Core (CORE-GG)

Historical forces are transforming the arts and the roles of artists. New innovations are influencing creativity, producing major changes in the lives and work of artists. This proseminar develops an interdisciplinary approach to an understanding of the arts and artists in a social context. What are the key factors that link the evolution of he arts to ancient even prehistoric times and to the present? Is there continuity between the "ritual dramas" of First Peoples and the efforts to create arts based rituals in the present? How are the arts influenced by social change? How are artists interpreting and challenging the major social forces transforming the planet? In what ways are artists creating alternative visions of the future that influence our own daily lives? In exploring these issues, the seminar seeks to illuminate the contributions of art to an understanding of our age. Students produce their own evening of arts performances and projects. Readings may include Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, Berger's Ways of Seeing or Shape of a Pocket, Chaiken's The Presence of the Actor, Staniszewski's Believing is Seeing, Morrison's Playing in the Dark and Shawn's The Fever. Most important, students develop their own insight, vision and creativity, their own commitment to art and social action through brief writing assignments and class presentations.

For over half a century following World War II, the industrialized Western world experienced unprecedented economic expansion and geopolitical dominance. The Cold War epoch, a period of superpower nuclear threat, turned out to be a time of relative global

Students registering for this course meet in the beginning of the semester with the thesis reviewer to discuss the procedures for organizing and presenting the thesis. It then becomes an independent project with the student’s adviser to complete the thesis. Students are required to register for Thesis and Defense when they have completed 37 credits in the M.A. program. Master’s Thesis and Defense is a required graduate core course for students who started the Gallatin M.A. program in Spring 2013 or earlier. It will be offered for the last time in Fall 2014. For more details, please see the information about degree requirements on the Gallatin Web site.

This seminar introduces a range of critical perspectives that can be applied to literary, dramatic, and cinematic texts as well as a variety of performance forms. Several art forms are interdisciplinary in composition?e.g. inter-textual literature and ex

In popular and scholarly discourse, the term "globalization" is widely used to put a name to the shape of the contemporary world. In the realms of advertising, policymaking, politics, academia, and everyday talk, "globalization" references the sense that we are now living in a deeply and ever-increasingly interconnected, mobile, and speeded-up world that is unprecedented, fueled by technological innovations and geopolitical and economic transformations. Drawing on perspectives from history, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, geography, political economy, and sociology, this course will explore theories, discourses, and experiences of globalization. Running through the course are three central concerns: 1) exploring claims about the "new-ness" of globalization from historical perspectives, 2) examining how a variety of social and cultural worlds mediate globalization and 3) analyzing a contested politics of globalization in which the opportunities for social mobility and transformation are pitted against renewed intensifications of exploitation and vulnerability along long-standing vectors of difference and inequality. While "globalization" is often touted as a "flattening" of the world, this course moves beyond such clichés to understand the intersection between large-scale transformations in political economy and culture in and through multiple cultural worlds situated unevenly on the world's map.

This proseminar is designed for students interested broadly in social theory and practice, or more narrowly in community studies and/or community-based action, whether in the social services, education, the media, urban planning, grassroots organizing or political movements. It introduces them to interdisciplinary inquiry and action by using ‘community’ as an example of a complex idea in the social domain: exploring its varied meanings and manifestations from the perspectives of different kinds of theorists—sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and historians, for example—and examining the ways different kinds of activists and professionals attempt to shape it. Readings, discussions and projects will engage students in understanding some of the dominant paradigms in social thought and approaches to social action. They will also be encouraged to apply these modes of inquiry and practice to their own goals and plans for the graduate program.

