Interdisciplinary Seminars (IDSEM-UG)

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 artificial light, photography, film, and television. "We will pay special attention to issues of representation, presentation, spectacle and celebrity. "Texts may include works from the Bible and Quran, St John of Damascus, Susan Sontag, "Jacques Ranciere, Daniel Boorstin, Wolfgang Schivelbush, Deborah Willis, Joshua Gamson, Liz Ewen, Walter Benjamin, and Guy Debord as well as period photographs, 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.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

"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.

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 misreading's 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

"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.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 .

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 attempt to re-envision vehicles, infrastructure, and buildings to meet the ecological needs of the future. Students consider questions such as: what is wrong with city systems today and what are the key environmental forces that shape them? Each student individually critiques and evaluates multiple engineered urban entities and subsequently prescribe new innovations. The objective is to establish the most scientifically plausible designs for a new socio-ecological world. Readings, historical figures, and works for the course 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Over the last one hundred years, seven Latin American authors have won the Nobel Prize: Gabriela Mistral (1945); Miguel Angel Asturias (1967); Pablo Neruda (1971); Gabriel García Márquez (1982); Octavio Paz (1990); Rigoberto Menchú (Peace Prize, 1992); Mario Vargas Llosa (2010). Together, they give us a chance to consider some of the major literary and political movements in Latin America leading up to the present. Through novels and autobiography, Asturias and Menchú explore very different aspects of the indigenous struggle in Guatemala; the poetry of Mistral and Neruda reveals the successive influences of surrealism, communism, and feminism, up to the eve of the Pinochet coup in Chile; the novels of García Márquez in Colombia and Vargas Llosa in Peru embody tensions between realism and magical realism; and Paz, in Mexico, in his poetry and essays, represents a country that has been a literary cornerstone of Latin America. We will look at these authors in the context of the history, politics, and cultures of their respective countries, and conclude by considering a few authors who did not get the prize but were equally influential,such as Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño.

The philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault argued that critique is a powerful form of insubordination and a crucial “instrument for those who fight, resist, and who no longer want what is.” But how might critical philosophy, which trades in ideas, help us combat material and pervasive forms of injustice? What is theory’s relationship to praxis and to politics, and what kind of theory or practice is critique? The seminar begins with a consideration of the uneasy place of critique in the western philosophical tradition. We will read Kant, Marx, Foucault,Asad, Mahmood and Moten among others, in order to establish a sense of how critique emerges as a mode of radical questioning, an art of unsettling self-evident answers and interfering with established relations of power. We will consider what the practice of critique entails, and what it means to suggest, as these authors do, that critique interrogates the historically specific relationships between power, truth and the subject. Together we will ask after the conditionsof what can and cannot be thought or said, and how these conditionstend to shape our formation as political subjects. We will close the seminar with a reading of Achille Mbembe’s recently translated Critique of Black Reason.

This course examines the impact of the digital age on questions of writing, identity construction, ethics, trauma, and love. Our entry into the digital age has been compared to the cultural shift that occurred when the Gutenberg Bible enabled the wide distribution of the written word. What is the relationship between the "spirit of an age" or Zeitgeist and its narratives and texts? For example, at the end of Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando (1928), her time-traveling and sex-changing Elizabethan heroine Orlando, enters "the present day." By the novel's end, Orlando has grown into a young woman in "present day" London. Who might Orlando be today? Reading a range of texts including Shakespeare's Hamlet, Durras" The Lover, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, "as well as essays on the gaze, trauma, gender and representation. "We will view Cindy Sherman's photographs and Chaplin's film Modern Times. We conclude with students writing their own last chapter of Orlando, situated in present day New York.

In the twenty-first century, the Internet arguably makes secrecy impossible, but the exposure of secrets is already an important theme in many 19th-century British novels. In part, this reflects a society in which identity seems increasingly malleable through greater social class mobility, the questioning of traditional gender roles, and imperialist opportunities. In these novels, fake identities conceal a murderer and a madwoman, among others. And the societal constraints inspiring the fictional secrets also led the authors to keep secrets of their own. Beloved author Charles Dickens, the father of 10, had a 13-year love affair with a woman who was 18 when they met. But does the novel genre, particularly the "realist" Victorian novel, with its emphasis on an omniscient narrator and intersecting plots, have a special relationship to secrets? We attempt to uncover the answer by studying Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte (1847), Great Expectations (1861), by Charles Dickens, George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2), and Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887). Theory and criticism include selections from Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism

"Corrupting the youth" of Athens? Virtue in action? Threat to the body politic? Model citizen? Plato's Socrates presents a conundrum for ancient and modern thought. In his brilliant dialogue, the Apology , Plato recreates Socrates" defense of himself at his trial in 399 BCE for (among other things) "corrupting the youth" of his city. The Apology sits at the intersection of law, politics, philosophy, religion, erotic's, and pedagogy. In this course, we read the Apology closely, exploring it as philosophical reflection, courtroom oratory, literary text and as gripping drama. Supplementary readings address: intellectual milieu, historical and political context, questions of genre.

This class investigates the role of festive custom and holiday release, and the kinds of performance and literary form that they enable or frustrate, in ancient Greece and Rome, and in Renaissance Europe, with a 20th century postlude. Why does festivity sometimes lead to political revolt and at other times does not? Why does the "carnivalesque" often include festive abuse as well as celebration? We look at theories of festivity and release, at the dionysiac, at the human/animal union in festivity, and at the role of the classical period in shaping Renaissance and even modern ideas of festivity, irony and the festive worship of the gods. We also explore the effect of the Protestant suppression of festive holiday and theatricality in Shakespeare’s England, and at the tensions inherent in festivity between excess and moderation, between the saturnalia and the philosophical symposium. The class begins with classical festivity, with Plato's “Symposium,” Euripides' The Bacchae and the satyr play Cyclops, selections from Ovid's Fasti, the Metamorphoses, and Apuleius' Golden Ass. Readings from the Renaissance include: Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel; Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1 Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale. Concluding with carnival practices in the circum-Atlantic world, we take as examples the film Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro, directed by Marcel Camus), New Orleans carnival and Jazz Funerals, and Paule Marshall’s novel The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969) in order to see how these older traditions shape modern experience. We may end in 1968 in Greenwich Village with Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69.

What is “critical theory”, and how did it gain profound and conspicuous traction in the art world? What does theory have to do with the experience of visual art? Does it change how we look at and respond to Art? Theory and critique are not only expected from so-called “serious artists”, both are also being produced and consumed at rapid rates by students, established artists, historians, critics, etc. This course will begin with a brief look at the foundations of critical theory, and move onto the primary aim of studying the development of critical theory in the field of art. Emphasis will be placed on addressing what it means to be “critical” and how critical theory has been used in the writings and artworks by artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Hans Haake, Mary Kelly, Thomas Lawson, Dan Graham, and Andrea Fraser. These artists have integrated writing/theorizing with creating artworks, and continue to do so with persistence and rigor. In addition to investigating the emergence and impact of critical theory in the field of Art, students will be challenged to make theory into action: to theorize.

The European Early Middle Ages may seem an unlikely place to find a renaissance. In recent centuries, the era has been labeled foreign and backward -- a “Dark Age” of systemic violence, brutal social injustice, and intellectual and artistic poverty. In reality, however, it was a world of vibrant artistic flourishing, social and political innovation, and ingenuity. In this course, students will study key texts from the long ninth century, which saw a proliferation of scholarship and art under the patronage of the legendary emperor Charlemagne and his heirs. Carolingian courts became centers of learning, bringing the finest thinkers of Europe together in conversation, recalling the aesthetics and values of the ancient world while also forging new artistic styles and modes of scientific thought. Carolingian rulers engaged diplomatically with the world beyond—not just England and Scandinavia beyond the North Sea, but also the eastern Atlantic, North Africa, and the Levant. Immersing themselves in this world, students will consider how the Carolingian “renaissance” paved the way for the inventions and revolutions of the later Middle Ages and beyond.

The goal of this course is to create a conversation between post world war two American literature and political thought. We focus especially on the relationship between theorists making arguments using the genre of the treatise or monograph, and literary artists dramatizing protagonists acting in fictional worlds. What theoretical and political difference do differences of genre make in how readers (and citizens) apprehend and act in the world? But we also pursue more substantive questions. First, how is politics (and the meaning of democracy) represented in both theory and fiction? Second, how do literary artists represent and rework the dominant idioms and tropes of American politics - especially ideas of the frontier, self-making, freedom, and related claims to American exceptionalism? Third, how are the politics of race and gender addressed in and by literary art in comparison to works of theory? Lastly, do critics and writers repeat the pervasive and unquestioned attachment to the idea of "America," or do they trouble it by offering anti-national or diasporic identifications? Our theorists include C. Wright Mills, Norman O. Brown, Sheldon Wolin, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Kimberlee Crenshaw, Gloria Anzaldua, and Eve Sedgwick; our literary artists may include Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, Allan Ginsberg, Phillip Roth, James Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison.

This seminar investigates the ideological, political and historical parameters of "taste" in popular culture. Through examination of media artifacts that exemplify "trash," the course examines how "taste" is constituted as a cultural category that reflects, produces and maintains the social structures of American society. What is meant by designations such as "good" and "bad" media, "high and "low" art, "offensive" or "artistic" and who is empowered to make these distinctions? How do "bad objects" reveal the ideological basis of "taste," and what is their relationship to "legitimate" art forms? Does "trash" pose a challenge to cultural standards of taste and "the mainstream?' What is the relationship between "bad" art and spectatorship and why might audiences find "trash" so enthralling? Readings are drawn from Bourdieu's Distinction , Glynn's Tabloid Culture , Ross" No Respect , and the anthology Trash Culture , while screenings include cult films such as Freaks, Pink Flamingos, Plan 9 From Outer Space,South Park, and The Room , and a selection of reality TV programs, music and viral videos.

What is the relation of the family to larger structures of community and of state? Do kinship bonds provide a model for those of community or must they be superseded in the interest of a more enlightened state? To what degree do contemporary aspirations for gender equality entail a radical renovation of our understanding of the family? We will consider these questions through a close reading of ancient texts, from the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions, which we will read in conjunction with some contemporary thinkers on kinship and the state. Primary readings include: Aeschylus Oresteia, Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone, Euripides Ion, Plato Republic, Aristophanes Ecclesiazusae, Longus Daphnis and Chloe, Genesis and Exodus, Paul Romans and Galatians, Martyrdom of Perpetua, Kushner Angels in America, Nelson The Argonauts; theoretical texts include: Freud Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, and selections from Engels, Lévi-Strauss, G. Rubin, P. Clastres, A. Rich, and J. Butler.

In this course we will explore ways to deepen our relationship to nature and apply this understanding to the challenging work of conservation biology. We will examine the diversity of life on earth, the principal threats to biological and climate systems, and specific actions that are being taken to reverse these threats, and manage our own behavior and choices. Throughout the semester, we will explore how a diverse mix of practitioners - scientists, business leaders, financial institutions, entrepreneurs, social workers, and artists - can work together to conserve the earth's rich diversity and create a balanced and equitable relationship with nature. Students will research and share lessons learned through a weekly blog, and propose a practical project that demonstrates how each of us can work to protect and restore nature. Course research will include extensive readings and viewings from a wide variety of peer reviewed science journals and popular publications. At the course conclusion, students from all disciplines should see a role for themselves in the conservation work that is an essential focus of this century.

In this course we will read and discuss the major works of James Joyce with a focus on their significance to Modernism, literary theory, and to interdisciplinary scholarship. We will read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses , and sections of Finnegans Wake . We will pay particular attention to how different movements in literary theory have responded to Joyce"s work and will therefore read short critical essays by major and minor Joyce scholars. Our exploration of interdisciplinarity will include discussions of Joyce and music, religion, post-colonialism, history, sexuality, philosophy, intellectual property, and Irish Studies. We will also look at representations of Joyce"s work in music, dance, visual art, theater and film.

Traces of time passing, ruins are time that has turned into space, duration ossified and broken up into fragments. Fragments are things we carry out of ruins, relics rescued from the abyss of lost time. We create archives to organize the rescued and the abandoned, compiling catalogs and designing systems that are often ruins themselves. Drawing on literature, painting, film, and installation art, this class will explore the entanglement of nature and history and of the recent and deep past in representations of architectural and social decay in stories and images of ruined cottages, "picturesque" abbeys and castles, partially buried woodsheds. We will examine representations of objects redeemed from the ruins of history as well as the ruined sites in which such objects find refuge (arcades, museums, libraries). And we will consider what it means for something to outlive its usefulness, to survive itself and live on in its own afterlife. Students will write several analytic essays, building toward a research project in which they will explore and interpret a ruin of their choice. Texts may include essays by Uvedale Price, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Douglas Crimp, Robert Smithson, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Hal Foster; engravings, films, and installations by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Jacques Tourneur, Chantal Akerman, Ilya Kabakov, Tacita Dean, and Pat O'Neill; poetry and prose by William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, H.D., Louis Aragon, Susan Howe, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

What if comedy and tragedy wore a single mask, not two? In fact, they already do. Drama (particularly melodrama) and comedy have long co-existed within the popular novels, plays, films, and television shows that have circulated since the 1700’s and the rise of mass literacy and media. In this class, we will consider how and why the comic and the melodramatic are so often made to work in tandem rather than against each other. Class readings will enable us to consider melodrama and comic realism as paired responses to or consequences of the key changes said to characterize modernity: the decline of presumed common belief in the universal and metaphysical; the newfound role of the machine in relation to art and the rise of the culture industries; shifts in the political meaning of race, class, gender, and sexuality; and the philosophical arguments that emerged from the tension between the “Age of Enlightenment” and “Discovery of the Unconscious.” The syllabus may include selected television shows (probably WandaVision) as well as fiction and films by Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Parker D. W. Griffiths, Buster Keaton, Douglas Sirk, Max Ophüls, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wong Kar Wei, and Bong Joon Ho.

Good Design takes as its premise that visual literacy is a vital yet under-examined area of academic discourse. Although we engage the designed environment every day, non-specialists have few ways to make sense of the myriad decisions that come together to form objects and places. This course asks students to analyze existing designs and create new work, while also examining the relationships between these two processes. One central question is whether design principles that operate at a small scale, say the scale of a hand-held object, are also appropriate at a larger scale, such as the scale of human habitation. The course uses scale as a lens through which to engage this question, as readings and projects consider the design of something you can hold (like a tool), the design of something that can embrace the body (clothing or furniture), and something that can be inhabited (a dwelling). Presentations of student-designed work, discussions of assigned readings, and reviews of analytic writing will structure the majority of course meetings. Students will read primary source material from the Museum of Modern Art archives, related to the original Good Design exhibits from the 1950's. Other authors will include: Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.; Paola Antonelli, Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design; ; Pietra Rivoli, The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy; Jay Greene, Design is How It Works; Richard Dyer, White; Louise Harpman and Scott Specht, Coffee Lids; podcasts from John Biewen, Seeing White. Field trips to museums, galleries, design retailers are planned.

This interdisciplinary seminar will investigate how mass media not only provides us with entertainment and distraction but is crucial in constructing and maintaining our identities. Contemporary mass media forms, both legacy and emergent, reflect anxieties and fears, aspirations and hopes while also providing a means by which we navigate an increasingly complex and divisive social and political landscape. Utilizing wide ranging critical and theoretical methodologies, students will consider how media turns fact and fiction, reality and experience into compelling stories through which we find our place in the world. The course will explore questions such as: How do mass media provide narratives that delineate and naturalize prevailing ideologies? How do such narratives alternately form our sense of politics, economics, race, gender, sexuality and citizenship? Can media provide a means to challenge cultural and political hegemony through construction and distribution of narratives which provide alternatives to such structures? Readings will be drawn from Berger's Media Analysis Techniques as well as the anthologies The Media Studies Reader and Gender, Race and Class in the Media and screenings will include excerpts from films The Dark Knight Rises, The Secret, The Truman Show, Network, The Social Network and Quiz Show, television shows Ways of Seeing, The Daily Show, The Simpsons and The X-Files, among others, as well as a selection of other media forms, including advertisements, blogs, podcasts, magazines, music videos, and social media sites.

