Interdisciplinary Seminars (IDSEM-UG)

One of the hallmarks of our contemporary commonsense is that everything we do in our everyday life is political—the food we eat, the music we listen to, the clothes we wear, the poetry we read. Yet, we also continue to view certain people (i.e. elected officials, street protestors) and certain practices (ie voting and throwing rocks at police) as properly the domain of politics. Further still, dominant western conceptions of politics assert that only certain kinds of cultures can produce democracy, for example one that is “modern,” “westernized” and “secular.” Each of these assertions assume a relationship between something called “culture” and something called “politics”—fundamental concepts within a range of disciplines and theories that seek to understand how societies reproduce and are transformed. This interdisciplinary seminar will examine the following questions: What is culture and how has it been defined in different texts and disciplines? What is politics and how has it been defined in a range of texts and disciplines? How and why have scholars and activists sought to put the cultural and the political in some dynamic relationship to each other? The seminar will not only include a range of texts across disciplines but will enact an interdisciplinary perspective by having three instructors from a range of disciplines (anthropology, political theory, and literary studies).

We are in the midst of a revolution. Computers permeate nearly every aspect of our life, yet we understand relatively little about how they work, their historical development, and their impact on our thought and actions. As with previous technological and communications revolutions like the rise of print and the ascendency of the image, computing is transforming our economic and political landscape, bringing with it new possibilities as well as new problems. In this course, we explore this ever-changing and rapidly expanding terrain, paying special attention to how computers and the Internet are transforming how we experience and understand identity and community, control and liberation, simulation and authenticity, creation and collaboration, and the practice of politics. Authors whose works we read may include Donna Haraway, Jean Baudrillard, Jorge Luis Borges, Yochai Benkler, Nicholas Carr, the Critical Art Ensemble, Galileo, Lawrence Lessig, Sherry Turkle, Lewis Mumford, Plato, the RAND Corporation, and Ellen Ullman.

In 1859 Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote of the new science and art of photography: “Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins and leave the carcasses as of little worth.” We now live in the world that Holmes could then only glimpse. In this course we will study the relationship between skin and carcass, surface and reality, through the history of oil painting, light, photography, films, and television. We will pay special attention to issues of representation, presentation, spectacle and celebrity. Texts may include works by Susan Sontag, John Berger, Sally Stein, Jacques Ranci'ere, Daniel Boorstin, Wolfgang Schivelbush, Joshua Gamson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Liz Ewen, Charles Baudelaire, Lizabeth Cohen, Lewis Hine, and Guy Debord as well as period films and television programs.

The history of the media is the history of struggle, a battle waged over words and images: who produces them, who has access to them, whose interests are served by them, and how they are interpreted. Media power has traditionally been the province of elites, from Church and State to multinational communication conglomerates. But this is only one side of the story, for everyday people have also fought for their right to speak and be spoken to. Media has moved from the elite to the masses, in the process becoming "democratized"…but also often commodified. Beginning with the printed word, and moving from the Bible through political pamphlet and popular song, the commercial penny press and immigrant newspapers, and ending with the web, this course will use the history of the printed word to explore enduring questions of power and culture. Texts will range from the Korean Sutra of the Great Incantations to the forced confessions of a barely literate sixteenth-century European miller; from Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson to Frederick Douglass; and from the literature and essays of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ursula Le Guin to the historical and contemporary appeals of marketers and advertisers.

This course explores the cultural, social, scientific, and political dimensions of epidemic disease through an examination of selected episodes from plagues in antiquity to AIDS, Ebola, influenza, malaria, and, of course, Covid-19 in our time. We approach the problem of understanding the role of disease in human history from two different, but interrelated, perspectives: an ecological/evolutionary perspective, making use of a combination of environmental, biological, and cultural factors to help explain the origin and spread of epidemics, and a cultural/social history perspective, emphasizing the interaction of cultural values, religious beliefs, scientific knowledge, medical practice, economics, and politics in shaping perceptions of the nature, causes, cures, and significance of various diseases. Topics include disease and health in the ancient world, the origins and consequences of the Black Death, cholera in 19th century New York, influenza 1918, disease and imperialism, the origins of AIDS, and a global history of malaria. Readings range from Thucydides and the Hippocratic writings to Boccaccio, Defoe, and Orwell, including, where possible, nonwestern sources, along with a wide variety of recent works that discuss the historical, social, and biological aspects of epidemic disease in different cultural and geographical settings.

This seminar focuses on the study of literature and literary criticism. Through close reading of a range of literary forms, including short stories, novels, plays, and narrative essays, we identify the conventions, continuities, and innovations that characterize genres (including blurred genres and hybrid texts) and that invite various strategies of reading. In addition to the formal analysis of each work, we will consider theoretical approaches to literature—for example, new historicism, postcolonial studies, feminist and gender analysis, and psychoanalytic criticism—that draw on questions and concepts from other disciplines. Attention will be given to the transaction between the reader and the text. The aims of the course are to encourage students to make meaning of literary works in varied contexts and to hone their skills in written interpretation. Authors may include Poe, Melville, Chekhov, Hawthorne, Bellow, Beckett, Baldwin, Woolf, Morrison, Conrad, Gordimer, Achebe, Kincaid, Borges, and Erdrich.

What defines the “self”? Is it possible to “know thyself”? Or is the self something opaque, unknowable, secret, or in the parlance of psychoanalysis, the effect of unconscious drives? Is selfhood an internal experience or does that very experience come from outside, from others? Is the self primarily autonomous, or the consequence of social and political forces? How do definitions of gender and/or race come into play when we define ourselves or others? What, then, are the possibilities and limitations of “self-fashioning” – in what ways are we free to (re)invent ourselves? – in what ways are we limited? These questions are important not only in terms of self-understanding, but also because the answers have political implications. In this course, we will thus consider how different authors imagine both the self and its relation to the political. We will begin by reading classic definitions of the self: Plato, Seneca, Montaigne. We will then turn to modern theorists of the self: Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, and contemporary theorists.

In this course we study the correspondence between the world of sound and the world of words. While the analogy between poetry and music reaches back to the origins of poetry, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries poets, philosophers, writers of fiction, and composers breathed new life into the relationship between these arts. We look back to some early philosophical writings on the relations between poetry and music, and then examine how symbolist and modernist thinkers considered these arts. Our inquiry will concentrate on why there was such a rebirth of interest on the part of philosophers, poets, writers, and musicians in the expressive possibilities born of the intermingling of these art forms. Readings may include Plato?s Phaedrus, Aristotle?s On the Art of Poetry and On Music, poems of Mallarm, Valry, Langston Hughes, Stevens, as well as Forster?s A Room with a View and Stravinsky?s The Poetics of Music.

This seminar examines the tradition of poetic protest in the African Diaspora. From the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude to the Black Liberation Movement of the '60s and today's Hip-Hop/Rap explosion, poets, lyricists and rap/hip-hop artists have sought to reclaim and reshape images of themselves and their communal experiences. Through comparative and critical analysis of historical works, songs, and poetry, we come to a deeper understanding of the common thematic and aesthetic approaches of these movements as they continue to alter the discourse on race and liberation. Texts may include Michael Richardson, ed., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean; David L. Lewis, ed., The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader; films such as Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley and Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant’s Style Wars; and samples from Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, KRS-One, Nas, and Tupac Shakur, among others.

The Enlightenment, the 18-century cultural and intellectual movement in the West, has had a lasting influence on our present values and political thought. Reason, freedom, skepticism, critical thought, progress - and even democracy - are values and commitments we have inherited from this era. In order to specify the thought of this period (as well as debates and disagreements), we will first read various authors of the Enlightenment, including Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant, and Wollstonecraft. In the second part of the course we will turn to the legacy of the Enlightenment. We will consider the doubts and critiques that have arisen. For example, Nietzsche and Freud (and psychoanalysis) have questioned the primacy of reason in both individual and collective action; Adorno and Foucault have questioned the ethics of political rationalism; and recent feminists have noted the paradoxes of the Enlightenment's rather narrow and implicitly gendered view of equality and citizenship. Do such criticisms alter our view of the basic tenets of Enlightenment thought? Or, on the contrary, might we read them as continuing the "spirit of critique" inaugurated by the thought of the 18th century?

This class will survey canonical European novels and ask why prose fiction became, arguably, the characteristic literary form of Western modernity. That period in Europe was marked by a steady stream of cultural innovations, scientific discoveries, and political revolutions. What work did the novel do, and how did it change to keep up with those ever-changing times? With its emphasis on the particular over the universal, the real over the ideal, the novel must surely have been useful to Europeans trying to understand and improve their time, their communities, their historical moment, their relationship to nature and religion. But if the novel was therefore a kind of modern epic, its protagonist was usually an individual, not a representative hero, and its most compelling action scenes often took place, not on battlefields or in courts, but within the mind of the protagonist. Accordingly, while this class will consider each novel in relation to its immediate social and political context, connection to contemporary philosophy, and particular contribution to the aesthetics of the form, we will consider the tendency within the most highly-praised novels to provide highly charged narratives of internal thought processes rather than action based on resolved ideas. When and why did how we think and feel become more exciting, more aesthetically satisfying, than what we think and feel? Readings will probably include: Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders; Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground; Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The Renaissance in Europe remains one of the most creative, prolific, and dramatic eras in human history. It was a period in which tumultuous events—such as the bubonic plague, the Protestant Reformation, revolutions in science, political transformation and intrigue—were accompanied by an unprecendented explosion in the arts, with the work of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and many female writers such as Christine de Pizan, Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franca. This course examines the politics, literature, philosophy, visual arts, and music of this period, as well as the social behavior of manners, morality, and the role of the Other, such as women and Jews. We will explore the new ideas about existence, the self, and humankind fostered by humanism, philosophy, and the arts. Readings may include Christine de Pizan’s The Treasure of the City of Ladies, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Castiglione’s The Courtier, Shakespeare’s plays, and the work of the Italian female poet, Gaspara Stampa.

Comedy, no less than tragedy, yields insights into the great questions of an age. This course examines the ways the comic, from the ancient world to modern times, reflects attitudes about love, marriage, religion, power, and war. In addition to the philosophical writings of Meredith, Freud, and Hegel, readings may include Aristophanes? Clouds and Lysistrata, Plautus?s Pot of Gold, Petronius? Satyricon, Boccaccio?s Decameron, Shakespeare?s Much Ado About Nothing, Congreve?s The Way of the World, and Beckett?s Endgame.

The role of the gods in human affairs inevitably raises the question of fate and free will. The epics, from the ancient world to the Renaissance, frequently reflect and define this debate. This course examines how the epics of Homer, Vergil, Dante and Milton not only mirror the philosophical and theological perceptions of the period, but sometimes forecast future debates on the issue. Readings may include the Epic of Gilgamesh, Iliad or Odyssey, Aeneid, and Divine Comedy, as well as selections from Plato's Protagoras or Aristotle's Ethics, Cicero's De Fato, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and Fromm's Escape From Freedom.

A specifically “modern” politics seems to mean overthrowing the authority of god, church, and tradition—in the name of establishing freedom. In turn, “self-determination” in its personal and political senses seems to mean an ongoing “democratic experiment” that questions the authority of all cultural codes and social practices. Canonical political theorists from Rousseau to Marx gave modernity this democratic meaning against traditional forms of authority, deference, ascribed identity, and exclusion. But significant figures in "modern political thought" have also questioned this romance of emancipation in profound ways. Some theorists explored how democratic forms in Europe were entwined with slavery and colonization as specifically modern forms of authority. Some theorists showed how self-determination among the enfranchised actually produced mass conformity and political docility, while other theorists focused on the difficulties of anti-colonial revolution. If modern politics was animated by a narrative promising movement from domination to emancipation, a significant chorus of modern political theorists questioned it. In political, cultural, and psychological terms, in metropolitan and colonial scenes, and through a variety of genres, they disclosed new forms of subjection, while re-imagining the meaning and conditions of human freedom. Readings include: Tocqueville, Democracy in America; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good & Evil, and The Genealogy of Morals; Kafka, “The Penal Colony;” Dostoevsky, “The Grand Inquisitor;” Fanon, Wretched of the Earth; Arendt, The Human Condition; Freud, Moses & Monotheism; Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love.

This course explores the impulse to define, understand, contain, praise, analyze, lament, restrain, and express love. Through a study of philosophy, poetry, drama, religion, art, and music we will endeavor to discourse on the meaning of this profound emotion. However, in order to understand the place of love within the lives of humans in the west, we need to look at love in its historic, cultural, social, and political contexts from Sappho and Plato to Shakespeare, while also considering non-Western influences. We want to consider Love's multiple roles with regard to desire, seduction, betrothal, marriage, manners, morals, political power, and the pursuit of wisdom, as well as its role in class, gender, and race. Possible readings could include Plato’s Symposium, the poetry of Sappho, the stories of Marie de France, selections from Dante, the Italian comic play, The Deceived, as well as plays of Shakespeare.

This course examines several nineteenth- and twentieth-century travel narratives in an exploration of the experience of travel and the many questions it raises about social identity and cultural difference, the traveler's search for adventure and “authenticity,” the relationship between tourism and colonialism, and the pervasive use of travel metaphors in the discourse of postmodernism. Readings will include a variety of nonfiction travel books, such as Flaubert in Egypt, Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, Chatwin's Songlines, Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express, Phillips’ The European Tribe, and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, as well as scholarly articles about the genre of travel narrative and the sociology of travel.

Freud once famously announced that femininity is a riddle and the female body is a problem. Some years later, feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir insisted that the problem is not the female body as such but rather the fictions we produce about the body. In this course, we will focus simultaneously upon two kinds of bodily fictions: Works of literary fiction with the body as their subject; and the various social fictions and cultural representations of the body that are to be found in a wide range of scientific, sociological, and critical texts. Some of the key questions that will structure our work include: How has our understanding of male and female bodies been shaped over time? What does it mean to explore the body as a historical rather than a biological object? How do we define deviant bodies and which bodies get to count as normal? How does our understanding of the opposition between Nature and Culture structure our beliefs about gender and the body? Authors may include: Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Susan Bordo, Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Margaret Atwood, Audre Lorde, and Joan Brumberg.

The cultural legacy of the Middle Ages continues to challenge and enchant us: its soaring architecture, its large philosophical and theological questions, its magnificent art, literature, and music. This course explores the genius of the medieval mind and its transcendent vision of life. A major focus of the course will be a study of the Realist-Nominalist controversy spurred by Aquinas and Ockham and its effect on writers such as Chaucer and Dante, as well as on the painting, music, and architecture of the period. Readings may include selections from Dante?s Inferno, Aquinas? Summa Theologica, Chaucer?s Canterbury Tales, and the writings of the Pearl Poet. The course may include field trips to the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a performance of medieval music.

The tension between free expression and social control has shadowed the Great American Conversation since the birth of this country. The constitutional ideal that our government "shall make no law" abridging free speech has given way, in fact, to laws that limit discussion, ostensibly for the public good. Likewise, new media technologies, while advancing our ability to access and exchange ideas and information, raise serious questions as to the boundaries of speech that is seen to challenge current political and social mores. This course, then, addresses the delicate balance between free speech and democracy, guided by seminal readings from Milton, Locke, and Hobbes as well as modern free speech rights’ scholars Geoffrey Stone and Lawrence Tribe. We will also be revisiting Orwell’s 1984 while also examining important Supreme Court decisions that have critically shaped First Amendment rights in regard to hate speech, pornography, corporate control of mass media, the student press and the rights of journalists. With this foundation, we ask: Are there any forms of free speech that should be restricted? If so, which? And, who should decide?

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection may be the single most influential, and controversial, scientific theory ever proposed. This course will examine the origin, nature, and consequences of Darwin’s theory, with an emphasis on interrelationships among the intellectual, social, and cultural dimensions of the scientific enterprise. Topics include the connections between Darwinian theory and social, political, and moral discourse in Victorian Britain; initial and more recent scientific and public controversies; past and present religious resistance to the theory; applications and perceived misapplications, such as Social Darwinism, eugenics, and sociobiology; and the influence of Darwinian thought on modern science, literature and the arts. In addition to Darwin’s Origin of Species, Voyage of the Beagle, and Descent of Man, readings may include selections from Malthus, Spencer, and Huxley, and recent works by Richard Dawkins, E.O. Wilson, Stephen Gould, Marlene Zuk, Sarah Hrdy, and Mark Pagel, among others. A background in the sciences is not assumed, but a willingness to engage with the scientific concepts and explanations is expected.

We know a great deal about speech and its role in the formation and transformation of identity for both individuals and groups. We know less about silence in such matters: whether silence complements or subverts speech, hence how it ultimately affects our identity and access to power. Speech and silence can be seen as conflicting strategies used selectively by women and men, blacks and whites, immigrants and indigenous people, rich and poor for the maintenance of self and the silencing of others. Why? What are the psychic and social costs of these strategies? What myths do they help perpetuate? Finally, what are the ideologies that affect our understandings of both? Our readings will include Trudgill?s Sociolinguistics, Achino-Loeb's Silence: The Currency of Power, Woolf?s A Room of One?s Own, Beckett?s Waiting for Godot, Hoffman?s Lost in Translation, Dangarembga?s Nervous Conditions, and excerpts from other sources.

This course examines the places in which we work and play, travel and dwell - the office tower and the suburban house, the city street and the superhighway, the small town and the megalopolis, the shopping mall and the theme park, the American road and foreign places. Synthesizing insights from literary works and fields like cultural geography, landscape studies, and architectural history, we explore such questions as: What gives a place its particular feel or character? How do our values and worldview affect the way we experience places, and what constitutes that experience? How do places---and the way they are represented in literature and other media---shape our attitudes and behavior? What gives a place "quality," and how can we design and build better places? Readings may include J. B. Jackson’s Landscape in Sight, Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, James Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and Michael Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan.

Long before Socrates discovered that the philosopher?s life is a rehearsal for death, before priests and doctors in Medieval and Renaissance Europe practiced ars moriendi (the art of dying), before the German Romantics penned lyrics of lamentation at the loss of love, and before Sigmund Freud proclaimed that the goal of life is death?the pagan world honored death as a god and created rituals to honor the god?s presence in life. In this course we enter into rituals of death and renewal, both ancient and modern, to guide us through our own death experiences in the midst of life. The experience of death-in-life is met only by taking the threatened discontinuity into a higher continuity that tradition calls the ?culture of soul.? Pagan mysteries of initiation, Greek tragedy and myth, the transformative operations of alchemy, and the modern psychoanalytic rituals of Freud, Jung and Winnicott give voice to the culture which soul has crafted out of its own deep and timeless wounds. Texts may include: Burkert?s Ancient Mystery Cults, Sophocles? Oedipus at Colonus, Freud?s Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Von franz?s On Dreams and Death, readings from Buddha?s teaching on ?Impermanence? and Marlan?s Black Sun.

Recognized in the modern world as Freud’s id and Jung’s collective unconscious, what we call the unconscious has a long and dignified ancestry in the ancient healing art of shamanism and in the histories of both Eastern and Western religion, philosophy and medicine. Our focus will be to trace the development of the idea of the unconscious as it evolves in the Upanishads, Greek Mystery Religion, Plato and Augustine through the Enlightenment, Freud, Jung and beyond, to the postmodern condition. This academic course will challenge your preconceived notions about the human psyche.

This course examines the concept of culture through its forms of communication. The shift from orality to literacy to electronic media and now to digital media has important consequences for the social, political, and economic structures within a culture. If we take as axiomatic that every culture wishes to preserve itself through its forms of communication, we then need to ask ourselves which forms of communication are best suited for this purpose. What happens to cultures when traditional forms of communication are forced to compete with the newer technologies? What do we mean by “knowledge” in the age of information? We will examine the development of electronic media, including the newer digital technologies, and analyze their effects on both the individual and cultural level. The course will conclude with an examination of the biases in search engines and how we might be able to resist the attention economy. Readings may include Plato’s Phaedrus, Ong’s Orality and Literacy, the Bhagavad-Gita, McLuhan’s Understanding Media, Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression and Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing.

African civilizations speak to us as much through monumental edifices, visual artifacts, sign systems, oral tradition, and films as they do through alphabetic texts. In their varied expressions, these societies, ancient and contemporary, present us with new ways of knowing. When we encounter these social imaginations through their multiple texts, the experience is reflexive, double-imaged, because of the complex interaction of the perceptions of Africa with the West’s own image of itself. Texts may include hieroglyphics, architectural symbolism, music, visual art, epics, folktales and proverbs, cosmologies and rituals (such as the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead), The Epic of Sundiata (which explores medieval Ghana and Mali), and the society of the Dogon and its extraordinary cosmology. African modernist art and writing will also be represented, through novels like Conde’s Segu and Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and films like Keita, Finzan and Ceddo. Using ideas both ancient (African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo by Fu-Kiau) and contemporary (In Search of Africa by Manthia Diawara), African civilizations will speak through their own words.

This course studies the nature of the tragic form in dramatic literature and performance, as well as its role in human existence. Focusing on two of the great periods of tragedy in Western literature and culture—ancient Greece and Renaissance England—we read selected tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Shakespeare as well as philosophical considerations of the tragic such as Aristotle's Poetics. We examine these works in their social, political, and cultural contexts, while considering questions of the role of the Other, Patriarchal power, gender, class, fate, free will, and the origins and evolution of tragedy as a literary and political genre. Readings might include, for example, Aeschylus', Agamemnon; Sophocles' Antigone or Oedipus; Euripides' Medea, as well as Shakespearean tragedies such as Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, or King Lear. Special attention is paid to the Greek and Shakespearean theater and practice, as well as performance. If we can, we will also attend a live performance.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 permanently altered the world we live in. Fear of nuclear annihilation became a fact of life. Although the end of the Cold War relaxed the tensions somewhat, the combined arsenals of existing nuclear powers are still sufficient to destroy most of life on this planet many times over, and controversies continue over nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea. How did this extraordinary state of affairs come about? Why were the bombs made when and where they were made? Why were they used? Did the individuals involved understand the destructive potential of these new weapons and ponder moral questions involving their manufacture and use? Did they anticipate the nuclear arms race that has resulted? How does this episode fit into the longer history of the relationship between science and warfare? How were both hopes and fears transferred to the debates over nuclear power? Readings will likely include Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary, Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn, and a variety of selections concerning nuclear proliferation, the disarmament movement, and nuclear power.

The course introduces and contrasts basic concepts of Buddha’s psychology of liberation with the modern depth psychologies of Freud and Jung. Buddhist psychology was born from Buddha’s personal awakening experience and had the effect of bridging the social divide between the privileged and working classes of 5th century BCE Northern India transforming the political milieu of the time. Buddha’s psychology of liberation offers the possibility of easing similar class tension in our time. Special attention will be given to theories of the self in Buddhist and Western texts, for it is the idea and belief in an unchanging ego that has emerged a debate between Buddhist and Western forms of psychology. While Western psychology attributes the deficiency of the ego/ self to the failure of upbringing, Buddhist psychology takes the impermanent, changing and unsatisfactory conditions of life as its starting point. Our goal in this class is to bring the Buddhist notion of healing into conversation with the models and strategies for healing in Western psychology. Texts may include: Andrew Olendski, The Radical Experiential Psychology of Buddhism; Peter Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader: David Tacey (ed.), The Jung Reader: David Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism; Bhikkhu Bodi, In the Words of the Buddha (translation of suttas from the Pali Cannon); Thanissaro Bhikkhu, The Mind Like Fire Unbound; and Mark Epstein, Thoughts without a Thinker; John Strong, The Buddha a Short Biography.

How does narrative create a sense of identity and give value to our lives? What are the ethical implications of looking at knowledge as a construction of narrative? The concept of narrative is currently used across disciplines to describe how people, texts, and institutions create meaning. This course will explore the idea that stories organize our thinking and our lives. We will begin with Plato’s ideas on tragedy and Aristotle’s Poetics, which later narrative explorations emulate and challenge. Our reading of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, and modern fictions will investigate the ways fictional texts radically reinvent literary forms and question social conventions. Students will carry out projects that explore narrative trends within their particular areas of interest.

The course will focus on an eclectic group of mostly contemporary, politically-directed writers and other artists primarily from various ethnic or racial minority backgrounds. We begin with performance proper, and then narrow our focus to discuss what elements of performance are incorporated into narrative text to produce “performative writing.” Does minority positioning affect the content, structure, and manner in which these artists perform or write, and in turn, how they are received? How might sexual/gender politics nuance that positioning? Rather than seeking division under the rubric of “national literature,” or the multicultural versions such as “African-American” or “Asian-American” writers/artists, the course will look for structural and contextual models that cross these categories - concern with oral histories and family-community genealogies, for example. We will also analyze how specific power politics inform these artists’ activities across their broadly diverse sociocultural, ethnic, and geopolitical contexts. Texts may include: fiction by William Faulkner, Nakagami Kenji, Ruth Ozeki and Toni Morrison, and theoretical selections from Jacques Derrida, Antonin Artaud, Judith Butler.

Art Now focuses on the contemporary art world, the forces producing continuous change and the ubiquitous presence of origins and tradition. We engage new media, technologies and performance while tracing their origins in ancient communities, Shamanism and Ritual. We explore the relationships between new media/performance forms and traditional artistic practice. We ask such questions such as: Why is New York still the capital of the art world? Why has everything in our culture and art become dominated by the money and power of the finance world, by the one-tenth of the one percent? Has money alone become the standard by which art and culture in general are valued? We pursue these questions by learning with guest artists, visiting museums, through imaginative writing, making art and through individual and group projects. Readings may include Meyer Schapiro’s Modern Art, Irving Sandler’s New York School, Harold Rosenberg’s Tradition of the New, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, Linda Nochlin’s and Lucy Lippard’s work on Women and art and Linda Weintraub’s To Life! Eco Art in the Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet.

What is a ?Chinatown?? The word alone evokes many images, sounds, smells, tastes from many different sensibilities. For recent immigrants it can be a home away from home, for ?outsiders? an exotic place for cheap eats, for male action flic fans Chow Yun Fat (or Mark Walhberg) in ?The Corruptor,? and for you ?!? (fill in the blank). We?re going to explore the nooks and crannies of Chinatown in the American imagination and in its New York real-time, non-virtual existence. How do we know what we know and do not know? What does Chinatown have to do with the formation of normative ?American? identities? What are the possibilities (and limits) of crossing cultural divides? Class members will individually and/or in groups research, experience, and document a chain of persons, places, and/or events creating their own narrative ?tour? of this place?s meanings. Novels, history books, tourist guides, films, and pop culture will supplement the primary ?text? of New York Chinatown. This will be a collaborative, discussion-intensive, field research-driven class.

Recently the feminist author Vivian Gornick announced “the end of the novel of love,” though romance has in fact a powerful place in the history of Western literature. Romantic love is a ubiquitous phenomenon in Western culture; we are saturated with images from the popular media about its value and inevitability, but historians and anthropologists cast doubt on its universality, sociologists point out its unreliability as an index to happy marriages, and contemporary literary treatments tend to run from skeptical to scathing. In this course students will analyze major shifts in definitions and treatments of romantic love, attending especially to issues of gender and power. We will read a selection of representative poetry and fiction, excerpts from research in the psychology of love, cross-cultural and historical views of romantic love, and feminist appraisals of women’s relationship to romance as a cultural institution. Course work may also include texts by Plato, Dante, Goethe and Lawrence, and a selection of love poetry from Sappho to the contemporary era.

This course examines several 'classic' texts to understand both their own intrinsic merit and their influence on society from their inception until our own time. Our emphasis, indeed, is on using these texts to understand our lives and world now. We explore classic texts in relation to contemporary life's dilemmas of consumerism and spiritualism, individual rights and community rights, vocation and career, God and the afterlife, rebellion and escape from freedom. Readings may include Aeschylus' The Oresteia, Sappho's Poems, Plato's Republic, Lucretius' On the Nature of the Universe, Ovid's Metamorphoses or Cicero's On the Laws, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales or Cervantes's Don Quixote.

Open to sophomores only. Two purposes shape this course. One is to explore our ambivalence towards and alienation from "politics." What does our apathy and cynicism say about politics as it is practiced in our society, and what does it say about ourselves? To pursue these questions means setting a second goal: to analyze what politics?as a concept and a practice?has meant in history, means to us now, and could mean. We begin by closely reading several canonical texts in political theory. We proceed by using more modern texts to explore different "dimensions" of political life: the ways we conceive and pursue interests; the ways we are motivated by often unconscious drives, anxieties, and fantasies; the role of culture in the form of narrative and identity; the place of rhetoric, persuasion and performance, since politics happens through speech on public stages; and lastly, different ways of understanding and practicing democracy. Our basic goal is to learn how to "think politically" about the world, by learning to understand politics in conventional and unconventional senses. Readings include: More, Utopia; Machiavelli, The Prince and The Discourses; Marx, selected writings; Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur; Baldwin, The Fire Next Time; Foucault, The History of Sexuality; and Arendt, "What is Freedom."

Colonialism, imperialism, and globalization all involve the domination of one part of the world by another. How do these forms of control differ? How are they related to each other? What are their dimensions in different places and times? What kinds of changes?economic, political, social, sexual, biological?are produced among the dominated and the dominators? What definitions and feelings of ?nationhood? develop during these processes? How are peoples drawn into or able to resist these relations? What are the liberatory or the oppressive aspects of different kinds of nationalisms? What do the changing links among countries and peoples signify? How is today?s ?globalization? connected to older forms of control, while creating new forms of domination? Texts may include several films (Life and Debt, The Triumph of the Will, The Battle of Algiers) with selections from, among others: AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame; Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, Sexuality, in the Colonial Context; Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; The Wretched of the Earth; Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.

Shakespeare, looking back to the Middle Ages and forward to the Renaissance, asks: ?Is it possible to be at home in this world?? Falstaff warns Prince Hal that if Hal banishes him, he banishes ?all the world,? implying what a tragedy that would be. Yet Hamlet says the uses of the world seem to him to be ?weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.? This course examines the dynamic tension that lies between these two world views, and the complex and challenging ways in which Shakespeare deals with the question. Readings may include Henry IV, Part I; Hamlet; King Lear; Much Ado About Nothing; and Twelfth Night.

The realist novel is often considered to have reached its peak in England in the Victorian era. How and why did that happen? To what extent did the society shape the novel? To what extent did the novel reflect or represent the society? For that matter, what is realism, really? Is the realist novel entertainment or art? Does it play a moral role? Can it change society? How does material production influence the novel? We ask these questions through the lenses of four inter-related issues of the period: the conflict between a “mechanical” and a “romantic” philosophy; the increasing wealth of the middle class and the pauperization of the new working class; the “Woman Question,” involving the first large-scale agitation for equal rights for women; and the “imperial adventure” that brought a fourth of the world’s territory under British rule. We read four novels: Dickens’s Hard Times, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim; essays by “sages” John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot; postcolonial criticism by Edward Said; and theories of the novel by Mikhail Bakhtin, F.R. Leavis, Raymond Williams, and Virginia Woolf.

What role did the theater play in the civic life of ancient Greece? How did Greek drama address vital social and political issues? Does Greek drama serve as a useful paradigm for exploring contemporary theater? Through our readings, we will explore Greek theater as a live space of social action, representing conflicts between the claims of family and state, between male and female, between traditional values and emergent democratic concerns. We will examine Greek drama's relation to religion (e.g. sacrifice, lament, festival), to law (e.g. courtroom proceedings, punishment), and to civic debate. We will discuss both how plays were produced and the theories of drama they inspired. Building on our investigation of the Greek 'case', we will turn our attention to Roman drama and to selected works of the modern theater. Readings may include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Menander; Seneca; Racine, Sartre, Fugard, Al-Bassam, McLaughlin.

In this course we will ask: How do clothes make the man? How has style in its broadest sense come to function as an expression of a person?s political positioning, sexual/gender politics, and allegiance to groups and subcultures? Conversely, how has style been used to limit the individual?s mobility and freedom, that is, to keep people in their place? What is the relationship of capitalism to the marketing of sex, the appropriation of subcultural style, and the system of fashion? We will discuss these issues and others in relation to the politics of style, past and present, in America, France, Britain, Japan and Imperial China, looking at fashion, hair, manners, foot binding, and body arts like tattoo and piercing. Texts may include narrative films, documentaries, fashion magazines, commercials, and writings by Karl Marx, Wolfgang Haug, Dick Hebdige, Judith Butler, Roland Barthes, Dorinne Kondo, Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Sennett, Liz and Stuart Ewen, Charles Baudelaire and George Bernard Shaw.