This interdisciplinaryseminar will examine a critical debate on culture and society. We will explore theories emphasizing structural or ?material? determinism, as well as intellectual currents privileging ?cultural? explanations. Excessive emphasis on the cultural unhelpfully blurs the economic and other aspects of social life, while reductive fixation on economic moorings suggests subordination of social life to the structural imperatives of the market. The course proposes the conceptual exploration and development of an integrative middle way, toward a more dialectically nuanced understanding of human behaviors, social interactions and their forms of subjectivity. The central question will be: how are hegemonic meanings produced and made to become a ?normal? part of our political, intellectual, and moral life? And how do such meaning-making processes shape the organization of spaces, policies and population within dominant discourses of modernity and development, as well as the emergence of forms of resistance to these economic imaginaries and practices. We will analyze the ?cultural political economy? problem, or culture and society, within four possible analytical frameworks: 1. The problem of nationalism and religion. 2. The problem of everyday life. 3. The problem of culture and human rights. 4. The problem of state theory. Reading will include selections from the works of Antonio Gramsci, Eugen Weber, Michel Foucault, Talal Asad, Michel de Certeau, Amartya Sen, James Scott, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx. This course is a seminar and active student participation in the course is required.

Individualized interdisciplinary scholarship requires a practical commitment to the idea that individuals can make free choices about what questions to pursue and what paths to follow. But is that commitment theoretically supportable or even ethically desirable? This class will pursue these questions—which are foundational to the Gallatin MA program--broadly and critically but with a general focus on the ever-fluctuating value placed on “the individual” within Western art and thought. We will consider: how individuals are formed by history and with regard to the future; the diversity of ideas about what “individuals” are and whether they even exist; the influence of culture and society upon the shaping of individuals; the “individual” as a political entity endowed (or not) with “inalienable rights”; locating or losing the “individual” within the panoply of newer ways of talking about “subjectivity” and “subjects”; the mediated individual—how people are creatures and producers within different media; whether truth and beauty exist only in the “eye of the beholder”; the concept of “the individual” in relation to current identity debates and affect theories. The class syllabus will group literary works with philosophical texts in relation to culture and period—for example, works by Aristotle, Plato, and Sophocles; Machiavelli and Shakespeare; Rousseau, Jefferson, Kant, and (Mary) Shelley); Douglass, Marx, and Mill; Nietzsche, Freud, and Cather; de Beauvoir, Fanon, and Truffaut; Baldwin, Foucault, Morrison, and Butler. Students will contribute contemporary scholarly articles representing their own concentration to the class syllabus.

This seminar introduces students to critique, a mode of questioning and a practice of analysis that exposes the actions of power and denaturalizes social and political hierarchies. In this context, and drawing on perspectives from history, literature, philosophy, and political and critical theory, this seminar will take up the difficulties of speaking and writing about silence in order to consider the importance of what is unsaid or unsayable for our formation as subjects. How are our psyches and social worlds formed around a multitude of silences--traumatic, enforced, and/or enabling? In Western philosophy and political thought silence has often been figured as the Other of speech and reason, and cast as the domain of the abject or excluded, or associated with catastrophic experiences at the limits of human reason (including the extremities of pain, violence, and death). In the context of this Continental tradition we will familiarize ourselves with recent scholarship on testimony and the “unspeakable,” while also critiquing the assumption that silence is necessarily solipsistic or signals only the failure of speech or freedom. Some silences are enjoined or imposed; others, like the recent silent protests of the indignados in Spain and Greece, propose alternative politics and constitute their own communities. Throughout we will consider how critique can help us recognize and account for the operations of silence and those other concealed or disavowed forces that are in fact inseparable from the everyday workings of language, knowledge, and ideology.

The novel Frankenstein (1818) features an ambitious scientist and his "creation," assembled of pieces of dead human bodies. If Frankenstein still haunts us, it is because it raises some quintessentially modern issues. Modernity has not only reshaped the human; in doing so, it has also produced sustained reflections on the nature of human being. Modernity defines the human differentially, over against non-human nature, with ambiguous results for those values modernity allegedly has championed most robustly: the power of science to control nature, the unlimited potential of reason, the individual as the founding unit of the political, among others. This course is intended as an advanced introduction to interdisciplinary study. The conjunction of the two terms of our title, one a temporal marker, one designating an ontological-epistemological category, will not only provide us with a kind of laboratory for thinking interdisciplinarily. Questions we will pursue include: What kind of category is the "human?" How does it get constructed? On the basis of what exclusions does it get constructed? How have authors across an array of fields articulated the boundaries between human and nature, human and animal? What are some competing models challenging the humanisms that have underwritten so many modern assumptions? Authors whose work we may examine will include Immanuel Kant, Thomas Paine, Mary Shelley, Karl Marx, H.G.Wells, Bruno Latour, Nikolas Luhmann, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, and Judith Butler.

