about them in creative "sonic translation" projects to better understand the creative potential of noise in literature.

In 2022, 54,400 photos were taken per second, 196 million per hour, 4.7 billion per day. We are surrounded by surveillance cameras, viral images, selfies, social media, gaming culture, Google Earth, news outlets, advertising and reproductions. Is the image a new social currency for the articulation of our identities? How does machine viewing change our view and experience of the world, when we can travel the globe, view the interior of our bodies, and watch the bombardment of cities on various electronic devices? How do we mediate reality as we click, swipe, scroll, delete and like, and how is this imagery experienced in different global contexts? What do these pictures want from us? This course addresses such critical questions from a global perspective drawing on a range of examples from popular culture, media, news, art and photographic practices and visual cultures across the globe. Students will have the opportunity to author a visual essay and develop visual literacy skills.

Nation and nationalism were dominant concerns in global scholarship from the 80's to 90's. But they have receded from academic conversations in the 2000s as 'post-national' thinking became dominant. However, the world over there has been a resurgence of nationalist movements. In light of these changing global dynamics, we interrogate how the nation is 'narrated'. Nations are ontological fictions but are also 'real' in a very significant sense - people literally die and kill for them. In this course we explore the duality of the nation through the notion of narration. Narratives 'construct' nations (or imagine them into being) and nations are also 'represented' in narratives because they are seen as 'real' objects. We will explore the literary, aesthetic and political implications of the ways in which nation and narration are intertwined in a range of texts spanning diverse cultures, historical periods, genres and styles. In doing so we will ask how has nation and nationalism been theorized? What are the relationships between decolonization, nationalism and postcolonialism? How do minorities and migration shape nations? We will conclude with reflections on thinking 'beyond' the nation.

World Dance and Global Perspectives: How does dance reflect cultural heritage and serve as a key to understanding diverse societies? How might dance encode a society’s religious, artistic, political, and economic values? How have migration, colonialism, trade and diaspora led to the creation of dance forms like “Bollywood” and “K-Pop”? Because dance is both a tradition and a living presence whose social functions are continually evolving, how might we decolonize dance in order to rediscover indigenous forms? This class will examine dance as an encoded and embodied expression of culture. We will explore issues of race, gender, and class to understand the body as an archive of memory. We will study different global dances through readings, video, and movement. Through dance classes students will experience dance and the trance-like powers of music. Each student will research a form of their choice and choreograph their own world dance that addresses our present moment and global issues. Students will be researchers, performers, and creators, revealing how dance can be a powerful tool for research as well as expression and community building. Student dances and group work will be brought together for a final performance.

How do we reconcile the marketing of tropical islands as "paradises," catering to tourist fantasies despite their troubled, often violent histories? Starting with recognition of this fundamental paradox, this course asks, can meaningful parallels be drawn between the 'paradisical' Caribbean Islands and the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar? Utilizing readings, films and music, this interdisciplinary course explores and compares the enduring social, cultural and economic consequences of histories of colonization on these islands. We will examine how and why their economic development has been tied to marketing the islands as "paradisiacal" destinations; students will travel Zanzibar to undertake qualitative observation of its tourism products and resorts for a capstone presentation on tourism provision there. Questions we will explore include: to what extent have Indian Ocean and Caribbean geographies contributed to both similarities and differences in socioeconomic developments? In what ways are the impacts of historical forces on the sociocultural formation of the Caribbean islands and Zanzibar similar? In what ways has tourism benefited or changed the societies of these islands? Pending international travel conditions this course will include a regional academic seminar to Zanzibar.

Loss and Nostalgia: Mourning Al Andalus: Why and how do humans grieve and how is grieving affected by the type of loss? How is grief socially regulated? How and when is grieving given ideological meaning? What are the historical and contemporary conceptualizations of nostalgia? How does a geographical place evoke a deep sense of loss and nostalgia, both individual and communal? This course will study the theoretical underpinnings of grief and nostalgia within the historical, scientific, philosophical, literary, artistic, and anthropological fields. It will focus on one case study to explore how the loss of Al-Andalus was grieved and articulated in the pre-modern historical and literary sources, in Arabic and Hebrew, to form narratives of divine decree, justice, self-realization, communal self, among others. The course will also discuss how the loss of Al-Andalus and the nostalgia about that “lost paradise” have been recaptured in the modern period, in the various art forms (novels, poetry, movies, and music), in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, to serve modern ideologies, and self and communal awareness.