Going on the road is an archetypal American experience, the subject of countless poems, songs, movies, novels, and travel books. Throughout the country’s history, native-born writers and visitors from abroad have hit the road in the hope that through direct experience they could come to a better understanding of the American character and what the country is all about. In this course we travel across the country with these writers, exploring such questions as: What is the “American way of life,” and can some values, myths, and obsessions be seen as distinctly American? What does it mean to speak of a national identity, when there’s so much social and cultural diversity? How do the road trip narratives map the regional and literary geography of the country? Why this love of movement and speed, this romance with the road? Readings may include Twain’s Roughing It, Miller’s The Air-conditioned Nightmare, Beauvoir’s America Day by Day, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie, Kerouac’s On the Road, Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, and Baudrillard’s America.

What constituted 'wisdom' for the societies of the ancient Mediterranean world? On what authority was its cultural status based? Long before the ancients formalized wisdom into what we now call "philosophy," they cast it in various literary forms, including parable, proverb, precept, and a range of poetic models. How did this wisdom (or "instruction") literature address questions about mortality, divinity, the natural world, structures of power, erotic relations, and more? Focusing on ancient Mesopotamia (the ancient designation of modern Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Syria, Turkey) as well as on Egypt, Israel, and Greece, we will examine the forms, themes, and cultural construction of wisdom in these ancient societies. Among the questions we will pose and explore: What were and are the cultural limits of wisdom? How did the wisdom traditions of the Near East and Greece interact? What is the relation of 'wisdom' to ideology?

This interdisciplinary seminar explores children and childhood in the United States from two vantage points—those of public policy makers and of parents. In what ways does public policy shape children’s lives? What historical trends influence the ways that people parent? What happens when parents disagree with laws or conventions regarding how to parent? The first half of the course examines common conceptualizations of the child figure historically and today. While all children possess some universal characteristics that transcend time, place and personal circumstance, we can also understand the contemporary child figure to be a social construction, with “childhood” as we know it emerging as a coherent life stage only in the past few centuries. Public policy—laws about healthcare, education and labor, in particular—have both shaped and responded to these conceptualizations of childhood. The second half of the course examines children as members of families. Just as we can understand the symbolic child figure as a social construction, so we will see that race, class, gender and sexual orientation are key factors influencing the lived experiences of actual children and their parents. Additionally, we will examine how the proscribed “best methods” of child-rearing seem to change continuously—parents who consult various “experts” often receive contradictory advice. Works we may engage include Guggenheim's What's Wrong with Children's Rights?, Lareau's Unequal Childhoods, Postman’s Disappearance of Childhood, and the photography of Sally Mann. By the end of the course, we should have deeper understandings of childhood as a social construction, of the debates surrounding some of the issues that society currently deems relevant to children, and of differing child-rearing practices that parents employ.

This course analyzes what politics—as a practice and as a concept—has meant, means now, and could mean. In what ways has "politics" (as a noun) been used to name a distinctive practice (call it citizenship) located in a specific space in the social world, and in what senses has "political" been used as an adjective to depict certain dimensions of every human practice? How is practice and conceptualization related in different places and moments? Are there distinctive challenges (and gifts) entwined with politics and with the political dimensions of our lives? Are new dilemmas (and possibilities) emerging now, as globalization unsettles the nation-state form? We explore these questions by closely reading several canonical texts in political theory and using them to think about contrasting ways that human beings have practiced politics and invested it with meaning. In turn, working through several profound -and profoundly different- visions of politics will help us learn to “think politically” about collective circumstances, choices, and actions. Key theorists include Machiavelli,Marx, Arendt. Wittgenstein, and Foucault, paired with critical race, feminist, and queer theorists.

The focus of this course is the history of the human being’s need to turn what is painful about the human condition into something beautiful. We explore the etymology of the word‘transformation’ and ask ourselves why humans have invoked the ecstasies and agonies of the process to explore the breadth and depth of the human psyche as it moves toward greater degrees of consciousness of self and world. We answer these questions by tracing the ancient science of alchemical transformation from its roots in the Stone Age, through the Eastern spiritual practices of China and India, into the embalming practices of ancient Egypt and the astrological symbol system of the Greeks, culminating in the work of C.G. Jung who discovered the ancient art of alchemy as the philosophical antecedent and language to his own transformational psychology, and so introducing the ancient art into the post modern world.The course culminates in The Alchemy Project where students will have the opportunity to experience transformation in thier own lives. Readings include: Eliade’s The Forge and the Crucible; Edward Edinger’s Anatomy of the Psyche: Stan Marlan’s Black Sun; Edinger’s Mystery of the Coniunctio and selections from The Alchemy Reader and Splendor Solis, together with readings from the Buddha,Freud, Jung and Hillman.

Re-visioning the classics, often in a subversive mode, has evolved into its own genre in recent years, and many of these literary and performance texts have been shaped by modernist and postmodern narrative innovations and avant-garde theatrical strategies. Several of these works are also informed by ideological criticism that reads “against the grain” of the “master-works” to produce new meanings. However, the revisionist genre also develops a tradition of literary and dramatic renderings of canonical works that look for continuity even in the context of stylistic invention and contemporary themes. This course examines assumptions and conventions surrounding intertextuality—the multiple ways in which texts and productions echo or are linked to earlier renditions. Readings (and viewings) include imaginative reinterpretations of myth, classical and modern drama, the novel, narrative poetry, dance performance as well as theoretical readings on revision and adaptation. Authors and artists may include: Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Henry James, Ola Rotimi, Joyce Carol Oates, Paula Vogel, W.B. Yeats, Adrienne Rich, Martha Graham.

In this class we will continue to explore the concept of narrative and the way writers interrogate literary and social conventions. As we consider how stories shape our notions of history, love, social class, and sexual identity, we will examine how the thinking of readers, and stories, changed from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. We will follow the emergence of a new form of narration, whose protagonists include not only characters, but also time, place, the city, the reader, and language itself. We will read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, James Joyce's Ulysses, as well as essays on film and narrative theory.

Most medical inquiry focuses on narrow issues of disease from within a biomedical framework. It rarely steps back from the particulars to ask larger philosophic questions regarding the goals of medicine and healthcare. In this class we take the opposite strategy to focus on the larger theoretical and philosophical issues in U.S. healthcare. We unpack the underlying concepts and principles that organize contemporary medical research, practice, and education. We look at the strengths and weaknesses of today’s dominant models of medicine and we consider the possibilities of alternative conceptual frames. Plus, we consider how much of the administrative and financial problems of today’s healthcare crisis can be explained by conceptual and philosophical issues. Our inquiry will be an interdisciplinary approach that draws from medicine, philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, disability studies, cultural studies, poetry, drama, and documentary.

This course explores the historical and current relationship between the science of ecology and environmental philosophy and policy. The focus will be on case studies, past and present, that shed light on interactions between ecological science and environmental thinking, the connections of both to broader intellectual, cultural, social and political trends, their sometimes tenuous relationship to one another over the past century, and their continuing interactions in the discourse over the fate of nature. Considerable attention will be given to the science of ecology–its concepts, explanations, and methods—as well as to the broad cultural background in which it has developed. Topics include changing views of equilibrium and the balance of nature, myths of the primitive, the transfer of metaphors between social theory and ecology, cross-cultural transfers and exchanges of ecological knowledge, and recent debates over biodiversity, population, “invasive” species, global warming, and environmental justice. Readings will include historical works by authors from Linnaeus and Darwin to Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, and Rachel Carson, and a variety of works by recent and contemporary ecologists and environmental thinkers, such as Paul Colinvaux, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare, Chris Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth, and Ken Thomson, Where Do Camels Belong?

At the birth of this nation, it was assumed by journalists and their readers that journalists were partisans, telling stories from particular points of view. But the growth of the modern newspaper combined with the ideals of science transformed the image, self-image, and practice of journalism, which now claims to worship at the altar of objectivity, to present information or “news” without bias. This ethic has carried over to the contemporary media, despite challenges from critics that include political power brokers that outspokenly seek to marginalize the press. In this course we examine this ideal or promise: is it possible? desirable? To pursue this inquiry we consider challenges to objectivity by figures such as Truman Capote, who linked a “new journalism” to a personal point of view, Robert McChesney, whose corporate media perspective provides a powerful macro analysis of modern journalism, and Jay Rosen, who articulates the postmodern shifts brought on by the Internet that have redefined and realigned the relationship between the journalist and audience. Readings include Walter Lippmann, Tom Wolfe, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and Ben Bagdikian.

What are the effects of a large, permanent military upon the political economy and society of the United States? What are the effects on other countries of their militaries? What are the effects on local societies of US military bases? What is the role of the various militaries in the history of colonial/neo-colonial control, and in contemporary empire? How are military establishments and violence linked to ethno-national, class and other social movements—and to the repression and domination of such movements? What does a military do to/for the people who staff it? What are the implications of militarization in such areas as gender, human rights, the environment, sports, knowledge and learning? What is the role of militias, “para-militaries”, and guerrillas? What methods can social or popular movements use in their attempts to subvert, paralyze, eliminate or otherwise struggle against militaries, military bases, and weapons? Texts may include, among others: A. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War; C. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire; C. Enloe, Nimo's War, Emma's War; K. Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century; K. McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico; J. Horgan The End of War.

The central theme of this course is modernity as a social and intellectual project. We will read a number of critical social theory texts which deal with modernity as their central theoretical subjects. The goal of this class is to introduce various theoretical perspectives about modernity and to examine different aspects of the current debate on modernity and its fate in our time. In the first few weeks of the class we will study original works by “classical” social theorists (Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber). We will then read two modernist texts (Habermas’ Transformation of Public Sphere and Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air), a text critical of modernity (Foucault’s Knowledge and Power), and a text which deals with modernity and the non-western world (Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom). This is a relatively advanced social theory course and student participation in the course requires some knowledge of classical or contemporary social theory.

This course uses social analysis, political speeches, and fiction to explore the relation of race-making, nation-building, and story-telling in the case of the United States. Our broadest premise is that collective subjects (nations, peoples, classes, religions, races) are formed and reformed through narratives joined to collective action. Our specific premise is that "American" nationhood has been formed by racial domination and opposition to it, as represented in and through contesting narratives. Our goal is two-fold: to assess racialized nationalism in its historic and recent iterations, but also to assess how it is contested differently by scholarly treatises, political speeches, and works of literary or cinematic invention. Part One uses social analysis to explore the intersections entwining settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and immigration restriction in forming American society and imagined ("American") national community. The practice and meaning of "democracy," has been set by white supremacy, but also enlarged and contested by social movements and counter-narratives that re-conceive the meaning of race and nation. Part Two thus uses speeches by activists to clarify the debates in the civil rights era about the goals, means, and stories that define effective social change. Part Three compares how fictions in literature and film represent the relation of race, nation, and democratic possibility. Authors include James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, Claudia Rankine; theorists include Michael Rogin, Glenn Coulthard, Mae Ngai, Hortense Spillers, Saidiyah Hartman, Frank Wilderson, Fred Moten. Films include Bamboozled, Get Out, and Black Panther.

Despite extensive numbers of people diagnosed with mental illness, there remains considerable debate and controversy surrounding these diagnoses. This class uses narrative theory and emergent work in mad studies to explore competing approaches to madness. We start with an overview of narrative theory as relevant to issues of mental difference and suffering. Key narrative topics we discuss include plot, metaphor, character, and point of view. With narrative theory as our guide, we consider multiple approaches to mental difference from mad science pathology to mad-positive art, activism, and spirituality. Throughout our exploration, we will be inspired by the mad pride idea that mental difference is often best seen as a “dangerous gift.” Mad gifts provide a way of knowing and being outside the norm but at the same time they can be challenging to navigate and negotiate.

This course is about dissent in a double sense: criticizing accepted ethical values, and criticizing old ways of philosophical thought about ethics. It is about affirmative ethics, not just criticism. Over the years the course has grown into a survey of classic writings in ethical philosophy from Socrates to Sartre. One half of the class is devoted to the classical Greek thought of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. There is a brief critical look at Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. The modern period covers the ethics of Romanticism, Marxism, Pragmatism, Existentialism, and Feminism—as dissenting alternatives to mainstream Kantian and utilitarian ethics. Authors include Dewey, Emerson, Hegel, Gilligan, James, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Schiller. From these texts perspectives emerge on: (1) criticizing unjust (e.g. sexist) ethical standards, and inventing fair ones; (2) choosing ethical careers and life paths; (3) recognizing responsibilities to the larger community; (4) resolving ethical dilemmas; (5) forming and justifying visions of a better world; (6) dialoguing productively with adversaries by respecting different ethical positions without the cop-out of "anything goes;" and (7) getting beyond dead-end debate on idealism/realism, egotism/altruism, objectivism/relativism.

In this course, we will examine several questions that arise for students interested in the relation of theory to interdisciplinary study. What is theory essentially? How does it help us to develop approaches and shape questions for study? What are some influential theoretical schools and theoreticians? What do they say and how might they be related to one another? We will proceed through readings from Structuralism to Post-structuralism, focusing on language, feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and interpretations of power and discourse. Authors considered may include Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray.

Rethinking the Biological Sciences: Haraway, Theory and Culture Today’s biology has moved out of the lab and into our biofutures. Genetically modified foods, in vitro fertilization, cloning, the biomedical enhancement debates, neurochemical psychic manipulation, and even the possibility of a posthuman culture all loom on the immediate horizon. These biological developments challenge our familiar ways of thinking, and they upset many of our most cherished categories and priorities. As a result, new ways of thinking must emerge to understand and cope with today’s biological sciences. One of the most important scholars to respond to this challenge is feminist historian of science, Donna Haraway. Haraway is unique because of her extensive use of recent theoretical work from humanities and cultural studies to think again about biology. We devote this class to a close study of her work, and we consider the intellectual context of Haraway’s writing in feminist theory, science fiction, and the biosciences.

In this class we take a visit to London in the years 1590 to 1616, in search of Shakespeare and the London in which he lived and wrote. During this period, London, a major political and economic power, was also a center of dramatic arts unparalleled in the rest of Europe. Volumes of plays were written, theaters were built all over London, and each day, during the season, those theaters were filled with audiences from every social and economic class and gender, including foreigners from the rest of Europe, the Mediterranean basin and beyond. Theater was a craze. It was one of the key centers of cultural life in London. And in the center of this remarkably, vibrant creative world, Shakespeare was a superstar. We examine the city of London, Shakespeare, and theater from literary, historical, social, political and cultural perspectives, including questions of gender and race. Our consideration of the theater is in relation to other forms of popular entertainment, such as singing, dancing and mountebank performances, and how they might have influenced Shakespeare. We read a selection of plays written by Shakespeare, that might include As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, Othello and Measure for Measure. We also see film versions of some of the plays and go to the New York theater, when we are able. We pay special attention to performance.

The astounding power of the ancient Greek philosophers and poets has been felt from their times to ours. Scholars in every age have pondered the questions they raised: What is the nature of man? What is the relationship of God or gods to humans? What is a good life? How do we live it? What is our relationship to nature? This course examines the way the Greeks examined these questions and the Greek influence on subsequent cultures. Works to be studied may include: The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, The Symposium, The Consolation of Philosophy, Midsummer Night's Dream, and selected poetry from Wordsworth, W.B. Yeats, and Wendell Berry.

"Baseball As a Road to God" aims to link literature about our national pastime with the study of philosophy and theology. This seminar aims to blend ideas contained in classic baseball novels such as Coover's Universal Baseball Association, Kinsella's Iowa Baseball Confederation, and Malamud's The Natural with those found in such philosophical/theological works as Eliade's Sacred and Profane, Heschel's God in Search of Man, and James' Varieties of Religious Experience. It discusses such themes as the metaphysics of sports, the notions of sacred time and space, and the idea of baseball as a civil religion. Not for the faint-hearted, this course requires students to read over two dozen works of varying lengths in addition to supplemental readings as they might arise. Weekly papers are also required. As with any serious commitment of one?s time, the rewards of taking a seminar such as this can be great.

C.G Jung wrote: “I am not addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery faded, and God is dead.” The course unfolds around the question: How does a person locate meaning in the postmodern age when traditional belief systems have been emptied of symbolic authority? In his discovery of the symbol making function within the human psyche, Jung offers a possible answer. Variously described as the religious, imaginative or creative instinct, this psychological function offers the possibility of losing and finding multiple meanings throughout the cycles of life. We begin by defining pre modern, post modern and post secular within their historical context with special attention to the role of language. We identify the influences that shaped Jung’s discovery, focusing on the classical elements that characterize a religious experience. Finally, we look to figures in the history of culture that have lost and found meaning, Jung himself in his Red Book and the Buddha. Readings may include selections from the Collected Works of C.G. Jung; Julia Kristiva,This Incredible Need to Believe; Nietzsche, The Gay Science; William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience; Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie; Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth; Caputo’s The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida and On Religion; Richard Kearney, Anatheism.

In this course we will focus intensively on Euripides? Medea and Toni Morrison?s Beloved, which acknowledges Medea as an important source. In exploring the cross-cultural and trans-historical enrichings each work may cast on the other, we will address questions of the political economy of the family and of sex, the nature of exile, the politics of the body, and the status of maternity. We will consider how these two distinctive genres?drama and novel?confront issues of agency and decision, and more broadly how literature displays and exposes the tensions and contradictions of the social. Readings will include essays by Gayle Rubin, Hortense Spillers, Nicole Loraux and others.

What is the economy, and how did it come to be understood as a separate, discrete realm of society, so unique that it demands its own academic discipline? How have philosophers understood the basic problems of economics—production, labor, coercion, risk, leisure, desire, self-realization, and the constraints of the material world—over time? Contemporary economics is modeled to a great extent on the hard sciences, and claims to reveal the universal laws that underlie the immense complexity of economic life. The economy, however, is itself a historical and political realm, shaped in fundamental ways by human choices, and the very way that people think about and try to make sense of the economy is influenced by historical circumstance. In this course, we will read and analyze works of economic philosophy and literature in order to understand the variety of ways that people have looked at economic life. Readings may include Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Friedrich Hayek.

French philosopher and cultural historian Michel Foucault’s radical approach to the power, knowledge, and subjectivity destabilized rigid distinctions between the individual and discursive structures, and it anticipated a new form of "bio-politics." These approaches have been broadly influential across the humanities, cultural studies, and social theory. Foucault’s later work on care of the self was devoted to understanding philosophy as a way of life, a spiritual exercise, and a practice of freedom. This work opens up new ways of thinking about ancient philosophy and religious life. Authors we discuss beyond Foucault include Stuart Hall, John Caputo, Pierre Hadot, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Merton, and Thich Nhat Hahn.

On August 6 1945 the city of Hiroshima in Japan was leveled by the first atomic bomb. On August 9, the city of Nagasaki was leveled by the second bomb. It is estimated that between 210,000 and 270,000 people were killed, some immediately, some from the radiation days or months later. These estimates do not include more long-term impacts of the radiation, such as birth defects, or various cancers. How can we, as human beings, make sense of these events? How can we cope with, and represent unthinkable trauma? What are the politics of such representation? What processes of healing are possible through remembering? Is it important to represent such traumas, and if so, why? This course will explore a selection of historical, literary, cinematic, and other venues in which this unrepresentable trauma was, and continues to be, indeed, represented. We will aim at exploring the processes of mourning, remembering, and representing collective cultural trauma. Readings will include: Hein and Selden, Living With the Bomb, Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” and selected short fiction, poetry and photographs. We will also view documentary footage and the narrative film Black Rain.

Aristotle described metaphor in The Poetics as “the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances” (XXII). Since ancient times, poets and philosophers have written about metaphor and its power, while visual artists have transposed the techniques of figurative language from the verbal to the visual. Metaphor has been employed in texts as ornamentation, as a means of introducing new ideas and concepts, and as a way of imitating the working of the mind itself. In this class, we investigate how metaphor, verbal and visual, influences our processes of thinking, creating, and innovating, both intellectually and artistically. And we experiment with making our own metaphors, in words and pictures. Readings will range over poetry, philosophy, theory of art, and linguistics, including essays by Plato, Paul Ricoeur, I.A. Richards, Max Black, Wayne Booth, George Lakoff, and Rudolf Arnheim; poetry by Shakespeare, Campion, Rossetti, Rilke, Stevens, Wordsworth, and Bishop, concrete poetry, and Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse.

This course is intended as an exploration of language as vehicle for processes of globalization and as framework for our understanding of them. What role did language play in the changes wrought by early capitalist transformations and the colonial expansion and what role does language continue to play in them? Conversely, how have these global changes affected localized communities and the languages that identify them? Finally, how do we come to grips with the multiplicity of frames provided by the advent of new technologies, and has such multiplicity altered our trust in the possibility of global communication? To answer these questions we will examine how the colonial experience has given rise to value laden linguistic practices that mirror and sustain the racializing of privilege; and how the experience of language loss encountered by voluntary and involuntary migrants can attack the integrity of the self. During our discussions we will keep an eye on the shifting line between information and disinformation and ask ourselves how we identify “truth” in all of this. While ultimately concerned with language, our discussions will have a wide scope ranging from issues of political economy to collective consciousness and individual psychology.

It can be argued that until the 1880s one thing was almost entirely absent in Japanese literary and performing arts: the notion of an interiorized subject. In fact, the ancient Japanese arts are examples of extreme "exteriority" that privilege form, word play and intertextuality and enfold the human being and human erotic passions within rituals for purity and harmony with a cosmology of the heavens. This course will explore ancient and premodern Japanese poetics and prose, performing and visual arts, from the very first writings through the nineteenth century, in relation to sociocultural history and belief systems such as Buddhism and Shintoism. Texts will include: selections of poetry, emaki (picture scrolls), noh and puppet plays, selections from The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book, and the earliest forms of manga.

The political upheavals and events of recent years have focused much attention on “Islam” and its cultures and texts, especially the Qur’an. Most of the attention and interest in the Qur’an, however, has been reductive and superficial, amounting to no more than de-contextualized misreadings of certain verses in most cases. This seminar will serve as an introduction to the Qur’an as scripture, but also as a generative and polyphonic cultural text. We will start with a brief look at the legacy of Qur’anic studies within the larger paradigm of Orientalist scholarship and “Western” approaches to all things Islamic. We will, then, address the historical and cultural background and context of the Qur’an’s genesis as an oral revelation, its intimate affinities with Biblical and Near Eastern narratives, and its transformation into a written and canonized text after the death of Muhammad. We will then examine the Qur’an’s structure as a “book” and read selections from its most famous chapters and explore how they were deployed in various discourses as Islam became the official religion of a civilization and an empire. Readings and discussions will focus on the themes of prophecy, gender and sexuality, violence and peace. The seminar neither assumes nor requires any prior knowledge of Islamic studies or Arabic.

Same as V18.0721001. With the rise of science, modern people believe they irrevocably separated themselves from their primitive, premodern ancestors. But are scientific practices really superior to other forms of inquiry? Does science provide the objective impartial knowledge that many moderns believe, or do social, cultural and traditional influences actually determine its course? And, in the face of increasing ecological crisis, will moderns eventually look back on science as not our greatest gift but our worst curse? For those interested in these kinds of questions, Bruno Latour has been one of the liveliest, most controversial, and most engaged scholars of the field. His work combines poststructuralist theory with robust empirical studies, and he consistently unpacks dense ?actor-networks? of subjectivities, technologies, organizations, and social power. In this course, we follow Latour from his early ethnographies of laboratory life, through his more philosophical works on Modernism and Truth, to his later works on the environmental and the politics of ?nature.? Along the way, Latour?s deliciously iconoclastic ideas will challenge us to rethink science, modernity, nature, and ourselves.

This course examines the development of capitalism in the United States over the course of the twentieth century, paying special attention to the relationship between the economy and political, cultural and intellectual transformations. It will cover the rise of the modern corporation, the labor movement, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the economic impact of war in the twentieth century, racism and economics, the changing economic position of women, deindustrialization and the stock market boom of the 1990s. The class will focus in particular on the problem of how Americans have confronted and sought to understand hard economic times. In a country whose culture privileges the ?American dream? of economic success, how have people dealt with struggle, difficulty and failure? How have financial panics, depressions and recessions, and economic decline affected American political economy and culture? Readings will incorporate both primary and secondary sources. Possible authors include Betty Friedan, John Kenneth Galbraith, Malcolm X and Ronald Reagan.

This course uses Lenin, Gramsci, and Foucault to pursue two questions: first, how does power operate in society? Second, what is the role of intellectuals in relation to power and politics? On the one hand, we ask: what is power? (Is it located in the state? corporations? media? in discourse? In what ways is power a problem and in what ways a resource?) On the other hand, we ask: what is “the intellectual?” What sort of social category and institution is thereby denoted? What do intellectuals claim to know and what is the political impact of their authority? Our goal is to explore how intellectuals give us a language to “see” power, but also how they have been implicated in the very forms of power they teach us to analyze. Readings include texts by Lenin, Gramsci, and Foucault, among others.

The pessimistic turn of Western art and philosophy in the second half of the 19th Century stands in sharp contrast to the progressive rhetoric of that era. European and American newspapers, serving the interests of nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism, trumpeted modernity as an Age of Progress. Mechanical marvels (cameras, electricity, railroads, telephones) and political emancipations (the end of monarchies and abolition of slavery and serfdom) were seen as signs of new and better ways of life for all. The novelists, playwrights, and theorists we will read in this class, on the other hand, tended to see things differently (although not always unanimously among themselves). Committed to a kind of whistle-blowing that was either a mode of representation (“realism”), an intellectual disposition, a moral commitment, or all the above, many of our authors conveyed some version of an idea expressed by the defense at Baudelaire’s obscenity trial in the late 1850’s: the point of art in the modern world is “to expose frank, unidealized, and unpleasant realities.” The most conspicuous “’unpleasant realities’” revealed in our readings cast doubt on philosophical and religious certainty, the sanctity of marriage and family, and the stability of identity and personality. While the general direction of our readings is toward what Weber called “disenchantment” and Freud called “discontent,” it should be noted that most of our readings include a surprising and comforting amount of comedy and wit. Readings will include: Dickens’s Great Expectations, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, James’s The Bostonians, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and The Decay of Lying, and selections from Baudelaire on modernity and Mill on feminism.

The body has always been a productive site for the construction of meanings, boundaries, and hierarchies. Taking the trope of the body in pre-modern Arabo-Islamic tradition(s) as its starting point, the course will examine the modes in which various discourses have inscribed themselves unto the body and competed for it. Readings and discussions will revolve around a number of interrelated questions: How was the body gendered and constructed in the early texts of the tradition? How were these representations appropriated and altered in later periods? How were desire and pleasure regulated, contained and/or celebrated ? How were religious representations of the body as a reflection of the divine appropriated by profane poetry and mystical writings? What boundaries and laws existed for the body?s movement in space (particularly female), and what were the implications and punishments for violating them? How did rituals of purity deal with blood and bodily fluids? How did religious and legalistic discourses deal with otherized and marked bodies of religious and sexual minorities? Readings (in translation) will range from excerpts from the Qur?an, hadith, (Prophetic tradition) poetry, Islamic law, philosophy, and erotica.

The process of modernization in Western Europe spanned hundreds of years, from its nascent origins in the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, into the twentieth century. In Japan this same process was collapsed into a few short decades around the turn of the nineteenth century. We will examine the shift from a premodern to a modern system of subjectivity and perspective in language, literature, and the performing arts. We will ask: What was the impact of Western imperialism, science, art, gender and sexual politics on Japanese language, literature and film? What were the internal conditions that made Japan ready for modernization? How did premodern conventions create a modernity in Japan different from Western models? What resisted modernization, and why? Our texts will include literature The Miner (Sôseki), In Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki), Ankoku butô dance, and secondary sources on history, language, and society, including Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature.

How has popular culture served as a path (or obstacle) to social, political and economic equality for African Americans? Can black popular culture align itself with political movements without compromising its artistic integrity and authenticity? What is “authentic” black popular culture anyway? For over a century black artists, intellectuals, political leaders and audiences have engaged with these questions, as part of a larger debate on the relationship between African American participation in popular culture and their status in American society. Because popular culture has historically been one of the few avenues of success open to African Americans, some have credited it with offering black artists and entertainers the possibility of economic success, social mobility and cultural visibility. Others, however, have charged popular culture with perpetuating negative stereotypes and limiting blacks in their quest for equality. Far from being settled, this debate continues today. This course will trace the development of this debate from a variety of historical, cultural and disciplinary perspectives. Students will analyze some of the key historical and contemporary works on the subject, as well as some of the movies, television shows, literature, music and comedy routines that were at the center of this debate.

This seminar will investigate the cultural contributions of Africans in the formation of the contemporary Americas. There will be a particular focus on the African religious traditions that have continued and developed in spite of hostile social and political pressures. Because of their important roles in the continuations of African aesthetics, the areas of visual art, music and dance will be emphasized in the exploration of the topic. This seminar will also discuss two important African ethnic groups: the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria, and the Bakongo of Central Africa. It will highlight the American religious traditions of these cultures, e.g., Candomble Nago/Ketu, Santeria/Lucumi, Shango, Xango, etc., for the Yoruba, and Palo Mayombe, Umbanda, Macumba, Kumina, African-American Christianity, etc., for the Bakongo and other Central Africans. In the course discussions, the Americas are to include Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, the United States and numerous other appropriate locations. There will also be a focus on visual artists like Charles Abramson, Jose Bedia, Juan Boza, Lourdes Lopez, Manuel Mendive, etc., whose works are grounded in African based religions. In addition, we will explore how African religious philosophy has impacted on every-day life in the Americas, for example in the areas of international athletics, procedures of greeting and degreeting, culinary practices, etc.

"How did the world begin?" and "why is there anything rather than nothing?" and "Who made the starts?" These are primary questions: the kind children like to ask, and philosophers, and theologians, and scientists. In this course we'll read and discuss the various classic accounts of Creation. We will anchor the course in the Hebrew tradition (Genesis) and the Greek tradition (both mythic and philosophical: Hesiod, and the Presocratics), and from there examine sources and analogs in Babylon, Sumer, Egypt; their counterparts in Japanese, African, and other global mythologies and religions; the story of their interpretation (especially in the Talmudic and Patristic traditions); and, finally, their relation to the paradigms of modern astronomy and philosophy. Texts will include Genesis; the Theogony; the fragments of the Presocratics; selections from Plato's Timaeus and other dialogues; Midrash on Genesis; Commentaries by Church Fathers such as Augustine and Gregory on the Creation story; and selections from ancient Middle Eastern, Hindu. Buddhist, Taoist, and Muslim scriptures and myths.

In the period of the American and French Revolutions, theater and theatricality took on powerful political significance. This course explores the convergence between theatre and politics during the Age of Revolution, while seeking parallels to the theatricality of our own political culture. Partly, we examine the historical conditions and cultural innovations that fueled writers and artists during this volatile and dynamic period between 1770 and 1850. Partly, we examine dramaturgy and theatre aesthetics exploring the links between history, and theories of drama, playwriting and stage practice, performance styles and critical reception. In addition to class discussions, students will be responsible for an extensive research project (paper and presentation). Course materials may include works by such figures as Voltaire, Rousseau, Sheridan, Blake, Schiller, Byron, Goethe, Stendhal, Robespierre, Washington, Pitt, and Paine; the music of Mozart and Beethoven; and the art of Piranesi, David, Ingres, and Delacroix.

We compare and contrast the revolutionary events, processes and outcomes in Haiti, Mexico, and Cuba. Each had significant anti-colonial or anti-imperial components, as well as social and political conflicts and alliances within the immediate societies of the revolutionary countries which involved both "internal" and "external" groups and ideas. None of the three cases were simple reflexes of European or North American ideas and politics, although such external factors were among the revolution’s causes and effects. We consider the roles of investors, landowners, mineowners, merchants, bankers, politicians, state administrators, peasants, laborers, intellectuals, migrants, and other social groups in-country or in the relevant imperial centers. We analyze interrelations among kinds of capitalism, and anti-capitalist ideologies or social forms and types of rationality; changing revolutionary processes and demands; the changing role and organization of the state; the supporters or antagonists of the revolution among differing social groups at differing times; the revolution's relation to earlier and later movements. Where necessary, we invoke examples from other countries. Readings might include selections from Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century; DuBois, Avengers of the New World; Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation; Sheller, various papers on gender and power in 19th century Haiti; Gonzales, The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940; Pérez Cuba, Between Reform and Revolution; Kapcia, Cuba in Revolution: A History Since the Fifties; A. Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution; Meeks, Caribbean Revolutions and Revolutionary Theory; Foran, Theories of Revolution and later works.