For students whose programs include investigations of the social world, this course provides an opportunity to grapple with a variety of theoretical approaches to the study of individuals, groups, organizations, cultures and societies, and to engage several methods for conducting research in those realms. Depending on students’ interests and goals, the theoretical frameworks might include behaviorism (Watson, Skinner), interactionism (GH Mead, Blumer), constructivism (Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner), conflict theory (Marx, the Frankfurt School), psychodynamics (Freud, Erikson), structuralism (Saussure, Levi-Strauss), and/or postmodernism (Foucault, Baudrillard). The class will explore the different premises, logics and arguments of various schools of thought. Moreover, members will conduct pilot-level research using methods appropriate to their own problematics: e.g., ethnographic observations, interviews, discourse analysis, document study, visual anthropology, psychometric tests, and/or case studies. The course will be a useful preliminary for students expecting to do a research thesis focused on questions about the social world.

Historically, criticism has evoked in the artist a myriad of reactions from antagonism to apathy and everything between. Yet despite the inherent vulnerability that comes with having one's work criticized, it is possible to constructively engage with and learn from criticism. This proseminar is designed for students interested in the visual, literary or performing arts. It is primarily intended for practicing artist/scholars who wish to explore how criticism may productively influence their creative process as well as understand their artwork and the role of criticism in a broader historical and theoretical context. In this class we will survey a range of readings that reveal issues about the history and changing purposes of criticism. Central to our exploration, however, is the requirement that each student create a piece of art (a screenplay, musical composition, painting, theatre performance, or other medium determined by the student’s concentration), which will receive criticism at various stages of development from a wide hierarchy of sources: peer, faculty, critics and experts in the field. Over the course of the semester, students will further develop their artwork in response to critique, while concurrently writing critically about their own work and work of their classmates. This iterative process of creation and criticism will provide an opportunity to deeply examine, through both theory and practice, the intersections between artist, audience, scholar and critic. Readings may include: John Berger’s Ways of Seeing; Hans Hofmann’s Search for the Real; George Bernard Shaw’s The Sanity of Art; Tolstoy’s What is Art?; Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist; Liz Lerman’s Critical Response; Richard Schechner’s Between Theatre & Anthropology; W.M. Shrum’s Fringe and Fortune: The Role of Critics in High and Popular Art.

Nothing is more taken-for-granted than everyday life: dinner-table conversations, workplace activities, shopping-mall transactions, sidewalk encounters. And yet each situation is shaped by a complex intersection of social forces, individual personalities, moment-to-moment decisions, cultural memes, and institutional histories. This course, designed for MA students in the social sciences and professions, will introduce them to a variety of ways of understanding and analyzing these sorts of quotidian experiences. We will examine talk and non-verbal behavior as they inform activities and relationships; we will look at the ways practical intelligence operates in different situations; we will track cultural differences in everyday behavior. We will consider the ways in which larger social structures and processes – class, race, gender, and so on – are produced, performed, and changed in the course of everyday life, as well as the ways they shape people’s actions and thoughts. Along the way, we will tackle such issues as human agency vs. structural determinism; the processes of social change; and the construction of identity, self, and nation. While the immediate purpose of the course is to unpack the dynamics of everyday life, the larger goal is to consider several broad approaches to social theory and research: the positivist, the interpretivist, and the poststructuralist. These explorations will give students an opportunity to try out various perspectives on their own studies and professional work, and may move them toward clearer conceptions of their theses. Readings may include sections from Karp et al.’s Sociology in Everyday Life ; Rogoff and Lave’s Everyday Cognition ; Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures ; Erickson’s Talk and Social Theory , and de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life .