What does the telegraph and cinema, the Internet and new social media, have to do with empire building? Contemporary discussions about media and technology often focus on how the ways in which our world today has been radically transformed by new kinds of information technologies and novel forms of globalized cultures, yet uneven media flows have long connected the world through processes of imperialism. "We will begin at the height of European colonialism in the 19th century, and move forward through the period of decolonization and the Cold War era of the 20th century, into current debates about US hegemony and decline. We will focus on the significance of communication technologies in establishing military and economic power and the role of the mass media in shaping our ideas about racial supremacy and cultural difference. We will also consider the role of these same media and information technologies to challenge colonial domination, mis-representation and imperial rule in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a geographical focus on Africa, Asia and Latin America in relation to Britain and US imperial legacies. Authors we will read include: "Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Niall Ferguson, Stuart Hall, Anne McClintock, Edward Said and Ella Shohat, among others

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. This course examines the way that the United States punishes offenders, including the costs borne at the state and federal levels of government to administer prisons and the criminal justice system more broadly. It also examines the causes and consequences of the rising incarceration rates that the nation witnessed during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, such as the role that politics has played, the labor market effects of having a prison record, and the spill-over effects that incarceration has on formerly incarcerated persons' communities and families. While grounded in the social sciences, the course explores its subject matter from an interdisciplinary perspective, connecting scholarship from history, economics, philosophy, political science, sociology and law. It will combine conceptual and statistical approaches to analysis. It is not a class about policing nor is it about protests or political advocacy, but understanding empirical evidence related to trends in incarceration is a skill that may be useful to students interested in such issues. Possible texts include Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America; Garland, David, Punishment and Modern Society; Mary Pattillo, David Weiman and Bruce Western, eds., Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration; Norval Morris and David Rothman, The Oxford History of the Prison; and Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy.

Why does the US government seem unable to ever put together a budget on time? "Why does the United States regularly run deficits and why does the nation owe over $21 trillion dollars in debt? What are some of the different ways that the government intervenes in the economy and why is government intervention often so controversial in the United States? In this course students will learn how an economy functions at the macroeconomic level and about ways the federal government can influence the way the economy performs, while also learning about how the structure of the US government and the political process can shape the nation's economic policies. Our goal is to study the national economy in a way that situates basic economic insights in a political, historical, and moral-philosophical context so that we can fully understand the environment in which economic policy decisions are made. Examples of issues to be analyzed include government spending, taxes, social assistance programs, the government's response to COVID, the Social Security Program, the debt limit, and whom the government borrows from. Readings may include the U.S. Constitution; Mattea Kramer's A Peoples Guide to the Federal Budget; Burman and Slemrod's Taxes in America: What Everyone Needs to Know; the novel Boomsday by Christopher Buckley; "George Lakoff's Moral Politics; Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, and Maurizio Lazzarato's The Making of the Indebted Man.

In his classic text, The Wealth of Nations, the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith argued that the human propensity to "truck, barter and exchange" would naturally lead to socially optimal outcomes if people were left to trade freely, without any government interference in markets. This idea that a competitive market can lead to efficient outcomes is a central tenet of economic theory today. Moreover, the more general belief that markets know what's best is widely held throughout U.S. society. This course is designed to teach students about what economics has to offer to the analysis of markets and the ways that firms make decisions. It also will include analyses of market outcomes from scholars in disciplines outside economics, and some discussion of firms' ethical obligations. In its exploration of these topics, the course draws largely on disciplines such as economics, history, moral philosophy, and the law. Readings may include texts such as the following: Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman, The Winner-Take-All Society by Robert Frank, The Globalization Paradox by Dani Rodrik, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, Lochner v. New York by Paul Kens, and Mary Hirschfeld’s Aquinas and the Market.

This course examines the role of music theory and musical performance in the formation of community, actual and utopic. We will begin our study with the musical, mathematical, and mystical thought of Pythagoras and his followers in the short-lived utopian community of Croton: How is "the Music of the Spheres" a paradigm both for ethical action within the community and for the progress of the soul within the cosmos? From Croton, we will turn to debates about music and civic culture in fifth-century democratic Athens: What forms of music and poetry sustain and subvert citizens and states? Is there a particularly "democratic" form of music? (Readings from Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Plato.) From ancient Greece, we will then turn to the late-nineteenth century efforts of Wagner, partially inspired by Athenian tragedy, to create the "Total Work of Art" in his Ring cycle of music-dramas and in the festival at Bayreuth; we will also read the responses of Nietzsche, Adorno, and Mann (amongst others) to Wagner. Finally, we will listen to and discuss some twentieth-century experiments in music and art, especially those loosely associated with Fluxus and with New York City (e.g., John Cage, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Yoko Ono, The Velvet Underground), as well as the "free jazz" of of Cecil Taylor and the afro-futurism of Sun Ra.

This course will examine the ways in which nonviolent movements have successfully influenced modern societies. While a major focus will be on the American civil rights movement beginning with the Niagara Movement in 1909, we will also study the philosophy and tactics employed by the 1989 Friedliche Revolution (Germany), the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Argentina), The Community of Peace People (Northern Ireland), the Kenyan Women’s movement (whose “no sex” strategy harkens back to Lysistrata), as well as the moral arguments embedded in the Religious Society of Friends and other “peace churches.” Notions of nonviolent resistance and pacifism as well as the philosophy employed by such leaders as George Fox, A. Philip Randolph, Rosa Parks, Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, and Mairead Maguire will aid us in understanding how nonviolence has been employed to effect social change in many different scenarios and cultures. Texts may include: Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch, Raising up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi by Sudarshan Kapur, The Children by David Halberstam, and such films as Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, Henry Hampton’s documentary series Eyes on the Prize, Lee Hirsch’s Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony, and Gini Ritiker’s Pray the Devil Back to Hell. Musical works by Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary, and the Beatles may also be utilized for analysis and chronicling of nonviolent movements.

In this course students learn to think about the reading and writing practices of contemporary visual culture. What does it mean to “read” an image? How are images used politically? Is what is “un-seen” as important as what is seen? Students tackle philosophical, ethical, and political questions, and are encouraged to pursue topics of individual interest for assigned papers and projects. We will ground our discussions in relevant theory and debates and will explore multiple visual genres, including the graphic novel form, film, ads, and photography. In examining the politics of visual images, this course places special, extended emphasis on images in the context of war and social justice crises. Throughout, we will think about our own roles in contemporary visual culture; we are consumers, participators, and creators of imagery. What does this mean for us when considered through, for example, an ethical or aesthetic or humanitarian lens? Critical literature by Susan Sontag, Susie Linfield, Scott McCloud, and/or Shahidul Alam, among others, will inform our discussions and deepen student writing. Our syllabus also incorporates journalistic accounts, feature films, and conflict photography. Students will write reaction papers, longer essays, and have the option of a visual project.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) achieved immense fame and international success at a relatively young age as a national/ist poet writing about and for Palestinian existence and resistance in Israel and, later, in various exiles. He resisted this label early on and reinvented himself and his poetry. But the tension between the “political” and the “poetic” and the pressures and demands of the former continued to haunt Darwish even as he became a renowned world poet and one of the most important Arab poets of the 20th century.The course will trace Darwish’s rise in the cultural and political context of the second half of the 20th century and follow his metamorphosis from a national/ist poet to a global figure. We will focus on his experiments with form and narrative and his engagement with nationalism, mythology, history, and other poetic traditions. In addition to extensive selections from Darwish’s work, readings (all in English) will include Yeates, Lorca, Neruda, Brecht, Said, and Benjamin.

This course uses Carl Sagan as a frame through which to examine the complicated relationship between professional science and the public, the place of humans in the universe, the tensions between science and pseudoscience, and the role of science in political activism. Sagan introduced a generation of readers and television viewers to a romantic, awe-filled vision of the universe. He explained that we were literally stardust, and let ordinary people inhabit the excitement of the exploration of space. Through The Tonight Show and Cosmos, he became a fixture of the American home. But Sagan was also censured by his colleagues for his work to popularize science, even as he vigorously patrolled the borders of science against those who fell short of professional stature. And while he gained fame by trying to communicate with aliens, he used that fame to warn against the dangers of nuclear war and environmental destruction. We will read works by Sagan, including Cosmos and its companion television program, Dragons of Eden, Murmurs of Earth, The Demon Haunted World, and The Cold and the Dark. These sources will be supplemented with theoretical work on the rhetoric and philosophy of science.

The “sublime” is an aesthetic term that goes back to Ancient Rome and forward to current times. We can get a sense of its contemporary use by looking at a Tate Modern wall description. The Tate tells us that, although the term is “much contested,” the sublime denotes “an exalted state of mind, or an overwhelming response to art or nature that goes beyond everyday experience.” The sublime expresses “formlessness, immensity, intense light or darkness, terror, solitude and silence,” all of which can be overpowering and even traumatic. But, surprisingly, rather than overwhelm us or traumatize us, the sublime offers us “the solace of transcendence, an art in which one could lose oneself.” Early examples of the sublime included natural or artistic representations mountains, avalanches, waterfalls, stormy seas, human ruins, or the infinite vault of the starry sky. This course examines theoretical and creative representations of the sublime in writers and artists from ancient to postmodern. These include Longinus, Kant, Schiller, Wordsworth, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Newman, Rosenblum, Du Bois, Lyotard, Battersby, Chopin, Freeman, Malick, Wagner, Viola, and von Trier. Our goal is to consider the personal, political, spiritual, and aesthetic potential of this most elusive and fascinating concept.

This course investigates video as an artistic medium, a tool of surveillant culture, and a means for everyday witnessing, watching, documenting, remembering, and giving oneself to be seen. We will begin by tracing the invention of the medium from the mid-1950s, and the subsequent effect on both artists and non-artists as video technology became more commonplace and affordable in the 1970s. We will consider the history of video art, including artists like William Wegman, Adrian Piper, Vito Acconci, Nam June Paik, and Joan Jonas, as well the historical use of video by activist groups such as the Videofreex and Paper Tiger Television. Our discussion of video in contemporary art practice will touch on works by Sharon Hayes, Candice Breitz, Patty Chang, and Jacolby Satterwhite, among many others. Examining the history of video as an art form will require that we make sense of the interaction between artistic and non-artistic uses of the medium, as well as the ways in which artists do the work of representing important aspects of life in the visual field as such technological innovations as video have transformed that experience. What does video offer as a mode of representation that other mediums do not? Are there things that video does particularly well? Conversely, what are the blind spots of the medium? While all students will write critical papers as well as produce short video projects, students are asked to elect to enroll in one of two course code options: Option 1 (Video as Interdisciplinary Seminar, wherein major work completed is of the written type) or Option 2 (Video as Arts Workshop, wherein major work completed is artwork/video projects). All students meet together regardless of option elected, and all students are also required to attend one and a half hour weekly screenings of videos in addition to regular course meeting hours.

The relationship between art and ethics has been a significant philosophical problem since antiquity and one that continues to engage us. While some argue that art is autonomous from ethics, others insist that ethics is a necessary component of art and of one’s aesthetic judgment of the work. This course explores the various positions that have been taken in this debate and raises several key questions: Can art be morally enlightening and, if so, how? If a work of art is morally better, does that make it better as art? Is morally deficient art to be shunned, or even censored? Do subjects of artworks have rights as to how they are represented? Do artists have duties as artists and duties as human beings, and if so, to whom? How much tension is there between the demands of art and the demands of life? These questions will be examined through the lens of painting (Rembrandt, Picasso, Rothko), cinema (Pasolini, Riefenstahl, Truffaut), photography (Mapplethorpe, Arbus, Mann), music (Wagner), and literature (Nabokov) with readings drawn from Plato, Horace, Tolstoy, Wilde, Danto, Nabokov, Sontag, as well as other contemporary philosophers, writers, and critics.

The aim of this course is to help students develop and write the Rationale, compose the List of Works, and prepare for the Colloquium. We will begin the course by asking students to hone their Concentration and to think about the relation/difference between a Concentration and a Rationale, and identify key words, questions, and themes to guide their thinking and writing. We will also discuss different disciplinary formations of knowledge and methodologies, how to think interdisciplinarily, how to contextualize works and key themes across cultures, geographic locations, and knowledge formations, and how to historicize key questions and topics. We will do this through weekly guest lectures, short writing assignments, and in class workshops and discussion. The first part of the class will be devoted to drafting, revising, and completing the Rationale and List of Works. Students will work as a class, in small affinity groups, and individually with their advisers and with the professors as they work toward their final drafts. The latter part of the course will focus on the colloquium. We will discuss expectations and strategies for preparation, and in the final weeks of the semester students will practice presenting their ideas and fielding questions in brief, mock colloquia.

This course examines the history of the sciences of the mind and brain from the end of the eighteenth century to the present. Ranging from mesmerism and phrenology to physiology, genetics, and neuroscience, it will consider the development over time of knowledge about the brain and its relationship to the body. The course will also analyze the ways in which this knowledge has been applied in medicine, law, economics, government policy, and religion. Some of the topics we will look at include the following: mind-body dualism, neuron theory, psychoanalysis and biology, brain imaging, the molecular and plastic brain, and psychotropic drugs. The course takes a primarily historical approach to this topic, but work from other academic disciplines that engage with related questions will also be addressed. The last third of the course will focus on recent history and contemporary issues surrounding the "century of the brain." One of our challenges will be to examine what history and science and technology studies more broadly might contribute to ongoing conversations about minds and bodies. " Texts we will consider include Ann Fabian's The Skull Collectors and Ray Kurzweil's How to Create a Mind .

In 1903, at the dawn of the commercial music industry, sociologist W. E. B. DuBois famously proclaimed that the foremost problem in twentieth century American society is “the problem of the color line.” Du Bois’s prescience sets the stage for this course’s exploration of racial identity in recorded, commercially available music. We will examine how racial performance has intermingled with music consumption in the United States since blackface minstrelsy in the 1830s. Our goal is to understand how deeply embedded race—both ascribed and claimed—is in American music culture, reverberating throughout the last century in debates on artists’ authenticity, propriety, and popularity. This course is organized chronologically; each week is devoted to a particular era and its corresponding musical genres leading up to the present. With the rising importance of visual media since the mid-20th century, a historically informed understanding of the confluences of race and ethnicity in American music culture through music media and technologies will offer an enhanced understanding of the past and our contemporary, internet-driven musical landscape.

One of the most powerful myths in American society is "the American Dream," which promises that opportunity is available to all, and that material success and happiness will come through individual effort. This dream deeply informs our psychic and political lives. In most cases American popular culture reproduces and even magnifies this myth rather than subject it to criticism. Economic downturns, lost wars, and social stagnation are rarely acknowledged in popular American cinema (without some redemptive factor), and abject failure is a surprisingly rare subject. Yet the Coen Brothers—two of the most critically acclaimed contemporary American filmmakers- have made failure their primary subject. Their work abounds with losers, lost hopes, and broken dreams. They challenge and rework established film genres—the western, crime caper, film noir, musical, and even art house film—as they disturb the ideology that drives these narrative forms. In this class we will examine how the genres of American film are structured by the American Dream, and how the Coens criticize its promise of prosperity, upward mobility, recognition, and fulfillment. In addition, we will explore how artists, social scientists, activists, and journalists have sought to portray an alternative (bleaker) view of American life. Readings will include sociological texts, cultural criticism--such as Jack Halberstam's Queer Art of Failure, as well as readings in cinema studies.

Science fiction is centrally concerned with the question, “How could things be different?” Often, it has answered that question by imagining that things are much worse. And sometimes, it has imagined that things are much better. This is a course about dystopian and utopian science fiction, focusing primarily on novels and short fiction; our readings may include George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream,” Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. What constitutes dystopia within these texts? How do they envision utopia? How do forms of injustice present in today’s world—such as those involving race and gender—shape these visions of alternate societies? How do those societies relate to the world in which the author was writing, or to our contemporary moment? What responses do dystopian fictions solicit from their readers? Our discussion of these and other questions will be informed by readings that provide historical, critical, and theoretical contexts. Work for the course will likely include short response papers, a class blogging assignment, leading discussion, and two formal papers, the second of which will give students the opportunity to investigate a work of dystopian or utopian fiction of their choosing.

In Book 18 of the Iliad, Homer describes the shield made for the hero Achilles. On the shield, the god Hephaestos represented the whole earth, the sun and moon, the constellations, the Ocean that encircles the world, the cities of men, and their farms, festivals, and wars. Achilles’ shield introduces questions about the ways in which the world and the cosmos were understood in the ancient world and the contexts that produced these understandings. How did different ancient sources represent the world and the relationship of the world to the heavenly bodies? What were the organizational principles and goals that governed these representations? As scientific knowledge expands, how do popular conceptions of the world adapt to this new information? And in the absence of maps, which have largely not survived from antiquity, how might other kinds of visual and textual evidence reveal how people thought about geographical relationships, as well as related relationships between centers and frontiers, peoples familiar and foreign, and the earth and heavens? This course investigates ancient scientific and mathematical theories on the extent and shape of the world alongside other kinds of representations—poetic, political, religious, material, and visual. Primary sources may include: Homer Iliad, Alcman, Plato Timaeus, Aristotle De Caelo, Herodotus, Hanno’s Periplous, Ptolemy, Strabo, Pomponius Mela, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Gallileo.