From Emerson, through William James, to John Dewey, and beyond, Pragmatism has been a uniquely American contribution to political theory and philosophy. The pragmatists are concerned with action in the world, to address “the problems of men and women.” They construct a philosophy for understanding and guiding that action. That philosophy values imaginative vision and exploratory experimentation. It looks forward to the new rather than dwelling on explaining, justifying, or condemning what exists. Pragmatism, like classical political theory, is concerned with politics as a way of achieving a good society, in which people can lead good lives. It does not view politics narrowly in terms only of elections and governments. Reading pragmatism as philosophy, in the first half of the course we will consider ethics, theory of knowledge, theory of science and social science, and put these in the service of democratic theory. Through the lens of the “Dewey-Lippmann controversy” we will consider the capacity of citizens for informed responsible participation. In the second half of the course we will consider democratic experiments: economic democracy, civic journalism, progressive education, participatory action research, and conflict resolution. Possible readings include Emerson’s “The American Scholar;” James’s “Moral Equivalent of War;” Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, “Creative Democracy,” and “The Economic Basis of the New Society;” Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, Jay Rosen's. What Are Journalists For, William & Katherine Whyte's, Making Mondragon, and so on.

How do we understand racial identity? How is race represented in popular culture and how has that representation changed over time? In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will answer such questions by focusing intensively on the black cultural studies approach to understanding race. Paying particular attention to the writings of Stuart Hall and those who have been influenced by him, we will introduce to or deepen students? knowledge of this important school of thought that has arisen out of an Afro-British context?a context that has been deeply influenced by African American experiences and political discourses. We will historicize this work, exploring antecedents to black cultural studies and the contexts in which it arises. In the process, we will be asking questions about black identities and their relationships to gender, class, and sexuality and about the African diaspora. Taking this opportunity to study the way that non-Americans look at race will help us break from commonsense and misleading notions of ethnic identity in our own country. At the end of the course, we turn our attention to the United States. Throughout, we will pay particular attention to how race plays out in popular culture. Writers to be studied will include, W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, Kobena Mercer, Paul Gilroy, Isaac Julien, and Zadie Smith.

In this seminar we will examine some of the most provocative ways in which photography has been imagined and practiced over the past century and a half, from early accounts of the daguerreotype to recent work on the digital image. Through close examination of photographic practices and works, as well as the critical discourses that have grown up around them, we will endeavor to understand not just what André Bazin calls the “ontology” of the photographic image, but also how the photograph gets thought about, talked about, utilized and, in turn, produced fantasmatically as a particular kind of object and a special way of picturing. In other words: what, precisely, is a photograph? Do we draw upon its material, chemical, visible, invisible, affective, or discursive properties to describe the essential aspects of this amazing and ubiquitous medium? Readings may include Azoulay, Barthes, Batchen, Bazin, Benjamin, Fox Talbot, Kracauer, Mann, Metz, Silverman,Sontag, Tagg, Wall.

Through an art historical lens, this course explores visual communication in a media-saturated society. We will analyze how people “speak” through images and symbols as well as words and how we “read” what we see. This class will attempt to understand the tools used to reach an audience. Images and texts from the past and present will help us assess the character of various media and their personal as well as political implications. Texts will include works by Barthes, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Lev-Strauss, McLuhan, Sontag and other seminal essays on the media.

From Sappho?s love songs to the Psalms of David, poetry in the ancient Greek and Hebrew traditions expressed the gamut of human thought, feeling, and experience. We will explore the Book of Psalms and Sappho, along with the Song of the Sea, the Songs of Songs, and the oracles of the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), and the odes of Pindar, the poetry of Anacreon, and Archolochus, and lyrical portions of the Iliad and Odyssey. We will consider historical setting (from war-tribes to kingship and city-state); culture (from the heroic to the democratic and the theocratic); theme (love, God, honor, sexuality, justice, forgiveness); function (the who, what, where, when, and why of any poem). Art and architecture, philosophy, and religious literature will also be examined to provide an in-depth, three-dimensional sense of the context. And finally, we will, throughout the semester, ask the question why these poems, some of them 3000 years old, speak to us with such startling immediacy, power, and urgency in the twenty-first century.

This course takes a look at the history of racial and ethnic relations in the U.S. from the standpoint of Latinos. We will explore how recent changes in Latino demographics, now the largest minority group in the U.S., are challenging our notions of whiteness, blackness, and the dominant White-Black race paradigm. Are Latinos the ‘new whites’? Or are they becoming instead the ‘new blacks’? What does this mean for politics and public policy debates? Through memoirs, fiction, videos, and social science theory, we will trace the history of racialization in the U.S. (from slavery to our latest Latino immigration cycle) in order to interrogate both the fluidity and the challenges confronting race relations in U.S. society. Readings will include Michael Omi, David Roediger, Leo Chavez, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Lisa Lowe, Clara Rodriguez, Piri Thomas, and Samuel Huntington.

Historically nature has been a fundamenHistorically nature has been a fundamental philosophic concept for analyzing the origin and structure of the polis. It has been used not only as a means for explaining the political and its limits, but also as a regulative device for shaping preferred political outcomes. Determining certain actions or institutions as natural can provide a sanction to political decisions so they seem necessary. This is the case whether the natural is determined according to honest scientific analysis, or as the manipulation of belief, with Plato?s hierarchy of souls in the Republic being the most overt. Nature appears in various forms in regard to the political, easily identifying the polis as the end of natural processes or as a protection against a hostile nature that obscures the more important questions of how and why such an answer is arrived at. In this course we will examine the use of the concept of nature throughout the history of political philosophy, with a particular emphasis on the effect the concept has had on the analysis of human activity and on understandings of preferred societal outcomes. Our main, but not exclusive, texts will be Plato?s Republic and Hobbes? Leviathan.

What is the political and economic value of people? Who has the right to control human reproduction and why? How do individuals express reproductive autonomy, and how do states exercise population control? This course will focus on birth control (broadly defined as the management of human reproduction) as a lens through which to see how the evaluation and cultivation of national populations has shaped government in the modern world. In discussing and writing about topics such as race and eugenics, overpopulation and sustainability, sterilization and abortion, human rights and demographic nationalism, students will draw on a variety of primary and secondary sources to develop their own ideas about government and self-government in the age of birth control. Readings will include works by Angela Davis, Thomas Malthus, Emma Goldman, Michel Foucault and Margaret Sanger.

This course explores the ‘global city’ of New York from the standpoint of three downtown Manhattan neighborhoods: the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and SoHo (South of Houston.) What are the historical and political roots of these communities? What are the social and global economic forces shaping their identity, from architecture and public space to labor markets and community organizing? How is gentrification—and the subprime housing crisis—transforming them? Through lectures, films, theory, literature, and walking-tours of each of these three neighborhoods, students will gain a firsthand understanding of the idiosyncrasies and struggles that make New York City such an unique place.

Louis XIV used theater, music and the visual arts to solidify and articulate his supremacy and in so doing created for himself the role of the magnificent and mighty "Sun King." But in his time Louis was not alone in understanding an idea that we now think so modern that image is all and that the manipulation of that image is the way to power and influence. This course examines performance and its expressions, both theatrical and political, during the Baroque period and the Age of Enlightenment. Readings may include: John E. Wills, 1688; Aphra Behn, The Rover; Jean Racine, Phaedra; Pierre Corneille, The Theatrical Illusion; Pedro Caldern de la Barca, La Vida es Sueo (Life is a Dream); Molire, La Tartuffe and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme; Susanna Centlivre, A Bold Stroke for a Wife; John Dryden, All for Love; Marivaux, The Game of Love and Chance; Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer; the music of Monteverdi, Lully, Bach, Hndel and Glck; as well as the art of Rubens, Le Brun, Watteau and more.

The popular imagination findsThe popular imagination finds them irresistible; so did the great artists of the Renaissance. The major religious traditions all have versions of them; so do various cults and makeshift religions. They appear on television, and in Dante?s Commedia. Angels and demons seem to interest everyone, yet very few people have a clear notion of exactly what they are supposed to be and where they come from. Our course will explore the tradition of the angels and the devil in the great global faiths; their origins in the myths and religions of the ancient world; their history in art and literature, from the Greek daimons to modern movies, novels, and cartoon art. Readings will be excerpts from the classic religious texts such as the Bible and the dialogues of Plato, from poems such as the Commedia and Paradise Lost, novels such as The Screwtape Letters and The Exorcist; museum visits for visual art and film viewings will round out the course.

This course examines the conceptual art movement, the hopes that shaped its political and aesthetic stratagems, and its legacy. We will begin by revisiting some of the major assumptions and conditions that catalyzed conceptualism, including the cultural climate of the 1960s, the critique of the object-status of art, concerns about the broader social function of the artist, as well as commodity culture. We will then take up our topic from various thematic vantages: the historical and philosophical question of language; the notions of “dematerialization” and documentation, particularly as aesthetic strategies aimed at “suppressing the beholder”; the practice of institutional critique and the broader idea of the world as system; the relationship between art, “information,” and the technological imaginary of the times. A few seminar meetings will be dedicated to focusing on a single artist or artwork. As we proceed we will also keep an eye on the question of why and in what ways conceptualism has persisted beyond its founding moment in the late 1960s, and what its more recent iterations in artistic production—as ‘global-’, ‘neo-’, and ‘post-conceptualisms’—have to offer.

Fears of “yellow peril” (and brown “Turban tides”) run deep in the present and past of U.S. political and commercial culture. Its imagery and stories are just beneath the surface of everyday discourse and always latent—readily triggered by an incident, real or fabricated. SARS fears, charges of Chinese “pirating” U.S. cultural properties, the racial profiling of “Arab-looking” peoples, and Asians “taking over” U.S. higher education all illustrate contemporary forms of Asian “peril.” Americans are woefully unaware of this scapegoating tradition and its history, and consequently remain particularly vulnerable to its ideological and affective power. Seminar students will learn historical research skills and collaboratively document historical and contemporary case studies. We’ll explore what can and must be done to counter these fallacies and practices.

Emotions and sentiment have always been a problem for moral philosophy. Aristotle found emotions useful for the development of character but not as the Good in itself. Kant went even farther and considered all emotions as unnecessary and even dangerous for moral actions. But other thinkers, such as the British Moralists, have tried to understand the importance of emotions in moral motivations and they actually developed systems of morals based on emotions. In this course we will first develop a philosophic conception of moral action. Next we will consider how evolution has shaped the debate over the cause, significance, and status of actions and sentiments commonly considered as moral. Finally, we will read contemporary social psychology on the acquisition of moral sense and the causes of destructive behavior. Our main, but not exclusive, texts will be Kant?s Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals, Hume?s An Enquiry Concerning The Principles Of Morals, and Frans de Waa l?s Primates and Philosophers.

What is the relationship between political life and the divine? What role do the gods play in the course of history? How has religion influenced the organization of human communities and the conduct of war between them? How have political events shaped peoples’ understanding of the divine? This course will explore such questions through the study of texts from ancient Israel and Greece. We will read the works of poets, prophets, and historians, and consider the different ways that they grapple with the human-divine relationship. Readings may include selections from the Hebrew Bible, Greek poetical works, and the historical writings of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Josephus. Though occasional secondary sources may be assigned, emphasis throughout will be on close and careful reading of primary texts.

Poetry is an art which can express our deepest feelings and thoughts about our human experience. Too many of us, however, encounter poetry timidly. We wonder how we can make meaning of poetic words and rhythms so distinct from those we use in our daily lives. In this course, we will work at developing poetic sensibilities, not by digging to find clues to the mysterious meanings of poems, but by gaining an understanding of how to read poetry as a language within a language. We will study how the concentrated language and sounds of poetry help us to grapple with the shades and subtleties of our own experience. The course will begin with a study of various verse forms, and then focus on the art of close reading. We will read many poems ranging from early English lyrics, popular ballads, and Shakespeare’s sonnets, to modern and contemporary poems, as well as poems originally written in other languages.

Course meets October 21?December 11. Wallace Stevens holds an important place among modern American poets, yet his readers continue to puzzle over Stevens? work, especially as it relates to the most pervasive concerns of the twentieth century. In his poetry, he writes very little about specific cataclysmic events of his time, yet Stevens ponders questions of faith in a secular world, considers heroism and loss in a century marked by two world wars, and probes our human relationship to nature in an increasingly industrialized and technological world. In this course, we will take a close look at Stevens? relationship to the twentieth century. While his poetry will be at the center of the class, we will focus our attention on how Stevens gives voice to the contradictions and complexities of the modern world. Stevens? own work will be the main text of this course, yet readings will include contextual material drawn from literary criticism, intellectual history, philosophy, and politics.

In this course, we will read philosophical dialogues and their modern successors—a novel and a play—about art and rhetoric. Ancient to modern writers have been fascinated with the power of art, and for each, ideas about art are connected to those about language and society. Our reading of Ion and Gorgias will look at Plato's ideas on art, rhetoric (oratory), and power before his Republic. Phaedrus, written later, develops Plato's ideas about the relation of the intellect, the emotions, and the appetites. Diderot's Rameau's Nephew revisits some of Plato's themes from the perspective of the eighteenth century and the changing world of the Enlightenment. Finally, we will explore dialogue form in the twentieth century through Virginia Woolf's novel Between the Acts and Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia. Among the questions we will consider together are the following: How are ideas born from conversation (and from our conversations)? What is the importance of human relationship in intellectual inquiry? Readings may include works by Plato, Diderot, Stoppard, and Woolf.

The words we use to categorize people are proliferating, signaling the increasing instability of our cultural categories for describing race, gender, and sexuality. But is this instability and border crossing a new phenomenon or are we simply more aware of the tenuousness of identity? How are we to understand this explosion of identities and conscious border crossings? We will explore such questions from a historical perspective, beginning with the eighteenth century and ending in the mid-twentieth century. To further focus our discussions, we pay particular attention to racial and gender boundary crossing. Where possible, we will look for circumstances where these racial and gender boundaries intersect. Throughout the course, we hope to give students a historical context for understanding the various ways people cross-cultural boundaries and to alert students to the ways race, gender, and sexuality can be intertwined. Writers we will most likely read include: Nella Larsen, Lisa Duggan, Judith Butler, James Weldon Johnson, and Ross Chambers. Films we may study include Imitation of Life and Looking for Langston.

?Home,? Spengler wrote in The Decline of the West, ?is a profound word.? This course examines the concept of home as it has been studied in literature, philosophy, psychology, and art. It examines the issues of home as a place in which we dwell, a place where we find our center. It examines the idea of home in relation to the physical world, cultural ties, and a changing world, a world where homelessness and exile are common. Readings may include: The Odyssey, King Lear, E.M. Forster?s Howards End, and selections from the works of Frost, Freud, and Jung.

This course examines a theme common to Eastern and Western philosophical traditions?the call to a simple life. Great thinkers in both traditions warn of mindlessly accumulating possessions and entering into a dangerous, frenetic competitiveness. This course examines the value of a simple life and asks such questions as: Is it possible to lead a simple life in an urban setting or does it imply living close to nature? Does such a life lead to a dangerous passivity or does it, as Plato suggests, provide reflective leaders for the society? Does it improve our relationships with others or does it affect them adversely? Texts may include selections from Plato?s Republic, Aristotle?s Ethics, Shakespeare?s The Tempest, Thoreau?s Walden, and the poetry and essays of Wendell Berry.

This course will examine the impact of James Reese Europe (1880-1919) on the development of American music in the early twentieth century. An innovative musician and conductor, Europe organized and conducted the first jazz concerts at Carnegie Hall (1912-1914), founded an African American music school, and served as a collaborator with Irene and Vernon Castle, who made social dancing a world-wide rage. During World War I, James Reese Europe led the all-black “Hellfighters” 15th Infantry Band, which performed throughout France and offered Europeans their first exposure to ‘le jazz hot.’ Readings may include A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe by Reid Badger; excerpts from Music and War in the United States, edited by Sarah Mahler Kraaz; From Harlem to the Rhine by Arthur W. Little; Black Manhattan by James Weldon Johnson; and Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 1890-1919 by Tim Brooks. Sound and film recordings will also be utilized.

This course will explore the conflicting ideologies apparent in the works of Noble Sissle and James Hubert “Eubie” Blake. Famed for such hit musicals as “Shuffle Along” and “Chocolate Dandies,” Sissle and Blake formed one of the most successful musical theatre collaborations of the 1920’s. Their work draws strongly on the minstrel tradition in African American theatre, and attempts to subvert many of its conventions. It may be argued that their commercial success had the opposite effect, and served to update and modernize the very conventions that they sought to destroy. We will examine the effect of Sissle and Blake’s oeuvre on musical theatre in general and African American musicals in particular. Readings may include excerpts from Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls by Allen Woll, Black Drama by Loften Mitchell; Terrible Honesty by Mary Douglas, Blacks in Blackface by Henry T. Sampson, Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake by Robert Kimball, and Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 1890-1919 by Tim Brooks. Archival sound and film footage will be utilized along with such works as Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled.

This class surveys popular culture studies from their origin in 19th century debates about the relation of culture to society, politics, and aesthetics. The phrase “popular culture” was once used to describe the everyday life and pastimes “of the people", but today its often used interchangeably with “mass culture” to refer to entertainments and objects manufactured for profit and distributed as widely as possible. How did this shift in meaning come about? Do mass and popular culture effect our social-political life, or reflect it, or neither? Have technological developments such as the invention of cameras and computers harmed or helped? What has happened to art in the age of mass culture? Why, for instance, do discussions of a popular song or TV show so often focus on its political and economic meanings rather than the aesthetic and emotional pleasures it may yield? Is it desirable or possible to restore “the people” as the makers, rather than the consumers, of culture? Readings may include critics such as Marx, Arnold, Leavis, Adorno, Benjamin, Greenburg, Macdonald, Barthes, Radway, Fiske, and Frith.

Some critics refer to television as a “story machine.” Whether that label is fair or not (can a machine produce real art?), it seems clear that television providers can barely keep up with the audience’s insatiable demand for more and more stories. Most television narrative comes to us in the form of a “series,” a dramatic structure that is our basic focus in this class. How has that format assisted or limited TV storytelling? Are the storytelling structures we associate with TV unique to that medium or simple modifications of novelistic and cinematic conventions? In this class we will consider some of the basic Aristotelian components of “good” drama in relation to American television history—genre, character, plotting, and spectacle—and also in relation to questions about how a given program represents life and provides pleasure. We will also examine TV in the light of theories about the cultural and political consequences of its dominance of the American cultural scene in the latter half of the twentieth century and (it might be said) current decline. Readings will be chosen to accompany the close study of several television shows including a season or two of Mad Men and The Wire.

Referred to both as “the father of lies” and as the founder of the discipline of history, Herodotus (5th cent. B.C.E.) stands at the threshold of historical and ethnographic discourse in the West. Through its primary topic, the wars between Greece and Persia, Herodotus’ Histories examines the distinctive social, political, and religious characters of the major cultures of the ancient mediterranean world. In this class, our reading of the Histories will include a consideration of the following questions: how does the perspective of the Histories contribute to, and complicate, contemporary notions of exoticism and “otherness”; what is the relation of the Histories (with its recognition of cultural pluralism) to the themes and structure of Athenian tragedy? How does Herodotus construct a history out of travel, hearsay, participant-observation? What can we learn from Herodotus about historical method? Our readings will include (in addition to the primary text) selections from: Michel De Certeau, The Writing of History; Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and Historical Method; Leslie Kurke, Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece.

This two-credit course focuses on Plato’s Republic. Our goal is two-fold: we practice the art of close reading to reveal the complex and contradictory layers of meaning in a text, and, we explore the enterprise of political theory by lingering over the central questions Plato raises. Those questions concern philosophy and its relationship to politics, the relationship between knowledge and power, the nature of justice, the role of art, poetry, and myth -of culture in its many senses- in politics, questions that remain urgent in contemporary debates about theory and politics. We begin with Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos to explore the relationship between tragedy and philosophy, and we end with rflections on Plato by contemporary political theorists.

This two-credit course focuses on Machiavelli’s political theory. Our goal is two-fold: we learn the art of close reading, to reveal the complex and contradictory layers of meaning in our texts, and we explore the enterprise of political theory by lingering over the central questions Machiavelli raises. What is the nature of power? What is the character of “good” leadership? What is the relationship between morality and politics? How can human beings sustain forms of self-government, given their short-sightedness and fear, the predatory and narrow interests of ruling classes, and the tendency of institutions to become reified forms of power? We focus on his two greatest texts, but also read several of his greatest interpreters.

In this class we will explore ancient Greek attitudes toward war, as represented in epic, drama, and historiography. Among the topics we will consider are: rhetoric and rationales for and against war; war and social cohesion; war and empire; the stakes of civil war; war and gender; the social costs of war; the implications for our contemporary situation. Readings may include, Homer, Iliad; Sophocles, Ajax; Aeschylus Seven Against Thebes; Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis and Trojan Women; Aristophanes, Peace; Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War; and twentieth century mediations on the problematic of war, such as Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain; Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam; Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the poem of force.

"The poem of force," according to Simone Weil, the Iliad is also a poem of forceful influence. In this course we will read the Iliad intensively, followed by an examination of its heritage on the dramatic stage. In the first half of the semester we will primarily explore the Iliad in terms of the poetics of traditionality; the political economy of epic; the ideologics of the Männerbund (the "band of fighting brothers"); the Iliad's uses of reciprocity; its construction of gender; its intimations of tragedy. In the second half of the course, informed by a reading of Aristotle's Poetics, we will focus on responses to the Iliad in dramatic form; possible readings will include Sophocles' Ajax; Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis; Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida; Racine's Andromaque; Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates; Ellen McLaughlin's Iphigenia and Other Daughters. Students will give presentations on an Iliadic intertext of their own choosing.

One of the two foundational epics of so-called Western Culture, the Odyssey features a wily hero whose journeys are extraordinary and whose longing for home is unbounded. The Odyssey offers a complex meditation on brotherhood, bestiality, sexuality, kinship, and power; it is the great epic of cross-cultural encounter, in all its seductive and violent aspects, as well as the great poem of marriage. An adventure in nostos (homecoming), the Odyssey shows us the pleasures and dangers of voyaging among strangers. Constantly exploring the boundaries between the civilized and the savage, the poem offers as well a political critique of many ancient institutions, not least the family, patriarchy, hospitality customs, and the band-of-brothers so central to epic ideology. And as a masterwork of narrative art, the Odyssey asks us to consider the relation of fiction to “truth.” We will explore these and other matters in the Odyssey, and may make some concluding forays into contemporary re-workings of Odyssean themes and characters.

Paradise or plantation? Spring break, honeymoon, or narcotics way station? First World host or IMF delinquent? Where do we locate the Caribbean? From Columbus’ journals to Pirates of the Caribbean, the Caribbean has been buried beneath the sedimentation of imagery by and large cultivated by non-Caribbeans, including colonial governments, settlers, international tradesmen, tourist agents and their clients. Caribbean peoples have had to re-member the islands that they eventually called home—haunted by a history of slavery and still a site of consumption and exploitation. A unifying trope, Caribbean landscapes function as metaphor, emblem, or even character. This course takes an interdisciplinary and transnational approach by examining the material relations of consumption, which links places, bodies, capital, text, plants and landscapes, within the Caribbean, the U.S. and its former colonial powers. Thus, the study of the Caribbean emphasizes that the region is central to the understanding of modernity and globalization as a modern construct. Some of the theorists/writers we will engage are Edouard Glissant, Jamaica Kincaid, Maryse Condé, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Mimi Sheller.

Nearly a generation after Chuck D of Public Enemy called hip hop music ?the Black CNN,? Nas?s latest CD declares that ?Hip hop is dead,? and proceeds to investigate who killed it. We?ll put off the autopsy to ask a more basic question: is there a hip hop aesthetic or common themes/tropes that can be traced through the various hip hop-infused cultural forms? To find an answer, we?ll take an interdisciplinary approach to examining hip-hop?s influence on poetry, fiction, film, art, style, and visual culture to see how it operates as a definitive cultural form and (in Raymond Williams? words) ?a particular way of life.? A key subtheme will be the relationship to American mass culture. Equally important to the discussion will be questions of race, class, and gender. Readings will include cultural critics Todd Boyd, Michael Eric Dyson, Mark Anthony Neal, and bell hooks, among others. Also on the list are Krush Groove and Juice (film); Black Artemis? Picture Me Rollin? (fiction); Danny Hoch?s Jails, Hospitals, and Hip Hop (drama); Willie Perdomo, Kahlil Almustafa, and Russell Simmons? Def Poetry Jam (poetry); and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Lady Pink (art/graffiti).

Are the outcomes of capitalist exchanges fair or unfair? Is capitalism supportive or detrimental to democratic virtues? Does the welfare state rectify the problems of capitalism or exacerbate them? John Rawls’ work A Theory of Justice has greatly shaped these considerations of the welfare state. His theory refined many of the debates concerning the fairness of capitalist economic outcomes and the effects capital accumulation has on democratic virtues. According to Rawls, the welfare state in some form was necessary for capitalism to have morally acceptable outcomes. But, critics of Rawls have called into question welfare state interventions, many finding them economically inefficient and detrimental to democratic virtues. Other critics have founds Rawls’ theory to be too limited in its impact, thereby supporting more extensive interventions into capital accumulation. In this course we will try to answer questions about the morality of capitalist accumulation by studying theoretical conceptions of Rawls’ work and the responses of his critics. The main texts of Rawls’ critics we will consider are Nozick’s Distributive Justice and Cohen's Rescuing Justice and Equality. We will also discuss current welfare state policies such as basic income grants.

At least since Freud’s “Dream Book,” psychoanalysis has taught us that psychic life is thoroughly steeped in images. This course will pursue the implications of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the subject, which elaborates and complicates Freud's thinking with respect to the ways in which psychic experience and visuality are intertwined. By examining a range of psychoanalytic texts alongside several films and photographs, we will begin with Lacan’s proposition that the “I” comes into being though the subject’s identification with his or her mirror image. This is ultimately a problem for sociality itself, for we learn to relate to others by way of how we relate to ourselves, our primordial other. Course materials MAY include the writings of Borch-Jacobsen, Butler, Descartes, Fanon, Freud, Heidegger, Klein, Lacan, Laplanche, Winnicot as well as several films, including Capturing the Friedmans, American Psycho, I Am Not Your Negro, and The Thin Red Line.

In Bolivia, where non-indigenous elites long ruled exclusively, an indigenous president now leads a socialist revolution; in Argentina, where governments once massacred youth by the thousands, citizens now fill the streets to demand accountability; in Guatemala, where Catholicism long reigned supreme, evangelicals now find rapt audiences. Throughout the region, the once unthinkable is becoming normative, and everywhere pundits wonder: are these the stirrings of a new Latin America or the rumblings of old ghosts in different form? This course has two aims: on one hand to decipher how Latin America has conventionally been imagined, by introducing students to major themes in the region?s study like mestizaje and machismo, authoritarianism and revolution, dependency and industrialization; on the other hand to question how valid these imaginaries remain against the backdrop of contemporary examples of social, political, and economic transformation in Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, and elsewhere. Readings draw widely from academic articles in history, anthropology, and political science, excerpts from memoirs and contemporary journalism, and samplings of music and visual arts, generating thematic student papers asking: is it time to re-imagine Latin America in this new century, and if so, how? Authors include Simn Bolvar, Gabriela Mistral, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Gustavo Gutirrez, Hermano Vianna, Javier Auyero, and Mariano Azuela.

This course examines the foundations, implementations, and implications of intellectual thought(s) of the African diaspora from the period of slavery in the Americas and post-emancipation societies through the present. Arguably, black intellectualism maintains roots in African-descended religious and cultural societies that pre-dates slavery in the West, however, this seminar seeks to explore the emergence of critical thought through historical, sociological, literary, autobiographical, religious and ethnographic writing that addressed vital issues facing African-descended peoples in the modern world. The matrix of race, class and gender has been a useful lens to analyze the systems and structures in place that both benefited and impeded racial progress. Yet, the themes of migration, nationalism, humor, music and empire-building also serve as essential tools to untangling and mapping the roots and routes of black intellectualism on four continents. Through a diverse set of materials (primary documents, films, music, and art) that utilize a multimedia and interdisciplinary approach to a range of historical, literary, political and economic questions central to Afro-diasporic experience(s), this course will critically engage the writings of thinkers who were at the vanguard of the Afro-modern and theoretical world, such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Arturo Schomburg, Richard Wright, C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Paule Marshall, and Angela Davis.

The central goal of this course is to examine the relationship between democracy and empire in the American case. Partly that means asking theoretical and historical questions about the relationship between the universalist claims of "liberal democracy" on the one hand, and practices of exclusion, racial domination, and military coercion on the other hand. Partly that means considering the ways that culture, livelihood and politics "at home" are shaped (in anti-democratic ways) by the institutions that enable global power. We at first relate these questions to domestic and international politics around the 9/11 attack, but we will focus on the Obama years. How have Americans understood and responded to economic crisis? How should we understand the pervasive language of economic and national decline? How do we explain bi-partisan support among elites for Bush-era "national security" policies, yet intense polarization over "domestic" policies whether taxes, (in)equality, "entitlements," immigration, abortion or gay marriage? What is the racial subtext of these debates? We will study the rhetoric and narratives of Obama, and of the "Tea Party" and "Occupy Wall Street" movements, to consider their different visions of democratic citizenship. To conclude we will compare the representational strategies in recent Hollywood movies that star George Clooney as a character awakening to (and trying to redeem) his complicity in imperial power, political corruption, and economic crisis.

This course focuses on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Our goal is two-fold. Partly, we learn the art of close reading to reveal the complex layers of meaning in a text. Partly, we expand the canon of political thought by exploring how a literary text asks foundational political questions. Indeed, the only profound thinkers about politics in American history are the great literary artists, like Melville, Faulkner, Ellison, and Morrison. Only they analyze American life and politics with the depth and artfulness we find in Plato, Hobbes, Marx, or Nietzsche. We read Melville, then, to explore how he dramatizes questions about the nature of nature, the practice of philosophy, the meaning of justice, the forming of national identity, racial violence and empire, the role of myth (and art) in culture. In addition to Moby Dick, we read Melville’s greatest short stories—“Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and “Billy Budd”—as well as scholarly readings about American culture and politics.

Colonialism left indelible marks on the cultures and societies of its colonized subjects. While nation-states have emerged, the colonial legacy and its various effects continue to haunt post-colonial societies and the modes in which they represent their history and subjectivity. The novel is a particularly privileged site to explore this problem. This course will focus on the post-colonial Arabic novel. After a brief historical introduction to the context and specific conditions of its emergence as a genre, we will read a number of representative novels. Discussions will focus on the following questions: How do writers problematize the perceived tension between tradition and modernity? Can form itself become an expression of sociopolitical resistance? How is the imaginary boundary between “West” and “East” blurred and/or solidified? How is the nation troped and can novels become sites for rewriting official history? What role do gender and sexuality play in all of the above? In addition to films, readings (all in English) may include Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Naguib Mahfuz, al-Tayyib Salih, Abdelrahman Munif, Ghassan Kanafani, Elias Khoury, Sun`allah Ibrahim, Huda Barakat, Assia Djebbar, and Muhammad Shukri.

As Japan entered its modern period around the turn of the twentieth century, a new literary trope appeared, into which a variety of premodern and ancient archetypes were collapsed. This is what I am calling the ?dangerous woman,? a powerful, sexy, and intimidating female figure who was reminiscent of, although not a replication of, earlier frightening females of the literary and dramatic tradition. This course will begin by reading a selection of premodern and ancient texts featuring various archetypes of witches, shamanesses, and female demons. Then we will examine how these figures are transformed with modernity, and what literary, social, gendered and other functions they serve as objects of male desire and fear. We will read a selection of relevant feminist literary theory alongside the fictional texts. Texts will include: Excerpts from Buddhist sutras, a Noh play, selections from The Tale of Genji, fiction by Izumi Kyoka, Enchi Fumiko, Sakaguchi Ango and Nakagami Kenji, and feminist theory by Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Cixous and Clement.