For students whose programs have included investigations of the social world, this course provides an opportunity to grapple with a variety of theoretical approaches to the study of individuals, groups, organizations, cultures and societies, and to engage several methods for conducting research in those realms. Depending on students’ interests and goals, the theoretical frameworks might include behaviorism (Watson, Skinner), interactionism (GH Mead, Blumer), constructivism (Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner), conflict (Marx, the Frankfurt School), psychodynamics (Freud, Erikson), structuralism (Saussure, Levi-Strauss), and/or postmodernism (Foucault, Baudrillard). The class will explore the different premises, logics and arguments of various schools of thought. Moreover, members will conduct pilot-level research using methods appropriate to their problematics: e.g., ethnographic observations, interviews, discourse analysis, document study, visual anthropology, psychometric tests, and/or case studies. The course will be a useful preliminary for students expecting to do a research thesis focused on questions about the social world.

This interdisciplinary seminar for incoming M.A. students introduces a series of key 20th- and 21st-century theoretical debates about interpretation in the modern humanities. The first half of the course will trace a broad chronology of theories of interpretation from the early 20th century to the first decades of the 21st. Beginning with thinkers like Marx and Freud who defined theories of interpretation in the early part of the century, we will then move into discussions concerning author, text, and context that took place within literary circles in the mid-century – clashes over the location of meaning that challenged the ways in which artists and critics conceived of their work. The course continues with close analysis of the so-called “high theory” of the 1970s and ’80s, such as structuralism, deconstruction, and cultural studies which both reflected and fomented broader shifts within the contemporary western world. We will finish our survey by looking at important theories of interpretation in the 21st century, including material culture, postcolonialism, feminist and queer theory, performance studies, and the concept of “theory after theory.” The second half of the course will turn to various fields and disciplines in the humanities to study how theories of interpretation have manifested within these fields. We will look at music, religion, gender and sexuality, visual art, theater, and media. Students will emerge from the course with a stronger historical grasp of the interpretive theory of the past century, and will be encouraged to use the course’s introductory framework to further develop the theoretical underpinnings of their own work. Readings will include Bhabha, Butler, Barthes, Bennett, Derrida, Felski, Hall, Halberstam, Spivak, and many others.

Theory and critique are not only expected from so-called "serious artists", they are also being produced and consumed at increasingly rapid rates by students, established artists, historians, critics, and others. This course will investigate the foundations and developments of art criticism and analysis. Emphasis will be placed on addressing what it means to be "critical" and how analysis has been influenced or shaped by critical theory, semiotics and psychoanalysis. The course will consider how these disciplines have been used in the writings and artworks by figures such as Nicolas Bourriaud, Julia Kristeva, Meyer Schapiro, Hans Haake, Mary Kelly, Dan Graham, and Andrea Fraser. In this instance artistic practice is viewed as involving both creating artworks and writing/theorizing. The course will stress the role of discourse in art while also allowing allowing practitioners to produce and present art projects.

The past is… An enabling tradition? A stifling burden? A repetition compulsion? A revolutionary imperative? Each of these by turns or all at once, the idea of the past figures centrally in the work of thinkers across disciplines and mediums: philosophers and psychologists, historians and social theorists, poets, painters, and filmmakers. This proseminar, aimed at the needs and interests of students embarking upon the Gallatin MA, offers an introduction to a series of influential theories and methods in the humanities and social sciences by exploring and comparing their conceptions of the past and its effects on the present and the future. The past is an unquiet ghost haunting theoretical texts as well as the literary and visual artworks they illuminate and that have inspired them. With the presence of the past as our guiding thread, we will read and closely analyze classic and modern texts (in fields ranging from philosophy and cultural theory to literature, painting, and film, to anthropology, sociology, and historiography); map major theoretical and political positions within these texts and artworks; develop a shared critical vocabulary; and formulate the urgent and intractable questions that motivate these texts and provoke our responses to them. Our texts may include essays and books by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Woolf, Stein, Du Bois, Benjamin, Césaire, Foucault, Said, Gilroy, and Morrison. Students will play a major role in navigating our readings, steering our discussions, and choosing the topics we address. In addition to writing short responses and a midterm paper, students will conduct a critical research project on a relevant topic of their own choosing that will culminate in a 15-20 page final paper.