From Jeffrey Eugenides's novel The Marriage Plot to TV's "Desperate Housewives" and "Real Housewives" series, our contemporary culture explores what happens after "happily ever after." Some of the great novels of the mid-to-late 19th century also examine the dilemmas of wives during a period when every aspect of "The Woman Question," including divorce and child custody laws, was debated. In this course we explore controversial novels in which female characters struggle with lives largely limited by the cultural stereotypes of the Angel in the House and the emerging New Woman. Readings include Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), and George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893). We contextualize each with readings on history and society in the French, American, and English settings. We also read about the post-publication history of these works, including Flaubert’s trial for obscenity, Chopin’s supposedly abandoning novel-writing because of the controversy over her work, and Gissing’s own two disastrous marriages. Other readings include selections from J.S. Mill's The Subjection of Women and from the theory of Veblen and Foucault. We will end with an "update"--Tayari Jones's An American Marriage (2018).

Exhibitions are spaces of knowledge, experience, and entertainment. This course studies the methods, functions, and conditions of exhibition practice, through visual and textual analysis as well as exhibition visits. Although the history of exhibitions and museums, from the 18th to 21st century, will provide a foundation for this course, special attention will be paid to the present. New York will be considered as a center of cultural experimentation where artists (including Latin American artists) share ideas in a global context. We will address the following questions: What are the major theoretical and practical issues at stake in different kinds of exhibitions, and how can we perceive their significance? What is the relationship between the curator and artist/s? What role does museum architecture play in creating a context for experiencing exhibitions? What are some productive interactions between exhibitions and contemporary thought? Finally, what is an exhibition? Readings will include essays by curators, writers, and critics.

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is clearly one of the most influential scientific texts ever published. It is also one of the most accessible to the general reader. Everyone has an inkling of what Darwin’s theory is about, but few people have read more than a few selected chapters of the Origin, if that. In this course we will read the first (1859) edition in its entirety, at the pace of two chapters per week. The Origin of Species draws upon a wealth of Darwin’s own experiences and research, as well as that of many others, and is both a snapshot of the state of the life and earth sciences in the mid-nineteenth century and a window into the workings of a keen, logical, and perceptive mind. A willingness to dig into the details is a more important prerequisite for the class than a familiarity with the sciences. The background and context of Darwin’s examples, concepts, and arguments will be supplied as needed through brief lectures, slides, and supplementary readings.

This course will focus on a close reading of Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population and an examination of some of the reactions to and implications of this work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ironically, today, if people read Malthus at all, they read the short first edition, whereas in the nineteenth century most of those who were influenced positively or negatively by Malthus, including, among others, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Harriet Martineau, and John Stuart Mill, read the second edition, or later editions based on the second. We will read both editions and focus on the second, which exerted the most influence on subsequent social and political thought, economics, and biology. Those not familiar with this work may be surprised to find that Malthus framed his arguments within the tradition of natural theology and that, contrary to the popular understanding, he did not predict environmental disaster due to human overpopulation. What he did say, and how people have interpreted it, will be the subject of this course.

In this course we unearth the lost art of letter-writing and study epistolary form in interdisciplinary context, putting the epistolary novel, one of the most popular prose forms of the eighteenth century, in conversation with a range of primary documents (newspapers, pamphlets, travel letters) as well as works of philosophy and critical theoretical works. As we do so, we will ask how these letters let us unfold the problems of distance, intimacy, and exchange. Of particular interest to us will be how the epistolary form accounts for the scenes of its composition and represents the circumstances and space around the act of writing: In what ways does the epistolary novel (along with collections of letters of the period) imagine travel and contact with other cultures? What exactly is the “readerly” intimacy letters create, and how do these strategies portray and construct gender? How do these letters depict strangers, foreigners, and other “others,” and how do they address or confront the public? We will think about how the letter reinforces or resists norms. Our readings will take us across Europe and the Atlantic world and, more locally, to the Wrightsman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where we will consider the domestic spaces, objects, and material histories that inform some exemplars of this literary form. Finally, we will conclude our inquiry with a look at the epistolary form’s 21st-century afterlife, and students can expect some creative projects along the way. Major texts may include: Montesquieu, Persian Letters (1721); Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1741); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or The New Heloise (1761); Lady Mary Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters (1763); Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton (1797); and Leonora Sansay, Secret History: or, The Horrors of Santo Domingo (1808).

Practices of meditation and contemplation have emerged as "mindfulness based interventions" (MBI) in medicine, psychotherapy, education, and popular culture. This class will explore some of the core practices of MBI as well as some of the larger philosophical, historical, political, poetic, and religious aspects of mindfulness. We will also consider how mindfulness practices compare with writings on spiritual, even mystical, states of consciousness. Theorists, poets, and practitioners we study include Thich Nhat Hahn, bell hooks, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Meister Eckhart, Hui Neng, Alice Walker, William James, Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams, Michael Pollan, Bret Davis, and Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, Ryokan, Basho, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wright, and Sonia Sanchez.

Landscapes are views of the world: sites seen as well as ways of seeing and knowing. Representations of landscape invite us to perceive the world while instructing us how to conceive it. Drawing on poetry and prose, narrative and philosophy, painting, photography, and film, this course will explore landscapes as symbolic sites that are also physical places, windows on reality that mirror our subjectivity. Our focus will be on the Romantic landscape and its transformation by and into the modern city. The Romantic self reads the face of nature as an ambivalent text, by turns beautiful and sublime, vivifying and deathly, familiar and strange. Romantic “spots of time,” local reservoirs of psychic meanings, register the growth of the mind as well as the passage of history, reflecting and resisting the ruinous progress of industrialization and commodification that overwrites the Book of Nature with a new system of inorganic signs. The modern city both negates the Romantic landscape and recovers it in the second nature of streets, façades, and crowds. Turning to the cityscape, we will examine its hiding places for modern fugitives from modernity and their melancholy pursuers. We will theorize landscapes from psychoanalytic, Marxist, and phenomenological points of view and, in turn, consider the role of landscape in these theoretical writings. Texts may include Romantic prose and poetry by Burke, Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley; modern and postmodern writing by Baudelaire, Stein, Woolf, Césaire, and Borges; cultural and aesthetic theory by Freud, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Smithson, Jackson, Cosgrove, Rose, and Taussig.

Contests between stalwart custodians of "tradition" and rebels searching for new, untested modes of expression pervade Western music history. This course surveys some of the most contentious debates on music's past, present, and future waged between music theorists, critics, artists, and audiences, spanning the last five hundred years. Our focus is on the seemingly inevitable tension between what music is, what it should be, and what it can be. Starting with the Greek philosophers of antiquity, we explore debates on the music of Claudio Monteverdi, Ludwig van Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Carmen Miranda, John Cage, Bob Dylan, and The Slits. We also examine the backlash against and subsequent defense of styles like jazz, rock and roll, punk rock, rap, and 2000s pop. Our goal is to better understand how culture is "made" precisely during these moments of charged debate, where a particular music"s perceived merits or transgressions serve as the pretext for larger often controversial ideological issues. Art in this sense--and music in particular--becomes a platform by which to observe how competing aesthetic value systems reveal deep social and cultural rifts. Each unit within this course has two parts. First, we scrutinize and discuss primary sources related to the debate: letters, scores, newspaper and magazine articles, journal entries, singles, albums, and films. Secondly, we read and discuss secondary sources by scholars, critics, and investigative journalists for context, using this new information as a way to think critically about the primary sources and our own aesthetic judgments. What we will see is that debating music in terms of what's "good" and "bad," classical and avant-garde, edifying and dangerous, traditional and innovative, is, in the Western world, a long-standing tradition in its own right.

This course is an introduction to the tragedy and philosophy of ancient Athens. We are especially interested in exploring concepts of guilt, justice, and the good, as these are developed in diverging ways by tragedians and philosophers. What role does free will play in politics? What does the invention of philosophy tell us about changing attitudes toward politics? Can justice be decided by a political body or must humans conform to an eternal standard? What is the correct way to educate the young? Is the good attainable and what is its relationship to happiness and pleasure? Is democracy possible or must we be ruled by the virtuous and the wise? What place does divinity and revelation have in politics? Does philosophy have a unique vantage point to discuss political questions? Is the emphasis in tragedy on imperfect knowledge a legitimate political concern? These issues will be considered by reading the following works: Aeschylus' Oresteia , Sophocles' Three Theban Plays, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and Plato's Republic.

The Arab world is a vast region encompassing vibrant societies and dynamic cultures, but its geopolitical importance and a resilient Orientalism often reduce it to Hollywoodish stereotypes and misrepresentations. One way of transcending these misrepresentations is to ask: How do Arab filmmakers represent their own reality cinematically? This course introduces students to contemporary Arab cinema. We will begin by briefly examining the introduction of the medium in colonial times and trace its development both as an industry as well as an art form through the national era all the way to the neoliberal present. We will view and critically examine a number of selected films that represent the diversity of the region, but also the shared concerns and common sociopolitical struggles and challenges facing its societies. We will focus on key moments, both aesthetically and politically, and will explore how filmmakers negotiate and represent the following: anti-colonialism and liberation, nationalism and national identity, gender and sexuality, communal strife and civil wars, class struggle and social justice, globalization and neoliberalism, and the recent revolts. Texts will include Said's "Orientalism," Shafik's "Arab Cinema," Khatib's "Filming the Modern Middle East." Films will include Chahine's "Alexandria Why?" Abu As`ad's "Paradise Now" and Tlatli's "Silence of the Palace.

This semester, we will read broadly in literary, philosophical, and political works of the Enlightenment and more recent critical-theoretical texts as we ask how authors of the period understood the construction of the subject (or self) and the powers that shape that subject. We will focus on works that unsettle the neutrality of the categories of “man” or “citizen” and allow us to consider the exclusions central to their constitution: foreigner, servant, woman, slave, the poor. Alongside twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical theoretical texts, we will read Abigail Bailey’s memoir of domestic violence, Pierre Marivaux’s play in which servants seize their masters’ roles (briefly), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, debates about the period's “poor laws,” and the anonymously authored Woman of Colour, among other texts.

If “the past is never dead,” as Faulkner wrote, how does it continue to live on? How do its ghosts continue to haunt the political present? Can these ghosts be exorcised or does one have to learn to live with them? These questions become especially urgent and consequential in the aftermath of war and catastrophe, as writers and artists confront the legacy of violence and try to memorialize annihilated bodies and spaces. The aesthetic modes they choose to address both the dead and the living and the ways in which they narrate the past have political consequences for the future. We will explore and try to answer these questions by reading a selection of texts (fiction, poetry, film, and visual art) as sites and acts of mourning. We will read and view works from and about Armenia, South Africa, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and the US. Readings will include Benjamin, Boulus, Butler, Darwish, Derrida, Freud, Khoury, Morrison, and Youssef.

This course offers an overview of the political economy of the 21st century fashion industry. Focusing on specific transnational supply chains, we follow the globalized production and consumption of garments and brands, and examine closely the debates about gender, race and globalization, economic and social development, labor standards, sustainability and activism. Some of the questions we will explore include: How do we account for the globalization of the garment industry? How do we historically understand the inequities of today’s global “fast fashion” industry both in the global South and in the North? Do alternatives such as ethical fashion initiatives by designers, programs for corporate social responsibility and campaigns of consumer activism offer meaningful interventions? What role do workers in the fashion industry—from garment workers to retail workers, to models—play in shaping discussions about a more just and sustainable future for fashion? We draw from interdisciplinary scholarship ranging from anthropology and sociology to media studies and race and ethnic studies. Readings for this course may include: Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Commodity Activism; Andrew Brooks Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second Hand Clothes; Jane Collins Threads: Gender, Labor Power in the Global Apparel Industry; Jill Esbenshade’s Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry; Tanisha C. Ford’s Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style and the Global Politics of Soul; Naila Kabeer’s The Power to Choose; Heijin Lee’s Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia.

It's commonplace to say that art "moves" us. But what does that really mean and how, exactly, does this happen? For millennia the effect/affect of art has been theorized, debated, and worried over. This class takes as its core the question "How does art work?", and looks at the ways in which various philosophic, religious, educational, political, and scientific texts, from antiquity to the present, have attempted to answer this question. Exploration of this larger question depends on others: What are the ancient philosophers' hopes and fears regarding art's affective abilities? What is at stake in the debate over Biblical iconoclasm and the defense of religious art? How do theorists talk about the ineffable sublime, or categorize aesthetic judgment? How does the avant-garde frame its intersection with the political? How might art "work" in the process of decolonization? How can art educate and persuade? What does neuroscience suggest about art's impact on our brains? Finally, does art, as the poet Auden once pondered, make nothing happen? Through readings, in class discussions, presentations, and writing individual research papers, students will tackle our major question from a variety of disciplinary and historical perspectives. Through this broad survey, How Art Works will be approached as an open question: our goal is not to arrive at a definitive destination, but instead to explore the terrain.

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 course we will carefully and closely read The Tale of Genji alongside selected secondary sources to focus our attention on such topics as: narration, visuality, sexual politics, relation to reality, poetics, and aesthetics in the text.

This course aims to give students an in-depth understanding of the fundamental concepts and theories of Sigmund Freud, the so-called "Father of Psychoanalysis." We will read closely a wide range of Freud's writings, from the earliest incarnations of Freudian psychoanalysis to Freud's final formulations of his views. Concepts and theories that we will examine include those of the unconscious, the instincts or drives, infantile sexuality, the "talking cure," transference, dream interpretation, and more. Our sights will also be set both on the ways in which psychoanalytic thought has, from its very beginnings, been in fruitful dialogue with the humanities, specifically literature, philosophy, and the arts, and on its development as a clinical practice. Texts may include: Studies on Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Papers on Technique, Metapsychological Papers, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id, and a selection of his shorter writings.

What does it mean to read closely? How does a work of literature change as you learn more about its historical context or the history of its own production? This is a class on reading and perspective meant to cultivate our skills as students of literature or other kinds of texts. In the first half of the semester, we will approach lyric poems, short stories and novels (Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the Arabian Nights), as worlds unto themselves, taking seriously the texts’ internal logic while probing their peculiarities, ambiguities, and paradoxes. We will attend to how poetry fuses intellectual, emotional and aesthetic concerns while developing a shared vocabulary in order to better understand and describe the ways poets utilize wordplay, figurative expression (such as metaphor, synesthesia, and synecdoche), and sonic devices (like rhyme and rhythm) as they transform ordinary language into art. For fiction, we will consider how stories are narrated, their arrangement of time and space, their experiments with point of view, and the ways in which they instantiate character. In the second half of the semester, our perspective will broaden as we look at two case studies. We will set Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre against the backdrop of nineteenth-century ideas about women’s work, the cult of the home and domesticity, the early feminist movement, and roiling debates about the British empire, all issues which intersect Brontë’s strange novel, which is at once a coming-of-age story, a spiritual memoir, and a Gothic romance. Similarly, we will explore how issues of race, diaspora, and urban life shape Langston Hughes’s 1949 poetry volume One-Way Ticket. In the process, we will consider how literary forms themselves are marked by genre (a different kind of history) as they play with and against longstanding conventions.

This course will introduce students to some of the major developments in psychoanalysis that have taken place in Freud"s wake. While stressing the broad interdisciplinary scope of psychoanalytic thought, we will also take seriously the insistence of Freud and others that what psychoanalysts know, they know from their clinical experience. Students in this course will become familiar with the concepts and theories of the main schools of post-Freudian psychoanalysis and with the extension of psychoanalytic theory from its origins in clinical psychotherapy into various nonclinical fields"in particular, the study of history and society"by way of a deepening knowledge of the narcissistic and psychotic structures of the mind. Topics include child analysis, object relations, sex and gender, feminism and psychoanalysis, Marxism and psychoanalysis, race/racism, and narcissism. Readings include works by Melanie Klein, Christopher Lasch, Juliet Mitchell, Wilhelm Reich, and D. W. Winnicott, among others.

What, when, and who is the Anthropocene? We are living in a dramatic period in which we are re-thinking how Nature and culture relate to one another. The geological metaphors, entangled histories, situated narratives, ecology, science studies, art, literature, science fiction, and bioinformatics that combine in Anthropocene conceptions both link and divide the Global North and South. In this course, we consider the historical background of the Anthropocene concept, why the debates over when it started are so vitriolic, and what it means in contrast to the many other ’–ocenes’ proposed (Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Plantationocene, Anglocene, etc…). Using books by Anna Tsing such as The Mushroom at the End of the World and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Facing Gaia by Bruno Latour, and Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway as guideposts we will explore ways of envisioning the natural world and its intersection with human culture. In particular, we will frame our individual perceptions of water, energy, fossil fuels, and plastics in light of contemporary discourses. This class is partnered with the ‘Art of the Anthropocene’ course taught by Prof. Eugenia Kisin. We will combine cohorts for shared field trips and guest speakers and will work together to build toward an art-science exhibition that will be shown on Governors Island in the WetLab house in Fall 2022.