In the world of fundamentalists, intermingled New York has and still represents the epitome of danger and evil about the American experiment—the public mixture of classes, genders, races, sexualities, spiritualisms, and the-devil-knows-what-else!#? As elite Protestants created a refined European-affected "high brow" culture, they also created myriad "others"—a transgressive, lowly polyglot city of shadows, miscegenation, and impurity. This two-semester course will examine the historical formation of both sides of this false yet foundational binary. Dangerous 1 focuses on the colonization and romance of Mannahatta from Leni Lenape coastal communities to Kieft's War to Henry James' Washington Square to Ayn Rand's Wall Street. The rise of wealthy white Anglo American Protestants from port trade becomes the basis for an unresolved, striving elite culture constantly moving uptown away from intermingled, non-WAAP others and from it's own repressive self-disciplining. Dangerous 2, taught Spring 2012, will focus on "Subaltern New York." Course materials will include: Sanderson's Mannahatta maps, Burn's documentary"New York" (1999), Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies (2006), and a course reader. Intensive dialogue-driven seminar approach. Students will learn how to conduct a case study using primary sources. Walking shoes and passion for NYC prerequisites! Friday lab required. Dangerous #1 & #2 can be taken separately or together in any sequence.

Paradise or plantation? Spring break, honeymoon, or narcotics way station? First World host or IMF delinquent? Where do we locate the Caribbean? From Columbus’ journals to Pirates of the Caribbean, the Caribbean has been buried beneath the sedimentation of imagery by and large cultivated by non-Caribbeans, including colonial governments, settlers, international tradesmen, tourist agents and their clients. Caribbean peoples have had to re-member the islands that they eventually called home—haunted by a history of slavery and still a site of consumption and exploitation. A unifying trope, Caribbean landscapes function as metaphor, emblem, or even character. This course takes an interdisciplinary and transnational approach by examining the material relations of consumption, which links places, bodies, capital, text, plants and landscapes, within the Caribbean, the U.S. and its former colonial powers. Thus, the study of the Caribbean emphasizes that the region is central to the understanding of modernity and globalization as a modern construct. Some of the theorists/writers we will engage are Edouard Glissant, Jamaica Kincaid, Maryse Condé, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Mimi Sheller.

This course will examine the relationship between theater and the public life of New York City by studying the history of The Public Theater. We will consider The Public?s effect on American theater, as well as its relationship to Greenwich Village and, by extension, New York City. We will research and discuss landmark productions from the last 50 years, examine the democratizing impulse of the New York Shakespeare Festival and identity theatre, and discuss the recent influence of Joe?s Pub on the development of new work. Questions to be explored include: What social and political circumstances led to the creation of the Public? How did producing Shakespeare and fostering new plays, seemingly in opposition, become the twin missions of the theater? Has the Public contributed more to the American Theater because of its ?importance? or its artistic achievements? How has the Public helped to shape the culture and public life of New York City? The course may include attending performances of the 2007-08 season at The Public, and will feature a special appearance from The Public?s current Artistic Director Oskar Eustis. Readings may be taken from the following genres: biography (Joseph Papp: An American Life, Helen Epstein; A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, James Shapiro), theatrical history (Shakespeare Alive!, Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland; On the Line, Robert Viagas, Baayork Lee, Thommie Walsh), social history (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs), and plays (Topdog/Underdog, Susan-Lori Parks among others).

Equating Latin America and revolution seems almost a truism. From Zapata to "Ché" to Chávez, the region's modern history is a tale of one movement promising epic change to the next, each more dramatic than the last and collectively giving rise to an image of Latin America as a cradle of firebrand leaders and riotous masses leaving in their wake endless cycles of unrest. But to look deeper into this history is to find a world of complexity, of peoples pursuing radical change but also gradual reform, at times taking up ballots and at times taking up arms, at times in the factory and at times on the farm, at times from the left and at times from the right. All of it "revolución," yes, but what kind? And through what means? And for what ends? And at what cost? This course traces the evolution of revolution in twentieth century Latin America, from the final collapse of Spanish colonialism in 1898 to the rise of chavismo in 1998, and finally considers the impact of this history on Latin America today. Authors may include, among others, Mariano Azuela, Eva Perón, Gustavo Gutierrez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Raul Zibechi.

Puppets and objects used in performance collectively fall under the term ?performing object.? In this course we will study the history of performing objects and consider their practices in a variety of contexts including religious ceremony, political activism, and popular theatre. We will examine several ?case studies? from a variety of perspectives including folklore, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and performance studies. These case studies will include the Javanese wayang kulit shadow plays, Japanese bunraku, Peter Schumann?s Bread and Puppet Theater, the English Punch and Judy tradition, and Victorian toy theatres to name a few. In each study we will examine the aesthetics of the objects as well as the relationship of the manipulator to the objects and how these values and dynamics change depending on the culture and circumstance of performance. Finally we will consider contemporary performance and the use of puppetry in the work of major downtown New York theatre artists including Basil Twist, Lee Breuer, Theodora Skipitares, Great Small Works, Ralph Lee, Julie Taymor, and Dan Hurlin. Readings may include texts by John Bell, Eileen Blumenthal, Andr Breton, Edward Gordan Craig, Martin Heidegger, Wassily Kadinsky, Heinrich von Kleist, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Filippo Marinetti, Frank Proschan, Richard Schechner, Steve Tillis, and George Speaight.

Antigone: heroine or harridan? Political dissident or family loyalist? Harbinger of the free subject or captive of archaic gender norms? Speaking truth to power or preserving traditional privilege? Sophocles' Antigone has been good to think with since its first production in the fifth century BCE. From ancient commentators through Hegel to contemporary gender theorists like Judith Butler, readers have grappled with what Butler calls "Antigone's Claim." The play's exploration of gender, kinship, citizenship, law, resistance to authority, family vs. the state, and religion (among other issues) has proved especially compelling for modern thought. In this seminar we will closely read the play and some select commentary; supplemental readings may include writings of philosophers, classicists, playwrights, political theorists. We will also conclude with some contemporary adaptations/re-imaginings of Antigone on the stage.

Beyond spectacular touchdowns and 120 mph aces on the tennis court, sport remains a vital institution for analyzing the ideological/theoretical frameworks of nationalism, diplomacy, economic development, corruption, gender and race. From the historic implementation of Title IX policy to the role of FIFA's World Cup in shaping national development plans, sport should be understood beyond masculine bravado, violence and the joy and agony of competition, but also as a serious vehicle for conceptualizing and analyzing the triumphs and limitations of our society and its complicated history. In what ways does sports reify concepts of race and gender? How is it utilized as a tool of challenging domestic inequalities and/or improving international relations? What is the relationship between sports and ethics? This course examines sports within the Americas, Western Europe and an African context during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will read key texts in the field of sport studies that illuminate the significance of sport in shaping culture and politics in our global society.

From the earliest myths to the latest big-budget action film, powerful monsters continue to menace the innocent and frighten the listener/reader/viewer. Monsters have been pivotal to folk tales, myths, literary texts, and films. These hybrids of living creatures and otherness have endured since the beginnings of time and inhabit both the ancient and modern imagination. In the nineteenth century, they became intertwined with immigration, industrialization, and scientific experiments. By the end of that century, the psychological monster emerged whose terror lies in its grip on the subconscious. Modern monster stories and films are often sites of veiled political commentary. Post World War II, the shock of the atomic and hydrogen bombs released a new generation on screen of radioactive primitive monsters, while space exploration created another group of alien monsters. In this course, our monsters will include, but not be limited to Frankenstein's Creature, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Nosferatu, Godzilla (including the original Japanese Godjira), King Kong, assorted Blobs, Things, and Aliens, as well as creatures from the worlds of Harry Potter and Bilbo Baggins. The reading/viewing material will include a mix of fiction, films, and critical articles.

This course will consider the multiple identities of Moses from a broad range of historical, religious and cultural perspectives. Particular attention will be on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Moses emerged as a figure of modernity, hovering between history and memory, between cultural purity and hybridity, and between linguistic expression and its limits. We will begin with the Hebrew Bible and debates about reading, re-reading and re-writing the Bible as literature. We will then explore the figures of Moses as an Egyptian, as the liberator of enslaved peoples, and as a complicated figure of modernism and post-modernism. Course materials will include excerpts from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, works by Hurston, Dunbar, Freud and Assmann, music by Schoenberg, Lee ?Scratch? Perry, and Marley, as well as a selection of Moses-inspired films and artwork. Final assignment will allow students to imagine their own Moseses for the twenty-first century.

The idea of an America/Amrica has been diffracted but reconstituted by a number of theorists, policymakers, (forced) laborers, artists and revolutionary activists. Each of these actors sought to craft a new existence that distinguished itself from ?Old World? tyranny and tensions, particularly through the creation of imagined communities of identity (i.e. racial, political, religious or sexual). America/Amrica proved to be an extraordinarily malleable idea that liberated, united and modernized. Yet, the narrative of ?Our America? also revealed its internal contradictions and fissures (the underside of modernity) within institutions and social phenomena it helped to perpetuate such as slavery, race, sexuality, diaspora (exile), and empire. This undergraduate course examines the cultural and political investments that have characterized the American Hemisphere and its components. The matrix of race, class and gender has been a useful lens to analyze the systems and structures in place that both benefited and suppressed American peoples and their contributions to the construction of America/Amrica. Yet, the themes of migration, nationalism, sexuality, creolization, and empire-building also serve as essential tools to untangling and mapping the roots and routes of American development. Through a diverse set of materials (primary documents, secondary readings, films, music, and art) that utilize a multimedia and interdisciplinary approach to a range of anthropological, historical, literary, political and economic questions central to American experience(s), this course will critically engage the writings of thinkers (Jos Mart Walter Mignolo, Amy Kaplan, Toni Morrison) who have helped us better understand the ?contact zone where Anglo and Latin America meet up, clash and interpenetrate.?

This seminar will explore guilt as the link between the three broad disciplinary arenas of our title. Literary works from ancient tragedy to the modern novel thematize guilt in various ways. Freud places it at the center of his practice and his theory of mind. While law seems reliant mainly upon a formal attribution of guilt in order to determine who gets punished and to what degree, we might also suggest it relies upon ?guilty subjects? for its operation. With all of these different deployments of the concept, we might agree it is a central one, yet how to define it remains a substantial question. Is the prominence of guilt in modern Western culture a vestige of a now-lost religious world? Is it, as Nietzsche suggests, an effect of ?the most profound change man ever experienced when he finally found himself enclosed within the wall of society and of peace?? Freud seems to concur when he argues that guilt must be understood as a kind of internal self-division where aggressivity is turned against the self. Is guilt a pointless self-punishment, meant to discipline us? Or does it continue to have an important relation to the ethical? Readings may include Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, Slavoj Zizek, Toni Morrison, Ursula LeGuin, W.G. Sebald, and some case law, among others.

?Only in Russia is poetry respected?it gets people killed. Nowhere else is poetry so common a motive for murder.? So said the poet Osip Mandelstam before his own state-sanctioned death in 1938. What is the connection between art and politics in Russia? Why have artists been at once so vital and so brutally repressed? Making sense of this terrible paradox means exploring the relationship between art, ideas, and a history of state repression on an almost unprecedented scale. Rather than studying art and politics separately, in this course we will consider together poets, anarchists, novelists, liberals, playwrights, communists, romantics, and other revolutionaries who defy generic categorization. In this course we will examine the cultural history of Russia from Pushkin to Putin, considering Soviet culture alongside that of the Tsarist Empire and today?s capitalist democracy. We will focus on the themes of ?Russia? and ?revolution,? organizing our ideas around these central concepts at the same time that we call these categories into question. How have ideas about revolution shaped ideas of Russianness? How have narratives of revolution been told and retold? How has the role of the revolutionary changed over time? What is the relationship between Russian society and the state? We will look for answers to these questions in significant texts by prominent Russian writers, thinkers, and actors on the world stage. Through posters, paintings, films, cartoons, speeches, essays, poems, and prose, we will trace recurring narrative threads pulled throughout the last two hundred years of Russian history. Readings will include works by Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Bakunin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Lenin, Mayakovsky, Stalin, Trotsky, Akhmatova, Khrushchev, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn.

Course meets October 21?December 11. Enrollment is restricted to students planning to study abroad at an NYU site during Spring 2009. This course is for students preparing for a study-abroad experience during spring 2009. Working in small groups and on individualized projects, students read travel literature and other works about the place they?re going, study its culture (art, architecture, music, history, food, etc.), and work with maps, guidebooks, and other orientation tools. In order to practice getting into the mindset of the traveler, the course also encourages students to look at New York through the eyes of the foreigner by exploring the city as a tourist (visiting museums, tourist attractions, etc.) and by reading travel writing about New York. Students are required to blog about their responses to the readings and other assignments, and to work with the students abroad who are taking The Art of Travel course. Reading assignments are individualized for the city and country of each study-abroad site, but some readings are for the whole class: these may include selections from de Botton?s The Art of Travel, Urry?s The Tourist Gaze, MacCannell?s The Tourist, and Leed?s The Mind of the Traveler. For more information, see the course website: placeandliterature.com.

Open to sophomores only. This course is designed to introduce students to the historical, social, political, and cultural dynamics of the contemporary Middle East. We begin with the history and geographical contours of the region, and explore its various cultures, religions, and political systems as we analyze issues concerning economic development, secularism, gender, and Islamic politics. We will attempt to identify the defining characteristics that distinguish the Middle East as a region, but also its internal diversity. To do so, we will use multiple disciplinary approaches and perspectives, anthropological and sociological, economic and political as well as the literary and cinematic. Because the primary purpose of the course is to facilitate cross-cultural understanding, students will be asked to reflect on their own assumptions. Readings include: Dale F. Eickelman, The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach; Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood; Edmund Burke, ed., Struggle and Survival in the Middle East; Elizabeth Fenea, Women and the Family in the Middle East.

“Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real, for on the land there were great cities, and in the lake ever so many more, and in front of us stood the great city of Mexico” (Bernal Diaz, 1518). When Europeans set foot on the “New World” they found a continent deeply shaped by a metropolitan experience. Yet urbanization in Latin America is still seen as a recent phenomenon, the consequence of post-war industrialization and misapplied dreams of Eurocentric modernity. Together, these forces have fixed an image of the Latin American city as a site of endless contradiction—poverty and wealth, order and chaos, intimacy and isolation, hope and frustration. Can we speak of an urban “culture” in Latin America, and if so, what are its features? In this first part of a two course sequence examining urban life in Latin America, we will trace changes and continuities in state policy toward cities and their citizens, from the pre-Columbian metropolises of Cusco and Tenochtitlan, to the colonial capitals of Lima and Rio de Janeiro, to the industrial centers of São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Readings range from the urban critiques of James Scott and Carlos Monsiváis, to personal accounts of city life by Flora Tristan and Carolina Maria de Jesús, and to the literary musings of urban misadventures by Machado de Assis and Mario Benedetti.

The topic of clothing and adornment embraces a broad spectrum, from the need for protective covering to the desire for individual expression to the profit of international industries. Encompassing the history of civilization, clothing epitomizes the way a fundamental necessity has been transformed by cultural construction---as well as desire and creativity---into a complex social indicator, a matrix of culture, class, and gender identity. It is also about aesthetics and the love of beauty. This course looks at the topic from varied perspectives. The history of clothing/fashion is central, but In order to establish a critical grid and vocabulary to use with which to discuss clothing/fashion our sources will include interdisciplinary readings including cultural studies, art, sociology, economics, fashion theory, and semiotics. Above all, our primary focus will be on literature where we will explore the way ancient, medieval, Renaissance and modern writers use clothing as indic ators of civilization, individuality, sensuality, polymorphous gender, guilt, and conspicuous consumption. Literature will include, Gilgamesh, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Utopia, works by Longus, Shakespeare, and Zola, and some Hollywood films from the 1930s and 40s. Other writers include Ann Hollander, Roland Barthes, and James Laver. We will also visit at least one costume collection exhibit.

This course will examine the rise and fall of New Deal liberalism as the dominant political and social order of mid- twentieth century America. It will begin with the onset of the Great Depression as the event which sets in motion profound transformations in the economy, in the balance of political power, in the role of the State, and in the relations between social classes and ethnic/racial groups. It will explore the rise of the labor movement and the creation of the welfare state. It will analyze the impact of the Cold War on domestic politics. Discussions will probe the emergence of the civil rights, anti-war, and counter-culture movements. The class will analyze the conservative reaction against the New Deal culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Students will analyze primary documents, novels, and films such as the Grapes of Wrath and Dr. Strangelove, as well as read secondary works including Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal by William E. Leuchtenberg, America in Our Time by Godfrey Hodgson, and Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody.

In this course we examine the complex interactions between science and religion through a historical approach. While most popular presentations of science and religion often descend into simplistic models of conflict (the secular nature of modern science and its repeated conflicts with religion) or cooperation/co-existence (science and religion each have clearly defined domains), we explore a wider variety of relationships between the two. Moving beyond claims of superiority or mutual isolation, we consider the complicated negotiation of boundaries and proper authority between science and religion. We mainly focus on the relationship of science and various forms of Christianity, but we also discuss Hinduism, ecotheology, and other new religious movements. Topics include: religion and the laws of nature; how scientists can be religious; natural theology; evolution and religion; miracles and medicine; and the social roles of science and religion. Readings include Augustine, Galileo, Newton, Hume, Darwin, and Einstein.

Who is the “man of many ways”? Who is it who declares “I am nobody but myself”? This course creates a dialogue between Homer's Odyssey and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the masterwork that evokes the Odyssey even as it reimagines the scope of the twentieth century novel. We will focus on the historical and cultural specificities of each text but will also pursue the synergies and energies promoted by reading them together. We will thus consider what the ancient world has to say to the modern novel, and how modernity might reanimate a key text of antiquity. Among the topics we will consider: formations and representations of subjectivity in antiquity and modernity; the status of race and ethnicity; the structuring effects of kinship, marriage, institutions, the state, and the law; the cultural poetics and politics of narrative. What stories are we telling about “ourselves,” and/or about “others,” and to what ends? We will draw upon secondary readings in literary theory, gender studies, critical race studies, and other social sciences. Students need no background in these materials but do need critical energy and discipline.

We live in the universe, but do we really understand it? The struggle to make sense of the cosmos and our place in it is one of the defining aspects of human civilization. This class is an interdisciplinary exploration of how scientists talk about the universe, and particularly the way scientific knowledge and methods intertwine with issues in philosophy, religion, and other socio-cultural perspectives. We discuss the history of how scientists came to understand the nature of stars, galaxies, black holes, extra-terrestrial life, the “Big Bang,” and the apparent “fine tuning” of the laws of nature. We will examine not just ideas about the universe (What is it? Where did it come from?), but also the techniques used to arrive at those conclusions (observations and theories), literary and visual representations of the universe, and larger philosophical issues (Why are we here? Is there only one universe?). Readings may include: Newton, Kant, Einstein, Sagan, and Hawking.

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.

Perhaps the most recent ethical challenge faced by all of us is biotechnology. This seminar explores the relationship between the biological sciences and society in the U.S. throughout the twentieth century. We will examine how debates concerning "nature versus nurture" have been framed historically. We shall discuss the history of eugenics and investigate how the U.S. government saw eugenics as proffering an objective tool for testing immigration and sterilization policies. We shall ask if there is a link between eugenics and the Human Genome Project. How has the patenting of human and plant genes reshaped the conduct of scientific research? How are molecular biology and pharmaceutical and biotech firms simultaneously challenging and reifying notions of race in the age of biocapitalism? How much of human behavior is shaped by genes, and how does that affect issues concerning free will and culpability? Is it ethical for developing countries to use genetically modified crops rather than their own sustainable practices? Has epigenetics changed philosophical notions of reductionism? How has the HIV/AIDS epidemic reshaped the historical notions of the doctor-patient relationship and objectivity of drug testing? How has the gene-editing techniques of CRISPR-Cas 9 changed the debate on genetic modification of organisms, including humans? This course aims at drawing attention to the ethical, legal, and social issues generated by biology over the past century. Readings will include works from nineteenth-century scientists such as Charles Darwin, twentieth-century politicians such as Teddy Roosevelt, eugenicists, including Charles Davenport, the historian of science Dan Kevles, the philosopher of science Michael Ruse, the sociologist and historian of medicine Steven Epstein, the sociologist of race Troy Duster, and the historian of science Myles W. Jackson, as well as recent works by molecular biologists and geneticists on the definition of race, the role of patenting in biotechnology, how commercial interests are driving scientific research, and the future of genetic modification of species.

Long viewed as a region of landless peasants and landed elites, Latin America is now a continent of cities and mega-cities on whose streets vibrant social movements confront the challenges of metropolitan life. From Buenos Aires to Porto Alegre to Mexico City, new “streetroots” movements forge political identities, goals, and strategies out of a very particular experience of urbanization stretching back hundreds of years. This course examines the trajectory of these streetroots movements, asking: what social, political, and economic forces have shaped their strategies and demands over time? In turn, how have Latin American urban movements shaped developments in the region and beyond? What kinds of cleavages—geographic, generational, tactical—potentially hinder the broad appeal and usefulness of these movements? Among others, readings will include the work of João José Reis (Brazil), Peter Winn (Chile), and Deborah Levenson (Guatemala) to examine the interplay of race, class, and gender in the development of urban social movements, and first-hand accounts of urban activism by Abraham Guillén (Uruguay) and Hebe de Bonafini (Argentina). We will frame our analysis around seminal theories of urban social movements by E.P. Thompson, Manuel Castells, and Alejandro Portes, as well as contemporary contributions by Javier Auyero, Leonardo Avritzer, and Marina Sitrin.

This course explores the idea of "political theology." In conventional interpretations, the concept has suggested that forms of political rule are anchored in or justified by divine revelation, god's law, or a scripture that enshrines them. Commentators thereby infer a politics from a scripture that they read didactically. But many political theorists have interpreted political theology more broadly, to suggest that collective and personal life is always anchored in a form of faith, including faith in reason, or secularism or democracy. In addition, because no faith (or scripture) is self-evident in what it means and entails, people interpret and practice "theology" in deeply divergent ways, even within the same ostensible faith. Politics thus involves the practice of reading or interpretation, as well as judging and mediating conflict both within and among a variety of faiths. To explore how issues of interpretation and conflict relate faith, self-formation, and politics, we read closely but "against the grain" in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian gospels, while also exploring seminal modern commentaries. The modern readings may include: Kierkergaard, Fear and Trembling; Schmitt, Political Theology and The Concept of the Political; Dostoevsky, "The Grand Inquisitor;" Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, as well as work by William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and contemporary political theorists.

The modern world is in fundamental ways the product of imperial interventions. And the workings and legacies of empires continue to devastate the lives of people around the world. Among the most vulnerable to the violence are women. Yet, women have also long challenged the terms of oppression. And, in the process, they have defied, in generative and liberatory ways, common conceptions of what constitutes opposition, freedom, solidarity, politics and knowledge. This course delves into the particularities of women’s experiences and feminist decolonizing imaginaries. It will be guided by the following questions. How have women from the broadly defined Global South been rendered vulnerable and unruly? How have contestations over gender, race, class and sexuality marked the histories of colonies, empires and the Global South? How have imperial interventions made evident the inextricability of the epistemic and material? And thus, what may be feminist decolonizing epistemologies? Readings may include texts from Christina Sharpe, Vandana Shiva, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Jamaica Kincaid, Gloria Anzaldúa and Audre Lorde.

Financial literacy is often a gap in a liberal arts education. However, finance and economics are not subjects comfortably ignored. For instance, the effects of the financial crisis continue to be felt today and have a significant bearing upon us all. This seminar aims to provide students with conceptual, interpretive and analytical tools to understand finance. The approach is interdisciplinary and interpretive, drawing upon political theory, economics, psychology, basic statistics, financial theory and accounting. For example, we use the subprime crisis to explore core concepts associated with credit, banking, business ethics, monetary policy and macro economics. We reference key ideas from classic texts and also take up contemporary debates in finance. The aim is to help students become more literate and numerate as economic and social agents. Readings are drawn from key works in finance and economics as well as contemporary articles and commentaries.

This course will examine the cultural history of Wall Street. For two centuries Wall Street has attracted, repelled, and fascinated Americans. It has profoundly influenced our economic and political life, challenged our conceptions of democracy and equality, and infused the work of writers, filmmakers, cartoonists, journalists, and others. Images of the Street have imprinted themselves on the public imagination. The course will explore five of these images and how they have changed over time. Students will consult the work of historians as well as analyze movies, novels, political tracts, cartoons, poems, and other materials to trace the influence of Wall Street in American public life from the time of the American Revolution to the present. Readings will include works by Tom Wolfe, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Kenneth Galbraith, William Dean Howells, Louis Brandeis, Thomas Friedman, and Herman Melville.

What kinds of people are scientists? What can we learn by studying their lives? How, if at all, do scientific lives differ from other lives? Do scientists possess unique insights that justify their privileged position in our society? How has the relationship between scientists and society changed over time? This course explores the nature of science, its history, and its place in our culture through a selective study of the lives of scientists. Our main sources will be biographies and autobiographies: books, articles, obituaries. Emphasis will be placed on the process of the creation of scientific knowledge, the relationship between science and politics, economics, philosophy, and religion, and the dissemination and application of scientific knowledge. There will be some attention paid as well to issues involving women and minorities in the sciences, to scientific biography as a genre, and to studies of science as a profession. The cast of characters will be drawn from a variety of time periods and disciplines, from the early modern period to the very recent past, and may include Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, E. E. Just, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, E. O. Wilson, Richard Feynman, and Stephen Hawking.

This class explores how science and scientists work with the invisible, unseen, or unseeable elements of our world. We will examine how scientists convince themselves that these unseen things, such as atoms and molecules, are real. Many things cannot be seen or held in one’s hand, but scientists claim to have detected and to understand them. We ask probing questions about what it means to “see” or “observe” the world around us, and grapple with the basic question of how we gain scientific knowledge at all. Topics include telescopes and microscopes, atomic theory, the unconscious and psychoanalysis, human consciousness and intelligence, dark matter, and the nature of objectivity. We will pay special attention to how scientists are trained to see in particular ways, and how culture and worldview can shape, restrict, or enhance the way we observe. Readings include Galileo, Ernst Mach, Henry Adams, Stephen J. Gould, Peter Galison, T.S. Kuhn, Freud, Edward Tufte.

This course examines how people imagine places through narrations of the past. It takes as central premises that the past is a contested terrain open to divergent interpretations and that interpretations of the past shape common understandings of places. The meanings bestowed on places dictate who can use them and how. Thus, how people narrate the past matters. It impacts places and thereby the ability of humans to survive and thrive. While this course explores the broad interplay between narrations of memory, history and place, it focuses on the struggles of disempowered communities to narrate history and claim a place of their own. Course readings include literary and other scholarly texts like Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past and Michel De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life as well as writings by Edward Said, William Cronon, Diana Taylor, Steven Hoelscher and Doreen Massey.

For Sigmund Freud, perversion denoted all sexual deviances from the heterosexual and genital social norm, even as he acknowledged the ubiquity of such perversions. For Jacques Lacan, perversion meant a particular structure of desire, regardless of social norm, and was related to an ethical dimension. For Michel Foucault, who thoroughly rejected Freud’s “repressive hypothesis,” perversion was an effect of modern sexuality. The course will pursue the following questions and more: What is perversion? Is there a “cause” of perversion? Does it lie in the individual or in the epistemological and ideological formulations of a particular historical chronotope? This course will explore Freud, Lacan and Foucault’s three contrasting notions of perversion, alongside some feminist critiques of the psychoanalytic models, in relation to a selection of Japanese fiction and film depicting a variety of perversions. Readings will include: Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”; Deleuze, “Masochism”; Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. I; Kawabata, The House of the Sleeping Beauties; Tanizaki, Naomi; Kono, “Toddler Hunting." Films will include "Patriotism" and "Happiness."

By exploring a variety of source materials, including museums, memoirs, historic sites, and written textual evidence, we will begin to consider the ways in which our uses of the past have contemporary social and political impact. Today in the Fatih district of Istanbul, the fifteenth century Roma (gypsy) neighborhood of Sulukule is under threat of demolition as the city begins the process of urban renewal and gentrification. Meanwhile, in Nottinghamshire, England, the Workhouse Museum documents and interprets the brutality of the nineteenth century British ?welfare system? within the dreary walls of an actual, landmarked workhouse. Such conflicting projects prompt us to ask: How do we choose to destroy certain places while preserving?or recreating?others, and what are the consequences of making these choices? What are the ethical problems we face when we save or demolish historic sites, and how are they tied to questions of individual, community, and national identity? These questions derive from political discourse that imagines how nationhood is created and sustained, as well as historical and anthropological inquiry, which so often attempt to locate the ?truth? of the past and the meaning of place. Texts will include selections from Orhan Pamuk, Dolores Hayden, Benedict Anderson, Susan Slyomovics, and Christopher Mele.

This course focuses on the literature of travel, from the ancient world of Homer and Herodotus to the Renaissance explorations of the New World. We focus on the conventions of the genre and how they evolved, the influence of myth and hero literature on the traveler’s tale, the construction of the Other and manifestations of Orientalism, the rhetorical implications of the writer’s motives and audience, the Old World’s encounter with the New, and the many social and political questions raised by travel. Readings may include selections from Homer’s Odyssey, Herodotus’ History of the Persian Wars, Travels of Marco Polo, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

In the 1960s Motown Records emerged as a dominant force in American popular music. Billing itself as “The Sound of Young America,” Motown established a lyrical and musical discourse through its records and albums that struck a responsive chord with white and Black listeners alike. In this seminar we examine the race, gender and class identity that is inherent in—and emerges from—“The Motown Sound.” How did this company exploit the nationalist pride in the African American community while simultaneously positioning itself as a “crossover” enterprise to whites? What models of business and community did Motown emulate and create? And how did Motown affect the politics and racial discourse of its listeners? Our exploration situates Motown in the Detroit community of the 1950s and 1960s, to understand how it was “imagined,” and its impact on the wider culture. Readings may include excerpts from The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue; Where Did Our Love Go? by Nelson George, Once in a Great City by David Maraniss; Dancing in the Street by Suzanne E. Smith; Just My Soul Responding by Brian Ward, and Detroit: I Do Mind Dying by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin. The lyrics of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Holland-Dozier-Holland as well as such films as "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" and "The Maxine Powell" documentary will be included.

This course explores the historical and contemporary representations of the Middle Eastern cultures and societies in the Western imaginary. We will examine shifting representations of the Middle East in pre- and post-enlightenment European political and intellectual discourses, Western literary texts and travel literature, and contemporary US popular culture (films, advertising, thrillers, spy novels, romance fiction, etc.). We will also consider the interrelationship between popular cultural representations and the manner in which the Middle East is conceptualized in the academy and in "high culture" in general (e.g., theorized as Orientalism). It is an assumption of the course that a "post colonial" framework is key to interpreting not only the Middle East, but also the “West.” Readings may include: Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes; Edward Said, Orientalism and Covering Islam; Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East; Jack Shaheen, Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs; Linda Khatib, Filming the Modern Middle East.

This class examines the canonical text Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961) by Martinican-born psychoanalyst and social philosopher Frantz Fanon. What is the relevance of Fanon's classic text and his insight on the revolutionary potential of the poor and intellectuals in our current world? Is there a "healing psychological force" in revolutionary action? This course provides a theoretical introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre's understanding of existentialism and bad faith and its influences on Fanon. More importantly, we will examine Fanon's ideas on existential humanism, the role of violence and tragedy in decolonization, and his notion of an "authentic existence" within and beyond post-colonial context.

In this course we will read closely and thoroughly a selection of Sigmund Freud’s papers, including “Three Essays on Sexuality,” and “Screen Memories,” and three of his classic case histories: “Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria,” (Dora), “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” (the Wolfman), and “An Autobiographic Account of a Case of Paranoia,” (Dr. Schreber). In general, we will focus on how the psychoanalytic method takes narrative seriously—that is, “at its word,” or literally—at the same time as it recognizes that whatever is articulated may be in a negative or “canted” (in other words, “encoded”) relation to what it “means.” We will watch a selection of films alongside the primary texts. We will explore how time, memory and history signify in psychoanalytic frameworks, and ask what literature, film and poetics might share with psychoanalysis. Finally, we will debate the validity of what might be called Freud’s “reductionism” in relation to drive theory and the sexual instincts.