This course is intended for Gallatin graduate students in their first or second semester who will be pursuing an artistic thesis. Students who have advanced past their second semester are encouraged to contact the professor in advance of taking the class to be sure the parameters of the class will be appropriate. The class aims to pose difficult and productive questions that will help you understand your tendencies and priorities as an artist, the methods you employ, and where these are in the service of the work as opposed to where they stand in the way. The class requires rigorous and individualized research into your sources of artistic influence with an emphasis on analytical thinking about the methods and strategies employed by those artists or thinkers you consider key influences. The course includes assignments that explore your existing strategies and subject matter in order to understand what has motivated and generated the work thus far. Other assignments push students to work against the grain of their usual modes in order to discover new ways of working and to undermine default strategies. Towards the end of the term, the accumulated insights will be channeled into writing about your work that will be useful in the future context of an artist’s statement or artistic aims essay. In the personal and lab-like atmosphere that this course hopes to cultivate, the class also aims to connect Gallatin graduate students to each other’s work and practice, and to take advantage of the enormous importance that peer input and critique can have on work in progress. Possible side effects include: focused engagement, enhanced motivation, collaboration.

In this class, we will investigate thorny issues such as peace, love and eros, genealogy, home and at-homeness, sovereignty and language, with the goal of exploring what it means to complicate, undermine, or even reject them as essentialist categories. How do we engage in the nuances of academic study without positioning differences as otherness? How does the confrontation of these themes pave the way for harmonious co-existence? Students from the humanities and social sciences will test and develop their interests with and against these concepts through critical reading, research and debating, writing and scholarly presentations. Many disciplines may be summoned in our project, including anthropology, art history, comparative literature, film, history, peace studies, philosophy, and politics.

In a much-remarked 2008 speech on race relations, then-candidate Barack Obama drew on Faulkner to remind Americans of the continuing legacies of racism in the US: “the past is never dead,” he noted, “it’s not even past.” In doing so Obama called upon a familiar trope in critical thought – that history is just as dynamic and elusive as the present, each one (past and present) continuously shaping and informing the other. Which raises the question: what is history? What does it mean to think historically, to understand history not as an array of facts but as process, not as a field of study but as a sensibility, as a way to analyze the world around us? This course is designed for students seeking to add meaningful historical dimensions to their theses. We begin by surveying conventional approaches to historical analysis, from Herodotus to Hegel to Marx to Benjamin. Then we draw from Nietzsche, Foucault, Hayden White, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot to consider how history is constructed, used, and misused. We will then examine how jurists, anthropologists, novelists, sociologists, and. human rights activists think historically to inform and deepen their craft, reading from Tolstoy, Justices Breyer and Scalia, Eric Wolf, Christopher Mele, and Daniel Wilkinson. We end with workshops that consider what it would mean to think historically about your own theses. What kinds of questions and materials would you include as you prepare for your prospectus, thesis, defense, and ultimately, life after NYU, armed with a sense of history?

“The priest departs, the divine artist arrives.” – Walt Whitman. Anyone who aspires to make new things must be open to ideas that challenge traditional notions of being and thinking. In this proseminar , we will examine the ways in which different artists have approached the challenges they face and evolved methods to guide their aesthetic lives. Paul Valery expresses the belief that “The work of art is never completed, but merely abandoned.” This would suggest that the artistic life is an ongoing process of constant flux and discovery. How has the notion of the artist evolved in the 21st century? What are the cultural impediments to breaking new ground? In what ways does an artist formulate and exercise an ethical relationship with the intended—and accidental--audience? And what possible roadmaps do we find in such thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Alain Locke, Friedrich Nietzsche, Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, Lionel Trilling and Ngugi Wa Thing’o? Students will examine these questions through class discussions and through workshop and critique sessions, and consider how they might intersect with and influence their own creative work.