The age of the Obama Presidency has been burdened by a number of highly publicized police cases involving the killings of unarmed black citizens at the hands of law enforcement and/or local vigilantes. In the wake of the deaths of Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and others, the recent #BlackLivesMatter movement has emerged largely in response to histories of state sanctioned violence against black and brown bodies. This seminar links the #blacklivesmatter” movement to four broader phenomena: 1) the rise of the U.S. prison industrial complex and the increasing militarization of inner city communities, 2) the role of media in influencing national conversations about race and racism, 3) the state of racial justice activism in the purportedly “post-racial” Obama Presidency, and 4) the increasingly populist nature of decentralized protest movements in the U.S. We will debate and engage with a variety of topics, including the moral ethics of “looting” and riotous forms of protest; violent vs. nonviolent civil disobedience; the media myth of “black on black” crime; coalitional politics and the black feminist and LGBTQ underpinnings of the #blacklivesmatter movement; and comparisons between the blacklivesmatter movement and the U.S. civil rights movement. Our course will likely include in-person visits from any prominent activists in the movement such as Dr. Cornel West, #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Alicia Garza, mayoral candidate Deray McKesson, and members of the New York City chapter of Black Lives Matter.

The volcano is a double-edged sword; volcanism provides the world’s most fertile soils and useful natural resources, yet is also the source of immense natural hazard and some of the most extreme global climate changes in human experience. What are the myths, ancient and modern, around volcanoes? How was their early modern scientific observation and conception linked to the Romantic sublime? What role do they play in 21st century conceptions of geoengineering to combat climate change? And what could go wrong? Over the course of this semester, the ongoing, unpredictable volcanic activity will help determine how we cover these questions and others, so that, like our subject, our class will be a dynamic, living entity. Other themes may include fake volcanoes, deep sea vents and the first life, extinction-level events, eruptions that never happened, Caribbean slavery, and geoheritage. Discussions of who has access to science, discussions with leading volcanologists about their research, and incorporation of creative depictions of geophysical processes in the music of Nina Simone and Bjork, films of Werner Herzog, poetry of Anne Carson, or movie depictions such as the 1913 silent film The Last Days of Pompeii or the 1990 Tom Hanks film Joe versus the Volcano are all fair game as ways to examine and explore Earth science methods and concepts and how we intersect with the planet.

The terms creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship (CI&E) are routinely invoked in the 21st century. The goal of this class is to examine these concepts both individually and in the way they interrelate. How do we understand these terms? To what extent are CI&E stable, contestable, or how is one a precursor of the other? A business writer suggested that “creativity is the price of admission, but it’s innovation that pays the bills.” As values, how do CI&E generate value in business, as well as in life? Thinking analytically and practically about CI&E, we will explore images of the self, economic notions of the good life and of society implicit in different ways that CI&E get parsed. And we will examine the anatomy of start-ups as well as intrapreneurship — the fostering of an entrepreneurial internal culture, where the Gallatin model of individualized study might be considered a useful paradigm.

This course seeks to counter the enormous flood of images we routinely consume and produce with alternative practices of looking, thinking and imagining.We will ask what it means to be arrested, interrupted or de-centered by a photograph--its content or form. What if uncertainty signals an ethical opening?Together we will study a wide array of images, from the earliest daguerreotypes of the 19th century through the present and expanding global image economy.The course begins with a brief critical history of photography and proceeds to ask what it might mean to “philosophize with a camera.”Students who are not practiced readers of political or critical theory are most welcome, but participants should expect texts by Benjamin, Alloula, Azoulay, Steyerl, Zylinska to help us fathom how questions of technology, identity and power enter the photographic frame.We now live in a world mapped by satellite imaging, drones, facial recognition, racial surveillance, in which what counts as human, and what constitutes human perception, is being radically rethought. How might the ubiquity of cameras inure or blind us to photography’s work? This seminar seeks to help students better understand the complex linkages between perception and understanding, and to increase our political and visual literacies.

In a letter that he wrote to his Cuban correspondent, José Rodríguez Feo, Wallace Stevens referred to Marcel Proust as a poet. “It seems like a revelation,” Stevens wrote of Proust, “but it is quite possible to say that that is exactly what he was and perhaps all that he was.” Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, is often considered for the way it challenged and enlarged the form of the 20th century novel, as well as for the author’s meticulous exploration of the workings of time, history, memory, psychology, and the senses. Yet, it is more unusual to study Proust as a poet, or for his impact on modern poetry. In this course, therefore, we begin our study of the presentation and importance of the senses in modern poetry with Proust (via portions of In Search of Lost Time). Proust will then serve as prelude to our examination of the various ways that modern poets respond to, follow, and reach beyond him in their use and portrayal of the senses (and, by extension, time and memory). Contextual materials may include, among other texts, Bergson’s "Introduction to Metaphysics" and Susan Stewart’s Modern Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Primary readings include portions of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and poetry and essays of Valéry, Eliot, Pound, Moore, Bishop, Auden, Stevens, and Brooks.

Oedipus: exemplary citizen or outlier? Savior of the city or its destroyer? Upholder or suspender of the law (including the law of kinship)? As a meditation on kingship as well as kinship, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, first produced in the fifth century BCE, offers a complex Oedipus, if not, perhaps, an Oedipus complex. Sophocles' meditation on the polis, law, family, knowledge, the structure of mind, desire, and the disease in and of state has proved especially rich for philosophers, psychoanalysts, and theater artists: the play also famously provides the core example for Aristotle's meditation on tragedy in the Poetics. We will explore the OT as tragedy, as resource, as example and exception.

How does trauma fracture narrative continuity and a cohesive sense of time? How can it collapse distinctions among past, present and future? These questions may seem particularly relevant after the past years of pandemic and lockdowns forced many to reconceptualize time. This course will explore theories about the nature of time and the coherence or fragmentation of Self. It will consider how traumas are documented, narrated, and passed on individually and in art, memorials, and performance. Readings may include Confessions (Augustine), Swann's Way (Marcel Proust), Moments of Being (Virginia Woolf), Austerlitz (W. B. Sebald), Maus (Art Spiegelman), The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien), Dora Bruder (Patrick Modiano), Homegoing (Yaa Gyasi) Lose Your Mother¨(Saidiya Harman), The Generation of Postmemory (Marianne Hirsch)The Melancholy of Race (Anne Anlin Cheng), The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin), Aftermath, (Susan Brison), poetry from and about Ukraine and contemporary essays on how current news, discourse, and assaults can trigger traumatic symptoms and returns of the past.

The course looks at poets writing in the twentieth century and after whose work is concerned with liberation from colonial rule and, subsequently, with the formation of a post-colonial literary voice. Poetry in the period of decolonization deals with issues of nationalism, racism, and gender identity, place and displacement, and freedom from linguistic and political oppression. We will read, among others, poets from the Indian Subcontinent and Middle East such as Tagore, Iqbal, Faiz and Darwish; two leading poets of négritude, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, in relation to movements in Caribbean, African, and American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present (Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nicolas Nicolas Guillén, and Derek Walcott); "Latin American poets including Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz; and English-language poets including W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, and voices of "more contemporary movements in poetry including the Beat, feminist, indigenous, LGBTQ and "Black Lives Matter" movements. Using theory and historical background, we will look at the work of each poet comparatively in the context of international development and political change. The course offers an approach to a voice not simply of protest, but of political identity through literature; since this process has touched so much of the world, we are open to works from other literatures that students propose.

How might we examine the myth of Babel to test assumptions about belonging and separateness? The construction of the Tower and its destruction by God, who then covered the earth with uncomprehending multitudes, would seem to be a story of uniformity, ambition, and then essential difference, of architecture, power, identity, language, and geographic spread. For thousands of years and from the Bible to the Early Modern to today, it seems to haunts us in architectural and imperial ambitions, in film and mass media, in high and contemporary art, in dystopian nightmares about globalization, in novels of authoritarian repression and novellas of spell-binding imaginings of freedom and connectedness. In this seminar we will analyze many of its figurations in Biblical and archaeological scholarship, literature, art and architectural history, film and visual studies, linguistics, philosophy, politics, and history. The subject leaves few alternatives but to broach the culture, politics, and philosophy of living together, and so we will explore some possible alternatives in peace and hospitality, in translation and in embracing the incompetence of language. Amongst the authors encountered, there will be Borges, Derrida, Gideon, Goethe, Huntington, Kafka, Kant, Mirzoeff, and Wordsworth.

Mannered, adorned, intricate, elusive, eccentric, subversive, reactionary—these are all qualities often associated with the Baroque aesthetic, a complex and resilient artistic movement that swept the European continent from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. While the Baroque may accommodate such labels, it also resists the fetters of definitions. In this course, we examine the controversies that animate the Baroque period: how did an aesthetic of excess come to inform architecture, politics, religion, the visual arts, and specifically for our intent, the theater? How might the Baroque period be considered a living tension between Ambiguity, closely associated with the Renaissance, and Hyperbole, understood here as monumentalism and dogmatism? We look at texts that embrace, but also decry the Baroque aesthetic turn, and we try to understand how this appetite for grandeur, for excess, for unbridled expressivity still mediates the sensibilities of our post-modernity. This course posits that the Baroque was neither a style nor a period, but a shift in sensibility, a philosophical veering, resolutely modern, that never left us. Alongside recent critical essays on the topic, we examine plays, prose and poetry, music and art by, among others, Shakespeare, Dryden, Burton, Donne, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Calderon, Aphra Behn, Montaigne; Monteverdi, Palestrina, Purcell and Vivaldi; Velasquez, Holbein, Caravaggio and Cranach.

For more than half a century, artist León Ferrari (1920-2013) was at the center of Argentine (and sometimes Brazilian) art, culture, politics, and history. In 1965, his controversial sculpture entitled Western and Christian Civilization, which depicted Christ crucified on a two-meter-long model of a U.S. Vietnam-era bomber, elicited both accolades and shock.During decades of national and international tension, Ferrari's art spurred controversy for the way it critiqued linguistic and cultural convention; sexual repression; anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia; military dictatorship; religion and colonialism; and Latin American megacities. At the same time, he explored paths toward liberation, the potential of mass media and the revolutionary potential of making-- and not making-- art. Is it any wonder that his 2004-2005 Buenos Aires retrospective was vandalized? A judge closed the show, but others mobilized in its favor, thereby demonstrating the unsettled business of culture and politics in a country one historian has called "the Extreme West." In this seminar Ferrari's career will be a springboard to examine a number of crosscutting issues, in particular cultural inheritance and global modernism; artistic, individual, and national sovereignty; censorship and vandalism; and differing notions of civilization. Such questions will lead us to look across media and disciplines toward architecture and urbanism, film and cartoons; as well as philosophy, political theory, history, and literature.

Scholars have often resorted to a variety of familiar cliches to interpret the artistic movement known as modernism. With an emphasis on the Impressionist school of painting, this class will take on those inherited truths, exploring them to tease out their paradoxes and contradictions. Some of the key myths we will explore include the idea of the metropolis (especially Paris) as the center of individual freedom; the notion that artistic change, fueled by technological innovation, is inevitably progressive; and the concept of scientific observation as the basis of knowledge and artistic practice. We will look especially at the idea that art is an autonomous realm, and ask why this vision of art emerged in an era framed by civil war, military defeat, and the emergence of trade and travel across colonial networks--the Caribbean, North Africa and the South Pacific--during an extensively colonial era. Some artists we will look at include: Manet, Monet, Degas, Cassatt, Gauguin, and Pissarro. This seminar will include study trips to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and to MoMA.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen’s novels are most appreciated while sipping tea and nibbling crumpets. Yet considerable controversy surrounds Austen’s six novels, their place in literary history, their cultural work and cultural capital. Scholarship includes books on "Austen and. . . " the French Revolution, queer studies, and game theory, along with Global Jane Austen. Questions abound: Is Austen, who first published as "A Lady," politically conservative, progressive, or radical? Is she a proto-feminist? Does she glorify the marriage plot or subvert it, and what narrative aspects provide the basis for each claim? What part do irony and free indirect discourse play in her sparkling style? Media commodification brings debates on the afterlife: Which group to join, idolizing (and fan fiction-writing) Janeites or academic Austenites? Was "Clueless" the best adaptation? What about the Bollywood or manga versions? We consider these issues and more while reading Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion through the lenses of literature, gender studies, and cultural studies. Critics and theorists include F.R. Leavis, D.W. Harding, Lionel Trilling, Claudia Johnson, Edward Said, Mary Poovey, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Cornel West.

The term "science" stems from the Latin word "scientia," meaning knowledge and skill, and in the early modern period this implied the synthesis of mind and hand. "Library and Laboratory" studies the connectivity of intellectual process and physical research in early modern knowledge production. It examines 17th-century botany and chymistry (developing scientific disciplines at the time) as comparative case studies in the interrelated activities of book collecting, note-taking, and experimentation, which practitioners considered as principal methods for investigating the natural world. Study of these two fields opens up new insights into the trans-cultural nature of early modern science and engages in the re-evaluation of Euro-centric narratives about the "Scientific Revolution." 17th-century European mercantilist globalization exerted a profound impact upon botany and chemistry as Europeans benefited from cross-cultural knowledge transfers involving people in North and South America, as well as in Africa, China, Japan, and SE Asia. In asking how these relationships contributed to the development of botany and chymistry, the seminar examines entangled networks of merchants, scholars, artisans, and indigenous communities, and tracks the material complex that informed operations in the library and laboratory linked epistemic spaces wherein texts, matter, and instruments functioned as tools in scientific knowledge-making.

Cities have long been viewed as the crucible of citizenship. "But over the last few decades, the rapid urbanization of the global South has recalibrated Western derived models of cities and citizenship. "This course draws on interdisciplinary readings from urban studies, geography, anthropology, and history to grapple with this global "urban revolution." Rejecting the language of crisis, chaos, and exception that is so often used to characterize cities in the global South, it will provide theoretically informed perspectives on social, cultural, and political life in rapidly urbanizing places throughout the postcolonial world. Attention will be paid to histories and legacies of colonialism alongside novel forms of governance and claims to the city. "Though focused primarily on cities in the global South, the class is intended to probe how these cities reconfigure conventional understandings of being a citizen in the city (anywhere), and will also examine the global South within the "North". "Topics may include the rights to the city, infrastructure and planning, gentrification, political ecologies, technologies of rule, informality and slum upgrading, and urban social movements. ""Selected authors may include Ananya Roy, James Holston, Mamadou Diouf, Nikhil Anand, and AbdouMaliq Simone.

This course will explore the origins and development of the apparently symbiotic relationship between comedy and the city in the dramatic traditions of antiquity and the Renaissance, focusing on plays written, performed, and set in Classical Athens, Republican Rome, the city states of Renaissance Italy, and Elizabethan and Jacobean London. From Aristophanes to Shakespeare, and, arguably, into the modern era, comedy has often seemed especially at home in the city: urban life is a perennial subject of the genre, and city-dwellers among its most loyal audiences. Throughout the semester, we will think about the ways in which comedy has functioned as a form of political engagement; investigate its roles as a repository of local knowledge and a laboratory for spatial experimentation at moments of rapid urban transformation; and attend closely to the ways in which it has represented (or failed to represent) the issues of gender, class, race, and ethnicity that have always afflicted – and energized – life in the metropolis. Readings will include plays by Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Terence, Bibbiena, Machiavelli, Aretino, Shakespeare, and Jonson.

The extent and the manner in which we can think of literary or cinematic genres as linked with human rights raises many questions. The historian Lynn Hunt has argued that the emergence of the novel as a genre in the eighteenth century is the site of the emergence of human rights: the novel invited its readers to engage with an individual's story, to sympathize and empathize with a character whose situation might be quite different from the reader's own. Literary works might even be understood as participating in the construction of the rights-bearing individual and designating the boundaries of the human. However, as Samuel Moyn points out, human rights, as a concept associated with legal frameworks and political claims, is a product of the mid-twentieth century. Testimony, autobiography, plays, essays, and film have been recruited to expose violations of what we might call human rights, inciting awareness and sympathy--and sometimes action. We will begin by sketching a microhistory of the emergence of human rights, testing--and complicating--Hunt's claims for the novel. Then we will move on to look at specific sites and issues. What are some different ways in which literary genres and discourses represent, render visible, and perhaps even constitute human rights violations? How do the techniques of representation associated with the literary communicate? What are the stakes of these forms of representation? How have writers negotiated the limits of genre and language to engage with that which cannot be readily represented? To what extent do the norms of some forms of literary representation serve, paradoxically, to silence or occlude certain voices? Do certain kinds of literary discourse implicitly sustain a problematic opposition between the humanitarian and the political? Authors and texts discussed may include Mary Hays, Olympe De Gouges, anti-gallows literature, Hannah Arendt, Costas Douzinas, Jane Taylor, J. M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Rigoberta Menchu, among others.