Why the utter lack of awareness in New York City of the Pacific? - of our own collecting, literary representations, missionary work, and ?manifest destiny? expansionism systemically imagined and formulated in America?s Pacific? How is environmental justice foundational to Oceanic worldviews and our global futures? We will reformulate this historical absence of presence. Help us deconstruct King Kong on the Empire State Building and other New York City-generated representations and formations of scholarly, museological, and pop culture about Pacific places, peoples, goods and ideas! We?re adapting the formulation of Atlantic Worlds to understand the Pacific; what Fijian philosopher Epeli Hau?ofa calls ?Oceania, a sea of islands.? Sessions, on and off campus, will include Herman Melville?s port culture novels, the Lincoln Center?s restaging of Rodgers and Hammerstein?s ?South Pacific? based on James Michener?s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, written in New York City; Margaret Mead and the American Museum of Natural History; Michael Rockefeller and the wing named in his memory at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pacific Missions to the United Nations; Pacificana kitsch? from tiki lounges to Halloween hula costumes. Through indigenous-grounded epistemologies, and the Pacific renaissance of cultural, linguistic, artistic and scholarly studies, we critically unpack the production of an imagined Pacific and global environmental policies.

How are people affected by the shape and appearance of buildings? How do they inhabit buildings and navigate between them? In what way is architecture informed by intangible realities like the builder?s or user?s social power, or identity categories like race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? And is there such a thing as the architectural sublime also in writing? This class will explore how literary representations help us understand the invisible characteristics of material constructions. As we seek to define the psychological effects of architecture, our readings and discussions will investigate the birth of the capitalist metropolis, the postwar suburban ideal, gated communities, and postmodern urbanism and its culture of the spectacle. We will also address questions of domestic privacy in relation to gender and the spatial politics of AIDS. Readings will include Alain de Botton?s The Architecture of Happiness, Steven Millhauser?s novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, T.C. Boyle?s novel The Tortilla Curtain, D.J. Waldie's memoir, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Rebecca Brown?s account of the AIDS crisis, The Gifts of the Body, and Alison Bechdel's the graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.

This course is designed to explore the role of religion in modern societies. We will examine religion as an important social institution and also as a cultural system. We will study canonical and contemporary theories of religion. The focus of the course, however, will be Islam. We will look at the cultural context and historical construction of Islam, as well as the different social contexts within which Islam has evolved. We will examine the relationship between Islam and modernity, including secular ideologies, gender politics, and modern democracy. We will pay particular attention to the role that Islam plays in the everyday life of those who practice it, who are affected by it, or who struggle with it as their tradition. Our goal is to study Islam not as a fixed object or authentic tradition but as a social and cultural phenomenon subject to change, contestation, and critique. Texts may include Mernissi, Islam and Democracy; Arkoun, Re-Thinking Islam; Fernea, In Search of Islamic Feminism; and Armstrong, Islam.

What is the relationship between Africa?s colonial past and its postcolonial present? How do we talk about this past and present without falling victim to the dominant discourse on Africa that stems from western domination of the African continent? Through film, literature, historical documents, and theory, we explore the evolution of postcolonial societies in Africa. This is primarily a history course but we will use a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to this history. Works we explore may include the films and writings of Ousmane Semebene, the literature of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, and the theories of Mahmood Mamdani.

India is a crucial site for discussions about globalization within the US and beyond. While some discourses fearfully worry about the loss of American jobs to outsourcing within India, other discourses herald “India Rising” to take its place among powerful global players. Drawing on an interdisciplinary set of readings about India, this course explores how the liberalization of the Indian economy and the forces of globalization are transforming the fraught and difficult emergence, out of colonial domination, of the nation-state of India. First, we explore a variety of pre-colonial and colonial imaginings of South Asia and examine politicized assertions of a unified Indian identity during the anti-colonial nationalist movement. Here, nation is not only a political entity, but also a cultural project that re-shapes ideas of self, religion, community, region, family, gender and kinship. The post-independence period is explored through writings on the Partition that created India and Pakistan, “development” as a key concept that has been central to nation-building, and struggles around caste, gender, sexuality, tribal identity, environment, region and religion. How the state contends with majority and minority identities and claims, the complexities of secularism, notions of equality and difference, all in the context of vibrant social movements and a large NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) sector will enable an in-depth exploration of how democracy, as idea and practice, happens in India. Having explored the cultural and political project of modern nation-state formation within India, we will then explore how globalization is transforming politics, economy and culture. Readings include: Ronald Inden’s Imagining India, Amitav Ghosh on the Indian Ocean World, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, the writings of Gandhi, Nehru, and Amdedkar, subaltern studies collective writings on nationalism in India, The Nation and its Fragments by Partha Chatterjee, Manu Joseph’s Serious Men, Menon and Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition and India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform by Leela Fernandes.

From a distance, much like an impressionist painting, modernity appears as a coherent whole, its parts working in concert to represent the possibility of unending, universal progress. Take a step closer, howeveFrom a distance, much like an impressionist painting, modernity appears as a coherent whole, its parts working in concert to represent the possibility of unending, universal progress. Take a step closer, however, and the parts disassemble before your eyes, scattering into discrete elements whose relationship is not always entirely clear. Religion is one such element of modernity. This course investigates the particular history of the passage to modernity in Europe, the concomitant emergence of the general concept of religion, and colonial and postcolonial global debates about the character of modernity and the place of religion in modern social, economic, legal, and political activities. Examples of such debate from around the world are legion, from the United States and Western Europe to South Asia and the Middle East, and will often inform class discussion. Among the general questions that will guide our work together: To what are we referring when we use the term ?modernity?? What constitutes the historical novelty of modern conceptions of religion? What place did the emergence of modern forms of religion have in the transformation of humanity?s understanding of and place in the natural and social worlds? How do modern forms of colonialism and their effects relate to these transformations? To investigate these questions we will read works from (among others): Augustine, Louis Dupr, HM Abrams, Antoine Nicholas de Condorcet, Foucault, James Mill, Bernard Cohn, Talal Asad, Jose Casanova, and Timothy Mitchell.

The Great Depression turned millions of people into travelers. Many of the unemployed took to the road in search of work, preferring to give up their homes rather than their cars; others hitchhiked and rode the rails. Ironically, it was also a time for leisure travel too, and this was the era when taking a family trip on a paid vacation became a national ritual. Government and industry promoted tourism to help the economy—and to pacify the working class. But getting people to travel required a deliberate, large-scale effort. As one tourism promoter put it, “The travel habit was not born with Americans. It’s an acquired taste that must be religiously and patiently cultivated.” So the Roosevelt administration created a national travel bureau to assist the hospitality industry, poured millions of dollars into roads and highways, and put authors like Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, and Ralph Ellison to work writing WPA travel guides. The travel theme attracted novelists like Nathaniel West and Nelson Algren, who used the journey motif in their fictions, and writer-and-photographer teams like James Agee and Walker Evans traveled to document the suffering of sharecroppers and migrant workers. This course will survey the travel writing of the 1930s and provide an introduction to the social history of travel and tourism during the period. Readings may include Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, West’s A Cool Million, Kromer's Waiting for Nothing, Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces, and Agee and Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as the WPA travel guides and histories of the Depression and the tourist industry.

The central question in this course is how to theorize language and conceive its place in political life. Since Plato, philosophy has defined itself against "rhetoric," as if to juxtapose a pure form of speech devoted only to truth against manipulative speech devoted to self-serving persuasion, even domination. Similarly, many theorists of media studies argue that in politics there is only "propaganda," and depict a political world ruled by monolithic "media," even as they disagree about how to respond. While some seek alternatives in scientific expertise, in rational validation, or in post-partisan dialogue, others endorse "counter-propaganda" claiming democratic goals. But perhaps the dichotomy between pure and impure speech is mistaken: Is there an inescapably rhetorical element in all speech, even speech that denounces "rhetoric?" Might rhetoric in fact be essential to any genuine truth-telling, great literary art, and authentic political speech? To pursue these questions we will read Plato, the Gorgias and Protagorus; Aristotle Rhetoric; Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers; Giambatista Vico, The New Science; Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric and Philosophy; Machiavelli, The Prince; Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech; as well as contemporary examples of political speech.

This course looks at the relationships between history, memory, counter-memory, amnesia, and social struggle. Our aim is to track back and forth between learning about the past and about its impact on today. We ask, what gets remembered about African American history, and who does the remembering? In what ways do communities develop collective memories? In what ways do counter-memories emerge? More specifically, we ask how the experience of slavery in the United States is constituted as a past, remembered and forgotten. Our goal is to achieve a solid grounding in 18th and 19th century African-American history, and to develop conceptual tools for making a complex analysis of the past and of the politics of memory. This will be a truly interdisciplinary class, mixing film, fiction, primary resources and historical studies. We may read Toni Morrison, Saidiya Harman, and David Blight. Films we may watch include Gone With the Wind and Django Unchained.

Since his short life in the fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great has enjoyed a legacy that has nearly overshadowed his actual accomplishments. Various cultures, from his own to ours, have honored, embellished, and even reshaped entirely Alexander?s powerful personality and his conquest of the massive Persian Empire. For some, he exemplifies the benevolent conqueror; for others, he represents the hubristic thirst for power, to which even the best-intentioned rulers can become victims. This course investigates the figure of Alexander and his legend in a range of cultural contexts: his own lifetime, the Roman and Byzantine Empires, the Islamic world, early modern Europe, and in the 20th century. Using visual and literary sources, we will investigate where, if anywhere, we might find the ?real? Alexander, what qualities of Alexander are valued or condemned in later periods, and how the figure of Alexander is used to reflect the values of a given culture, or to subvert them. Readings may include Plutarch?s Life of Alexander, Arrian, Diodorus, Pseudo-Callisthenes? Greek Alexander Romance, the Persian Iskandernamah. We will also make use of objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In this class, we will investigate the form, development, and role of images of people in pre-modern societies. Using visual and literary sources, we will focus on how we define a portrait and will confront the variety of problems that the representation of human subjects in the ancient world entails. How essential are the concepts of “likeness” and “realism” to the definition of a portrait, and to its function? How do faces and bodies communicate meaning visually, and how do we access this visual language? Who controls the image, and who is the audience? What is the correlation between the image and the individual? How do we think about these possibilities from our perspective in the modern world? We will address these questions and others, concentrating on the use of portraiture in shaping personal, political, and cultural identities. Our texts may include monuments from Akkad, Egypt, Nubia, Greece, Rome, and China. We will make use of objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Textile arts have been so firmly linked with women’s writing that one of the central metaphors of women’s writing traditions has become the metaphor of the quilt. This course explores this metaphor that proposes the making of beautiful, functional wholes out of fragments and scraps, using it to explore the cultural work of African American women and to illuminate connections between writers and artists. This rich intersection of writing and art allows us to consider broader questions about power; we investigate the ways in which the written works and textiles articulate, challenge and transform representations of race, gender, sexuality, as well as the meanings of art. This course takes us out into the city, where we view the textile creations of Black women artists like Faith Ringgold, Brenda Amina Robinson and Carrie Mae Weems at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the American Craft Museum, and the Museum of Folk Art. Written texts may include: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Gloria Naylor, Mama Day; Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach; Ntozake Shange, Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo. We also participate in a quilt-making workshop, where each student creates his or her own textile interpretation of the major issues of the course.

The ways in which Americans have imagined and represented the sacred have been profoundly shaped by race and slavery, and this intersection has become a foundation for many kinds of cultural practices and the development of political philosophy in African American culture. Two central questions therefore motivate this course: How has race shaped the production of sacred meaning and African American sacred art? How have spiritual discourses of salvation and redemption motivated political and cultural action? To pursue these questions we will explore representations of the sacred in several genres, including the Bible, essays, sermons, and art, as well as performances of African American sacred music and dance. Also, each student will select a contemporary cultural form and examine how it is shaped by the desire to represent both racialized experience and the sacred. Students can research cultural forms of interest to them, including familiar forms like contemporary music (rap, gospel rap, and more), or films, but could also tackle less familiar forms like public performances (inauguration, anyone?), historical sites and public spaces. Primary texts include: Exodus; Frederick Douglass, Narrative; W.E.B. Dubois, Souls of Black Folk; James Weldon Johnson, God?s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, including Aaron Douglass? illustrations; Dr. Martin Luther King, selected speeches; Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother?s Gardens; Alvin Ailey dance performance; spirituals performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock; and gospel music (may include a church visit).

Since the 1990s, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities and subcultures have come into mainstream visibility in popular media and through political and consumer targeting. If the term ?queer? has been used to describe cultural critiques of heterosexual and gender normativity, does ?queer? still apply to these more mainstream representations? This course pieces together a mapping of ?queer theory? and ?queer studies? as critical and disciplinary formations that surface in the cultural landscape following the gay liberation, civil rights, power, third world, and feminist social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. We will explore critical strategies that emerge in the aftermath of these contending social struggles. The course takes an intersectional approach towards the analysis of sexuality, gender, race, class, immigration, and ethnicity. It will also look to the emergence of transgender studies for new critical possibilities. Readings may include excerpts from: Harry Benshoff, Queer Cinema, The Film Reader; Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzalda, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color; Suzanne Danuta Walters, All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America; Monique Truong, The Book of Salt: A Novel; and Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure. Screenings may include: Daniel Peddle, The Aggressives; Sundance Channel/Logo, Transgeneration; and Olaf de Fleur Johannesson, The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela.

This seminar will provide an overview of the history of the environmental sciences from ancient times to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. We will explore ways in which naturalists and lay people came to know the environment and in what ways nature could mobilize social and moral author­ity. With a focus on the history of the European environmental problems from the ancient Greeks, Middle Ages, to colonial and Modern experiences, we will survey different ways of knowing nature. Where did the idea of nature as “designed” come from? How did natural historians and philosophers unveil nature’s secrets? What role did scientists play in the colonial experiences? How was European environmental centrism construed? These broad questions will guide us in our readings of a series of primary sources, including great and not-so-great books by Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Pliny, St. Francis, Hildegard, Evelyn, Grew, Bacon, Linnaeus, Buffon, Jefferson, Rousseau, Malthus and Darwin, as well as largely forgotten texts by anonymous authors and colonial explorers.

The Arabian Nights (The Thousand and One Nights) is one of the most fascinating "world" texts. Since its translation and publication in European languages it has captivated the imagination of countless writers and artists such as Poe, Joyce, Borges, Mahfouz, and Rushdie. It continues to play a disproportionate role in constructing and perpetuating an essentialized and imaginary East, populated by violent and hypersexual beings. The narratives of the Nights and the cultural archive they have spawned have had a fascinating influence on literary and artistic production, popular culture, and political imagination. The course introduces students to this important world masterpiece and the debates surrounding it. We will start out by briefly tracing the genealogy of this collectively authored and anonymous text, its collection, and versions and the cultural context of its translation and popularity in the west. We will then explore the literary structure and narrative strategies and dynamics of the Nights, read some of its most famous cycles and discuss how they have been read from a variety of perspectives, focusing primarily on gender and sexuality, power and politics, and otherness and boundaries. In the last part of the course we will read some of the modern literary works inspired by the Nights (Borges, Mahfouz, and Rushdie) and will end by watching and exploring how the Nights fared in adaptations in popular culture, especially in the US. All readings in English.

The past two decades have witnessed what has come to be known as the “memory boom,” that is, a greater cultural as well as academic interest in the workings of remembrance and forgetting. At issue are crucial concerns, among them: how past events are written into history; how literature is a form of remembering; how language itself can fail to portray and thereby fail to remember certain traumatic events; and how a culture decides, collectively, what it will and will not recall about its own past. This course takes up these concerns in its examination of memory, especially as growing from three major historic events: World War I, The Holocaust, and 9/11. We consider how memory is narrated and explore the connections between place and modes of narration. Through our readings of works of fiction as well as theoretical texts, through film and analysis of sites of commemoration, we grapple with some of the most fundamental concerns of memory studies today, and in so doing we also explore the dynamic relationship between personal and collective memory. Students will write critical papers, visit a site of commemoration, respond to recent film on the subject of memory, and give a class presentation. Reading will include W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, and VirginiaWoolf, Mrs. Dalloway.

The mythological stories of the classical gods and heroes are perhaps the best known and most widely appealing of the legacies left from the ancient world. Myths offered morals and explanations in addition to entertainment, and, although they are familiar in large part because they are preserved in literary sources, the episodes and characters from the mythic world supplied a vast and compelling body of subjects for ancient artists. This course investigates the ways in which episodes from mythology appear in the visual tradition, and focuses on the ways in which the visual tradition complicates and enhances what we think we know from written sources. We also expand our study to later traditions from the Renaissance and modern periods. We consider what ancient sources are influential in transmitting myths and how these myths are reinterpreted both in literature and in visual media. Readings may include Homer, Iliad and Odyssey; Ovid, Metamorphosis; Pseudo-Apollodorus Library; Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica; Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream; Kurt Weitzmann, Illustrations in Roll and Codex. We will also make use of objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Modern western civilization has frequently sought its origin and inspiration in the classical world. Ancient cultures, too, maintained an intimate connection to their own cultural history. This course will investigate the role of perceptions of the past in the shaping of Greek and Roman cultural identity, and the use of texts and images to communicate and perpetuate certain legacies. We will explore the role of monuments, literature, histories, and mythologies in the shaping of Greek and Roman perceptions of their own past, and we will examine how they were used to establish, maintain, or undermine contemporary relationships. We will also investigate the impact of these classical civilizations in Renaissance, and modern Europe and America. Readings may include Homer The Iliad or The Odyssey, Virgil The Aeneid, selections from Livy, Plutarch, and Suetonius, Shakespeare?s Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra, Edward Gibbon, Lord Byron, and Heinrich Schliemann.

This seminar proffers a glimpse into the historically contingent relationships between machines and humans from the Enlightenment through the Industrial Revolution to the twentieth century. We shall underscore the ways in which those interactions helped define aesthetics, particularly but not exclusively in music. In essence we hope to use machines and music to trace the history of creativity over the past three centuries. Immanuel Kant famously defined ?genius? in his Third Critique as ?a talent for producing something for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition consisting of a skill for something that can be learned by following some rule or other; hence the foremost property of genius must be creativity.? By this definition mimicry and imitation are the antitheses of the creative genius, while mechanical skill and machines were deemed inferior to it. During the later stages of the Industrial Revolution, however, there arose an aesthetic of mass production. Quantity?as Lenin would famously remark a century later?had a quality all its own, and a new aesthetics celebrated how an artifact could be perfectly copied thousands of times over, with unprecedented speed, precision, and efficiency. Central questions and debates follow from this development: How "creative," if at all, are machines? Are mechanical musical instruments superior to performers? How are humans different, if at all, from machines? Readings include Kant's Third Critique, Jackson's Harmonious Triads, Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Essinger's Jacquard's Web, Standage's The Turk, Riskin's (ed.), Genesis Redux, Katz's Capturing Sound, and Thberge's Any Sound You Can Imagine.

The historical epoch starting in the early 1970s and stretching up to the present has been referred to as the ?age of Reagan,? the era of neoliberalism, and the decline of capitalism?s Golden Age. This interdisciplinary history class will look at the 1970s and 1980s as decades that mark the beginning of many of the problems that we confront today: the rise of economic inequality; the origins of globalization; the first awareness of an ?energy crisis;? the birth of social movements like feminism, gay rights, and black power; the deepening of urban poverty and the expansion of the criminal justice system; the ascendance of the stock market and financial deregulation; the transition to a service economy; the growth of new forms of art and music like hip-hop and punk; the rise of evangelical Christianity as a political force; the emergence of a conservative movement; the end of Soviet Communism. The class will ask students to consider how the social problems of the 1970s and 1980s anticipate those of the present day, and also how America today is different than in this earlier period. We will use political speeches, manifestos, poetry, film, and novels as well as works of historical scholarship in order to try to understand the period. Readings may include Garry Wills, George Gilder, Jerry Falwell, Kwame Ture, Tom Wolfe, Thomas Frank and Alice Echols.

Until 2007-08 we took for granted that in the past sixty years following World War II, the industrialized Western world experienced unprecedented economic expansion, and the United States was economically and geopolitically.” the dominant superpower, indeed America was the primary coordinator and beneficiary of the post World War II period. Only a few keen observers detected economic flaws or geopolitical vulnerability in what has been called “The American Century.” Since the mid-1970s however, there have been enormous changes in the United States and the world. New forms of violence, major economic shifts and geopolitical reversals have seriously undermined and changed the world order and particularly American lives and even more pointedly the lives of American youth. Recently the self-destruction and breakdown of the U.S. financial and economic systems triggered a deep global destabilization and The Great Recession. For a growing number of Americans life has become the equivalent to the severe dislocations of the Great Depression of the 1930s. With this broad historical are in view, this seminar offers a critical history of Post World War II America, focusing especially on major social, political, ideological, extremist “teavangelical” obstructionist aggression and the world historical economic collapse. Readings will include social and political thinkers such as C. Wright Mills, Barrington Moore Jr., Hannah Arendt, and Arthur J. Vidich and economists such as, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith, the essayist John Lanchester, and Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stieglitz. We will read “Ill Fares the Land,” by the late New York University historian Tony Judt, and be inspired by the work of the great world class political economist and unsung American radical thinker, Thorstein Veblen. How do the emerging realities of today portend the future?

In the development of Christianity the definition of “heresy” was crucial to defining “orthodox” belief and worship. Indeed, every faith seems to struggle over what is deemed heretical as part of defining what is deemed normative, and it is hard to imagine any ideology (even an anti-ideology ideology) that does not draw a boundary to mark what is subversive or unacceptable to it. This course pursues these ideas by asking two central questions: Can there be any form of (religious or secular) faith without such boundaries? What does the study of these boundaries reveal about some of the basic assumptions that have formed (and still form) our society? In the first part of this course we use primary texts to study several of the most divisive theological moments in Christian history: debates over the nature of Christ and God in the fourth century, the reemergence of arguments over heresy in the twelfth century, the Protestant Reformation, and several nineteenth century American sects. In the second part we read literary art that uses and wrestles with the idea and ideas of heresy. We conclude by considering how theological arguments over orthodoxy and heresy are rescripted and reenacted in current debates about censorship, education, constitutional interpretation, the environment, crime and punishment, and torture. Readings will include letters and sermons by Athanasius, Arius, Eusebius, and Augustine, Luther’s 95 Theses, the Book of Mormon, poems by William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dostoevsky’s ‘Grand Inquisitor’ Parable, and sections from Ulysses, Moby Dick, Doctor Faustus, and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Contemporary theorists will include Mark Taylor, Harold Bloom, and Slovoj Zizek.

Energy makes the world work. Originally an obscure concept of natural philosophy, energy has become the foundation for our international economy, social structures, political policy, and everyday life. Energy explains how cars run, the sun shines, and our cell phones ring, but also why Saudi princes are wealthy and Iowa corn farmers receive massive government subsidies. This course examines the gradual realization of energy as a physical concept, its materialization in the engines of the industrial revolution, the construction of an energy infrastructure for electricity and oil, and the emergence of energy as the focus of economic and political conversation. We will use simple equations and math to learn what energy is and the laws that govern it, and how those simple equations help us understand the amazingly complex industrialized world in which we live. We will discuss energy production, transmission and use, and grapple with the problem of alternative energy in technical, social, and political detail.

Who is white and how has the definition of whiteness changed over the past five centuries? How is our definition of whiteness dependent on gender and other racial and ethnic categories? What are the benefits of being white in American society? How has American culture shaped, challenged, explored and redefined whiteness? Though often invisible or unacknowledged, whiteness has played a significant role in shaping American society, politics and culture. For those who at various times could claim whiteness as a racial category, it offered what W.E.B. DuBois termed a ?psychological wage? and social privileges. For racial and ethnic minorities however, whiteness often served as a justification for their oppression and marginalization within American society. This course will examine the social category of whiteness and its role in shaping modern society from a variety of historical, cultural and disciplinary perspectives, drawing upon the works of historians, legal scholars, literary critics, playwrights, filmmakers, novelists and social scientists. Possible readings include William Shakespeare?s The Tempest, Toni Morrison?s Playing in the Dark, Norman Mailer?s ?The White Negro?, Dalton Connelly?s Honky, Matthew Frye Jacobson?s Whiteness of a Different Color, as well as works by W.E.B. DuBois, Kim Hall, George Lipsitz, Adam Mansbach and Danny Hoch.

Ethnography has been narrowly construed as the research methodology that defines the discipline of cultural anthropology, but this course explores ethnography more broadly as both a mode of inquiry and a genre of writing through which we grapple with the experience of Self and Other at the intersection of overlapping cultural worlds. We begin by linking modern ethnographic writing to early travel narratives, to missionary accounts, and to colonial reports serving evolving imperial formations. We then examine the consolidation of an "ethnographic" perspective in the emerging discipline of anthropology, as well as more recent critiques of this genre. Our own method is reading classic and contemporary ethnographic works. These reveal ongoing tensions between the scientific and the literary; between abstract "theory" and ethnographic "practice;" and between the claim to truth-telling and the power and limits linked to the positioning of the author. In response to these tensions we also trace the textual experimentation that mixes ethnography, poetry, memoir, and travel writing, fiction, and film. Our goal is to develop a self-reflective ethnographic imagination, open to the possibilities and difficulties in cross-cultural understanding, as we consider the complexities in encounter and contact, looking and describing, representing and translating. Possible texts include travel writings from the period of early European expansion, Conquest of America by Todorov, Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Malinowski, Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston’s Of Mules and Men, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography by Clifford and Marcus, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment by J. Biehl, In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh, and the films of Trin Minh Ha.

This seminar explores shifts in film analysis and cinematic reception, as initiated by new digital technologies and the growing popular consumption of global cinemas. We will track the development of film aesthetics and critique in relation to other visual mediums, including photography and the computer. How has the specificity of film changed with the speed and mobility of digital media? The course will also speculate on the links between the cultivation of formal film analysis and the increased circulation of images of racial, sexual, and ethnic difference. How have transnational economies of production and viewing impacted cinematic reception? Readings may include excerpts from: Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin, America on Film; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction; Kara Keeling, The Witch?'s Flight; Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media; and Jim Pines and Paul Willeman, Questions of Third Cinema. Screenings may include: Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu, Babel; David LaChapelle, Rize; and Alain Resnais, Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Food can be both physical sustenance and a form of cultural expression. As with comedy and pornography, this too direct tie to the body problematizes the appreciation of food as a purely aesthetic pleasure. This interdisciplinary seminar will examine food and foodways as they appear in literature, film and painting. These cultural artifacts will be contextualized through readings in the social sciences and the new politics of food. We will try to discover how attitudes about the enjoyment and preparation of food change and reflect different historic eras and cultural milieus. Why are gluttony and abstention tied to morality? Where do our ideas about taste and aesthetics come from? Can we separate an aesthetic appreciation of food from current concerns about sustainability, food safety, and human and environmental health? Texts will include Epicurus's writings, Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste, E.A. Burtt's Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast, Juzo Itami's Tampopo, Francis Bacon's meat paintings, and Grimm?s Fairy Tales.

What is the relationship between human rights and social justice? Do both always operate in conjunction? Are they ever mutually exclusive—one sacrificed at the expense of the other? This course explores key questions around the theory and practice of human rights promotion, surveying specialized literature and founding documents to consider the promise and challenge of existing human rights frameworks as they work for, but sometimes clash with, the promotion of social justice. We ask, are there universal rights? If so, how are these defined, and by whom? What is the relationship between "political" and "human" rights, between individual and collective rights? Can human rights be in conflict, and if so, how are such conflicts to be resolved? In regions rife with inequality—political, social, and economic—is promoting a global human rights agenda unrealistic, or more necessary than ever? After exploring these general questions, we will focus on Latin America, in particular on Argentina, Guatemala, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico. How do human rights struggles in these countries change our view of the prevailing human rights regime? How do legacies of colonialism in these countries affect both the protection and violation of human rights in the present? Do these countries reveal a political tension between social justice and human rights? Readings will draw from Bartolomé de las Casas, Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, Ariel Dorfman, Paul Farmer, and Greg Grandin, among others.

Despite being heralded after his death in 1991 as the most prolific French intellectual of the twentieth century—he wrote more than seventy books!—the fact is that few theorists have had such as bad a rap as Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Scolded by the Althusserian establishment during the 1960s and 1970s for his rejection of structuralist epistemology; chastised by the French Communist Party for his contempt for dogma and orthodoxy; and ignored by academia for his irreverence toward disciplinary boundaries, Lefebvre’s ideas were never fully embraced until recently. In this course we focus especially on his writings about urbanism—with special emphasis on his concepts of everyday life, social reproduction, and the right to the city—as we explore why his ideas are becoming so popular today. Primary readings include The Urban Revolution, The Survival of Capitalism, Critique of Everyday Life (volume three), and chapters from State, Space, World: Selected Essays.

Few intellectuals have been so universally embraced as Italian Marxist and social theorist Antonio Gramsci. His political writings—most of them written from prison under Mussolini almost eighty years ago—continue to shape and inspire the way we think about society today. Yet the implications of his theories for our understanding of political change and its relationship to theory are far from settled. Using David Forgacs’ The Gramsci Reader as our primary source—and with the help of secondary sources—our job for this course is to: 1.take a close look at Gramsci’s ideas on intellectuals, power, and the State; 2. historically contextualize his theoretical framework within the Marxist tradition; and 3. explore the potential relevance of his analyses in our current state of affairs today.

This course examines Shakespeare’s Mediterranean plays in relation to the cultural and imaginative geography established for this region in the classical, medieval and early Renaissance periods. It also provides a brief introduction to the new field of "ocean studies" and will include some readings in marine environmental studies. We will spend about one third of the class on the Ancient Mediterranean, seen through the lens of comedies by Plautus, Virgil’s Aeneid, and writings by Plutarch, among others. We will consider how the various cultures around the Mediterranean opened emotional, physical, imaginative and political possibilities for Renaissance writers and thinkers, particularly as exemplified in Shakespeare’s plays. Topics for study will include the sea as a space of economic and political possibility and threat, including piracy; the differences created by intermingling gender, genre and diverse geographies; romance and comedy and their relation to travel writing; early map making in relation to other kinds of representation; questions of exoticism, orientalism, and the attraction and fear of the foreign. Along with studying how classical and renaissance writers may imagine the Mediterranean differently, we will consider some representations of religious and cultural divides between the Christian and the Muslim worlds in traveler’s accounts and in literature. Readings will include plays by Plautus, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Vergil’s Aeneid, selections from Boccaccio, Ibn Khaldûn, and Don Quixote.

This course will examine intersections between historical memory and representations of wartime experience in mediums ranging from art and literature to museums and textbooks. We will consider: What is history, what is memory, and what is the relationship between the two? How is the experience of war translated into different art forms like film, fiction, photography, and documentary? What constraints--historical and ethical—may limit the representation of past traumatic events? We will explore such questions with respect to the Japanese experience in World War II while creating comparisons with war memories elsewhere, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Students will read historical and social theories of memory written by Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Nora, and others before exploring the history of the Pacific War and allied occupation of Japan. Theory will serve as a launching pad from which to explore accounts and representations of Japan's wartime past in fiction, anime, manga, oral histories, visual arts, and documentary. Finally, we will address the use and abuse of history while discussing controversies over the history textbooks, the military "comfort women," the Smithsonian exhibit on the Enola Gay, and the Rape of Nanking.

Consumerism—the linking of happiness, freedom, and economic prosperity with the purchase and consumption of goods—has long been taken for granted as constitutive of the “good life” in Western societies. Increasingly, global economic shifts have made it possible for some developing countries to engage in patterns of consumption similar to those in the West, such that one quarter of humanity now belongs to the “global consumer class.” At the same time, however, nearly three billion people struggle to survive on less than $2 a day. This course takes an international and interdisciplinary approach to examine consumption in different societies, and we do so by asking several central questions: What are the key determinants of patterns of consumption, and how are they changed or reshaped over time? In turn, how do patterns of consumption shape class formation, racial inequality, identity, aesthetic sensibility, and international boundaries? How do practices of consumption inform the ways in which people understand their values and individuality, imagine success and failure, or conceive happiness? By reading widely in sociology, anthropology, and history we will develop a framework for analyzing the ethical, environmental and social justice implications of consumerism. Readings include case studies from the US, China, India, Europe and Africa Some likely authors include: Keynes, Marx, Marcuse, Benjamin, Mary Douglas, Bill McKibben; Arlie Hochschild, Lizabeth Cohen.