Problematizing the binary of 'tradition' and 'the contemporary' as two isolated categories, separated by time, history and culture, this course will question: How do we see the 'contemporary' in 'tradition'? In the process, how can we develop a more fluid concept of time, where the past, present and future can intersect to form new synergies of understanding the performative self in relation to society and politics? These questions will be confronted through an immersive experiential process of viewing traditional performances in Kerala, India, on the actual site of the legendary Kerala Kalamandalam. Apart from examining the aesthetics and training processes of Kutiyattam (the oldest 'living tradition' of Sanskrit theatre) and Nangyarkuttu (the earliest tradition of solo women's performance in world theatre), the course will interrogate the social contexts of these traditions in conversation with leading contemporary performers and directors in India. Thinking through debates around gender and caste, the students will be encouraged to subvert essentialized readings of the past to arrive at new paradigms of tradition-inspired psychophysical knowledge. Pending international travel conditions this course will include a regional academic seminar to India.

A City's Essence: London, Past, Present and Future: What makes a city? Is a city anything more than a large aggregate of people? Does a city’s essence lie in its monuments, its historical strata, its millennia-spanning narratives? Is it in geology and geography, heroic feats of engineering, innovative infrastructure? How productive is it even to think of a city as a singular entity? Using as a case study London, a city significantly constituted by aristocracy and empire, this class investigates how to locate the contemporary within the metropolis. Where is the nowness of this place and how much of it is informed by its past? Where can we find its social and cultural edges that may go on to become part of its future legends? This interdisciplinary class, spanning the arts and sciences, looks at London through a variety of lenses including food, data, water, medicine, childhood, finance. It will include a wide roster of field trips and also offer sustained access to field-leading artists, curators and public intellectuals. Students will have the freedom to work on creative, collaborative and multi-disciplinary research projects.

In an era of increasing xenophobia and intolerance, what might we learn from past experiences of multiculturalism? This course examines the cultures of coexistence (convivencia) among Muslims, Jews, and Christians in medieval Iberia and their legacies across the Mediterranean. We first examine medieval convivencia and explore how it transformed cities such as Toledo, Córdoba, and Granada into leading European centers of knowledge. Next, we explore port cities such as Palermo, Livorno, and Tunis that emerged as spaces of religious tolerance after the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Iberia at the dawn of the modern era. Considering the porous boundaries of Europe during a period when terms such as "Moors," "Christians" and "Jews" were in flux, we ask such critical questions as: What do works by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian authors suggest about the nature of religious, ethnic and gender identity in medieval and early modern contexts? What can the Iberian cultures of medieval convivencia and their legacies teach us about the possibilities of interfaith dialogue and the ethics of hospitality today? Students will engage these questions through class discussions and site visits in Spain.

Increasingly vocal xenophobic discourses across Europe frame migrants as an existential threat – what is often referred to as Europe’s “migration crisis.” This is especially the case when the migrants come from Africa. Yet, Africans have been present in Europe for centuries, prompting us to ask, “What is Europe? What is European?” This course introduces students to the long history of Africans in Europe through three main lenses. The first explores the Afro-European past to develop critical counterpoints to a series of key moments in history: the Renaissance, the Age of Revolutions, the two world wars, and the global 1960s. The second attends to the question of memory: How is the Afro-European past remembered and debated? What role does this memory play in different European contexts? The third centers on the notion of diaspora: How have people of African descent in Europe negotiated their belonging in multiple geographical spaces? What is the significance of the African diaspora in Europe for the African continent itself? Through readings, discussion, guest lecturers, site visits, and research projects, students will explore the complex African past, and present, in Paris. The course readings focus mostly on Sub-Saharan Africans in Europe, but class discussions will also touch on the migration of people from other parts of Africa, while also problematizing the connection between Africanity and Blackness.

All Power to the Imagination: Surrealism and the Magical Prague: How can the artists’ desire to participate in social change link to the fantastic explorations of their imaginaries? How does the condemnation of fascism connect with an artistic re-envisioning of social conventions and norms? Is any revolution primarily a liberation of our unconscious, of our ability to dream? The mystery of Prague, a city known for the presence of alchemists, astrologists, and esoteric thinkers, inspired the work of surrealist and avant-garde artists in the interwar era. This seminar will explore the power of the imagination within Czechoslovak art, film, architecture, poetry, and book designs from the 1930s into present times. Students will examine the work of artists and thinkers who attempted to move “against the current” of tradition and into greater freedom by asserting the right to wildly dream, question gender roles, and create revolutionary links between housing and socio-economic justice. Through readings, films, urban walks and visits to Prague’s architecture, and art museums, we will explore the sustained impact of surrealism as a poetic and political force.