Cultural work is political imagining. This course asks just where the picture of a just world comes from. The common link between recent political movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter, contemporary radical feminisms and queer politics is the claim that justice is not for everyone. Through events, actions and statements, movements urge us to see who is left out of the collective imagination of a just world. The creative work of our culture, as much as much as any political document or decree, teaches us what justice is and whom it is for. This means that it is crucial for us to examine how novels, film, exhibitions, memorials and events represent histories of political change and the achievement of justice. Our time is ripe for this exploration, since in the last few years we have been inundated with work in many genres that represent the anniversaries of the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, LGBTQ movements and more. Who do these narratives teach us that justice is for, and what happens to those who fall out of their view? We will investigate a range of texts, considering how they uphold or limit forms of justice and also how they intervene against those limits. A range of primary and secondary texts might include Morrison's Beloved, Walker's Meridian, Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Coates's Between the World and Me, and the recent films Selma and 12 Years a Slave.

This course uses the concept of tinkering to explore the innate links between "maker" culture and feminist studies of science. Something more than novice, but less than expert, a tinkerer is one who tests boundaries and innovates through fresh perspective, often working outside of a professional context. Students in this class will learn the theoretical tools of feminist technoscience studies, noting how the topics of scientific research are guided by, and tacitly reinforce, sexist and racist stereotypes and assumptions, and question whether it is possible to change the methods and the ideas that justify scientific knowledge itself. Along the way, students will become tinkerers in a literal sense by completing a collaborative robotics project. Together, we will consider the radical potential of building from scratch in the digital age, the ethical imperative to re-write the world around us, and the philosophical experience of tinkering with knowledge itself. For in feminist critical theory, it is not enough to take things apart: we must also put them back together. No prior experience in building, coding, electronics or feminist theory required.

This course traces the history of environmental sciences such as ecology and climatology from the turn of the 20th century to current affairs. The global history of environmental concern stays at the center of this course, which discusses environmental worries in the British, German, Scandinavian, African and American colonial contexts. The chief focus will be on U.S. experience in trying to deal with organizing nature, environmental preservation and conservation, population growth, environmental design and climatic change. Various ecological, climatological and colonial understandings of human philosophy, race, gender, religion, architecture, politics, and economy will be subject to critical discussion.

In this class we explore ancient Greek attitudes toward war, as represented in epic, drama, and historiography. Among the topics we 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.

This class is a seven-week introduction to the thought of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Nowadays, we encounter Montaigne's work most frequently in aphoristic quotations like this one: "When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?" Yet taken out of context, solitary citations conceal the complexity of Montaigne"s thought as well as that of the genre in which they appear, a genre, in fact, Montaigne is credited with having invented: the essay. This semester, we will read widely across the three volumes of Montaigne's Essais and the diverse topics they consider, from lofty questions that "grapple with the construction of the self, the question of experience, and the meaning of friendship and family to more banal topics like books, laziness, and, yes, thumbs. We will contextualize these writings by placing them in conversation with texts by other authors of the early modern period as well as with more recent literary critical and critical theoretical texts.

This course is a seven-week introduction to the major philosophical works of René Descartes (1596-1650). As we read Descartes' writing, we will study some of the concepts his work is best known for, among them, radical doubt, mind-body dualism, and the "I" created by his famous formula cogito ergo sum , or "I think therefore I am." We will take an interdisciplinary approach to our study of Descartes, valuing careful close readings of the texts and putting Descartes' thought in conversation with literary works of the period. At the same time, we will look ahead to some of Descartes' more recent interlocutors, examining the debates of twentieth-century thinkers responding to Cartesian questions.

What role did pharmaceutical drugs play in the shaping of the world that we currently inhabit?When and where did the key developments in drug therapy take place and how did these therapies relate to evolving understandings and definitions of disease?In what ways has the relationship between the the drug industry, the state, and the university changed over time?To what extent were and are drugs and the diseases they are designed to treat embedded in the broader society and culture?What is the relationship between Western drug therapies and the global South?This course examines the history of pharmaceutical drugs and related medical technology in global perspective from the late nineteenth century to the present.Important biomedical advances in drug therapy—such as vaccines, vitamins, antibiotics, steroids, and antiretrovirals—will be considered in relation to changes in the medical profession, the rise of the pharmaceutical industry, and an ongoing tension between drug marketing and state regulation. We will also consider the ways in which Western medicine relates to other medical and healing traditions.Public reaction to and expectations about scientific discovery, intellectual property and global health, and the relationship between illicit and licit drugs will also serve as unifying themes for the course.Course texts will include Jeremy Greene's Prescribing by Numbers and Robert Bud's Penicillin: Triumph and Tragedy.

Across the globe today, we are witnessing the emergence of new political movements, fueled by media technologies, passionately advancing the claims of "the people" against the ruling "political classes". We see the rise of charismatic populist leaders and the simultaneous waning of civic values, and polarized political cultures. In this seminar, designed for sophomore students, we will discuss the cotemporary moment of growing polarization and passionate social media-infused politics, by taking a historical and transnational perspective in our overview of normative theories of media and democracy. We will focus on four core questions throughout the course of the semester: What insights and limitations are offered in theories of the “public sphere” and “deliberative democracy”? How has colonialism and capitalism shaped political imaginaries constituted through the media? How has the rapid expansion and commercialization of media infrastructure transformed political participation? How might we rethink media as space of civil society and contentious politics? Authors may include: Walter Benjamin, Franz Fanon, Jurgen Habermas, Benedict Anderson, Edward Said, Partha Chatterjee, Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau, Sylvia Winter, Wendy Brown and Jacques Ranciere.

“The Anthropocene” is a controversial term that signals the indelible human marking of the earth’s strata by anthropogenic processes, such as plastic waste, erosion, and atmospheric changes. For many scientists, activists, and artists who use this term, the Anthropocene is not just an objective geologic epoch that follows the Holocene; it enables a critique of human-led environmental impact and provokes us to imagine alternative futures. In this class, we will explore how these groups picture the Anthropocene as more than a geologic era through visual, literary, and ethnographic works that convey the implications of human impact on the world. What are the points of intersection between geophysical and artistic models of climate change? How are experiences of Indigeneity and difference articulated in these future imaginaries? What does it mean to foreground humans in a geologic epoch, and who is excluded from this category of humanness? Students will explore these questions through written assignments in different genres and through the analysis of contemporary art, including work by Edward Burtynsky, Teresa Margolles, and Postcommodity. Texts may include speculative fiction by Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell as well as critical approaches to the Anthropocene by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Anna Tsing.

Through a critical exploration of ‘the consumerist gaze,’ this class considers how global capitalism as a process of production and consumption is mediated by the circulation of commodity images. More specifically, we seek to understand the role of commodity images in shaping consumer practices and politics, ways of thinking and seeing, and notions of belonging and difference. In the contemporary moment, that which is gazed upon takes any number of avenues from promises for a better self, environment, or world to images of racialized, exoticized, gendered, sexualized, classed, and ‘othered’ bodies and ways of being. While we will consider the origins of ‘the gaze’ as a theoretical approach, the consumerist variety acts as an especially useful framework by employing an interdisciplinary lens that utilizes cultural theory, visual culture, critical geography, business and advertising ethics, and political economy. Possible case studies and topics include: the United Colors of Benetton “Sentenced to Death” campaign, TOMS Shoes’ visualization of ethics in its model of poverty alleviation and examples of ‘poverty-porn,’ the ‘pinking’ of breast cancer awareness products, and commodity-activism. Possible readings include Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Jean Baudrillard, Laura Mulvey, Anne McClintock, Teju Cole, Sut Jhally, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin.

What is the proper place of nature and agriculture in cities? How do cities shape nature, and vice versa? Where do and where should city-dwellers get their food? "Concrete jungles" (as opposed to "real" ones) often seem to be purely human-built, unnatural places where things are made and consumed, not grown. But the place of nature in cities, and our relationship to it, has long been contested. When we look at food in relationship to urban centers, we end up seeing far beyond the questions of what we eat and where we get it. The proper place of nature in cities is at the heart of many contemporary debates over urban policy, including food and agriculture, land use, disaster policy, and immunization. In this class, we will think historically and critically about these debates both in the past and in contemporary cities, focusing on North America, especially New York. Readings will include William Cronon, Ted Steinberg, Catherine McNeur, Katherine Leonard Turner, and others

Sargon. Hammurabi. Nebuchadnezzar. Darius. While these names might sound only vaguely familiar to modern ears, the men behind them were influential ancient rulers. What do we know about them, and how do we know it? How did these men define their kingship and communicate their power? In this class, we address these questions, concentrating in particular on the role of visual material in the construction and maintenance of the image of kingship in ancient western Asia, an area commonly called the Near East (an artificial, modern category that encompasses many millennia of diverse civilizations in and around the region of the modern Middle East). Working primarily with archaeological material and with pieces of art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we think about how ancient kings and their courts used images to assert the king’s right and worthiness to rule, to attest to his character, and to describe the extent of his power. We consider, too, the legacies of individual kings and how successors—ancient and modern—have responded to them. And we look, too, at the women in and around positions of power. Monuments from the following cultures will be our focus: Early Dynastic, Akkadian, Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Achaemenid Persian.

Although the United States has been celebrated for its political stability, its history has been shaped by currents that start out far from the mainstream. This course will look at how and why social movements have formed in American politics, and the influence they have had on the country. We will focus on the following political mobilizations, spending two weeks on each chronological unit: the Populist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century and the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s; the Communist Party of the 1930s and American Nazis and fascist sympathizers during the Depression years; the civil rights movement, black power, and massive white resistance; the student movements of the 1960s, including SDS and Young Americans for Freedom; second-wave feminism and the religious right of the 1970s; and the labor movement alongside “Christian free enterprise” in the late 1970s and 1980s. We will examine how these mobilizations of apparent outsiders have affected each other rhetorically and strategically, and how they have been able to shape electoral politics. How do protest movements “win”? When have they been able to change the terms of the debate? Are there fundamental dynamics that distinguish left- and right-wing social movements? And how have these movements on opposing ends of the political spectrum echoed or shaped each other? We will end by bringing the class up to the present, looking at the rise of right-wing nationalism and the election of 2020.

Walking is an integral part of the urban experience. The course explores the relationship between the city and the urban dweller at the level of the sidewalk. Through the class, we will unpack texts by city wanderers such as , Lauren Elkin, Alfred Kazin, Philip Lopate, Rebecca Solnit, Walt Whitman, and Colson Whitehead, while learning about topics such as wayfinding, mental mapping, walkability, place identity, restoration, crowding, noise, stress, and perceived safety through data-driven research studies. Together the class will go on walking tours, reflect on pedestrian experiences, and use ethnographic tools to analyze public parks and plazas. Students will develop and narrate a walking route that incorporates theory and phenomenological experiences.

What makes a postcolonial novel a bestseller? Is it memorable characters? A scintillating subject matter? Provocative descriptions? A masterful plot? In order to answer these questions this seminar will work to assemble the ‘bag of tricks’ many postcolonial African authors use in creating narratives that resonate with both the reader and the increasingly globalized market. Of particular interest will be the distinctions between audiences (national vs. international) and registers (high vs. low). For example, what is the difference between ‘literary’ and ‘mass-paperback’ bestsellers? Why are African bestsellers often characterized as hard-boiled detective novels or bildungsromans? And how is the African bestseller complicated by the history of postcolonialism? Readings can range from classics, including Chinua Achebe’s The African Trilogy, Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat, to contemporary bestsellers like Teju Cole’s Open City, Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Chimamanda Ngozi Ndichie’s Americanah. We will also explore the emergence of African crime fiction from authors like Mukoma wa Ngugi and Kwei Quartey. We will analyze these novels using narrative theorists including Vladimir Propp and Roland Barthes, as well as examine extra-literary factors like industry trends beginning with Heinemann’s African Writers Series and current publishers like Anchor Books and Random House. Through a combination of literature, theory, and the publication history of African literature, this course will sketch the anatomy of a postcolonial bestseller. This course will also introduce students to the Digital Humanities. We will acquire basic knowledge of the ArcGIS software, Storymaps, to complete a digital project.

Underground Alien Outsider Queer: Black Culture at the Margins is a seminar in which we will consider the long association of each of the title adjectives with the experience of social marginality, political insecurity and existential anxiety. Our aim is to explore whether and how non-belonging inspires (and requires) alternative, transformative, creative, even subversive, approaches to subjectivity and society. Drawing from black studies, cultural studies, performance studies and sexuality studies, the seminar is aggressively interdisciplinary—be prepared to critically engage history, literature, philosophy, art, music and film texts—and rather eclectic. We will wend our way through topics as varied as fugitive slave laws and avant-garde jazz, black existentialism and afrofuturism, Afropunk, Pariah and The Brother from Another Planet as we analyze works by Bruce Nugent, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Thelonious Monk, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Sun Ra, Samuel R Delany, Octavia Butler and Audre Lorde. Our readings, writings and discussions will provide us with occasions to think about new and unexpected ways—underground alien outsider queer ways—of appreciating and studying black culture.

Despite predictions throughout the twentieth century that modernization and secularization went hand in hand with an inevitable decline of religion, the so-called “return of religion” in the late twentieth century called this thesis into question. Political and social shifts of the twenty first century have made it even more clear that to understand our world—its past, present, and future—we must understand religion. But what do we mean when we say religion has “returned” and what do we mean by “religion”? Is it a set of practices, a belief system, an ethnicity, or a cultural identity? This course will be based around the complex and ultimately unanswerable question, “what do we study when we study ‘religion’?” The course will include discussion of major world religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—as well as new religious movements, magic, atheism, and religious identifications such as “spiritual but not religious.” We will discuss religious studies as an academic discipline, the history of religion, sociological and anthropological approaches, the psychology of religion, feminist theory, the idea of “lived religion,” topics within popular culture and religion, and recent political characterizations and debates. Readings may include works by Tala Asad, Graham Harvey, William James, Mircea Eliade, J. Z. Smith, Robert Orsi, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Saba Mahmood, Charles Taylor, Russell McCutcheon, Jeffrey Stout, and Michael Warner.

The transformation from the practice of “buying” as a practical acquisition of consumer goods, to the practice of “shopping” as a feminized, bourgeois leisure activity is linked to nineteenth-century socio-cultural influences such as urban renewal, architectural innovations, industrial advancements, and evolving notions of crowd and female psychology. This course will explore the ways in which literature and visual culture of the nineteenth-century represented the transformation from “buying” to “shopping” through the phenomenon of the department store. We will examine how literature and other cultural productions such as prints, paintings, advertisements, and photographs depict this commercial phenomenon as a “phantasmagorical space” in which stereotypical notions of female desire are disseminated, and ideas of social mobility and scientific progress are advanced. We will also explore how contemporary display strategies of the grands magasins, or “cathedrals of commerce,” helped create a new consumer culture of “commodity aesthetics” based on spectacle, artifice, and pleasure. We will read Benjamin, Simmel, Marx, Leach, Bowlby, and Williams to understand some of the underlying strategies behind the literary and visual portrayals of consumerism in the late nineteenth century. We will closely examine Zola’s novel, The Ladies’ Paradise, as well as Balzac’s César Birotteau and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie to further understand the evolution of consumer culture and how social constructs of gender are intimately woven into the fabric of modern consumer practices.

From the power of the ‘Like’ button and hashtag-activism to the media frenzy surrounding a celebrity visit to help out in a disaster-struck country, this class engages with histories of humanitarianism, their antecedents within empire-making, and the shifting ways in which technology and digital cultures have often helped, sometimes hindered, and regularly complicated humanitarian efforts and modes of communication. Guiding questions include, but are not limited to: what motivates the humanitarian impulse—understood as an individual’s need to advocate, act, or raise awareness about a particular issue or crisis? How has humanitarianism shifted over time, especially in response to de/colonization, capitalism, commodification, and shifting geopolitics and global governance regimes? How have humanitarian issues and crises historically been publicized through the media, whether at the level of the individual, non-profit organization, nation-state, or intergovernmental organization? What effects—if any—do digital culture enacted as activism have on existing humanitarian dilemmas? While this course emerges from critical theoretical and historical foundations within media studies and visual culture, cultural studies, political science, and studies of capitalism, colonialism, and independence, it also relies upon participatory culture, meaning students will engage with and critically reflect upon social media. Possible readings by Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Jonathan Crary, Michael Barnett, Barbie Zelizer, Aimé Césaire, Lilie Chouliaraki, Susie Linfield, and Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser, among others.

From Casablanca and A Clockwork Orange to Sophie's Choice and The Matrix, popular films offer surprisingly perceptive insights into complex philosophical concepts. This course begins by exploring the nature of philosophical analysis, argument, and the relevance of thought experiments. "It will then draw on a wide range of films " along with a diverse selection of historical and contemporary thinkers " in order to explore many of the central areas of philosophy. "Some of the areas under consideration will include perception (the nature of perceptual experience and the status of perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world), philosophy of mind (the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness, and their relationship to the physical body), determinism (the philosophical idea that every event or state of affairs, including every human decision and action, is the inevitable and necessary consequence of antecedent states of affairs), and the philosophy of religion (the area of philosophy which considers questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil). By merging the cinematic and philosophical worlds, debates will also arise around ethics, free will, and the nature of time. "Readings will be drawn from Aristotle, Anselm, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Locke, Nagel, Pascal, Putnam, and Williams, among others.