This interdisciplinary seminar is designed to introduce central methods and debates in current humanistic scholarship. Many approaches to literary and cultural study have entailed forms of critique. We can briefly describe critique as interpreting texts and objects against the grain: Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and Foucaultian theories seek, in a variety of ways, to expose the ideological underpinnings of power or the operations of unconscious desire or the ways in which language itself never quite says what, or all, it seems to say. Recently, some theorists have questioned the assumptions of these methods; they argue that the humanities have tarried too long with what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” The suspicious hermeneut is always on the hunt for concealed meaning and eager to expose the hidden workings of power. Some literary scholars have claimed that the priority given to “symptomatic reading” has come at the cost of attending to the surfaces of texts. Urging “reparative reading,” Eve Sedgwick wondered whether, in a world where violence and power are often happy to do their work in the light, how effective methods of exposure can be. Other thinkers have also wondered about the political efficacy of critique, seeing it as informed by a pessimism that risks reinforcing precisely the structures of power that these modes claimed to unveil. Has critique really “run out of steam,” as Bruno Latour famously claimed? In this course, we will examine these methodological debates in some detail. Readings will include selections from Marx, Freud, Foucault, Jameson, Spivak, Felski, Marcus, Moten, Assad, Ranciere, Latour, among others.

Students registering for this course meet in the beginning of the semester with the thesis reviewer to discuss the procedures for organizing and presenting the thesis. It then becomes an independent project with the student's adviser to complete the thesis. Students are required to register for Thesis and Defense when they have completed 37 credits in the M.A. program. This course is required for completion of the master's degree program.

This proseminar explores how to do interdisciplinary research in the humanities. To exemplify this approach, our subject is Africa-China relations. China’s controversial investment in Africa causes reactions ranging from accusations of a “new colonialism” to celebrations of a collaborative “win-win” for development. Also, immigration both by Africans to China and by Chinese to Africa signals a shift in global power dynamics and an opening of a new era of multi-polar globalization. Through an analysis of media, history, literature, political economy, sociology, film, and art this seminar examines the interdisciplinary nature of these relations. We ask what are the connections between the longue durée of history and the contemporary moment? How do different actors at state and individual levels engage with Africa-China relations? What are the symbolic dimensions of these relations? And finally, how does this shift to multi-polarity impact theories of globalization across disciplines?

Students who do not defend the thesis successfully or have not completed the thesis during the semester in which they are registered for Master's Thesis and Defense, CORE-GG 2335, are required to register for Thesis Advisement each semester (including the summer, for students graduating in September) until the thesis is defended. Credits earned through Thesis Advisement are not included in the 40-credit requirement for the master's degree. The special tuition rate for Thesis Advisement is $400.00 plus a non-refundable registration and services fee

Before starting the thesis, students are required to conduct an independent study—usually with their adviser—in which they find, read and critique a substantial body of scholarship related to the thesis. The purpose of this independent study is to ensure that the student is familiar with the previous scholarly work that forms a context for the thesis. The required work for Review of the Literature is a critical essay and a bibliography. The aim of the essay is to identify the categories of pertinent studies; report on major concepts, theories, debates, trends, and gaps in the field; and place the thesis topic in relation to earlier studies. The adviser sets the length of the paper, but it is typically more than 25 pages. Review of the Literature is a required graduate core course for students who started the Gallatin M.A. program in Spring 2013 or earlier. It will be offered for the last time in Spring 2014. For more details, please see the information about degree requirements on the Gallatin Web site.

This course engages students in the conceptual and technical processes leading to a thesis: articulating a core problem, reviewing appropriate literatures, designing effective methods, and constructing persuasive analyses. Focusing on students' own work, the seminar examines the conventions of scholarly discourse, strategies of analysis and argumentation, and the ways in which writing can serve as a means to discover ideas. The thesis process in Gallatin is reviewed and clarified. Sections of the course focus on different thesis formats (research, artistic, project) and broad disciplinary categories (arts, humanities, social sciences), but all take the student to the stage of preparing a thesis proposal.