Can a yoga pose or a dance step be considered “private property?” Who owns the genetic sequences found in your DNA? What are the rights of an author/artist and how do those rights overlap with the rights of the community to engage with works of art? How can the “public domain” and the “cultural commons” survive in a free-market economy? In this course, we will deepen our understanding of the cultural and ethical implications of copyright, trademark and patent law by placing the concepts of ownership and authorship in both historical and global context. In addition to scholarly essays drawn from the fields of history, legal studies, anthropology and sociology, this course will also draw on a range of texts from the visual arts, music, and literature. Course requirements include: research-based essays and creative projects, in-class presentations, and a general willingness to both critique and create. Texts studied may include Boon's In Praise of Copying, Demer’s Steal this Musicand Patry's Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. Visual and audio sources from Girl Talk, DJ Spooky and Joy Garnett may also be included.

The Vietnam War occupies a special place in U.S history and foreign relations. For decades, it was known as America’s longest war, the only war the United States ever lost, a war that shattered Americans' faith in their government and spawned a culture of protests that divided one generation from another. More recently, it has become the conflict against which the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are most often compared and contrasted. In this course, we will examine the history of the Vietnam War both in its own context and as part of ongoing debates about U.S. foreign policy and military interventions. In addition to considering the war from the U.S. perspective, we will also read texts that offer insights into the Vietnamese experience. We will cover a wide range of genres and disciplines, including: official documents written by Robert McNamara, George Ball, and Daniel Ellsberg; historical scholarship by Leslie Gelb, David Hunt, and Marilyn Young; and novels, films, and poetry of Eugene Burdick, Norman Mailer, Yusef Komunyaaka, and Tim O’Brien.

Long before the advent of green politics, and before recycling and repurposing became fashionable, there were people surviving with little fanfare on discards, and theorists meditating on the revolutionary possibilities of refuse and junk. This seminar introduces students to the work of Walter Benjamin, who is both a central figure in critical theory and an early, powerful commentator on the politics and aesthetics of trash. We begin with Agnès Varda’s film The Gleaners and I, and explore the relation between theory and the recycling of ideas, images, and objects, especially those that have been overlooked or abandoned. As a refugee himself, Benjamin knew intimately how whole populations can be dispossessed or cast off. Following his life and thought, we ask what displaced subjects and discarded objects might teach us about the larger economies of capitalism, modernity and the city, as well as human desires, needs and frailties. Our primary text is Benjamin's expansive and unfinished work of citations and brief commentaries, The Arcades Project (1927-1940), but we will read Freud, Marx, and the Frankfurt School to contextualize the work historically and theoretically. What did Benjamin make of dross, and what can we glean from his thought for our own times?

Ancient Greek tragedies, particularly those detailing the events of the Trojan War and its aftermath, are obsessed with the plight of women who have been taken prisoner in war. The songs in which they lament their fate, recall their past happineses, and wonder about their new lives and homes are some of the most beautiful and moving in Greek poetry. In the non-fictional world of 5th-century Greece, however, these enslaved and foreign women would be all but voiceless. The reality of war and of its female captives was one of slavery and sexual violence, and the female captive herself became a poetic metonym for a fallen city. This course will explore the role of these captive women both within tragedy?their speech and actions and the agency they create for themselves?as well as within the society that produced these plays? the social anxieties revealed by tragedy?s focus on the female captive and the Greek relationship to political realities such as slavery and imperialism. Readings may include plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as historical writings of Herodotus and Thucydides, and philosophical and critical writings by Aristotle, Said, Scott, and Foucault.

The premise of this course is that profound thinking about politics occurs in American literary art. Indeed, formally "political” writers, like Madison and Hamilton in The Federalist Papers, present a world that seems antithetical to the world presented by, say, Melville and Morrison: one depicts rational, self-interested bargaining among men in markets and legislatures, whereas the literature depicts genocide, slavery, and sexual violence, domestic life and frontier encounters. One depicts rationality and narrates progress, the other depicts madness and tragedy. The literature makes visible what political rhetoric and canonical political thought typically make invisible - the centrality of race and gender in the formation of nationhood, the operation of politics, and the deep narratives of "America." By comparing American literary art to prevailing forms of political speech and dominant theories of American politics, we ask: How do literary artists narrate nationhood? How do they retell the stories that Americans tell themselves about themselves? What is the difference between a fiction that dramatizes a world, and a treatise that makes an argument about it? What can literary art do that theory cannot? How can that art re-orient people toward the assumptions, practices, and tropes that rule their world? To pursue these questions we read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, while surrounding each text with historical context, typical political speech, and canonical political theory.

The conceptions of people outside of one's own culture are complex and multi-layered, and this was as true in the ancient world as it is today. From the conquered Elamites that were depicted on the palace walls of the Neo-Assyrian Assurbanipal, to the exotic Dionysus of Euripides' tragedy, or to the Gauls with whom Julius Caesar did battle, representations of other kinds of people serve as a backdrop against which a distinctive sense of cultural identity can be clarified, rethought, or complicated. This seminar explores the representation of "foreign" peoples in the visual arts and literature of the ancient Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman worlds. Using visual (reliefs, vase-painting, sculpture, mosaics, and wall-painting) and written (inscriptions, epic poetry, drama, histories, novels) sources, we pursue the following questions: What are the political or social motivations for the representations of foreigners in ancient art and literature? To what extent does the definition of an "other" reflect an already defined identity, and to what extent is identity constituted by imagining difference? How does the representation of difference problematize one's own values or traditions? Readings may include Simone de Beauvoir, Clifford Geertz, Euripides Bacchae, Aeschylus The Persians, Herodotus, Caesar The Gallic Wars, Heliodorus Aethiopika (The Ethiopian Romance).

This course focuses on a single, extraordinary work of fiction, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow?Pynchon's vision of modernity, and important themes in the history of science and in philosophy. Topics: the weaponization of science in the twentieth century, clashing accounts of explanation. How does one explain the world of V2 rocket-bombs exploding around London in World War II? Do we learn about the location of future detonations from the past, as Pavlov might have had it? Or are events utterly independent one from the other as Poisson would say? Such reflections on the world?and they extend through identity, love, war, and materiality?feed back into the very nature of writing itself, and in the final sessions of the seminar, we will turn to literary-philosophical questions: How, in the absence of causality and continuity, does narrative itself function? What might be a postcausal (postmodern) novel? Along with Pynchon's text, we will read widely in the history of technology, warfare, science, literary theory, and philosophy.

What is the difference between law and morality? Is positing a higher moral order that supervenes over positive law an invitation to chaos or the only way to hold governments to account? To what extent is a legal system undergirded by background moral understandings? And when judges elaborate moral principle rather than black letter law does this undermine judicial legitimacy? Is it ever legitimate to legislate morality, from the bench or through legislative acts? How can civil disobedience be justified? Through questions such as these this course explores the various ways in which law and morality are both clashing and complementary in legal discourse, which also entails examining the relationship between law and religion. We will read canonical political theory and legal texts that discuss the debate between legal positivists and natural law theorists. Readings are likely to include landmark Supreme Court cases and primary texts such as Hobbes' Leviathan, Locke's Two Treatises, Kant's Second Critique, HLA Hart's The Concept of Law, and Dworkin's Taking Rights Seriously.

The Ur-text of literatures for children is the encounter between a child and a Wild Thing. From Little Red Ridinghood to Peter and the Wolf to Charlotte?s Web, the border between the child and the wild is a rite of passage marking the transformation of the child into an adult and is the site of a child?s most fundamental education about how to be human. Works of children?s literature agree that literature can be used to explicitly structure the relationship between children and the wild, and to construct subjectivities by nurturing a deeper awareness of what that relationship should be. Yet, what, exactly, is the wild in children?s literature? Representations of the wild reflect adult ideas about children?do they have a privileged relationship to nature and innate understanding of the connection between humans and the world around them? Or are they wild things themselves, in need of templates for human/humane behavior toward other beings? Representations of the wild are also informed by ideology, shaped by societal ideas about race and gender, domination and subjection, power and privilege. In this course we will be thinking and writing about the surprising ways in which children?s texts imagine the wild as a charged cultural, political and racialized space, and how these texts imagine and construct subjectivities based on these relations of power. Text may include Babar, The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, Where the Wild Things Are, Ricky Tiki Tavi and Fantasia.

Plato and Freud offer especially interesting and plausible accounts of intrapsychic conflict in terms of the psyche?s having parts. In this course, we will look at the theories of the composite psyche in the dialogues of Plato and in various works and case histories of Freud. Our first theme concerns whether they conceive psychic division differently, and for different purposes. A second and closely related theme concerns the ways that Plato and Freud both posit love as a fundamental force in human life; indeed, Freud explicitly identified his concept of libido with Plato?s eros. But is this claim credible? Our third theme concerns Plato's way of addressing these issues not by telling but by showing us, by writing not a treatise, but a philosophical drama with characters interacting by dialogue. Lastly, we will explore the implications of Plato's and Freud's psychological arguments for philosophical and political practice. Texts include Plato's Gorgias, Republic, and Symposium; and Freud's Ego and Id, Three Essays on Sexuality, and case studies.

This course will examine the mythic and narrative traditions of Homeric Greece, the cultural dynamics of the interactions between them, and finally the ways in which modern narrative can transform such traditions. The course will begin with a consideration of the central structures and emphases of the Greek mythological system, and then move on to a close reading of the Homeric Iliad, with a focus on the ways in which the interactions between mythic and narrative traditions can result in fundamental challenges to a culture and its traditions. The course will then leap forward to the late twentieth century and Derek Walcott's Afro-Caribbean/American, Nobel Prize-winning poem Omeros with its seemingly impossible union of mythic and narrative traditions, its mythic scope extending from Greece to West Africa to Native America as it brings together narrative traditions ranging from the Homeric to the post-colonial.

This course explores the relationship between religion and literature by focusing on literary depictions of the afterlife: How are changing beliefs about the afterlife reflected in literary treatments, and how does such literary art affect beliefs and practices? The 'visit to the underworld' is a traditional theme already in the oldest ancient Greek literary texts and we begin with the rich cultic and ritual background of the Homeric underworld visits (nekuiai) and their afterlife in Greek literature. From Homer, we explore how the afterlife theme is taken up in Latin poetry (most notably Vergil's Aeneid), and in turn how Vergil becomes the poet for the Western Middle Ages and is re-imagined by Dante as the guiding poetic model for his own vision of the beyond. At the same time, Dante's Divina Commedia shows striking parallels with literary visions of the afterlife composed in Arabic and Middle Persian. Is the connection a literary manifestation of an experience common to revealed religions, or another indication that literary constructions of imaginary other worlds are readily transmissible across cultures? Indeed, what accounts for the immense popularity of such accounts across cultures? Readings include: Homer, Pindar, Plato, Lucian, Vergil, the Middle Persian Arda Viraz Namag, and Dante's Divina Commedia.

This course is an introduction to global environmental history through an examination of selected episodes and themes, with emphasis on the nature and role of resources, on the one hand, and cultural conceptions of the natural world, on the other. The course asks the general question, “What light can the life and earth sciences shed on human history?” while also drawing upon the perspectives of social, cultural, and political history, anthropology, economic theory, and the history of technology. Humans have been shaped by their environments over the course of their history, and they have obviously altered their environments, often drastically so. The purpose of the course is neither to document environmental gloom and doom nor to cast particular peoples or practices as good or evil on the basis of currently acceptable standards of sewardship or sustainability. Rather it is to understand the role that the natural environment has played in human history and the roles that perceptions of nature have played in shaping human institutions and practices, even as we humans have altered and shaped “natural” environments. Readings will include original works from different periods, broad historical narratives, case studies, accessible scientific works, and possible works of fiction.

Although lyric poetry is the art of language that we reserve for the expression of the emotional dimension of our human experience, lyric poets also importantly use the forms and conventions of their art to respond to the shape and substance of the world they inhabit; that is, the historical, political, and physical aspects of the world—the “actual world”—in which they live. This course has two principal aims: first, to help us to develop skills in the reading of lyric poetry, and, second, to consider the complex relation between lyric poetry and the actual world. In the first half of the class, we will study the forms and conventions of lyric poetry and work on developing our poetic sensibilities. In the second half, we will focus our attention on the relationship of modern poets to the concrete or actual world and focus our study on W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens, two poets who address the pressing questions of their day, and the world they shared, in strikingly different ways. Yet, however different their approaches, both poets ponder questions of faith and secularity, consider heroism and loss in a century marked by war, and probe our human relationship to nature in answer to an increasingly industrialized and technological world. Readings will include texts that consider how to read lyric poetry (Hirsch, Vendler, Perloff), a representative selection of modern lyric poetry (Eliot, Pound, Valéry, Éluard, Apollinaire, Moore, H.D., Bishop, Hughes, Brooks, Rich), the works of Auden and Stevens (essays and poems), as well as the philosophical, historical and political narratives to which they refer and that inform their work (Freud, Nietzsche, William James, Santayana).

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a literary critic, philosopher and social theorist whose work has proven enormously influential across a number of disciplines, including literary study, media and popular culture studies, urban studies and political theory. Closely associated with the Frankfurt School, Benjamin?s work is itself interdisciplinary, drawing from Marxism, psychoanalysis, sociology, literature and religion. In this course, we will spend time reading some of his major essays as well as parts of his great unfinished Arcades Project in order to attempt to track the thinking of one of the twentieth century?s most astute and complex analysts of culture and politics. While we will also look at some central secondary writing on Benjamin, we will focus most closely on reading his work. Among our readings: essays on Baudelaire and Paris, the ?Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,? ?Theses on the Philosophy of History? and possibly One Way Street.

Theodor Adorno (1903-69) was a philosopher, cultural theorist, music theorist and a central force in the Frankfurt School. His work, departing from the philosophical tradition of German idealism, draws from Marxism, psychoanalysis, and sociological thought. His sometimes controversial writings on literature, popular culture in the middle of the twentieth century, the category of experience in modernity, and the aftermath of the Holocaust repeatedly call us back to the question of the relation of politics, culture and the ethical. Adorno?s work is dense and often difficult to read; we will consult some of the leading secondary sources on his writing, but we will apply most of our energy to examining closely some key shorter texts concerned with literature, art, and politics closely. Among our reading: Notes to Literature, Prisms, sections of The Dialectic of Enlightenment coauthored with Max Horkheimer, and, perhaps, parts of his posthumous Aesthetic Theory.

This course is designed to enhance students' understanding of ancient Greek theater and its stagecraft, through directorial practice and close examination of selected plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Combining textual study with workshops and exercises focused on staging, we will create a framework for approaching the original environment of the plays and their reception in Athens of the fifth century BCE. The course will investigate the performative aspects of each play (such as character, status, gender, etc.) and will use the insights gained from practical workshops to explain important material elements such as masks, scenic design, and stage properties, as well as to explore the theatrical dynamics involved in the use of the chorus, messengers, entrances and exits. We aim to guide students to a deeper understanding of the plays and to possible techniques for translating them to the modern page and stage.

“The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled.”—Denis Diderot. Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau all wrote for and about the theater. In the Age of Enlightenment, the stage was a place for philosophical exploration. Drama was perceived as an important instrument for the breaking of what the historian Peter Gay called “the sacred circle” of dogma. This class will examine the convergence of theatrical arts and ideas in the eighteenth century—a dramatic expression that would ultimately prove to be the rehearsal and the scripting for the Age of Revolution. This will include: analysis of sample plays of the era; philosophical writings that were influenced by, or responded to, these works; and contemporary accounts of theatrical performances and their implications. Included in our examination of the intersection of Enlightenment thought and theatricality will be a study of the works of visual artists such as Boucher, Chardin, Reynolds, Goya, etc., as well as the musical compositions of Haydn, Glück, Salieri, etc. Course readings may include: the plays and other writings of Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gotthold Lessing, Louise Gottsched, Goethe, Ramón de la Cruz, Catherine the Great, Carlo Goldoni, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan; modern critical works such as, Dena Goodman’s The Republic of Letters and Samuel S. B. Taylor’s Theater of the French and German Enlightenment.

Justice is often understood as a concept that structures political life, by indicating who should be enfranchised, how to rule fairly, who should be punished and how. Even more broadly, "justice" indicates what constitutes a common good as well as who should benefit (and how) from collective actions. But how is the definition of justice established and implemented? Does justice denote a transcendent standard we access by philosophy or by revelation and then "apply" to and in political life? Or is any definition of justice necessarily shaped by political struggles by actors with contrasting interests and points of views ? Must we escape politics to determine justice rightly, or is that an impossible and ultimately tyrannical idea? But if we define justice through politics, is what we call justice necessarily going to be the rule of the strong? This course will consider three attempts to define justice that also explore its relationship to politics: Plato's Republic, Kant's Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals, Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

This course will explore the social, political, intellectual and religious evolution of the late medieval dantesque world, by focusing on Dante’s Divine Comedy. A close reading of The Divine Comedy will serve as a forum to discuss and analyze Dante's writings and those important works that helped to shape the thirteenth-century Florentine society that ultimately served as a stepping stone for the humanist movement that paved the way for the Italian Renaissance. But Dante’s Divine Comedy is not just a text of and for its own time. It has left readers fascinated and shuddering for over 700 years because its poetical and literary tropes enable them to confront their experience of the human condition and transform what and how they desire. During the class, therefore, students will conduct research projects on more historical and more enduring aspects of Dante’s Commedia. As well, field trips to museums, cinematic recreations, documentaries, music and other visual and auditory aids will be used to enrich our sense of the text’s meaning and context. Readings include: The Divine Comedy, The Confessions, The Consolation of Philosophy, The Aeneid, and The Book of the Zohar.

This course will focus on Darwin?s writing, from The Voyage of the Beagle to Vegetable Mould (his last book, about worms), attending to the particular qualities that went into the development of his theory and the sustaining arguments. It will include consideration of contemporary (i.e., early nineteenth century) science writers, and it will also juxtapose literary writers we know Darwin read and valued immensely (like Milton) with one or two contemporary literary texts (like George Eliot?s Middlemarch). The point will be to read Darwin in a cultural context that clearly had significant effect on his own writing and thinking strategies. We will try to understand better the special qualities required to make his great argument and the singularity (and typicality, where that works) of his engagement with imagination, hypothesis and speculation, thought experiments, close observation, and rigorous reasoning. The course will address the question of the relation of these qualities to qualities usually regarded as literary, and thus the question of the relation of literary qualities to science.

In 2008 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. This begs 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 concentrations. 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, Charles Payne, and Daniel Wilkinson. We end with workshops that consider what it would mean to think historically about your own concentrations. What kinds of questions and materials would you include as you prepare for your rationale, booklist, colloquium, and ultimately, life after NYU, armed with a sense of history?

Is it possible to say that a piece of music “means” something? Can music communicate emotion, narrative, or philosophy? Can it embrace or resist political ideology? In what ways is music influenced by, or in what ways does it influence, society? For Richard Wagner, music and words together are capable of expressing the deepest thoughts and feelings that a human can have, and according to Nietzsche, music provides access to the nature of reality itself. On the other hand, Eduard Hanslick insisted that music should be divorced from the extramusical world, and Stravinsky famously claimed that music, by its very nature, is essentially powerless to express anything at all. More recently, thinkers have stressed the importance of approaching music as a cultural construct to reveal its encoded ideological meanings. This course looks at the nature of musical meaning from all these perspectives. We listen to and discuss forms of Western art (i.e. “classical”) music as well as genres of popular and folk music as we explore the relationship of gender, race, class, and politics to musical works. Each unit in this course takes a specific musical text (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, John Coltrane’s Love Supreme, the Beatles’ White Album) and explores different theoretical, philosophical and musicological approaches to the music’s “meaning.” We read philosophical works of aesthetics and hermeneutics by Plato, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger, essays by musicologists and cultural studies scholars such as Carl Dahlhaus, Theodor Adorno, Leo Treitler, Paul Gilroy, Susan McClary, and Robert Walser, and creative pieces by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and John Cage.

During the European Enlightenment, political philosophers set out to establish a novel form of politics?one not grounded in divine authority. We will begin by studying two of the major figures in this endeavor?Thomas Hobbes and John Locke?in light of the sacred scriptures they aimed to overturn. In so doing, we will simultaneously gain an understanding of how the Bible was read as politically normative and how these thinkers co-opted, reinterpreted and undermined the biblical teachings in order to found a secular politics. Even before these ideas started to take root within the early American republic, the viability and desirability of secular politics began to be questioned by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The second part of this course will study the discontents of secularism as articulated by Rousseau in his critique of the Enlightenment vision of politics and by Alexis de Tocqueville in his observations on religion in American democracy.

Written in the eleventh century by a noble lady of the Japanese court, the Tale of Genji has been called the world?s first novel, and even the world?s first psychological novel. But can we really use the terms ?novel? and ?psychological? to describe the narrative? In this seven-week course we will read and compare two English translations of the text, by Seidensticker and Tyler. Each week we will supplement our readings with selected secondary sources to focus our attention on such topics as: narration, visuality, sexual politics, relation to reality, poetics, and aesthetics in the text.

The Japanese author Mishima has been called ?everyone?s favorite homo-fascist.? And, he may be better known in the West for his performative suicide in 1970 by ritual disembowelment than for his writings. But he is well known for his fiction as well?a complex set of narratives that follow an aesthetic that privileges art above life, or reality. In this course we will read a selection of fiction by Mishima, alongside supplementary secondary sources, and screen the films Patriotism and Black Lizard, as well as various YouTube videos. We will ask: what can queer theory bring to an analysis of Mishima?s narratives? How and why did his life become so intertwined with his art? What was performative about his life and writings? Why have so many Western critics psychoanalyzed Mishima? We will hope to come away from the course with a better understanding of both Mishima the man and his literature.

Is there such thing as religion--definable and singular? If there is no agreement, how can we have a philosophy of it? Departing from this predicament, this course will first examine how “religion” has been construed over time and in a variety of contexts. After touching upon various Western medieval endeavors to “prove” God’s existence, we’ll attend to the nineteenth century and Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. We will consider the ways in which Nietzsche employs Hegel’s master/slave dialectic to identify the psychological state of ressentiment as a key factor in the birth and character of Jewish/Christian morality. Also, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) will be read as a groundbreaking study in the psychological states of religious consciousness. We will also draw Western notions of the ineffability of God—especially as appearing in the Pseudo-Dionysian tradition of the via negativa—into conversation with the second century (CE) Buddhist philosophy of Nagarjuna and his influences on the Zen/Ch’an tradition. Finally, we’ll explore recent reimaginings of religion in light of postmodern themes such as nihilism and the death of God. Readings include: Anselm of Canterbury, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Teresa of Avila, Mircea Eliade, Rene Girard, Gianni Vattimo, Pseudo-Dionysius, Nagarjuna, and Shunyru Suzuki.

This course will examine the roles fashion plays in film, television and digital media and their cultural and economic significance. As a signifying system in its own right, fashion contributes to the semiotics of popular forms. It can also operate as a means of authentication (especially in period films and TV) or reveal a variety of ways in which media plays with space and time, purposeful or not. Besides evoking specific temporalities and narrative tone, fashion plays an important role in the construction of gender, both in terms of representation and address. This course will examine the history of the intersection of the fashion and media industries from the free distribution of film-related dress patterns in movie theaters of the 1910s to the current trend for make-over TV, networks like the Style network, the increasing proliferation of fashion blogs and the construction of specifically feminine video games. How does fashion’s specific configuration of consumerism, signification and visual pleasure lend itself to the articulation of modern/postmodern cultures and their presentation of the self? Texts will include Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson, Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explanations and Analysis; selections from Roland Barthes, The Fashion System; Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity; assorted articles and selected clips from films and television shows including Marie Antoinette, What Not To Wear, The New York Hat, Fashions of 1934, Now, Voyager and Sex and the City.

In a democracy everyone can speak, but will they be heard? Ideally, a public sphere is where diverse voices can debate government policy directly. Does this public sphere still exist? What is the relationship between the public sphere and media? This course explores the theory and reality of the public sphere by focusing on the ways in which different media, from parades to movies, shape forms of expression and who can participate. The rise of commercial culture concentrated control of the media among elites, but it also expanded audiences. Indeed, has the advent of consumer culture changed political life, as citizens become consumers and ?publics? become ?audiences?? On the other hand, do Internet applications like Facebook and Twitter, by giving many more people access to a wider audience, make political mobilization easier or more effective, enhancing participation in political life? Or does virtual community fail to achieve the deliberation and power that modern political thought associated with the formation of publics and counter-publics? Our central goal, then, is to explore the relationship between media, political participation, and different forms of power. Texts will include: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty; Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself; Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film; Walter Lippman, Public Opinion; Johyn Newey, The Public and Its Problems; Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics.

A close reading of seven central Socratic dialogues that discuss (among other things) the nature of love and of the soul, the formation of the universe, the cosmology that can be deduced from it, the relation of love and ideas, the tragic story of Socrates? trial, his defense, and his decision to accept the judgment of the court, namely to drink the hemlock. The class will look particularly at the use of irony to complicate key ideas, at the different, perhaps unreliable narrators included in each one, and at the ways in which literary form and philosophy intersect in these cases to complicate ideas about the ideal structure of the universe or of society. Readings: (1) Timaeus, Critias, (2) Symposium, Phaedrus, (3) Apology, Crito, Phaedo.

In a world mediated by images how can we critically approach the visible? This course focuses on the politics of representation, offering students critical approaches and methodologies in the field of visual studies. Exploring the relationship between aesthetic movements and theoretical production, we interrogate how artists and theorists frame and define art and visual politics. How do regimes of the visible render certain subjects and histories invisible? In what different ways, and with what political consequences, has the meaning and practice of ?art? been denaturalized and redefined in the twentieth century? To pursue these questions, we explore a diversity of theoretical paradigms and their implications, including formalism, feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, the ?social? history of art, post-structuralism, performance, post-colonial theory, and museum studies. Our goal is to build a theoretical toolkit that will help us to analyze art and visual culture broadly. Readings may include: Stuart Hall, Rey Chow, Michel de Certeau, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, bell hooks, Lucy Lippard, T.J Clark, Amelia Jones.

Human rights has become the privileged political vocabulary for justice in a range of contexts: from Untied Nations meetings on the millennium development goals to media reports on Darfur, from court rooms adjudicating the treatment of Guantanamo detainees to street protests regarding the WTO. For some, it provides inspiration for struggle and progressive change. For others it carries the taint of illusory promises; a fig leaf for liberal hubris and imperial intervention. What historical dynamics have shaped this debate? What potential does human rights carry for different groups? Is human rights the language of dissent and revolution or is it the language of global governance? The course will travel a two-pronged path—partly focused on key debates that have structured the history and theory of human rights, and partly focused on debates internal to specific topics such as torture, homelessness and genocide. In addition to key human rights cases, we will read authors such as Phillip Alston, Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Andrew Clapham, Karen Engle, David Kennedy, Susan Marks, Sally Merry, Samuel Moyn, Makau Mutua, Jacques Ranciere, Henry Steiner, Gayatri Spivak and others.

Labor has long been associated with pain and toil, and more recently with exploitation and the production of commodities. In this class, we will focus on the ways that labor has been represented and understood, especially in relationship to the development of capitalism in its global form. Some primary questions we will explore are: How does labor create value? How do some gain control of the labor of others? How does this relationship of power change over time? How are those who labor valued in society, and represented in art? How are distinctions of gender and race entwined with the division of labor? How has the demand for labor required migration and imposed geographical dislocations? How do laborers themselves seek to shape practices of laboring and how they are valued? To answer these questions we will explore representations of unfree labor--both slavery and indentured servitude--in dialogue with representations both of "free labor" and of migration. Along the way, we will consider how laborers organize themselves and the ways they develop community in new locations. We will begin by looking at a seventeenth-century play (Shakespeare's The Tempest) and a contemporary novel (Toni Morrison's A Mercy) that reflects back on the seventeenth century--the period when systems of global capitalist production were being invented, but before the relationship between race and categories of laborers were firmly fixed. Then we will use writings by Karl Marx to explore how these institutions of labor and production became central to the modern world. In addition to the texts mentioned above, additional works may include documentaries, murals, and fiction, as well as early modern ethnographies, works of political philosophy, and modern scholarship by literary and cultural critics, historians, and anthropologists.

The image of the medieval world as dark, backward, and stagnant has for too long held sway over our modern popular conceptions of the era. In this course, we will investigate the ways in which the Middle Ages were actually a period of vast movement, migration, and pilgrimage. We will study the “discovery” of North America by Scandinavian sailors five centuries before Columbus. We will explore the colonization of the New World by European powers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And throughout, we will ask how we can better understand the history of identity formation, orientalism, and imperialism in the pre-modern era. We will delve into the questions, the conflicts, and the painful changes that these travels and encounters fomented both within European society and without. Readings may include the Confession of St. Patrick, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, The Thousand and One Nights, the Saga of Eirik the Red, Marco Polo’s Division of the World, Mandeville’s Travels, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, More’s Utopia, Bartolomé de las Casas’ Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, and Françoise de Graffigny’s Letters from a Peruvian Woman.

We say we live in the Information Age as if such an age never existed before. But throughout time, the introduction of new forms of media and communication technologies have had a transformational effect on existing social, political, and economic life, creating new perceptual pathways to our understanding. This course examines history through the prism of these communication “revolutions,” beginning with the arrival of the spoken word, the development of writing systems, the spread of the printed word, the age of electricity, before focusing on the modern era of digital media. It is through our investigation of these previous revolutions that we may come to some greater understanding about the promise, and consequence, of our own technological age. Readings from: Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall; Plato’s Phaedrus; Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy; Neil Postman, Technopoly; and Sherry Turkle, Alone Together.

Students will explore the designers, cultures, and suppositions about the contemporary environmental movement. Who are the key figures that first ignited the green design revolution and its ensuing agenda? Who effectively promoted maxims such as “energy crisis,” “climate change,” and “sustainability?" Many books, films, projects, and actions contributed to the irresistible success of mainstream eco-values. Which readings initially established the core underpinning of this environmental debate—Hiroshima by John Hersey, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, or Ecology of Freedom by Murray Bookchin—and how are they linked today? The class will review architecture and art, and unpack texts by thinkers such as Patrick Geddes, Henry David Thoreau, Ebenezer Howard, John Muir, Louis Sullivan, Ivan Illich, Buckminster Fuller, Sim Van der Ryn, Victor Papanek, Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, William McDonough, Marc Reisner, Jared Diamond, and Al Gore. In tandem, we acutely review seminal designs and works by Antoni Gaudi, Norman Bel Geddes, Bruce Goff, Rudolf Steiner, Samuel Mockbee, and others. The overall objective is twofold: to survey the lager historical context of ecological design and define specific contributions to the green movement.

What are the most stimulating solutions to global climate change? If we were given an imaginary 'client' with an unlimited budget and colossal power, what should we design? The resounding formula for green thinking is broadly interpreted in three meta-themes; apocalyptic, technological, and traditional. Each category promises solutions and/or interpretations of our current environmental calamity. We explore critical philosophical, artistic, and scientific positions in each meta-theme that will help elucidate this dilemma. Students will read, evaluate, and synthesize projects and texts from great minds such as William Cronon, Bill Mckibben, Bruce Mau, Mike Davis, Marshall McLuhan, Bjorn Lomborg, David Orr, Paul Virilio, Naomi Klein, Laurence Buell, and others. The final project is the production of a mock Madison Ave. advertising campaign that promotes urban 'sustainability'.

V.I. Lenin called cinema the most important art because of its power to persuade. And in fact, cinema has played a key role in many of the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, in particular for the Russian and Cuban revolutions. In this course we will examine how the cinema works as political language by introducing a variety of theoretical writings both on revolutionary politics and on political aesthetics. We will explore the boundaries between propaganda and political cinema, and we will analyze whether there is a tension between the aesthetics of modernism and the clarity purportedly necessary for effective political persuasion. As we examine how filmmakers attempt to translate revolutionary ideas into cinema, our topics will include: Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, Brazilian Cinema Novo, and New Queer Cinema. Readings will include: Franz Fanon, Trinh T.Minh-ha, Sergei Eisenstein, Bertolt Brecht and Glauber Rocha.