Walking has been used for spiritual, physical, and psychological purposes across human history. Why does a walk in the woods, or along a river, often leave us feeling relaxed and refreshed? In an increasingly urban world, can we maintain this integral part of the human experience? How might our health and well-being be compromised if we can’t? The class will examine these questions through classic works by Rousseau, Emerson, and Thoreau as well as newer meditations by modern writers like Frederic Gros and Rebecca Solnit. Alongside these readings, the class will learn about the ways psychology research seeks to categorize and quantify the phenomena expressed in the philosophic and literary readings. We will focus on research investigating relationships between exposure to natural environments and stress, exercise, ambient environment factors, and health.

The relentless commodification of all areas of social life is a defining feature of our time. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in our intimate lives. Paid childcare, takeout food, gardeners, and grocery delivery provide what the unpaid labor of family life once did and have become accepted parts of everyday life. Increasingly, commodification extends deeper into our intimate lives, encompassing our relationships, our bodies and ourselves. In turn, dating services, egg and sperm banks, surrogacy, “life coaches”, and even the sale of bodily “products” have become part of our commercial and social landscape. This commercialization of intimate life constitutes what Arlie Hochschild calls a “commodity frontier”—a social and cultural leading edge where the market encroaches upon zones of life once situated (or imagined to be) outside of it. On this frontier, various forms of care are packaged in the form of expertise or a service and sold back to us. On this frontier, our deepest personal connections are forged through market transactions. This course examines the social and economic conditions that give rise to the commercialization of intimate life. We ask what is new and not-so-new about this development. What does it mean when emotional and intuitive acts become work for hire? How concerned should we be that capitalist practices (like marketing and branding) are attached to care, bodies and our selves? Our readings engage politics, ethics, gender, race, and global capitalism from a range of social science disciplines.

Elizabeth Bishop is a 20th century North American (American and Canadian) poet who did not adhere to a single geographical center, nor a single tradition or school of poetry (modernism, symbolism, surrealism, confessional, post-modernism, etc.). "Born in Massachusetts and raised in Nova Scotia (what she calls "her true North"), she writes poems linked to her native ground, yet also is a poet of travel: Brazil, where she lived for many years, is home away from home for her, as is New York, and, for shorter stays, Paris. "She is no more geographically anchored than she is easily classified in terms of schools of poetry. "Bishop authored stories, composed poems, and was an essayist and frequent letter writer (notably to Robert Lowell). Her relatively slim collection of poems is as eclectic as her life: she wrote both in free verse and conventional forms, and the subjects of her poems are wide-ranging: sea poems, city poems, poems of remembrance, political poems, poems of the north and poems of the south (Nova Scotia and Brazil). Bishop also studied music, and was an accomplished watercolorist. Bishop's poetry will be at the center of this course, and we will study her for her grasp of poetic form, her musical-poetic virtuosity, and for her visual accomplishments in poetry (her ekphrastic poems). "While her own work will be at the center of the class, we will study poetic theory (Hollander's Vision and Resonance ) and consider poetry's relation to music and visual art. We will also read literary criticism that addresses Bishop's relation to form, place, and politics. "

Text and Performance is an interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between “text” and “performance” as its plays out in different artistic genres. What do we mean when we refer to the “literary text,” the “performative text,” and the “cinematic text,” and how do these texts often overlap with or refer to one another? While “text” in performance, usually created from a prior playtext or script, is typically acknowledged as the blueprint for performative action, new issues arising from fields such as semiotics, feminist and gender theory, cultural studies, and reception theory have questioned where meaning actually resides: In the reader/viewer’s response? In directorial vision? In the performers’ interactions on stage? In the interpretive “readings” of live spectators? Essentially, we are talking about how artistic work is interpreted and the multiplicity of ways that readers and viewers make meaning of these texts and performances. Many of the analytic questions that we pose whether formalist, psychoanalytic, historicist, or political suggest that the act of interpretation is both creative and interdisciplinary and is produced in some way by the cultural situation of the reader/viewer as much as by the formal codes and strategies of the texts in question. The mediums we will explore include literature, drama, performance art, film, and dance, as well as types of “cultural performance,” where the text is created communally. Readings will include works by Kate Chopin, Tennessee Williams, Anna Deavere Smith, Henry Sayre, Toni Morrison, Sally Banes, Martha Graham, Pina Bausch, and Meredith Monk, among others.

Motionless and dynamic, mute and eloquent, commodity and gift: a toy is a thing that comes to life through play even as it remains inanimate, stubbornly separate from us yet also a member of the family. Toys were objects of fascination for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers, artists, and philosophers, who thought very seriously about toys—dolls and automata, puppets and marionettes, mystic writing pads and magic lanterns—as they struggled to make sense of modernity and the new relations it produced between persons and things. Taking its operating instructions from the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, this class is a playful and serious experiment with toys as ambivalent cyphers of social desires, material signs of collective dream lives, and (in the words of Charles Baudelaire) “a child’s first initiation into art.” Drawing on literary, art-historical, psychoanalytic, and anthropological approaches to material culture, this class will combine cultural analysis with sensory experience to explore the lives and loves of toys. Reading Romantic, modernist, and contemporary texts, we will explore toys as historical embodiments, as material culture that matters. In addition to texts by Benjamin, we will also read works by Heinrich von Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Baudelaire, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Gregory Bateson, Anne Allison, Mel Y. Chen, Elizabeth Chin, Donna Haraway, and W.J.T. Mitchell.

This seminar maps postcolonial African literature and film through its representation of migration and diaspora. Readings explore how diasporic figures interrogate communal boundaries, which have served as structures of meaning in postcolonial worlds. We will examine narratives that engage with histories of migration, trauma, exile, and stranger-hood. We will focus on figures that productively blur the boundaries between center and periphery. This course uses literature as an interdisciplinary point of departure to explore sociological accounts of the diasporas depicted in the fictional text. We will also benefit from New York City"s rich history of diaspora by visiting sites such as Little Senegal in Central Harlem and the Ghanaian community in the Bronx"s Concourse Village. These readings will broach questions of genre, aesthetics, and migration: What is the difference between postcolonial and diasporic writing, if any? What is the relationship between stranger-hood and exile? And finally, how can "thinking diasporically" provide a model for critical thought? Possible readings include The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano , Sembène Ousmane's, The Black Docker, Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease and Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land . Others include Teju Cole's Every Day is for the Thief , Nadifa Mohamed's Black Mamba Boy , Zadie Smith's White Teeth , Fatou Dioume's The Belly of the Atlantic , and NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names . Films include Touki Bouki by Djibril Diop Mambéty, Black Girl by Sembène Ousmane, No Fear, No Die by Claire Denis, and La Pirogue by Moussa Touré.

China's controversial investment in Africa has caused reactions ranging from accusations of a "new colonialism" to celebrations of a collaborative "win-win" for development. Furthermore, immigration both by Africans to China and Chinese to Africa signals a fundamental shift in global power dynamics and an opening of a new era of multi-polar globalization after America's dominance post-Cold War. Through an analysis of journalistic and historical accounts, literature, economics, art, film and blogs, this seminar will explore the multi-faceted nature of Africa and China relations. We will ask what are the connections between Cold War history and the contemporary moment? How do different African actors at state and individual levels engage with the Chinese presence? And finally, how does this shift to multi-polarity impact theories of globalization? Readings can range from diplomatic histories like O. Arne Westad's The Global Cold War, and studies in globalization like Giovanni Arrighi's Adam Smith in Beijing, to novels including In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo Inc. and Kwei Quartey's Gold of Our Fathers. We will read studies on immigration like Ufrieda Ho's memoir, Paper Sons and Daughters, Adams Bodomo's Africans in China and Howard French"s China's Second Continent. In terms of media we will examine films such as Cold Harbour, the documentary, When China Met Africa, as well as paintings by Michael Soi, China Loves Africa, photographs by Li Dong, Baohan Street, and the blogs, The Mind of a African-Chinese Guy, and Africans in China.

In a book with an outwardly jokey title, journalist Ralph Wiley offers up some fairly serious views about Why Black People Tend To Shout (1991). “When joy, pain, anger, confusion and frustration, ego and thought, mix it up, the way they do inside black people,” he says, “the uproar is too big to hold inside. The feeling must be aired.” In this course we will consider both the joking and serious import of Wiley’s provocative (but not unproblematic) assertion by drawing on a theoretical framework provided to us by affect studies. Several carefully chosen case studies in black peoples’ shouting draw our attention to the role that “catching feelings” often plays in creating and sustaining notions of community, protest and resistant politics. Readings on a variety of subjects—ring shouts and race riots, black power protests and protest novels, spoken word poetry and prophetic hip hop, the Black Arts movement and Black Lives Matter—are designed to fuel thoughtful and exploratory discussions whose references run the gamut from church ladies hollering “Hallelujah” to Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go, to Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)” and Tupac Shakur’s “Holler If Ya Hear Me.” In each instance, we will attempt to uncover specific spiritual, political, psychological and aesthetic motives for (or effects of) airing inside feelings in public spaces. Our collective inquiry might provoke some heated—and hilarious—conversations; it will definitely provide us with an opportunity to critically and conscientiously engage key concepts in black cultural studies.

This course examines artistic, literary and cultural responses to the cataclysmic events of the Great Plague (The Black Death, 1347-48) and its shaping agency upon early modernity and beyond. To better posit the Great Plague (and its recurrences) as an early confrontation with the hazards of globalization, we immerse ourselves in Renaissance texts to explore the tropes of the invisible enemy, the wrath of God, the psyche of hysteria, the fear of the other, of the intruder, of the undesired. The effects of this catastrophe on the social fabric of the communities it touched were not only pervasive but enduring; so were the psychic wounds it inflicted. Faced with such traumas, intellectuals and artists felt compelled to fully measure the effects of the plague, as well as comprehend its deep philosophical and moral consequences. This initial investigation into early modern reactions to epidemics propels us in the second half of the semester into a study of current responses to infectious diseases, mainly through literary representations of current pandemics: AIDS, Sars, Ebola, and Zika; we also look at hypothetical diseases that operate as thought experiments. We will consider a wide set of questions: What kind of art do epidemics provoke into being? How do diseases shape social and state structures? When weighed against individual liberties, what kind of ethical concerns should attend the elaboration of policies such as quarantine, scapegoating, contagion containment? How does disease mediate the relationship between society, the individual, and the family? Why does humor play such a fashioning role in the representation of epidemics?

This course analyzes the relationship between fashion and politics in the former state socialist regimes of the Soviet Bloc (Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Cuba) during the Cold War, with a brief cameo of China. Mainly characterized by state ownership of the means of production, centralized planning, and communist party rule, the communist regimes addressed fashion as a capitalist phenomenon, implementing strategies to transform people"s sartorial practices. Students will understand fashion as both an instrument of power and a vehicle of political critique and change. Beginning with an introduction to material culture and fashion studies, the course proceeds to an examination of the ways in which those regimes manipulated fashion to legitimize their power, followed by an examination of the sartorial practices citizens developed to assimilate, adapt, and resist dominant sartorial styles. Students will examine literature from the humanities and social sciences, documentaries, movies, and primary sources, including fashion magazines and clothes.

This course will examine the romantic and sexual behaviors of college students over a century of time within the context of the university and its role as in loco parentis (in place of the parent) and will consider how, since the development of youth culture in the early 1900's, college students' interactions may -- or may not -- have changed and the pace at which America’s universities responded. The questions that will guide our semester include: What are the shared commonalities - and differences - between generations related to relationships and intimacy? Is there a relationship between technology/invention/culture and intimacy/sex for college students? How have world events such as public health (i.e. STIs, HIV/AIDS) and political issues (i.e. war) directly impacted college students' and their sexual/romantic behaviors? Do on-campus institutions (such as the Greek system) influence social and sexual interactions amongst college students? In its role as in loco parentis, has the university socially engineered the campus environment in relation to students’ social behaviors? Has the university, as an entity, reasonably demonstrated responsiveness to changes in students’ behaviors? Using the lenses of educator and public health practitioner we willexplore how universities responded to their students’ sexuality including adapting to co-education campuses, marriage preparation, sexuality education, Queer friendly campuses and informed consent.

Viewed as a natural kind or socially constructed, "madness" was defined and treated, examined and controlled, diagnosed and cured according to the spirit of the time. This course follows the varied social imageries of "madness" throughout Western history, from the Hebrew Bible to the contemporary and controversial Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM), also known as "the bible of psychiatry", in its most recent 5th edition. Students read primary and secondary texts by philosophers, physicians, theologians, jurists, tragedians, novelists, psychologists, social reformers, policy makers, journalists, historians and individuals who suffered madness, known as "experts by experience." They also observe art and watch films that portray different aspects of madness. Reading includes: the Bible, Plato, Hippocrates, Ibn Sina, Maimonides, Margery Kempe, Erasmus, Robert Burton, Freud, George Canguilhem, Foucault, Ian Hacking, Elaine Showalter among others. The course explores the interaction between the social, cultural, scientific, political as well as economic factors that have shaped the views of "madness" and its treatment while paying ample attention to the history of ideas that informed and, often, framed them.

In this course, we will combine academic study with an experiential approach to the topic of strategy as an element of both structured play and warfare in early China. To set the stage, we will begin by thinking about the larger meaning of play as a universal human activity and contextualizing several examples of popular games from the Chinese tradition with background reading on related philosophical and cosmological beliefs. At the same time, we will learn the fundamentals of the ancient Chinese game of Go (weiqi), a favorite pastime of scholars and generals since the Han dynasty. Students will be introduced to on-line resources that allow them to play the game in real time with opponents from around the world, and they will also visit local New York City Go clubs. Using knowledge of Go strategy, students will then grapple with classical Chinese philosophy on the art of war by writers such as Sunzi and Sun Bin as well as selected works of Mozi, Guanzi, and Xunzi. Finally, we will conclude with modern echoes of the longstanding relationship between Go and warfare in literature such as Kawabata’s The Master of Go and Shan Sa’s The Girl Who Played Go.

How did Aristotle get a mortgage without a credit score? How did the few thousand people in the Roman imperial administration manage to tax the entire Mediterranean world? Most courses on ancient Greece and Rome study their literature, art, and history; but Greco-Roman antiquity represents a formative period not only in the politics and culture of the Mediterranean, but also in its economic and social history: at its height the Roman Empire encompassed some 2.5 million square miles, organizing more than 70 million people into a single state and, in some sense, a single market-all without modern telecommunications, mechanized transportation, firearms, mass media, professional police forces, or extensive bureaucracies. This course will explore how individuals, organizations, and governments in Greco-Roman antiquity solved a variety of economic and organizational problems in their comparatively low-information, small-government institutional environments. We will study such topics as: measurement and standards; markets, auctions, and prices; money supply and credit; property, conflict, cooperation; contracts, torts, insurance, and liability; agency and corporations; courts and enforcement; reputation and self-help; and regulation and taxation. The course will proceed largely via the case method, analyzing ancient transactions, disputes, and laws that survive in inscriptions and papyri, supplemented by ancient and contemporary theoretical readings in law, society, and economics. For Fall 2023 the period studied will be Athens and Classical Greece.

This course provides insights into the nature, methods, and contexts of modern science by examining historical and recent episodes in which a scientist or scientific concept, theory, or practice has come under investigation either in a court of law or a formal inquiry. The episodes, which focus on Europe and the U.S., range from the trial of Galileo before the Roman Inquisition in the 17th-century and the investigation into mesmerism in 18th-century Paris, in which Benjamin Franklin served as one of the commissioners, to several trials involving evolution theory, the trial of earth scientists following a devastating earthquake in Italy, and the recent U.S. Supreme Court case over patenting the breast cancer gene. Each episode will bring out a different facet of science and its relationship to the legal matters at hand, and each requires some understanding of the social, cultural, and political context, which will be supplied through readings, informal lectures, and class discussion. Recurring themes include the relationship between scientific and legal reasoning, the place of authority in science and the state,the uses of evidence in science and law, and the role of scientific expert witnesses in courts of law. Sources will include original court transcripts along with secondary literature, such as Maurice Finocchiaro's The Galileo Affair, Tal Golan's Laws of Men and Laws of Nature, and a variety of periodical articles.

How did societies trade in the past, long before the advent of airplanes, GPS, and Google maps? In this course, students will learn some basic economic trade theory while also using Tanzania as a case study for an investigation of trade patterns and other issues related to trade in Pre-modern times. The region of Africa that now forms the nation-state called Tanzania had a rich history long before European colonial powers arrived, including several city-states that accumulated substantial wealth during the 12th through 15th centuries. This course examines the "Swahili Coast," its trade, production technology, and relationships with places in the Eastern part of the world, such as Persia and India. The course also will place some emphasis on studying the relationships between Tanzania today and present-day Arab states. It draws on academic disciplines such as economics, archaeology, history, and the natural sciences. Readings may include The Swahili World by Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Adria LaViolette, Zanzibar and the Swahili Coast by Felix Chami, The Indian Ocean by Michael Pearson, Navigation through the Ages by Donald Launer, Science and Human Values by Jacob Bronowski, The Archaeology of Money by Colin Haselgrove, and The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.