Imaging Arab and Black Lives: What Vernacular Photographs Teach Us: How have ordinary photographs captured Arab and Black lives? What insights about photography emerge when vernacular photographs from the Arab world and Black American experiences are compared and contrasted? This course explores the rich photographic cultures represented in two collections: the Akkasah Photography Archive at NYU Abu Dhabi and the Peter J. Cohen Collection of Black life in NYC. Both collections feature vernacular photographs - those that capture everyday life through studio portraits, news and advertising images, travel albums, school portraits, identification photographs, and snapshots. A key component of the course is the hands-on engagement with these photographic objects, allowing students to explore their cultural significance of photographs and their status as objects to be physically held within the context of investigative leaps, entanglements, and resonances from across the globe. The course includes guest lectures and field trips to the Alkersal Avenue arts district in Dubai, the Africa Center in Sharjah, and the on-campus Arts Center photography darkroom. Students will culminate their studies by curating a small exhibition as a final project. This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

Post-Ottoman Worlds and Beyond: Memory of the Past and Imagining the Future: How does nostalgia influence our understanding of the past? Is it possible to construct a memory of the past through reading memoirs, historical documents, photographs, and historic maps? Can we separate the act of memory from our everyday lives and existence? Through exploring the dynamics of late Ottoman Istanbul, this class will consider how current societies transform how we understand the past while providing a platform to imagine the future. Focusing on early 20th-century Istanbul, which was inhabited by multi-linguistic urban dwellers, we will study the diverse ethnic and religious groups that once filled the streets. We will travel to Istanbul, where we will use its neighborhoods as "sites of memories" in search of remnants of the past. We will examine how the state constructs memories through architecture and urban spaces while working to discern what memories and histories have been erased from today's collective memory. By visiting mosques, churches, and synagogues and meeting with local cultural foundations, we will focus on how understanding modernity created divided societies and new forms of nationalism. Back in Abu Dhabi, we will visit sites, examining if the UAE can serve as a model for the post-Ottoman states to rethink their sense of nationalism within today’s world. This course includes a regional academic seminar to Turkey. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

The question of the ‘Other’ is one of the most intractable social, philosophical and political questions of contemporary existence. The ‘Other’ can take multiple forms: ethnic, racial, sexual, national, class and the list is potentially endless. We encounter otherness on a daily basis and given the highly mobile world we inhabit Otherness also often becomes a source of conflict. This course asks a set of interrelated questions about how we encounter otherness from a specifically postcolonial lens – particularly in terms of how otherness is represented. Some of the questions it raises are: What was the nature of Otherness in the colonial encounter and what are its postcolonial implications? What are the politics of attempting to comprehend the Other? Is the Other constructed or is it real? Why has Otherness been important for a sense of self, particularly in colonial discourses? But also how does such notions of Otherness continue to shape identities in the postcolonial world and the Global South? How are academic disciplines and epistemologies implicated in producing the Other? The course takes as it point of departure anglophone writing from different historical and geographical contexts to critically explore how writers using English as their primary medium of expression have grappled with representing 'otherness'. We will read texts such as Leonard Woolf's Village in the Jungle set in colonial Sri Lanka, George Orwell's Burmese Days set in colonial Burma (or what is now Myanmar) and Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong set in Hong Kong to respond to a set of questions that arise when Otherness is produced under contexts of extreme inequality, such as colonialism.

What ties do our bodies have with the world around us and with each other? Who gets to define the human and the non-human? What place does the human-like have in our world of experience? Stories of Our Bodies is a course where students explore the intricate relationship between the world and the human body, the human-like body, and the non-human body. We investigate the connections between sensory, cognitive, and emotional experiences of the world around us. The course is structured around key themes exploring the body and will cover a wide range of media such as fiction, poetry, film, music, and video games, alongside scholarly articles on the body. Classroom discussions will delve into questions about our conceptions about our bodies, our embodiment, our situated knowledge, and the powers that surround and influence our bodies and our perceptions of other people’s bodies.

Eco-art and ecomedia offer ways to conceptualize ecosystems that are biological, cultural, economic, epistemological, political, social, and, above all, more-than-human. They also foreground potential damage that human activity, including art making and viewing, inflicts on the planet. This class examines how film and video, interactive media, multimedia installation, and visual arts can address issues, such as carbon and pollution trading, earth democracy, digital energy consumption, environmental in/justice, e-waste and waste, extractivism, GMOs and IP, greenwashing and sustainability, habitat degradation, indigenous, local, and traditional knowledge, industrial farming, labor informalization, petroculture, plastics, public health, resource privatization, rewilding, risk assessment, species extinction. The course challenges conventional partitioning of thinking into discrete academic disciplines that normalize anthropocentrism, capitalism, and colonialism to amplify and accelerate overlapping existential crises that affect future generations.