In this course supervised by the student's adviser, MA candidates complete and defend their theses. Students registering for this course must also attend a 75-minute workshop, offered only once at the beginning of the semester, to discuss the procedures for organizing and presenting the thesis. The workshop is led by one of the program directors. Students must register for Thesis and Defense when they have completed 37 credits in the M.A. program. This course is required for completion of the master’s degree program.

Students who do not defend the thesis successfully or have not completed the thesis during the semester in which they are registered for Master's Thesis and Defense, CORE-GG 2335, are required to register for Thesis Advisement each semester (including the summer, for students graduating in September) until the thesis is defended. Credits earned through Thesis Advisement are not included in the 40-credit requirement for the master's degree. The special tuition rate for Thesis Advisement is $400.00 plus a non-refundable registration and services fee.

In this seminar, you will draft and complete your M.A. thesis proposal while establishing an ongoing, productive dialogue with your peers who are doing the same. You will learn about the structure and content of the thesis proposal as we (1) consider ways of articulating a core problem and well-defined research questions; (2) discuss the conventions of scholarly discourse, documentation, and argumentation; and (3) formulate goals that are ambitious but also achievable in a reasonable amount of time and in accordance with the availability of resources. Separate sections of this course are offered for students in the Social Sciences, the Humanities, and the Arts. In some weeks the course sections will meet separately, while in other weeks all sections will come together for plenary sessions that may include events and activities such as guest lectures, library visits, and human subjects research instruction. After completing this course, students must submit the final thesis proposal to the program by June 15. To learn more about the Approval Process for the Thesis Proposal, visit this webpage:https://gallatin.nyu.edu/academics/graduate/thesis/proposal.html

Master’s Thesis I Registration Form: https://forms.gallatin.nyu.edu/node/377 In Master’s Thesis I, students work under the supervision of the adviser and independently on the thesis research, project, or artistic work described in their thesis proposals. While students and advisers work in their own ways, Master’s Thesis I typically involves activities such as mapping the academic field, compiling an annotated bibliography, creating a draft outline, and completing a chapter draft or some equivalent portion of an artistic work. The goal for MT I is for students to advance significantly from the proposal stage into the drafting and execution stage of their project. Student and adviser (the grading instructor for this class) should plan to meet at least four times during the semester and students should plan to submit at least 15-20 pages of draft material to their adviser by semester’s end. Master’s Thesis I culminates in the RAW Forum (Research and Writing Forum) where students present their work in panels for comments from faculty. Participation in the RAW Forum is required in order to pass Master’s Thesis I. Students will receive information about Raw Forum scheduling later in the semester. All students are required to attend a mandatory information session during the first week of classes. For more information about registering for this course, see https://gallatin.nyu.edu/academics/registration/graduate/MTI-registration-instructions.html

In Master’s Thesis II, students continue to work in collaboration with the adviser to complete the research thesis, or, in the case of an artistic thesis, the artwork as well as the related research essay. While students and advisers work in their own ways, common activities for Master’s Thesis II include revising draft material, clarifying and strengthening analysis, engaging in more direct dialogue with relevant research, and preparing the final project draft with full bibliography and citations for submission to the defense committee. Students must submit their work (including artistic projects), fully approved by their adviser, at least 4 weeks in advance of defense. Completion of the defense is required in order to pass Master’s Thesis II. Please consult this timeline for the Thesis Defense – https://gallatin.nyu.edu/academics/graduate/thesis/calendars.html. All students are required to attend the mandatory information session during the first week of classes. For more information about registering for this course, see https://gallatin.nyu.edu/academics/registration/graduate/MTII-registration-instructions.html

Students who do not defend the thesis successfully or have not completed the thesis during the semester in which they are registered for Master's Thesis II (CORE-GG 2403) are required to register for Thesis Advisement each semester (including the summer, for students graduating in September) until the thesis is defended. Credits earned through Thesis Advisement are not included in the 40-credit requirement for the master's degree. The special tuition rate for Thesis Advisement is $400.00 plus a non-refundable registration and services fee.