One distinctive dimension of globalization is the flourishing of transnational activism in the register of human rights and humanitarian goals. Causes, organizations and activist networks have crossed borders alongside capital, goods and labor to reshape the terrain of political engagement. With attention to the dynamics of racial capitalism and the politics of empire, this class examines the intended and unintended consequences of this turn to transnational activism in relation to the political subjectivities it calls forth, the political horizons it shapes and the global governance regimes it legitimizes. From 18th and 19th century campaigns to end the slave trade to 20th and 21st century anti-trafficking campaigns, we will study a constellations of international institutions (such as donor agencies and international courts) and civil society organizations that have come together in the name of agendas such as ‘women’s rights’ or the prosecution of ‘crimes against humanity’. This includes organizations such as the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, The International Committee for the Red Cross and Amnesty International. The class will collectively analyze how different approaches mobilize and challenge different actors, causes and alternative imaginings of 'the global' in the realm of human rights and humanitarian goals. Readings are likely to draw from scholars such as Lori Allen, Didier Fassin, Jenny Martinez, Sally Merry, Joseph Slaughter, Mahmoud Mamdani, Kamari Clark, Walter Johnson and Jessica Whyte.

There are times when controversies in the art world spill over into public discourse, as they have recently in Dana Schutz’s racially charged use of the image of Emmet Till in her work at the Whitney Biennial and as they did in the 1999 exhibition ‘Sensation,’ which raised questions about the use of city funding and the inclusion of Chris Offili’s depiction of the Virgin Mary. These high-profile examples raise the question: In a context that values pushing boundaries, how do we think about what defines ‘too far’? This question is tied up in complicated notions of value that include not only the artistic, but also the political, the social, the economic and commercial, the historical, and even the spiritual. In this class, we explore the ways that these issues are embedded within and addressed by contemporary exhibition spaces. In the rarefied context of the art world, how do considerations like the artist’s past work, the potential controversies of a piece, or the political climate influence exhibition choices? How does the exhibit space itself—whether the Met or a pop-up in Brooklyn—impact the ways that art is received? In a forest of potential readings and meanings, how do we, as audience, critic, and consumer, make sense of what we encounter? Through readings and visits to exhibitions, we will work toward a collective and personal language with which to engage the variety of possibilities implied within works and their display. Readings may include Ngai, Jameson, Diderot, Baudelaire, Steyerl, Ranciere.

Since the last decades of the twentieth century there has been a dramatic increase in the number of women writers from the Middle East. This course provides a window into this rich and largely neglected branch of world literature. Students will encounter the breadth and creativity of contemporary Middle Eastern women’s literature by reading a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, short stories, memoirs, and poetry, and by viewing films that are from or about Iran, Lebanon and Egypt. How do Middle Eastern women authors address women’s oppression – both social and physical – and enunciate issues such as the tension between tradition and modernity, sexuality, identity and class from a female perspective? What literary traditions and models do they draw on? How different are those texts written in English or French for a global audience, as opposed to those written in Persian or Arabic? What are the effects of reading them in translation? Authors will include Simin Daneshvar, Zoya Pirzad, Marjane Satrapi, Azar Nafisi, Hanan al-Shaykh and Nawal El Saadawi.

In Love’s Knowledge, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum considers emotions as “social constructs,” transmitted—and potentially dismantled—by the stories we tell. In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will look at the ways in which contemporary art and literature have depicted, disseminated, and disassembled feelings, particularly the sort of complicated, unwieldy, troubling affects one might deem “ugly.” We will begin with Sianne Ngai’s eponymous work on the subject of “ugly feelings,” then go on to consider a variety of such emotions, including anger, fear, shame, humiliation, and happiness (which we will consider as potentially “ugly”). As we investigate how contemporary visual art and literary works tackle negative emotional states, we will pay particular attention to the effects of social and cultural positioning on affect and interrogate the capacity of art to be productive in helping us process our ugly feelings. We will also ask how aesthetic choices impact our understanding of our own ugly feelings and the ugly feelings of others. Readings my include work by Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Sheila Heti, Elena Ferrante, J.M. Coetzee, Sylvia Plath, Claudia Rankine, and Frederick Seidel. We will also consider works by artists like Tracy Emin, Hannah Wilke, Diane Arbus, Francis Bacon, and Kara Walker.

The Ottoman Empire covered vast territories over three continents and for six centuries included a diverse population made up of people who spoke Arabic, Albanian, Armenian, Kurdish, Italian, Ladino, Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Tatar, who identified as Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Yazidis. Who were the Turkish-speaking Muslims who made up the governing elite of this empire? Where did they come from? How did they negotiate the social, religious, racial, economic, linguistic, and gendered differences among their population? What kinds of sources tell us these things? What has shaped our image of the sultan, and is it accurate? What was this empire like and who were the Ottomans? We cannot hope to cover the whole of Ottoman history or the breadth of the empire in a single semester, but this course will introduce the Ottoman Empire, addressing these questions by looking at different aspects of its history, government, society, and culture. We will read primary sources that reflect Ottoman court life, imperial ceremonies, the empire's legal and economic governance, and slavery, and that attest to the various experiences of its diverse populations; we will also look at imperial dedications and civic projects.

While the neoliberal ethos of the last decades has mandated the shrinking of governments in their multiple iterations, militaries have come out unscathed. In the 2021 fiscal year, for example, more than half of the discretionary budget by the U.S. federal government went to defense and military spending. The figure follows a historical trend suggestive not only of the centrality of the Armed Forces in U.S. nationalist imaginings and capitalist undertakings, but also of the difficulty of civil society in envisioning non-militarized ways of existence. Such difficulty has a history and consequences. Their unveiling necessitates a reckoning with the workings of settler colonialism and the U.S. Empire. This course will focus on the tense and complex ways through which the U.S. has organized itself to produce violence and legitimate its use. It will specifically interrogate what militarization means and how it is linked to colonialism. It will further explore unruly calls for a different world in which human relations are not mediated by (raw) violence and in which liberation, security and humanitarianism are not militarized. The course may build upon the work of Catherine Lutz, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, David Vine, Cynthia Enloe, Katherine McCaffrey, Robert Rabin, Suzuyo Takazato and others.

Recent studies of television viewing have moved from understanding the experience as a passive one to understanding it as more active and “participatory.” At the same time, the rise of social media, fan conventions and platforms, and new forms of distribution and dissemination have transformed various “fandoms” from marginal often-dismissed subcultures into a creative, influential and mainstream demographic. All of these factors have radically changed the relationship between creator, producer, text, and perceiver and have destabilized our ideas of the role and authority of the author or showrunner, the canonicity and ontology of the text, and the stability of narrative. In this course we will analyze how fans of television shows respond to and influence content, how they interact with and create content across various mediums, and their role in the promotion of programs. We will examine the interactions of fans to television shows and transmedia content from the early fandoms of the original Star Trek to the more recent multifaceted fandoms of Stranger Things and Game of Thrones, as well as debates over gender, race, fan labor, and politics. How do we distinguish between fan, critic, and scholar? How are fandoms integrated into individual and group identity? How does fan culture differentiate between “fanboys” and “fangirls”? What role does fan content—parody, fan fiction, fan art, fan games—play in regards to the original “canonical” content? Readings will include essays by Henry Jenkins, Jonathan Gray, Matthew Hills, Suzanne Scott, Mizuko Ito, and others, as well as essays, stories, and blogs by fans, fan/scholars, and critics.

Robots Are Coming for Your Job Sooner Than You Think," declared VICE in a September headline. Two months later, physicist Stephen Hawking said AI could be the "worst event in the history of our civilization." Are these statements of pragmatism, or doom-and-gloom? What do our concerns about robots say about our own humanity? In this course, we examine the changing boundaries between artificial and real bodies through readings in studies of science and technology, feminist theories of embodiment, studies of race and ethnicity, posthumanism, futurism, and science fiction - while also building and programming our own robotic toys. Topics include the machine/human boundary, potential machine futures, and the ethics of our technological present (and future). No prior experience in coding or robotics required.

This class will approach television's visual storytelling as a unique form of narrative. "Much academic study of television has focused on its social impact and ideological content, and in this seminar we will engage that work. "Television can't be fully comprehended, however, without considering how the stories of television are told. "Our working hypothesis is that form organizes the meanings and generates the emotions that audiences take away from stories, and so it's worthwhile to consider television as text. "What genres are emerging today, and how are they connected, if at all, to classic network forms such as the sitcom and the cop show? How have dramatic, film, and literary forms shaped television storytelling, and how do we measure the impact of technological innovation and the commercial conventions unique to television? Assigned readings include writers on the problem of narrative form and content such as Aristotle, Stanley Cavell, and Roland Barthes, as well as writers on television, including Theodor Adorno, Jason Mittell, Linda Williams, John Sconce, Jane Feuer, Emily Nussbaum, Clive James, and various critics and recappers.

This course will focus on three major themes: the discovery of the earth’s deep history, for which the concept of extinction played a major role, the very long history of extinction itself, and current controversies over the role of humans in causing extinction. The concept of extinction was established in modern science only in the late eighteenth century. For most of the planet’s history extinctions were caused by natural events—volcanic eruptions, asteroid collisions, climate change, and life itself, as when living things have altered the composition of the oceans, the soil​,​ or the atmosphere. Are anthropogenic extinctions “natural” as well? We will examine historical and recent debates on this question along with such topics as the role of religion in establishing the concept of the earth’s history, catastrophism versus uniformitarianism, the relationship between evolution and extinction, evidence and explanation in the earth sciences, controversies over asteroid collisions, and current debates over “invasive” species. Readings will include original works by Cuvier, Lyell, and Darwin, among others, as well as recent works by historians, philosophers, conservationists, ecologists, journalists, and evolutionary biologists, such as Martin Rudwick, Stephen Gould, Peter Brannen, Jan Zalasiewicz, Ursula Heise, ChrisThomas, and Elizabeth Kolbert.

Historically, the relationship between psychoanalysis, the matter of race, and racism has been both complex and fraught. Understanding and rectifying this history is crucial, as psychoanalysis takes as its primary charge the theorization and treatment of psychic attachments which shape not just individual experience, but also relations between subjects, as well as the ways in which experiences of belonging and exclusion shape the social order. Indeed, some strains of psychoanalytic thought have problematically proposed that “the Other has no color”; still, a growing number of psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners offer critical insight into the problem of racial subjectification and racism by considering their operations through the lens of psychoanalytic concepts such as fantasy, identification, melancholy, projection, and negation, among others. This course explores the limits and possibilities of thinking psychoanalytic theory, race, and racism together. Our work will include close readings of theoretical texts as well as considerations of literary texts, works of art, and musical forms that serve as sites where matters of subjectification, relationality, and belonging are contested. Course material may include works by Bass, Bollas, Cheng, Eng, Fanon, Freud, Gherovici, Hartman, Lacan, Moss, Sexton, Spillers, Stephens, Viego, and Wilderson.

In this course we will explore the production and contestation of injustice and inequality in urban environments. Rapid rates of uneven urbanization in the Global North and Global South have made cities important sites of environmental struggle. To examine environmental struggles in cities across the world we will first ask: what constitutes urban environments? We will work to create an expansive and distinctly urban definition of the environment to include sites as diverse as subway stations, urban gardens, sewers, landfills, highways, and city parks. After defining the urban environment, we will draw from a range of disciplines including urban political ecology, environmental history, urban geography, and environmental justice to ask: how is inequality and injustice both produced and resisted in and through urban environments? We will illustrate these concepts with specific case studies of urban environmental politics from cities across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East and placebased exercises in New York City. In these case studies we will examine both spectacular events such as urban natural disasters and more mundane challenges like mold and water pressure in informal and public housing. Readings will be drawn from scholars including but not limited to Maria Kaika, Paul Robbins, Erik Swyngedouw, Sarah Moore, Nikhil Anand, David Harvey, Karen Bakker, Nik Heynen, and Laura Pulido.

We’ll read and discuss the two great epics of South Asian history, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.Both epics tell us that dharma (or “right conduct”) is subtle; and both epics define and critique dharma within a world that is on the cusp of collapse.We will enter into the epics’ debates about action, duty, individuality, just violence, and, in general, the possibilities for an ethical life in calamitous times.We will read extensively from each epic (including the Bhagavad Gita), while tracing the development of key themes:kingship and family, women and sexuality, mortals, avatars, and gods, the fate of the outsider, animals and non-human life, battle and purification, the fate of the soul, poetry as teaching, devotion, commemoration—and critique.We’ll also read a set of representative critical essays on the two epics from anthropological, historical, and literary perspectives.Finally, as we read the Ramayana, we’ll give attention to the question of “many Ramayanas”—that is, the tale’s multiple retellings by a diverse array of peoples—Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, South Indians, and Nepalese—and in diverse mediums—dance, theater, film, and graphic novels.

Since Descartes’ famous decision to doubt what he could not prove, the problem of knowledge has vexed philosophy, psychology, and literature. What do we know for certain? How does this knowledge (or this uncertainty) relate to what we believe, what we desire, what we fear? And if knowledge is unstable, how do we ground the “self” or “subject”—does identity depend on a metaphysical God? Does it derive from an autonomous interior? Or is “the self” itself a misunderstanding, merely an effect of language, of history, or of the unconscious? This course surveys the Modern’s search for truth, focusing on major works of philosophy and literature and on issues that still inform our modernity: the relationship between aesthetics and politics, history and economics; the crisis of language; the fragmentation (or multiplicity) of identity; the necessity and impossibility of love. Readings may include Descartes, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Virginia Woolf.

This seminar begins with the conviction that the arc of modern history for both the U.S. and France has had a similar form. Both countries’s Enlightenment ideals of stunning potential, as found in The Declaration of Independence and The Declaration of the Rights of Man [sic], have often been ballyhooed and ignored, actualized and subverted. At the same time, we have remarked that the specificity of the ambivalent French entanglement with universalism, race, and empire is too rarely understood in the so-called New World. Our focus will be directed to art that in all its manifestations has had a critical role in this dynamic. It has been and continues to be deeply imbricated in the contradictory and reinforcing projects of universalism, race, and empire. But how exactly? What roles have objects played? This is the subject that the seminar will investigate. How have they functioned as symptoms, vectors, or agents in France and in dialogue with sites of French artistic and political ambitions and claims, including New France and Louisiana; the Caribbean; Egypt, North and West Africa; Tahiti and Viet Nam? And what has been their role when it comes to stateless people? Readings and discussions will consider fine art such as painting, drawing, prints, and sculpture, as well as other material objects and products of human and natural manufacture, such as books, the sea, obelisks, shells, textiles, makeup, and clothing.

In Latin, the verb convertere , literally "to turn," can refer both to the physical metamorphosis of an object or creature and to the translation of a text from one language to another; the same word also gives us our English vocabulary of religious conversion. This course will explore the relationships between these different kinds of transformation in four major works of Latin literature: Lucretius"s De Rerum Natura , Ovid"s Metamorphoses , Apuleius"s Golden Ass and Augustine"s Confessions . Although t hese texts are very different from one another " they include a radically materialist philosophical poem, a mythological counter-epic, a picaresque novel whose narrator is magically turned into a donkey, and an autobiographical profession of Christian faith " they share a deep concern with the nature of personal identity and its relationship to writing. Over the course of the semester, we will track these common interests, while also situating each of our texts in its particular historical, social, and intellectual contexts ; we will also want to consider the ways in which Latin literature"s persistent concern with transformation reflects the distinctive hybridity of Roman culture. Finally , a ll four of our texts played an important role s in the cultural transformations of the European Renaissance, so, in addition to our core Roman materials, we will also read works by later authors, including Petrarch, Montaigne, and Shakespeare. All readings will be in English.

What does the growing population of Asian Americans mean for the landscape of American politics? What are the contours of Asian American political consciousness and movement? Using the lens of comparative racial formation, this seminar investigates Asian American political participation around contemporary issues such as immigration, multiracial coalitions, affirmative action, data disaggregation, detention and deportation, Islamophobia, intergenerational relations, and gentrification. This course will explore the political developments that gave rise to “Asian America” in the 1960s and probe deeper theoretical questions about the complexities and pluralities of the contemporary Asian American experience. We will also consider the role of American political institutions including the federal, state, and local governments, and how public policies at all levels come to shape the political lives of Asian Americans in the United States. Texts include Karen Ishizuka’s Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties, Eric Tang’s Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto, and Monisha Das Gupta’s Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States. As we read these texts, students will be exposed to intersectional, comparative, and emergent approaches to the study of race, culture, power, place, and politics.