The workings and even existence of the U.S. Empire has long been cause of controversy. The debate often revolves around whether the United States is guided by imperial self-interest, or lofty ideals. Because debates about U.S. imperialism since 9/11 have centered on interventions in seemingly distant places like Iraq and Afghanistan, Empire appears to denote a far-from-home phenomenon. Yet, the U.S. Empire is born out of and continues to depend upon interactions in the Americas. This course explores the premise that the U.S. Empire is an American Empire continuously redefined closer-to-home through contested borders, migrations, local politics and cultural practices, and inseparable from hemispheric experimentations with the meanings of freedom, democracy and development. It specifically addresses the following questions. How can Empire be understood as a category of analysis? What distinguishes an American Empire? How are U.S. imperial formations negotiated “at home?” In addition, the course foregrounds the U.S. relationship with Latin America in order to further question the meanings of home, America and Empire. Readings include texts from the disciplines of history, law, literature, political theory and cultural studies.

Feminist theorists have critiqued the canonical works of political theory as implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) premised on the exclusion of “woman” and the “feminine.” The “feminine” (private, domestic, passive) has been seen to be in opposition to the “masculine” political sphere (active, public, rational). In this course we will read works from the canon of political theory alongside feminist critiques. The question we will consider is: how do feminist critiques of the absence of “woman” and the “feminine” in discourses of the political affect our ideas of not only the private and public, but also those of citizenship, equality, freedom, the individual, and community? In addition to feminist critiques of political theory, we will also be attentive to internal debates within feminisms, especially with reference to women of color feminisms and queer theory. Readings may include Kimberlé Crenshaw, Carole Pateman, Chandra Mohanty, Bonnie Honig, Judith Butler, Plato, Rousseau, Locke, and Marx.

The current environmental decline is a multifaceted predicament for our civilization. Previously, utopian projects have failed to reverse this ecological decay. This crisis demands robust solutions on a massive scale to deal with an immanent mega-urbanity. We will attempt to re-envision vehicles, infrastructure, and buildings to meet the ecological needs of the future. Students will consider questions such as: what is wrong with city systems today and what are the key environmental forces that shape them? Each student will individually critique and evaluate multiple engineered urban entities and subsequently prescribe new innovations. The objective will be to establish the most scientifically plausible designs for a new socio-ecological world. Readings, historical figures, and works for the course will include Janine M. Benyus, Ian McHarg, Richard T.T. Forman, John Todd, Anne Spirn, Geoffery Jellicoe, Jane Jacobs, Annie Leonard, Buckminster Fuller, William J. Mitchell, Mohsen Mostafavi, Ken Yeang, and others.

Africa is quickly becoming urban, with profound implications for African socio-economic structures, environments, and political systems. Recent scholarship representing African cities, however, is often divided. On the one hand is a perspective which concentrates on colonial legacies and Africa’s place in international capitalist circuits. On the other is an emphasis on emergent forms of citizenship and the dynamic ways that African cities work. This class holds both in tension while exploring key themes of African urbanism. It begins with a brief history of African cities to lay the groundwork for an examination of colonial legacies. Then, it delves into cross-cutting contemporary issues related to: infrastructure and planning, economies and livelihoods, and politics and identities, including contestations around religion, generation, and gender. Finally, insights gained will be used to reflect on theories of the city and international development. Authors include: AbdouMaliq Simone, Achille Mbembe, Michael Watts, Jennifer Robinson, and Mamadou Diouf.

Why did Asian countries become economic tigers while African nations saw their economies shrink? This course provides an introduction to the political economy of international development in order to explore the historical origins of the uneven geographies of wealth we see today. The course draws primarily on scholarship from the fields of political economy, geography, anthropology, development studies, and history. In Part 1, we begin by contrasting the dominant metrics used today to measure the object of development. Part 2 examines some of the most important and influential theoretical ideas and intellectual traditions which seek to explain the historical origins of capitalist development. Part 3 then illuminates the key actors, institutions, and discourses of Development, through tracing the history of the Bretton Woods project, in relation to the history of capitalist development. Part 4 analyzes regional trajectories of socio-spatial change in theory and history through detailed case studies of Africa, Latin America, and East Asia. Finally, Part 5 will consider key themes framing contemporary development discourse and practice including gender and sustainable development. Possible readings include: Amartya Sen, Stuart Hall, and Samir Amin.

In May 1431, Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orléans, was burned at the stake as a heretic and a witch by an English partisan court after the French nobility had betrayed her.An illiterate peasant girl just sixteen years of age, she had led the French back from the brink of defeat and saved the French monarchy from ruin.Yet in death, she would gain further power still as a martyr and symbol of indomitable French will and resistance.In this seminar, we will study Joan’s complex historical moment and her place within the long history of medieval women, Christian mysticism, and religious fanaticism.We will trace the stories of her appearance and military success, attempt to hear her voice in the extant transcript of her heresy trial, analyze contrasting French and English narratives about her life, and explore how she became the national heroine, patron saint, and political symbol that she is today.Texts will include Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, Catherine of Siena’s Dialogues and Letters, Thomas of Cantimpré’s Life of Christina the Astonishing, and Shakespeare’s I Henry VI.We will also analyze and discuss modern renditions of the Joan of Arc story by such diverse artists as Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Luc Besson.

How have human beings conceived and represented benevolent behavior toward others differently across time and place? In this course, we will explore the history of the concepts, ideals, and behaviors that we associate with the modern English word, "kindness" -- a story that begins in the classical Mediterranean world and unfolds slowly over two millennia into the present day. We will connect ancient debates about human nature, the practice of justice, and moral responsibility, to recent studies concerning the evolutionary biology of altruism (is there a "kindness gene"?), sociological studies of gender difference (is hostility a male trait?), and anthropological studies of how culture regulates conduct. We will study the rise of state-sponsored morality and the ways in which ideals of social welfare have changed over time. Key texts will include Aeschylus's Oresteia, The Gospel of Matthew, Augustine's Against Faustus, Dhuoda's handbook for her son, Bonaventure's Life of St. Francis, and Voltaire's Treatise on Tolerance. As part of the course, students will also conduct individual studies of how philanthropic organizations define, enact, and organize our notions of "kindness" today.

In this seminar, we will consider the interrelationship between health and human rights. We will examine the origins of health and human rights concerns, their impacts and interdependence on one another. We will discuss the health consequences of human rights violations and the premise that individual and community health are improved by protecting and promoting human rights. Similarly, we will consider whether health is essential to the realization of human rights. Sentinel health and human rights issues that continue to unfold, including COVID, racism and immigration, will be among the topics we will explore. Educational tools we will use to inform our discussions about and to deepen our understanding of health and human rights include scholarly articles, human rights texts, case studies, presentations by guest speakers and seminar participants. This course is intended for non-science as well as science majors. Students with diverse interests and experiences are welcome.

This class investigates celebrity culture as a transmedia phenomenon, exploring what it reveals about a culture and its awareness of self. It analyzes celebrity culture from the late nineteenth century to the present, exploring the role of photography, print media, postcards, movies, television, recorded music and digital media. We will consider how media turn to celebrity at a particular point in their history, often as they start to move away from novelty forms and reach mass audiences and acquire a certain “maturity.” Besides examining the different configurations of celebrity produced in each media form, and its relationship to prevailing concerns about fame and the construction of self, we will examine the difference between celebrity and stardom. In the process, we will explore what celebrity discourses reveal about the changing relationship between private and public spheres, work and leisure, and the status of upward mobility and the American dream in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture.

This class introduces students to critical legal studies through focused engagement with diverse areas of law. It is anchored in reading cases that captured pivotal debates in American legal history, cases such as Brown v. Board of Ed., Roe v. Wade, Lochner v. NY, MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co., Univ. of CA v. Bakke, King v. Smith, Perry v. Schwarzenegger and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Through discussion of these cases, we examine different understandings of the relationship between legal debates and social justice. Can law be tilted towards the powerful, while also being 'indeterminate?' Does it undermine the 'rule of law’ if, as some scholars argue, legal rules contained ‘gaps, contradictions and ambiguities?' How do unjust outcomes appear legally necessary? How do different understandings of gender impact anti-discrimination law? How does the legal architecture of property impact labor rights? What are the legitimate roles, rights and responsibilities of different actors in the system—from judges to corporations to welfare recipients? In addition to reading cases and legal scholarship, we will also analyze films focused on law and society. Readings include Duncan Kennedy, Cornel West, Karl Klare, Janet Halley, Rich Ford, Martha Minow, Joe Singer, James Clifford, Austin Sarat, Alan Freeman and others.

Globalization has become a much-debated and deeply controversial topic. In this class, we will focus on the ways that labor has been represented and understood, especially in relationship to the development of capitalism in its global form. We will explore how the movement of capital, commodities, and workers across the globe and with seeming indifference to national borders shapes the idea of work and those who perform it. Of equal importance in our study will be the way that work transforms the structure of the global economy. Some primary questions we will explore are: How has the demand for labor required migration and imposed geographical dislocations? How does labor create value within these new locations? How do some gain control of the work of others? How do workers organize themselves and develop community in new locations? Some likely texts for the course include: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a Haitian novel about a sugar cane worker who migrates to the Dominican Republic, and a postcolonial play created and performed by workers from Kenya. We will place these fictional texts in conversation with visual representations by Diego Rivera, works by Marx, by anthropologists and narrative filmmakers on sex tourism and domestic labor, and by documentary filmmakers and historians on global corporations and utopian economies.

New York City possesses the largest population of Caribbean peoples outside of the Caribbean, and this course explores key issues in four boroughs where Caribbean politics are being shaped and identities performed. We will examine Caribbean livelihood in the city—the ways they worship, work and play, their creation and utilization of green and artistic spaces, their access to social services, their political affiliations and mobilization on matters such as immigration, gentrification and domestic worker rights. Our interdisciplinary, critical study of the sacred (e.g. Santería in Brooklyn) and the secular, from educational, political and economic institutions (e.g. hometown associations) to public figures (e.g. Colin Powell)—highlight the politics of the second-generation, migration, race, class, gender-stratified social systems, cultural resistance and appropriation, and nationalist projects. Readings may include: Jesse Huffnung-Garskof’s A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950; Junot Diaz’s Drown; Elizabeth McAlister’s Rara! Vodou, Power and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora; Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl Brownstones; and Arlene Dàvila's, Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City.

This course explores what happens when geographical spaces get divided and people are dislocated, forced to migrate, or become part of a new political entity. We will focus on these geographical divisions both as larger political crises and as events that have effects at more personal and local levels, for example, on familial ties, the ability to find work, or to practice one's religion. We will focus on a few regions whose borders have been and still are in crisis in different ways: Haiti and the Dominican Republic; India and Pakistan; and Israel and Palestine. Some specific questions we will explore: In what ways do geographical borders participate in the creation of national, racial, or religious, identities? What happens to individuals or groups of people who live in a nation to which they do not feel a primary allegiance and to people who have multiple allegiances? In what ways do borders facilitate or demand the production of social difference? How do writers imagine the relationship of subjects to divided spaces and the relationship of those subjects to each other? How do fictional and historical works address the relationships between possibilities for peace and security and notions of justice? The class will focus primarily on literary texts and narrative films, which we will place in dialogue with oral histories, personal memoir, and documentary films. Some likely authors we will read in the course include: Edwige Danticat, Junot Díaz, Salman Rushdie, Sami Michael, and Ghassan Kanafani.

Using the foundation of ancient imagery from the Ancient Near East, Greece, and Rome, this course will examine that process of visual communication with special attention to the question: How is time represented? While the reading of imagery often seems a natural one to us, the ancient world offers a moment in the history of art when artists were wrestling with—and innovating—ways of telling a narrative that unfolds at different moments over time. We will look, for instance, at narrative programs like the ones displayed on the walls in Neo-Assyrian palaces (which both serve as a record of the king’s accomplishments and symbolically reflect the Empire’s geography) and the victory columns of Rome. We will look at single images that conflate pivotal moments of ritual movement or mythological episodes, and at images that juxtapose moments that seem to have no direct sequential relationship. The following questions, among others, will guide our investigation: How do audiences learn to recognize an abstract concept like “time”? How does narrative imagery in architectural settings shape the audience’s movement through and relationship to space? To what extent do the “reading” of text and image correspond? How does the study of narrative intersect with and impact other concerns in the study of ancient imagery, including political and social functions and cross-cultural exchange? We will make use of objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Readings may include K. Weitzmann, Illustrations in Roll and Codex; T. Todorov, Grammar of Narrative; R. Barthes, “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”; G. Genette, Narrative Discourse; Homer, Odyssey; Virgil, Aeneid; Theocritus; Aristotle, Poetics; and Res Gestae Divi Augustus.

This course explores the political ecologies of African development in historic perspective. Drawing mainly from anthropology, geography, history, and development studies, it offers an inter-disciplinary perspective on the politics of African environments. The first part of the course focuses on the history of human-environment relations, paying particular attention to the exploitation of the natural environment during colonialism and patterns of extraction and trade set up during that time. Building on this history, we will then concentrate on the postcolonial period in order to compare different forms of exploitation across Africa and their connections to key development debates and national development trajectories. Specific topics may include: the extractive industries; export agriculture; wildlife conservation and tourism; Asian investments and the ‘land grab’; resources and violence; and urban ecologies. Aiming to provide more complex, critical, and nuanced understandings of human-environment relations on the continent, we will draw from academic texts, novels, as well as documentary films. Readings may include: James Ferguson, Gregg Mitman, Michael Watts, and Adam Hochschild.

Although the ancient Greeks used the word “moûsike” to designate both poetry and music and the two were once “one” art, with alphabetic writing their paths diverged and poetry, music, rhetoric, and musical theory became distinct from one another. Yet, however much music and poetry may have their separate histories and technical languages, poets and composers have continued to probe the relation between the two arts. In this course, we will focus on the relationship between music and poetry in the modern era—from the “fin de siècle” and Verlaine’s call to the symbolist poets to compose “Music above everything,” to the modernists in English and American poetry and the jazz improvisations of the twentieth century. We will study musical and poetic history of the period, grapple with what we mean when we say a poem is musical and what melody means in poetry, and we will study how to define and discuss lyricism in music. Readings may include the work of modern poets (symbolists, imagists, modernists)—Mallarmé, Verlaine, Auden, Brooks, Stein, Hughes, Stevens —and modern composers Debussy, Stravinsky, Copland, Ives, Thomson and the rhythms of blues and jazz. To develop a critical vocabulary, readings may also include texts on the history and theory of both arts (Winn, Kramer, Hollander, Adorno).

In this course students will explore historical memory, mythmaking, and the myriad ways in which human beings construct and reconstruct the past to address present hopes, dreams, and fears. Our case study will be the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne (d. 814), who in life helped to lay the foundations of modern European society, and in death would continue to represent an imagined pan-European unity that predated factionalism, regionalism, and nationalism. The seminar will begin in the ninth century with Charlemagne in memory before moving briskly forward in time to study Charlemagne in legend and myth. Along the way, we will discuss themes and problems of particular relevance, including the birth of “Europe,” the advent of “the state,” Christianity and Crusade, the rise of vernacular literature, and early colonialism. In addition to theoretical works on memory, myth, and history-writing, texts for discussion will include a vibrant mix of canonical and lesser-known gems: Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, The Song of Roland, and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; but also the Astronomer’s Life of Louis the Pious, The Voyage of Charlemagne to Jerusalem and Constantinople, and the anonymous Charlemagne play from the London of Shakespeare and Marlowe.

This course, which spans from the Scientific Revolution to the present, examines various examples of how the conduct and context of science are framed by culture, and conversely, how science shapes culture. Which models proffered by various historians, philosophers, cultural anthropologists, and sociologists can begin to explain this relationship? The first portion of this course addresses how scientific knowledge was intricately intertwined with religious and political knowledge during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. The next section illustrates how important developments in thermodynamics (or the physics of work and waste) led to improvements in nineteenth-century musical instrument design and a change in musical aesthetics. Similarly, we shall discuss how twentieth-century technological and scientific developments in fin-de-siècle Europe and the U.S. directly led to new artistic expressions and aesthetics. The final third of the course looks at how the content of scientific and technological knowledge associated with “Big Science” from World War II to the present owes much to the development of national defense in the case of physics and to venture-corporate capitalism in the case of molecular biology. Rather than simply stay at the level of case studies, we shall continually test the various models, which attempt to explain the complex and historically contingent relationship between science and culture, including Marx’s theory of base-superstructure, Kuhn’s paradigm, Latour’s social constructivism, Shapin and Schaffer’s historical social constructivism, and Galison’s bricolage model and trading zones. Finally, the course will force students to think about related issues, such as the history of objectivity and the differences and similarities between science on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities on the other. Readings include: Shapin and Schaffer, Galison, Jackson, Latour, Marx, and Kuhn. This interdisciplinary seminar may be used to fulfill the science requirement.

Takeshi Kitano, aka Beat Takeshi, is probably the most famous contemporary Japanese actor, filmmaker, and personality. This course will take up the issue of a continuum, or a “thin blue line,” between male homosociality and homosexuality as theorized by Eve Sedgwick in her Between Men, by exploring the role of desire in male friendship, male love and homophobia in the context of three Kitano films: Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Sonatine, and Taboo. We will be attentive to how male friendships are protected from, or conversely, directly confront homoeroticism, as well as to how women figure as objects between men. We will consider other issues in relation to the specific historical contexts of the three films: (1) colonialism, wartime ethics, and racial politics for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence; (2) Yakuza characters as film tropes and Okinawan-Japanese ethnic politics for Sonatine; and (3) the politics of male-male relations in samurai culture for Taboo. Readings may include the following: selections from Eve Sedgwick, Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet, Gregory Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire, Lydia N. Yu-Jose, Japan Views the Philippines, 1900-1944, and Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Earl Jackson, “Desire at Cross-Cultural Purposes,” positions; Timothy Corrigan, A Short Guide to Writing About Film; and Bob Davis, “Takeshi Kitano,” Senses of Cinema.

2012 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, an artist and public intellectual who can be said to have shaped our times as much as anyone. Like many world historical figures of modernity, he embodies more than one paradox. The adjective “Dickensian” carries opposite meanings: squalid impoverishment and cheerful bounty. Dickens’s work bridges high and low culture, aesthetics and social purpose. We think we know him through his associations with Christmas, familial love, and quaint Victorian sentimentalism, and yet his own political disposition is impossible to label, and the social conscience permeating his fiction co-exists with a dark psychological and philosophical pessimism that inspired writers ranging from Dostoevesky and Freud to the creators of HBO’s The Wire. In this class we will explore a select number of his novels which raise themes of interest in every corner of the university: the nature of childhood, family life, work, labor/management relations, domestic and international politics, urban space and city life, the culture of commerce, education, criminal justice, the politics of representation—and more. He was among a small group of Victorian novelists Marx praised for having “issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together.” Dickens, however, went further than his English peers in developing his own ingenious and highly energetic brand of realism that continues to influence, instruct, amuse, and provoke. In this class we may read Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Hard Times, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and/or Our Mutual Friend in conjunction with related work by Dickens’s contemporaries as well as by writers he influenced, including Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Freud.

From their birth in conjunction with the rise of the modern nation state, museums have been under scrutiny by artists, philosophers, public intellectuals, and everyday citizens. Even their precursors, the Early Modern Cabinets of Curiosities, were subtly critiqued by artists commissioned to paint the collections. In the twentieth century, several artists appropriated the role of the curator to denaturalize collection and display practices. The 1980s and early 1990s particularly witnessed an explosion of debates related to curatorial practice. Today, as museums turn towards what is often referred to as the "new museology," curatorial practice remains under scrutiny, and yet too often curators rely on the traditional "white box" to avoid a political stance, or to maintain a self-effacing relationship to their own practices of framing, contextualizing, and disciplining objects. This course explore the roles of curators in relation to how objects are displayed in museums and galleries, considering a variety of disciplinary and professional perspectives. The title, inspired by Walter Benjamin's theories of translation, brings attention to the often overlooked or naturalized labor of curators, which involves subtle but nonetheless transformative acts of framing and poetic interpretation. The course emphasizes a critical approach to display practices where students are exposed to a wide array of interdisciplinary critiques. Assignments may include primary research, museum ethnographies, and the development of a curatorial proposal. Students may be required to attend related events, and field trips. Authors include: Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett, Tony Bennett, James Clifford, Griselda Pollock, Carolina Ponce de León, Walter Benjamin, Nicolas Bourriaud, Claire Bishop, Jacques Ranciére, Guillermo Mosquera, Eungie Joo, amongst others.

Environmental Psychology examines the intersections between behavior, mood, place and space. We will define "environment" and learn about the ways in which environments can impact our behavior, beliefs, and feelings. Does living in an urban place change the way you act in public? How can city planning impact the way you commute from home to school? Can exposure to a garden help you recover from surgery? When you are sick, can where you live impact how your symptoms are treated? This class will examine these questions related to natural and built environments by incorporating the theoretical perspectives and research methodologies of Ecology, Environmental Psychology, Geography, Physiology, and Sociology. Topics may include attachment to place, the concept of "home", the benefits of being outside, institutional spaces (e.g., schools, jails, and hospitals), privacy, and navigation. Readings may include: Benjamin, Arcades Project; Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception; Kaplan & Kaplan, The Experience of Nature; Lynch, The Image of the City; Nasar, The Evaluative Image of the City; Thoreau, Walden; and Wilson, Biophilia.

In this course, we will be considering the way Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection affects the way we think about the “ethical.” One form of the question is, “If Darwin’s theory is correct, how is it possible that humans can be moral beings, can be altruistic?” For many people in Darwin’s time and in our own, true morality is only possible if it has an extra-human, divine or transcendental basis. Otherwise, morality is simply arbitrary. Darwin's naturalism raises the issue of whether ethics are objectively “real” in the same way that stars or material things are real. A related issue is nature/nurture: is human behavior determined biologically or culturally? In this class, the discussion of these issues will focus primarily on the nineteenth-century responses to Darwin’s theory, but will also attend to a few arguments of modern scientists relating to questions of ethics. The point of the course is not to provide an unequivocal answer to the questions but to consider why and how the questions arise, and what possible implications they have for our own lives. Readings will include or be drawn from: Paley, Natural Theology; John Stuart Mill, “Nature”; Arthur Balfour, Foundations of Belief, “Ethics and Theism”; Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, “Struggle for Existence,”; the chapter on the origins of morality from Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man; The discussion of religion from Darwin’s Autobiography; W. K. Clifford's "The Ethics of Belief"; William James, “Is Life Worth Living?”; T. H. Huxley, “Prolegomena,” Evolution and Ethics; Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship”; Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea; Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin; Eiseley. The Darwin Century.

On Friday June 19th, 1953 just before the sun set on Sing-Sing prison, Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg were executed by electrocution for their part in an espionage network that transferred classified information associated with top secret U.S. atomic research to the Soviet Union. This case was a landmark at the height of tensions associated with the second Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s, but the almost half-century of Cold War tensions, teetering on the brink of global annihilation, brought out the devastating threats of societal paranoia and political persecution. Throughout the Cold War period science was wielded by both the United States and the Soviet Union with alarming efficacy. As big science began to dominate international and domestic policy, the two superpowers played ‘chicken’ with an atomic arms race and ‘catch me if you can’ with a space race that seemed to fuel animosity and bring us ever closer to the brink of world catastrophe. In this seminar we will use primary and secondary sources to examine the complex role of science during the Cold War, as weapon, threat, and salvation. Readings may include works by J.R. Oppenheimer, Deborah Cadbury, Albert Einstein, John Lewis Gaddis, John Earl Hayes & Harvey Klehr, and Jessica Wang among others.

To many people the latest theories in science may seem distant and otherworldly. Math, logical reasoning, and subject specific technical jargon can form intimidating barriers to modern scientific understanding. Why then are big science fiction movies like Star Wars and Avatar so successful at the box office? Is the sci-fi genre simply a social lubricant for the acceptance of science? Do these fictional narratives prophetically predict innovations within the sciences or do they actually serve to inspire these innovations? At its core, the sci-fi genre emerges from the interlacing of scientific rationality and the escapism of story-telling, extrapolating current scientific knowledge into alternate realities. In this seminar we will explore the genre of science fiction and its underlying literary and scientific elements. Readings may include works by: Isaac Asimov,Ursula K. Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, Leon Lederman,Orson Scott Card, Alice Sheldon, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Dawkins, H.G. Wells, Octavia Butler, Robert A. Heinlein, John Gribbin, Philip K. Dick, and Jules Verne.

This course offers a comparative social and historical analysis of race. Using a wide range of empirical and theoretical materials, we problematize what is too often considered settled: what constitutes race. We challenge the prevailing assumption that race is a biological fact and investigate race as a social construct--one that has changed over time, and varies across societies. A major goal of the course is to understand the mechanisms through which racial domination is (re)produced. We ask questions like: How do systems of racial classification stem from and facilitate patterns of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation? How do those patterns relate to racial violence and even genocide? Why do some societies sanction interracial sex and/or marriage and not others? We read selections from sociology, anthropology, history and literature on ethnoracial division in the US, Western Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Readings may include works by Stephen Gould, George Fredrickson, Virginia Dominguez, Carl Degler, James Baldwin, Barbara Fields, Pierre Bourdieu, Loic Wacquant, Ann Stoler, Zygmunt Bauman, Dorothy Roberts and Colson Whitehead.

There is currently a loud contest over what counts as terrorism, but there is also a quieter and wider crisis in our capacity to name and demarcate violence--the United States' and other's. It is no longer clear what counts as war, what constitutes a combatant, nor what kind of peace we might hope to make. What then can be said to confront, critique or rethink violence? We will begin the seminar by familiarizing ourselves with the origins and logics of the Just War Theory (including Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine) and we will go on to consider the historical and philosophical contexts of Kant’s call for Perpetual Peace. But the seminar will focus primarily on critical theory’s engagement with the form and logics of modern warfare. Together we will read work from the Frankfurt School in order to begin to reckon the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and violence. Finally, with the help of contemporary theorists (including Asad, Butler, Chow, Mamdani, Mahmood, Redfield) we will turn toward questions of technology, terror, and the changing face of war in the 21st century. Can critique help us in anyway to abate violence or the anguish of its aftermath?

In this course, we’ll engage in close reading of some of the work of two of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers: Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Theodore Adorno (1903-69). Although Benjamin’s relations to the School for Social Research in Frankfurt and then in exile are complicated, both thinkers are associated with the tradition of critical theory and thus our broader goal in this course is to understand what critical theory is, what traditions it departs from, and what methods it uses. Benjamin was a literary critic, philosopher and social theorist whose work has proven enormously influential across a number of disciplines, including literary study, media and popular culture studies, urban studies and political theory. Benjamin draws from Marxism, psychoanalysis, sociology, literature and religion; his thinking is metadisciplinary in so far as it invites us to think carefully about the way knowledge is constituted in modern societies. Many of the same quest ions surface in Adorno’s work. Departing from the philosophical tradition of German idealism, his sometimes controversial writings on literature, popular culture in the middle of the twentieth century, the category of experience in modernity, and the aftermath of the Holocaust repeatedly call us back to the question of the relation of politics, culture and the ethical. Readings will include some of Benjamin’s major essays and parts of his Arcades Project, some of Adorno’s shorter writings on culture, politics and modernity, and some carefully-chosen secondary works designed to help clarify the stakes of both thinkers’ projects.

The Arab world was long thought to be inhospitable to democracy, both as an idea and a practice. Its culture and societies, dominated by Islam, could only produce authoritarian rule, at best, or Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. The Egyptian revolutionary upheaval of 2011 shattered this and many other myths perpetuated by ideological and geopolitical interests rather than material reality and rigorous inquiry. It surprised experts and observers alike by toppling a powerful dictator without the use of violence and achieving this feat through a combination of old and new tools of mobilization and organization. Many have highlighted the primary role played by social media (Facebook and Twitter) in this revolution. However, this overlooks human agency and a very complex history of political activism, state-formation, and cultures of resistance that predates social media. This course will start by situating this latest revolutionary-formation within Egypt’s postcolonial history and previous revolutions (1919, 1952) and their sociopolitical impact. We will then focus on the last three decades of Mubarak’s reign and examine the global and local socioeconomic and institutional conditions which formed a fertile terrain for the overthrow of the dictatorship. We will pay particular attention to the cultural forms, genres, and spaces (poems, novels, films, blogs, Facebook pages) through which opposition was expressed and disseminated and political action organized. The course will end by interrogating the effects of this revolution on the region at large as well as what is still needed in order to secure the long-term survival of the revolutionary promise of this period. Readings may include Marx, Arendt, Fanon, Said, Mahfuz, Ibrahim, al-Aswany, Gramsci, Poulantzas, and others.

When ancient Chinese kings seared sacred bones with fire, reading the future from the resulting cracks went hand in hand with creating archival records to preserve the past. In this class, we will explore several interrelated early Chinese divination traditions through classical texts, archaeology, and recently excavated manuscripts. In all cases we will pay attention to the complex interplay between past, present, and future, including aspects of the history of writing, the history of the book, and the interwoven histories of science and religion. After starting with a discussion of the above-mentioned oracle bones, we will proceed to examine the enigmatic Yijing (Book of Changes), the earliest and most revered of all the Chinese classics. Then we will consider a popularization of divination practices in the form of almanacs that circulated widely in ancient China. Students can expect to try their hands at the actual practice of the various divination techniques covered, but most class time will be used to engage important themes arising from our investigations, Readings may include: The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China (Ca. 1200-1045 B.C.) by David Keightley; Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China by Peter Hessler; the Yijing (Book of Changes); selections from The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C.; and select scholarly articles.

International, innovative and cool are terms rarely associated with medieval texts. These adjectives more usually describe the domain of contemporary forms, particularly the graphic novel or avant-garde literature. This course will complicate the relationship we assume between medieval and contemporary texts by reading them in tandem with an eye to their many commonalities. The goal of this course is to consider the way texts—both medieval and modern—challenge how we read and how older literary styles inform current works. We will be reading medieval manuscripts and graphic novels as complex forms which allow us to interrogate the relationship between high and low art; the connections between books as physical objects and as vehicles for narrative; and the workings of non-linear plot structures. Readings may include Beowulf, Le Morte d’Arthur, Mandeville’s Travels, Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s project, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Art Speigelman’s Maus and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

In the world of fundamentalists, intermingled New York has and still represents the epitome of danger and evil about the American experiment—the public mixture of classes, genders, races, sexualities, spiritualisms, and the-devil-knows-what-else!#? As elite Protestants created a refined European-affected "high brow" culture, they also created myriad "others"—a transgressive, lowly polyglot city of shadows, miscegenation, and impurity. This two-semester course will examine the historical formation of both sides of this false yet foundational binary. Dangerous 1 focuses on the colonization and romance of Mannahatta from Leni Lenape coastal communities to Kieft's War to Henry James' Washington Square to Ayn Rand's Wall Street. The rise of wealthy white Anglo American Protestants from port trade becomes the basis for an unresolved, striving elite culture constantly moving uptown away from intermingled, non-WAAP others and from it's own repressive self-disciplining. Dangerous 2, taught Spring 2012, will focus on "Subaltern New York." Course materials will include: Sanderson's Mannahatta maps, Burn's documentary"New York" (1999), Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies (2006), and a course reader. Intensive dialogue-driven seminar approach. Students will learn how to conduct a case study using primary sources. Walking shoes and passion for NYC prerequisites! Friday lab required. Dangerous #1 & #2 can be taken separately or together in any sequence.

In the world of political moralists, intermingled New York has and still represents the epitome of danger and evil about the American experiment—the public intermixture of classes, genders, races, sexualities, spiritualisms, and the-devil-knows-what-else!#? As elite Protestants created a refined European-affected “high brow” culture, they also created myriad “others”—a transgressive, lowly polyglot city of shadows, miscegenation, and impurity. The docks, the Bowery, The Five Points, Greenwich Village, LES/Loisaida, Chinatown, and Harlem were all forged against the repressed imaginings of the powerful and the distinguished. This peoples’ Gotham, this disdained intertwined underworld of music, slang, jokes, songs, stories, foodways, and marvels of people will be the focus of this advanced research seminar. Course materials will include: Wallace & Burrow’s Gotham, Burns' documentary New York, Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, and a course reader. Research walks and visits off campus will be held during lab hours on Fridays. Students will learn how to conduct a case study using primary sources.

The nineteenth century was an age of “ocularcentrism.” A culture of looking emerged with the development of new visual technologies and reproduction techniques, the opening of art museums, and the expansion of the art market. This was the heyday of the illustrated book and the beginning of photography. The visual was used not only to make sense of the external world, but also to reveal internal truths and the realm of the invisible. In the mid-nineteenth century, Europeans and Americans alike had great confidence in vision. Yet as the century drew on, there were increasingly moments when this confidence wavered. This course will look at moments of both optimism and skepticism about the ability of the brush, the camera, and the engraver’s tool to capture what the eye could see. This course will cover a range of media, including painting, photography, book illustrations, and even “optical toys.” Focusing on how shifting theories of vision affected art production and reception, we will discuss a wide variety of art movements active in France, Britain, and the U.S. during the second half of the nineteenth century including Realism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, and Symbolism. We will have at least one museum visit.

In response to the bafflement expressed by Kafka’s hapless Josef K, one of his warders explains that the law is attracted to the guilty. We might adapt this remark to say that the law has been attracted to the novel—and vice versa. From Daniel Defoe to the Jacobin fictions of William Godwin and Mary Hayes to Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and the sensation novelists of the nineteenth century, to more recent narratives from Kafka’s Trial to Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, novels have focused on the ways in which law operates to mediate social relationships, to define public space, to frame questions of justice and injustice. In this course, we’ll engage in a study of the novel as form, while interrogating relations between the novel and the law. By supplementing our readings of novels with theoretical and historical texts and legal cases, we’ll be able to pose some fundamental questions about this strange mutual attraction between law and the novel. Some of our questions: Do novels offer an alternate vision of justice to that posited by law and even a critique of modern legal apparatus? Or do they instead teach people how to understand themselves as legal subjects? Do novels present themselves as law’s supplement in some sense? Or are they always somehow in advance of the law, offering visions of society and the ethical to which law must catch up? Authors studied may include Godwin, Dickens, Eliot, Braddon, Coetzee, and Morrison. We will also consult works by critics and theorists, and perhaps some contemporary popular media narratives.

Will the newest version of the CERN accelerator in Europe create a mini black hole on earth? What are the implications of our advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology? 20th Century Science gave us revolutions in many diverse fields, but three of the most important and pervasive innovations were relativity, quantum theory, and the mapping of the human genome. The effects of these advances on human knowledge have begun to ripple through our society but they are far from having realized their full potential. Where do we stand now and where are we headed? These are the fundamental questions we will grapple with in this seminar. The implications of understanding nature, and by extension learning to manipulate her, straddle multiple disciplines. We will be exploring topics in the conceptual understanding of modern science and its relationship to religion, politics, economics, and philosophy. No mathematical background is necessary; a sincere interest in the subject matter is the only pre-requisite for this seminar. Consider this a ‘science for poets’ course. Readings may include works by authors such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, James Watson, Justine Burley, Thomas Kuhn, Hilary Putnam, Arthur C. Clarke, Richard Dawkins, and Brian Greene among others.

Is light a wave or a particle? Were the ‘Bone Wars’ of the late 19th Century good for the study of paleontology? Is the atomic world deterministic or not? In the study of animal morphology does function dictate form or is it form that dictates function? What is the scale of our universe? These are some of the greatest debates that have gripped the scientific community over the past 350 years. Many of these debates have been restricted to a healthy dialog within the scientific community but on occasion they have sparked lively and even ad homonym exchanges between scientists. In this seminar we will explore the nature of these debates within their appropriate contexts. To grapple with these debates effectively we will need to examine primary and secondary source materials relating to the particular controversy, including biographical materials on their corresponding protagonists. As such, we will be studying works by scientists like: Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Georges Cuvier, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Thomas Henry Huxley, Samuel Wilberforce, Harlow Shapely, Heber Curtis, Othniel Marsh, and Edward Cope. Readings will include works by these protagonists as well as supporting secondary source material.

At least since Nietzsche, we have been hearing reports of the death of God. How, then, is religious belief still possible? Under the conditions of postmodernity, religious questions and themes about God, the good life, suffering and evil, and what being “human” means have been reclaimed and given new expression. This is the subject of this course. Most authors who might be situated as religiously postmodern write out of the Jewish and Christian traditions, for the postmodern situation arose out of those traditions. But wouldn’t a consistent postmodern ethic be one that seriously engages “religious” perspectives outside the scope of these Abrahamic traditions? Affirming this, we’ll also read Buddhist thinkers who employed philosophical therapies that exposed the error of assigning permanence where it does not reside, as in one’s self. The problem of suffering associated with reified thinking—turning processes into “things”—will serve as one guiding theme throughout our class. Other topics include: God without being; ethics without metaphysical foundations; the secular as sacred; mysticism of “unsaying;” deconstruction and shunyata (emptiness) as shared ways of reading texts and seeing the self and world as both impermanent and interdependent. To help identify some roles that power and transformation play in postmodern religious thought, this class will collaborate and share some readings with Bradley Lewis’s Foucault: Biopolitics and the Care of the Self. Course readings include: John Caputo, Derrida, Epictetus, Pierre Hadot, Thich Nhat Hahn, Heidegger, Irigaray, Kierkegaard, Levinas, David Loy, Jean-Luc Marion, Nagarjuna, Nietzsche, Nishitani, Shunyru Suzuki, and Gianni Vattimo.

In this class we explore food as an explicitly political space, one that demarcates racial and cultural boundaries and shapes identities. We address these core concerns, in part, by engaging works of literature that examine the relationship between food and the expression of culture, history and trauma. Course texts may include novels like Nervous Conditions, Breath Eyes Memory, Beloved, and Black Boy. Nowhere is food more politically and culturally charged than in NYC, so the city is also our classroom. We negotiate the porous yet enduring boundaries of race and culture as often as we eat, walk or shop in Little Italy or Little India, Koreatown or Chinatown, Le Petite Senegal or Harlem. None of these places or cuisines is in any way associated with contemporary American food culture, which has historically harkened to preserving what is "authentically" American. These differences can be understood as forms of exclusion as well as cultural preservation—but either way they are lines of demarcation that make legible forms of power. We use a variety of texts to investigate dynamics of power represented in and by food. Who is food for? How does the representation of food reify and negotiate the boundaries of race and culture?

The course will examine forms of what are known as “social” or popular dance as expressions of cultural or group identity from approximately the 18th century to the present. These dances, from the secular tradition of American social dance, include those performed in ballrooms, cabarets, nightclubs, cabarets, discotheques, and the street. The seminar will explore various social and popular dance styles developed as a result of the rich fusions of West African, African American, Euro-American, and Latin American forms of dance within the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean. Topics may include the colonial era and the dances of George Washington; ragtime couple dance and the New Woman; the lindy-hop and the of crossing racial boundaries; and teen dances and youth rebellion of the 1950s. In all cases, we will explore social and popular dance forms as experiences of movement that both respond and give shape to social, cultural, and political issues of the day. In addition to extensive viewing of dance, readings will include Mauss, “Techniques of the Body”; Katz, “The Egalitarian Waltz”; Hunter, “The Blues Aesthetic and Black Vernacular Dance”; Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York; Tomko, Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance; Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York; Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance; Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars; and Rose, Black Noise

We will view three films from the celebrated masters of Japanese filmmaking Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi, each of whom are famous for their technical innovations in cinematic space, time, and depth of field. The course focus will be on formal film syntax and how these filmmakers arrived at a set of filmic codes independent or in advance of what became the standard Hollywood ones. We will also consider how the films comment on the huge cultural shifts, particularly of values, in Japan’s twentieth century. Specifically, we will look at the ways in which the films handle gender relations, women’s roles, notions of truth, family, and “traditional values.” Readings will include selections from: James Monaco, How to Read a Film, David Bordwell, Ozu and The Poetics of Cinema, Stephen Prince, The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, Mark Le Fanu, Mizoguchi and Japan. The films will likely be: “Tokyo Story,” “Rashomon,” and “Sisters of the Gion.”

The 1960s has been called the golden age of Japanese cinema by many. We will view three critically acclaimed films from the period: Shinoda Masahiro, “Double Suicide”, Kurosawa Akira, “Yojimbo,” and Teshigahara Hiroshi, “Woman in the Dunes.” The course will focus equally on formal film syntax and the “message” of the films. We will be attentive to the cultural and historical context in which the films were first released to explore what these films are saying about postwar Japanese art, culture and society and how they are saying it. Readings may include: James Monaco, How to Read a Film, Chikamatsu, “Love Suicides at Amijima,” Brett de Bary, “Not Another Double Suicide,” Louis Althusser, "Ideology and the State," Selections from Andrew Gordon, ed., Postwar Japan as History, Stephen Prince, The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, and Nina Cornyetz, The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature.

The term global citizen has been used to think about the expansion of citizenship rights, responsibilities and activism onto a global scale. This course will introduce students to the contemporary theory, history and anthropology of this concept of global citizenship while situating its development in the contexts of unequal capitalist development, international institutions, and the increasing interconnectedness of world populations. The course will address such topics as: nation-state sovereignty and its challenge to global citizenship; the tensions between global citizenship, international law and the moralities embedded in particular legal systems and cultures; the political economy of transnational activism. The guiding question of the class will be: can global citizenship exist in the contemporary world and, if not, can we imagine the conditions under which it might someday emerge? Class texts will include works by: Walter Mignolo, Gloria Anzaldua, Paul Gilroy, Immanuel Kant and William Robinson.

This class will explore the medieval roots and later reinterpretations of the ideas of wandering and error, primarily through the figure of the “errant knight.” The image of the gallant hero who becomes lost in within his systems of morality and chivalry persists in English fiction from accounts of the Knights of the Round Table to Batman, the Dark Knight. The course will examine the evolution of this figure and the multiple uses to which he has been put as an avatar of the desire to correct social disorder. These themes will also be discussed in medieval mystical texts and migration narratives that construct a framework around which notions of race and national identity are still constructed. This course will begin with the most robust instances of wandering that the Middle Ages offer – Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain, Guy of Warwick, Njal’s Saga and Mandeville’s Travels. Readings will also include texts about metaphorical wandering in Julian of Norwich’s Showings, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Old English Exodus, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. There may also be screenings of Huston’s Maltese Falcon, Ford’s The Searchers and Batman: The Dark Knight.

This interdisciplinary seminar explores how gender and sexuality simultaneously produce and is produced by global, transnational and international visions. For example, the project of identifying affinities between women across cultures and national boundaries has long grounded the work of feminist movements, scholars, journalists, institutions and activists in a variety of locations, both within and outside the Euro-American context. More recently, struggles for the rights of sexual minorities have become increasingly transnational. We explore such efforts to forge enabling alliances and solidarities. We also critically examine how such efforts navigate cultural and national differences, hierarchies within a global world order and complex histories of imperialism, paying attention to the different locations through which such projects intersect with the global. The course highlights the rise of a new post-war international order centered in the UN system, exploring the links between colonial legacies and new global trajectories. How and why are women and girls, gender and sexuality so central to this system? By examining development initiatives that target women and girls, anti-violence and anti-trafficking campaigns, and the rights of sexual minorities, we explore how gender and sexuality become grounds for debating global, transnational and international visions and frameworks that, in turn, shape feminist and queer politics in different locales. Readings include Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, Kumari Jayawardena's Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire by Mrinalini Sinha, Afsaneh Najmabadi's Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards, Are Women Human? by Catherine MacKinnon, Transnational LGBT Activism: Working for Sexual Rights Worldwide by Ryan Thoreson and Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics by Naisargi Dave.

By the late Warring States period, life in the Chinese cultural sphere had become sufficiently complex, and literacy sufficiently widespread, that manuals or “how-to” books were compiled to transmit specialized knowledge on a wide variety of subjects, including (but not limited to) agriculture, medicine, gastronomy, magic, and of course, the arts of love and war. Relevant to both public and private life in early China, these texts are at times strikingly familiar and at other times disconcertingly strange for modern readers, and they offer an alternative window on the past to that provided by the traditional philosophers and historiographers. We will read them primarily for their intrinsic interest as detailed approaches to aspects of universal human experience from a distant time and place, but note will also be made of implications for understanding the foundations of the Chinese tradition, which has too often been viewed exclusively through the lens of elite philosophical texts. Readings may include: Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts by Donald Harper; Sexual Life in Ancient China by R.H. van Gulik; The Art of War by Sun Zi; and selections of recipes, rituals, and get-rich-quick schemes.

Even as indigenous groups have found themselves subjugated by centuries of colonialism, they are increasingly finding that they must prove their “indigeneity” to legal, national, or colonial authorities so as to gain territorial, cultural and political rights. Here, national and colonial authorities are concerned to distinguish inauthentic from authentic cultural practice and tradition. But what does it mean for a culture to be “authentic”? What are the criteria by which cultures are evaluated as genuine or spurious, and who judges? This course interrogates the relationship between discourses of cultural authenticity and performances of indigenous identity as a lens through which to understand the particularly post-colonial (and post-modern) predicaments of indigenous peoples today. The course will look at how the concept of indigeneity as a globalized identity-category has emerged historically out of conditions of settler colonialism. We examine common strains in colonial, anthropological, missionary and tourist encounters with local linguistic and cultural communities in order to better understand how indigenous peoples have been represented and constructed as social “Others”, and how indigenous “culture”—as a set of objectified practices—has been discovered, documented, and often prohibited through these encounters. An aim of this course is to understand the double-bind that indigenous groups face: they must publically display signs of “traditional” indigenous culture in order to gain recognition, but in performing “indigeneity” they are then accused of being fakes. Readings will include: James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture; Jean & John Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc.; Kirk Dombrowski, Against Culture: Development, Politics, and Religion in Indian Alaska; Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation; and Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism.

Finnegans Wake is often described as the most difficult work of literature ever written, and it is still debated whether the novel is a masterpiece or an elaborate hoax. This class will be part interdisciplinary seminar and part arts workshop. Half of the class will be devoted to the work itself. We will read short sections of the Wake in concert with various commentaries, histories, and annotations, exploring possible “meanings” the text suggests. The other half of the class will engage with artistic pieces that have been inspired by or that incorporate elements of Finnegans Wake, including visual art, film, music, sound art, theater, and dance. Students will study these pieces (for example John Cage’s sound piece Roaratoriao and Ulick O’Conner’s one act play Joyicity) as well as create and present their own creative works. Class requirements will include an analytical paper and a creative work. The course will also feature invited guest speakers and artists.

In 1980, literary critic Stephen Greenblatt coined the term “self-fashioning” to describe the 16th century phenomenon by which men in England developed an increasing self-consciousness about their ability to shape or “fashion” their identities. Anyone familiar with Shakespeare’s often quoted lines, “All the world’s a stage/ and all the men and women merely players,” has already received an introduction to this idea that identity is “fashion-able” or “performative.” Taking Greenblatt’s concept as a point of departure, this course will explore identity and the concept of “self-fashioning” as it relates to performance. How does one fashion an identity, and how does knowledge of the theater inform our understanding of how identities are fashioned? What degree of autonomy does an individual have in fashioning his or her identity? How are our social, sexual, and racial identities mediated and shaped by our speech, our appearance, our institutions, and finally, our audiences? This course will engage with both primary and secondary sources. Students will examine early modern literature and drama alongside theories of performance from multiple disciplines. Authors will include Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Castiglione, Pico della Mirandola, Erving Goffman, J.L Austin, and Judith Butler.

The Renaissance witnessed both an explosion in theatrical innovation and an increasingly global world--the beginnings of global trade, the “discovery” of the New World, and bouts of both conflict and cooperation among the world’s powers. By reading plays that stage encounters between Europeans from different countries and of different religions, between Europeans and the Ottoman Empire, among natives of “India,” and among Europeans, Native Americans, and African slaves, we will explore how and why the stage became such a significant site for the representation of cross-cultural encounters. Some questions we will explore include: how do these plays represent conflict—between self and other and over goods and territory—and what possibilities for reconciliation do they imagine? How does the theatre participate in the production of a global consciousness? How do these plays understand the differences encountered as a result of travel, trade, and exploration? Why did the theatre develop a fascination with the exotic (for example, with cannibals and pirates)? In what ways did what it means to be European, Christian, or even a good wife or husband get defined and altered by these encounters? In keeping with the theme of encounters, this course will stage a number of creative encounters from the period: between works from different European nations; between plays and the prose works with which they were in dialogue; and between written and visual materials, for example, engravings of the New World and its inhabitants. We will also read some newly translated accounts of how Arabs viewed Europe. Likely authors include, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cervantes, Montaigne, Behn, Fletcher, DeBry, and Massinger.

This course will examine Film Noir as a genre coming out of the moral unrest after World War II. Film noir expresses a despairing vision of the world borne of the brutality and absurdity that war forced humanity to face. The atmosphere of loss and isolation in this genre has elicited a variety of readings, some emphasizing class and racial anxieties, and others the impact of suburbanization and changing gender roles. But this course also explores the relatinship between film noir, and existentialist themes in literature and philosophy. Existentialism approaches enduring questions that philosophy, religion and literature have always sought to answer: Does fate, free will or chance dictate our lives? What is the proper response to atrocity and how do we assign blame or establish a moral order in the face of it? We will analyze the fallen world portrayed in noir by tracing these questions in the philosophy and literature that precede and accompany the moment of classic noir in the forties and fifties. We will read Sartre, Camus, Primo Levi, Eli Wiesel, Raymond Chandler, The Book of Job, genre theory, as well as specific film studies texts. Films will include Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, Howard Hawk’s The Big sleep, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye.

Across time and place, global migration and the flow of information have presented profound questions with respect to national identity. What does it mean to be American? Who can be German? What is a Canadian citizen? How have large immigrant populations in countries like France generated debates on the character of national identity and the demands and nature of citizenship? Can many different cultures (rather than one national culture) coexist peacefully and equitably in a single country under a policy of multiculturalism? We often think of these questions in the context of the United States and Europe. But how do they look if we examine Japan, today a country with falling birthrates and almost zero net immigration? The idea of Tan’itsu minzouku (“a unified race” or a “single people”) is a prevalent one where “the Japanese” are said to share common customs, lifestyles, and beliefs. This course aims to deconstruct the myth of Japanese homogeneity with a focus upon marginalized populations at the fringes of Japanese society. Ultimately it asks the questions: who are “the Japanese” and what place does “Japan” occupy in the contemporary world? Will demographic changes generate more open policies with respect to immigration and citizenship? Weekly topics cover nationalism and the politics of identity, Nihonjinron and the myth of Japanese uniqueness, oldcomers in Japan (Koreans), newcomers to Japan (Filipinos, Chinese, Vietnamese minorities), indigenous populations like Ainu and Okinawans, burakumin, sexual minorities, and popmultiethnicity. Sources include fictional works by Japanese minority writers, historical scholarship, documentaries like Shinjuku Boys, which addresses gender, sexuality, and love in Japanese society, and films such as GO about Zainichi Koreans (resident Koreans).

This course will examine the effect of electronics on the inventions and the artistic and social activities that shaped musical thought throughout the twentieth century and into today. From the initial “magic” of capturing sound through recording - until the invention and development of electrical and electronic musical instruments, these changes in art and music during the century of electronica were unique and often mind-blowing. The interaction of impressionism, “modernism”, abstract art and dadaism on musical compositions during their times will be explored as will the profound effect of both analog and digital devices on creativity and performance. The primary text will be Electronic and Experimental Music by Thom Holmes, and recommended readings will include Analog Days, by Pinch and Trocco; Theremin, by Albert Glinsky; and Electroacoustic Music, by Herbert Deutsch.

This course examines several nineteenth- and twentieth-century travel narratives in an exploration of the experience of travel and the many questions it raises about social identity and cultural difference, the traveler's search for adventure and “authenticity,” the relationship between tourism and colonialism, and the pervasive use of travel metaphors in the discourse of postmodernism. Readings will include a variety of nonfiction travel books, such as Flaubert in Egypt, Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, Chatwin's Songlines, Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express, Phillips’ The European Tribe, and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, as well as scholarly articles about the genre of travel narrative and the sociology of travel.

Among the early Chinese philosophers whose ideas have framed moral, social and political discourse in East Asia, the figures of Confucius and Lao Tzu stand out, not only as thinkers of towering influence, but also as diametrically opposed archetypes of wisdom. In this seminar, we begin by reading the works attributed to each man, and then we proceed to examine the ways in which their legacies have been and continue to be appropriated by others. Toward this end we explore competing manifestations of Confucius and Lao Tzu in Chinese religion, in popular culture, and in the marketplace of ideas. Themes include the opposing impulses of idolization and iconoclasm, censorship and propaganda, and the sacralization and commercialization of traditional values. Apart from Confucius’ Analects and Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, assignments may include Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching edited by Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue, selections from Early Daoist Scriptures by Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Confucius from the Heart: Ancient Wisdom for Today's World by Yu Dan, and the controversial 2010 Hong Kong film "Confucius" starring Yun-fat Chow.

Imamura Shohei (1926-2006) was one of Japan’s most highly acclaimed film directors, twice awarded the Cannes’ Golden Palm award. This course will explore three of his films, The Insect Woman, Pigs and Battleships, and Vengeance is Mine, each of which takes a hard look at the seedy side of modern Japanese society, depicting, respectively, a prostitute, gangsters, and a serial murderer. We will support our film viewings with analytic treatments of the films, alongside readings on Japanese history and tradition. Possible texts include: Gluck, Postwar Japan as History; Richie, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film; Washburn and Cavanaugh, Word and Image in Japanese Cinema.

What holds a society together? This course will explore one influential answer to this foundational question within philosophy and social theory, namely social contract theory as it developed within early modern European political philosophy. Modern assumptions about the relationship between individual and society, private property and ownership, rationality, economics and the market, and rights and responsibilities of citizenship have all been shaped by social contract theory. But, even though this theory has enjoyed great influence, it has been severely criticized as unrealistic and biased towards individualism and property holders. We will read the foundational social contract works in this course and try to understand their assumptions, strengths, and weaknesses. The works to be read will include: Hobbes' De Cive, Locke's Two Treatises of Government, and Rousseau's The Social Contract.

Over the past several decades, scholars from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives—literature, women’s studies, political science, and aesthetics, to name a few—have returned to the question of “affect,” also referred to as “feeling” or “emotion,” as well as “passion,” “pathos,” “mood,” or even “love.” This course aims to familiarize students with the field of “affect theory” by surveying some of the most important texts that ground it (e.g. Aristotle, Raymond Williams, Freud, and Silvan Tomkins) as well as several that have emerged more recently (Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi, Ahmed, Ngai, among others). Much of our work together will be to read closely some very difficult theoretical texts, each of which attempts to describe what affect is, and why it matters to and for a wide range of experiences: political, aesthetic, musical, and psychic, among them. Additionally, over the course of the semester we will focus on some specific affective states and the texts that have grappled with their deep structure—from “cruel optimism," to happiness, anxiety, boredom, and depression. Lastly, we will undertake some experimental work by collaborating to produce what we might call "affective events" that may serve to instruct, persuade, or otherwise make an impact through affective means. While this course has no prerequisites, it is particularly appropriate for students who feel they are up for the challenge of reading some rather difficult theoretical material.

Over and over, we are told that the world we live in is becoming increasingly global. All its parts are connected to one another, and goods, people, culture, and information can move from one place to another, seemingly without barriers. Yet how new is this phenomenon? Scholars have pointed to the middle of the sixteenth century as the moment when the economy became global, and the age of exploration and colonization began to connect many parts of the world to each other in a complex network that included cooperation, piracy, and slavery. This course will explore the emergence of a global consciousness in the early modern period. Our primary questions include: to what extent did people in this century begin to imagine and experience the world globally (that is, as an entity whose regions were interdependent rather than separate)? Does the change in understanding of the world vary by region, by class, ethnicity, gender, or religion? How did globalization influence cultural developments? What influence did global encounters have on European identities—for example on ideas about, and experiences of, gender, sexuality, class religion, and citizenship? Was the global economy seen as cooperative or competitive? To answer these questions, we will consider how the attempts to create, and the struggle to understand, this global world produced new narratives and forms of interdisciplinary thinking. In order to see how the issues surrounding globalization as we understand them today have a long and complex history, we will also study works that put the past in present in conversation with each other. We will investigate a wide variety of primary works, such as travel narratives, plays, poems, early forms of ethnography, films, engravings, and globes, as well as secondary works by literary scholars, anthropologists, and historians of labor, the economy, and science. While the focus is on the “European” and emerging “American” perspective, we will also read several works that challenge the Eurocentric view of globalization that was emerging and still dominates much of contemporary discourse of globalization.

The idea of the world coming to an end is a characteristic and fundamental part of the western tradition. The course will examine the emergence of the idea of end-time thinking, often called apocalypticism, and consider its persistence and influence through religious, psychological, sociological, and literary lenses. We will examine Jewish and early Christian apocalypticism, its revival in the middle ages and nineteenth century America, the rereading of Biblical narratives as atomic destruction during the Cold War, and the development of science-based apocalypses. The course will close with deep investigation of the Mayan calendar and the modern eschatological movements inspired by it. Readings may include: Book of Daniel; Book of Revelation; Wessinger, Millenialism, Persecution, and Violence; Kyle, The Last Days are Here Again; Paul Davies, The Last Three Minutes; Mary Shelley, The Last Man; Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End; Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More; Mayan calendrical documents relating to 2012; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; John Hall, Apocalypse; Film: On the Beach; Carl Sagan, The Cold and the Dark; Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth.

It is not surprising that concepts of spectacle have been of great importance for studies of visual media. From the earliest modernist theories that linked spectacle to medium specificity, historians, theoreticians and critics have attempted to understand the centrality of spectacle to mass media. This class looks at some of the pivotal ways in which spectacle has been understood, exploring the differences between modern and post-modern critics and the distinctions and overlaps between historical and theoretical investigations. Starting with Tom Gunning’s idea of attractions, a concept that revolutionized understanding of early cinema and its seemingly cavalier approach to narrative, we will explore how the concept of spectacle links history/theory and representation/reception. We will look at modernist debates around the image and consider their consequences for theories of perception, exploring the impact of consumerism in reshaping the image. We will also consider the relationship of spectacle and narrative, looking at how theorists like Laura Mulvey tied this regimen into the presentation of sexual difference. Mulvey is one of many critics to link spectacle to femininity, a topic we will explore as we consider the relationship of spectacle to sexuality. Finally, we will consider the postmodern consumerist spectacle and the creation of a “virtual gaze,” explored by Anne Friedberg. Readings will include Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Anne Friedburg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture.

The modern notion of "greenness" equates the natural environment with goodness. What do we make of this equation? This seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing the way that people have conceptualized their relationship with nature and the natural, and how these views impact our behavior. We will employ psychological theory and empirical research to explore how people form their values with regard to the environment. Possible texts include Hippocrates, Yi-Fu Tuan, E.O. Wilson, William Cronon, Ernest Callenbach, Rachel Carson, Alan Weisman, Michael Pollan and Ruth Ozeki.

This course will consider the intimate relationship between writing, identity and movement. We will survey texts in the English literary tradition that use the language of motion – travel, migration and wandering– to articulate the problems of identity formation, ranging from mythmaking on a large scale in Anglo-Saxon poetry to the self-fashioning of individuals, such as the poetic aspirations of Langston Hughes. The texts we will consider will include rewritings of the Exodus, the European arrival in the New World and the Middle Passage as well as literary texts that enable literal movement. The swirl of ideas and genres we will question center on the idea of passages, or the possibility of transformation through travel and writing. The course will help students think about the political and effective implications of the written word to bridge cultural gaps, mobilize peoples and excavate one’s sense of heritage. The reading for this course will be cross-temporal and focus on medieval and African-American texts. Medieval texts will include the Old English Exodus, Egil’s Saga, Chaucer’s “Man of Law’s Tale” and “The Clerk’s Tale,” Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. Later texts will include: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Dave Eggers’ What Is the What, Langston Hughes’ poetry, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’ Harlem is Nowhere.

A production of Antigone is taking place somewhere in the world every day—right now, as you are reading this. What was Antigone? What is Antigone? What might Antigone yet be? Our course—a collaboration between a stage director and a classicist—begins with an immersion in Sophocles' prize-winning play (441 BCE), with close attention to the history, politics, aesthetics, performance conditions, and production features of ancient Athenian drama more generally. The second half of our course turns to contemporary renditions of Antigone and will consider the dramatic and cultural configurations each new production activates. Antigone's exploration of the complexities of gender, kinship, citizenship, law, resistance to authority, family vs. the state, and religion (among other issues) has been compelling for modern thought, and especially galvanizing to theaters of resistance and dissent. Our classes will combine critical inquiry into the plays and surrounding discourse as well as experiments in interpretation—including acting workshops and staging exercises. Students need no background in acting, theater, or ancient literature, but do need critical energy and discipline. Among the modern plays we might address, in the second half of the semester, are reimaginings of Antigone by Brecht, Fugard, Miyagawa, Gambaro, Pongstaphone, and Piatote. To help us place antiquity and modernity in a productive conversation, we will also read secondary literature from several fields (classics, political theory, anthropology, theory of sexuality/gender).

How did language emerge? Language is arguably the most important of social institutions and yet its origins and what it reveals about human nature have posed a persistent and unresolved riddle to philosophers and evolutionary biologists alike. This course looks at the long history of thought about the origins of language in the Western tradition, from enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau and Condillac through modern linguists like Chomsky and Pinker, as a way to explore how ideas of the human and of society are theorized. As we will see, each theory of language origins invariably involves a theory of human nature, of the relationship between emotions and rationality, and of the individual to society. How do various theories of language presuppose theories of society and human nature? How do thinkers about language origins account for linguistic diversity and what implications does it have for their understandings of human nature and difference? The course will engage with a lineage of texts from philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and evolutionary biology in order to explore these questions. Texts include Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge; de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics; Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language; and Pinker, The Language Instinct.

How should one live? What is the best life? The thinkers of Ancient Greece contemplated these questions in different ways, and their responses have powerfully influenced subsequent political and social philosophies. In this course, we will examine four ways in which the Greeks thought about and articulated the idea of the good life—the heroic, which understands the good life as striving for distinction and lasting fame through great deeds; the tragic, which sees the pursuit of happiness as fraught with conflict, ambiguity, and finitude; the philosophical, which prizes contemplation and the quest for truth; and the political, which emphasizes the contribution of collective life to individual happiness. Texts will include Homer’s Iliad, selected plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Plato’s Republic, and Aristotle’s Politics. We will explore the visions of the good life these texts present, their possible points of overlap, the internal tensions that complicate them, and their continuing relevance and impact on modern ethical and political ideals.

A flea market where one always finds what one has lost; a vanishing passage through a capital city where capitalism dreams of its own demise; a landscape riven by colonial violence whose scars speak the language of resistance. The Surrealists did not want to escape from the world but to return to it -- to reclaim reality for those whom reality drove into exile. The sites of Surrealism are as contradictory and ambivalent as the artworks that represent them: at once external and internal, strange and familiar, contemporary and archaic. In these sites, psychic and social life endlessly mirror each other, and private interiors are open to the elements of history. In this class, we will examine these contested sites in texts by André Breton, Louis Aragon, Claude Cahun, Aimé Césaire, and Julien Gracq. We will draw on the theories of Freud and Marx, both of whom influenced Surrealist thought, and on the work of Walter Benjamin, who found in Surrealism a method of reading the relics of a recent past. Sites are also places seen -- sights -- and Surrealist thought is always a way of seeing. Guided by the work of Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Mary Ann Caws, James Clifford, and Michael Taussig, we will examine Surrealist vision in painting, sculpture, and especially film and photography.

Why are gay marriage and family planning at the heart of the cultural divide that polarizes contemporary American politics? What is at stake in debates about family values and the right to choose, and what subject positions do these debates produce and refuse? This course will take a comparative look at the ways citizens inhabit categories of sex, gender, and sexuality, with attention to the fact that some identities are made more legible than others. We will call into question the separation of the so-called public and private spheres, asking what is gained and what is lost by imagining a ‘private’ sphere as somehow outside of politics and the market. If we understand registered marriage as one mode of addressing the state, how does it both generate and violate fantasies of privacy? What is the relationship between private property and the sanctity of the home? What bodily practices are at stake in asserting a relationship between sex, dignity and humanity? Readings may include works by Janet Halley, Hendrik Hartog, Saba Mahmood, Timothy Mitchell, Mimi Thi Nguyen and James Scott.