New Yorkers talk about real estate the way most people talk about the weather. We know each others’ mortgage interest rates, rental costs, and amenities. We calculate our affective ties based on neighborhood-to-neighborhood subway travel and make lifelong commitments based on rent stabilization. How did we get to be this way? Is there an alternative? This course examines how the concept of private property came to define the Western approach to land, how New York City capitalized on this concept, and how alternative approaches have been practiced on the Lower East Side. We will encounter the work of historians, geographers, theologians, activists, environmentalists, and philosophers to excavate the meaning of land and property in this dense and culturally rich urban neighborhood. As part of our classroom-based research, we will also collaborate with organizations such as the Cooper Square Community Land Trust, Catholic Worker, Loisaida Center, and Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, to witness how they have re-defined land as a social, cultural, and natural urban resource. Readings will include Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850, John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," and Henry George, Progress and Poverty.

In this course, students explore the relationships between architecture and narrative-based cultural expressions such as film, novels and even games, analyzing current developments from a critical perspective. As part of their study, students will focus on space as medium for storytelling. The course is divided in two parts in order to progress from homo spectator to homo faber. In the first half students develop their theoretical framework through lectures, group discussions and workshops on different sources that may include films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Japanese Studio Ghilbi’s Spirited Away, architectural work from Rem Koolhaas and Toyo Ito, and cyberpunk texts from William Gibson, Lebbeus Woods, and others. Students’ newly-acquired conceptual background is summarized in a midterm essay. In the second part of the course, students apply their skills on a series of short projects for Manhattan, located at the intersection between architecture and narrative. For the production of their projects, students are expected to bring to the class their own set of interests and abilities —ranging, for example, from music to computer gaming, or from academic research to Internet literacy.

*This course requires travel to Governor's Island. Students should not schedule courses before or after this course to accommodate travel time as well as field trips to offsite locations.* In this course, we will examine the past, present, and future of NYC waterways. The course entwines archaeology, geomorphology, climate change considerations, urban ecology, citizen science, and science fiction to think about the changing coastlines of NYC and the impact of urbanism on the natural environment. In addition to scientific publications, we will draw from historic representations such as The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky, the futuristic imaginations of Kim Stanley Robinson's NY 2140 , and contemporary efforts such as the Billion Oyster Project to regenerate the waterways in order to envision the relationship between the historical, contemporary, and post- 21 st century material culture and coastlines of New York City.

This seminar explores the possibility of doing global environmental history through the lens of a planetary “sphere”—the cryosphere, the envelope of frozen water distributed differentially in space and time around the planet. The term “cryosphere” emerged during the interwar period amidst nationalistically-inflected debates surrounding the formation of the discipline of glaciology. The seminar goes beyond this narrow framing to explore two related threads: the natural history of ice on Earth; and the history of knowing about the cryosphere. Students will learn how successive glaciations shaped the world we share today and will explore different ways people and ice have interacted throughout history. They will also learn how the cryosphere as an object of scientific scrutiny was fashioned through crisscrossing practices of living with and on ice, exploration, recreation, geopolitics, field science, development, and resource extraction. Throughout the course, we remain attentive to the virtues and vices of doing global history from the starting point of a scientific concept by asking: Who speaks for the cryosphere? Answers to this question will bring into focus dynamics inflected with colonialisms, ideologies, class, gender, nationalisms, and geopolitics. The course ends with an exploration of Martian glaciology and the possibility of comparative cryohistories: What might the history of ice on Mars say about Gaia’s icy story?

In order to demonstrate justice, Plato has Socrates build the ideal city in words, the Kallipolis (“Beautiful City”). For philosophers, Classicists and political theorists, Plato’s Republic incites readings, re-readings, debate and controversy: is Plato the greatest political idealist? The first totalitarian? Is Plato a feminist? In this course, we will analyze the dialogue’s arguments, analogies and imagery and interrogate Platonic metaphysics, aesthetics and theory of politics as they are presented in the dialogue. Supplemental readings will include modern and contemporary interpretations and will address: intellectual milieu, historical and political context, questions of genre.

Graffiti and street art have been a crucial part of urban landscapes since the very origins of cities, reflecting and revealing powerful connections between a city's political and social lives. But these connections are not static, or universal. Or are they? This year-long, transnational, multi-modal course brings arts, humanities, social science, and digital technology to bear to explore street art and what it says about life in New York and Buenos Aires: How are art and politics understood and expressed differently and similarly in these two American metropolises and why? How do shared aesthetic features of public art in the city reflect the global circulation of urban creative modes? What do we learn about local politics from looking at the art and writing on a city’s public spaces? In the fall (Part 1), students will explore conceptual landscapes necessary to fully parse the dense interplay of street art and politics. Drawing on readings in the history, culture, and politics of each city, as well as on theoretical work in art criticism and urban studies, students will analyze how social and political processes like gentrification, inequality, and planning generate and reflect creative political expression. At the same time, teams of students in both cities will conduct field work in selected neighborhoods to help create a coded database of murals, graffiti, performances, and installations. Then in the spring (Part 2), students will explore the digital landscapes of both cities, learning to use and to interpret Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology and data, and drawing on publicly available census, electoral, and planning records from each city, to generate digital maps finding links between art, politics, and demographics as drawn from the systematic analysis of our database of urban arts. The year will culminate with the online publication of transnational, collaborative projects that explore what the art and writing in city streets reveals about urban life in 21st century America.

This course uses enhanced videoconferencing to bring students in New York and Buenos Aires together to examine how urban arts and politics intersect in the Americas: How are art and politics understood and expressed differently and similarly in these two American metropolises and why? How do shared aesthetic features of public art in the city reflect the global circulation of urban creative modes? What do we learn about local politics from looking at the art and writing on a city’s public spaces? In the fall, teams of students in both cities conducted field work in selected neighborhoods to generate a coded database of murals, graffiti, performances, and installations. In the spring, students will use this database, and draw on readings in the history, culture, and politics of each city, as well as on theoretical work in art criticism and urban studies, to analyze how social and political processes like gentrification, inequality, and planning generate and reflect creative political expression as captured in our database. In particular, students will learn to use and to interpret Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology and data, drawing on publicly available census, electoral, and planning records from each city, to generate digital maps finding links between art, politics, and demographics as drawn from the systematic analysis of our database of urban arts. The semester will culminate with the online publication of transnational, collaborative projects that explore what the art and writing of city streets reveals about urban life in 21st century America.

“The white worker” and the “black welfare queen”; the “Southern strategy” and the “woman vote”; victims of "economic anxiety" and soldiers of "identity politics". Such tropes have played a central role in framing U.S. political discourse and strategy. They have also stoked intellectual questions and popular debates about the underlying dynamics between race, class, and gender in electoral politics. Is “identity politics” a distraction from economic issues? Why do certain segments of the population vote “against” their economic interests? Is there such a thing as a “woman vote”? Organized as a critical examination of political tropes, this course will operate on the assumption that the answers to these questions are not eternal or natural but are instead constructed through language and narrative that is itself political. Using history, literature, film, and journalism, we will explore the roots, evolution, and legacy of tropes that have dominated the discourse about race, class, and gender in U.S. politics since the era of Reconstruction. Each trope will be unpacked through a reading of a “major” scholarly or creative work, as well as shorter pieces of recent commentary and analysis from journalists and pundits. Authors may include W.E.B. DuBois, Ira Katznelson, Dana Frank, Michael Lassiter, and Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor. In addition to gaining critical insight into framings of race, class, and gender in U.S. politics, we will grapple with the challenge of contributing to the ongoing political debate through our own writing. Students will write an op-ed, a review essay, and a critical essay, all geared toward a public audience.

Raoul Peck’s 2016 film, I Am Not Your Negro, brings together the work of James Baldwin with an archive of American cinematic and photographic traces. The film proposes that America is deeply if not completely structured by the figure Baldwin refers to as “the negro,” and that this figure is predicated on both a relation of possessive, colonizing belonging, and a defensive and projective psychic mechanism that has made itself visible repeatedly on the silver screen in the United States at least since the 1930s. By stacking film clip upon film clip, photograph upon photograph, Peck underscores Baldwin’s words by showing how deeply visual the relation of “my negro” is, and that that visuality takes both cinematic and psychic form. This relationship—of race in the visual field—is the subject of this course. This class will be an extensive close reading of the film I Am Not Your Negro, using it as primary archive. We will examine the ethical dimensions of appearing in the visual field, as well as complexities of what it means to take up a position from which we witness, behold, project, or otherwise participate as a viewer of that field. Weekly film screenings are integrated into class meetings; thus, the four-hour timeframe. Course materials include: the work of James Baldwin; Avedon and Baldwin, Nothing Personal; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness”; Kara Keeling, “‘In the Interval’: Franz Fanon and the ‘problems’ of visual representation"; Diana Fuss, Identification Papers; the films Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927), King Kong (1933), The Defiant Ones (1958), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), and Elephant (2003).

We are surrounded by machines, but that has not always been so. As a species and a civilization we have had to learn how to live with the technology we have built. This course takes a historical, philosophical, and sociological approach to examining the complicated process of integrating machines into our lives, and ourselves into our machines. We will examine the social changes resulting from technology and industrialization, the boundaries between human and machines, connections between gender and technology, technology beyond the western world, and how the Internet and virtual spaces have changed notions of identity and community. Readings will include Ruth Cowan, More work for mother; Priya Satia, Empire of Guns; Natasha Schull, Addiction by Design; Sherry Turkle, Simulation and its discontents; Iris Chang, Thread of the Silkworm; and Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression.

Waste is a dynamic cultural phenomenon, a language of power, and a material object. Discard studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the politics of production, consumption, and disposability by beginning with objects such as household garbage, sewage, hazardous waste, and e-waste. In times of planned obsolesce, infrastructural disrepair, austerity, and urban divestment, scholars have turned to waste, in its many material and symbolic forms, to shed light onto topics as diverse as urban ecology, labor, justice and inequality, governance, informality, development, abjection, and protest. This course serves as an introduction to discard studies by delving into the foundational texts and contemporary scholarship in the field. In the first section of the course, we will explore different disciplinary and conceptual approaches to studying waste. We will then ground these frameworks with place-based readings and exercises in New York City. In order to identify and explore global connections and divergences in the politics of waste, we will move to international and transnational studies of waste and uneven geographies of disposability. The final section will involve projects aimed at training students to become discardians. “Readings may include the work of Robin Nagle, Sarah Moore, Vinay Gidwani, and Adriana Petryna.”

What happens when we die? Is religion good for society? How can atomic theory help people lead better lives? These questions were on the mind of the poet-philosopher Lucretius when he composed On the Nature of Things for his fellow Romans in the first century BCE. Through a complete reading of the text in translation, this course examines how ancient Greeks and Romans rationalized their world and analyzes how philosophy and religion governed their understanding of natural phenomena, such as disaster, decay, and death. Together, we will explore where these ideas originated and how they were transformed through metaphor and language. At the same time, we will critique Lucretius' poetry and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of his illustrative, didactic style. Supplementary readings will discuss contemporary intertexts, the poem's historical and cultural context, and the influence of Lucretian philosophy on the modern humanities and sciences.

For many black women, their understanding of their race, gender, class and identity and notions of beauty are linked to hair. Divided into three sections, this course will first seek to understand the historical, structural, and economic dimensions of black women's hair. We will cover topics such as labor, the service industry, and how the black beauty salon presents a rare opportunity for black women to become entrepreneurs. We will also discuss the multi-billion dollar industry and economy founded on black women's hair, from dreadlocks and perms, to weaves and wigs. The second part of the course will examine how the beauty salon as a place presents the opportunity for intra-racial community building and networking, with predominately Asian-owned hair supply stores and the rise of African- and Dominican-owned hair salons. Third, we will explore how black women interpret the connections between their racial and gender identity and their hair; and we will examine how the politics of hair links to notions of racial authenticity, colorism, class, and attractiveness. Readings may include: Doing Business with Beauty: Black women, Hair Salons, and the Racial Enclave Economy by Adia Harvey-Wingfield, Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women's Consciousness by Ingrid Banks, and Ain't I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race by Maxine Leeds Craig.

From the antebellum era to the Harlem Renaissance, Black people have turned to art, writing, and spirituals to make a statement about race relations, construct their racial identity, and (re)claim a sense of humanity under conditions of oppression. These artistic expressions are all the more significant and worthy of analysis in this era of mass media and in light of contemporary racial conflicts. This course will explore the pluralities and contradictions of black experiences as depicted in literature, movies, and television. It will take special interest in the work of Spike Lee, Toni Morrison, Tyler Perry, and Shonda Rhimes, all of whom delve into issues concerning race and captivate black audiences while doing so. We will use each artist to decipher what it means to be black; how this definition varies according to gender, class, age, and sexuality; and how depictions of blackness have changed over time. While many of the readings and media in this class are fiction, we will approach them from a sociological and humanistic perspective—that is, mining them for clues on how historical and social conditions (e.g., Jim Crow, mass incarceration, gentrification) shape the possibilities and limits of black experiences. And we will probe how different media permit artists to convey the lived experience and struggles of blacks in different, often more visceral, ways—and to different audiences—than conventional social science and nonfiction reporting.

The American film musical is one of the primary vehicles for the development and transmission of popular dance. It was also one of the primary vehicles for the development and transmission of American popular dance. “Dance on Screen” will explore the ways in which these films responded to major cultural and political events and social movements of the day including the Depression and New Deal; World War II and race relations; the Civil Rights movement; the rise of teenage culture, and the emergence of second-wave feminism. It will also consider how popular dance reflects and influences our perceptions of gender, age, ethnicity, and economic status. Although the emphasis of the course will be on the so-called “classic age” of Hollywood musicals (from the early 1930s through the 1950s), we will also discuss landmark dance musicals from the 1960s through the present concluding with Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016), which reprised and resurrected some of the “classic” formats and structures of the golden-age musical. At the same time, the course will identify and trace the development of key dance artists, styles, and genres in American popular dance from tap to the Lindy Hop to disco dancing and consider the formal ways that these dances served the narrative structure of the films and how they lured audiences into a state of “kinesthetic empathy.” Films and artists we will view and discuss include Gold Diggers of 1933 (Busby Berkeley); Top Hat (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, 1935); Stormy Weather (Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and the Nicholas Brothers, 1943); On the Town (Gene Kelly, 1949); Oklahoma (Agnes de Mille, 1955); West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, 1961), Dirty Dancing (Patrick Swayze, 1987); Cry Baby (Ricki Lake, 1990).

Liberalism seems in many ways deeply imbricated in the novel form: not only does the rise of Classical Liberal thought parallel the emergence of the novel as a dominant literary form in the nineteenth century, but the novel in its focus on the individual in quest of a secure place in a social field, often represented as an independent actor in the marketplace, is arguably a genre invested in theorizing liberalism. This course takes this hypothesis as a means of examining both the protean form of the novel and unpacking the complicated term “liberalism.” We will begin with some key novels by nineteenth-century authors, interlacing our reading of fiction with critical analyses of key texts in the history of liberal thought. In the latter part of the course, we will think about the way in which more recent novels engage with the emergence of neoliberalism in the mid-20th century, a formation characterized by the shrinking of the state and the expansion of the global market; as described by the political theorist Wendy Brown, it involves “the transposition of the constituent elements of democracy into the economic register.” Throughout we will attempt to understand the novel as a literary form that inscribes economic and political experience in an affective register, while seeking greater understanding of these two sometimes opaque-seeming terms, liberalism and neoliberalism. Readings may include Dickens, Gaskell, Forster, Conrad, Ghosh, Adichie, Smith, Mill, Marx, Brown, Harvey, among others.

“We need to think with our eyes,” the writer, critic, and photographer Teju Cole enjoins. In this interdisciplinary seminar we will consider what it might meant to “think with the eyes” by focusing on literary and theoretical works that rely on and incorporate images, as well as by examining works of visual art that make use of text. That is, our interest will lie in the intersection of text and image, of art and narrative. What does the visual add to the written and what does it demand in return? How do we write about the visual and visualize the written? How does storytelling differ across the text and image, and what happens to the story when the two are juxtaposed or combined? What new possibilities and paradigms, particularly for discussing ideas about race, class, gender, and sexuality, emerge when words and pictures are brought together? How can literature accommodate pictures and to what end? How can visual art expand upon available narrative possibilities? And how can genres like comix and iconotexts help us think about thinking with our eyes. Readings may include work by W.J.T. Mitchell, Roland Barthes, Teju Cole, W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Art Speigelman, and Ben Lerner. We will also consider art works, including those by Taryn Simon, Sophie Calle, Jenny Holzer, Bruce Nauman, Zoe Leonard, David Wojnarowicz, Tracey Emin, and Erica Baum.

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore basic concepts and theories for analyzing historical and contemporary Black and Asian relations in the United States. We will survey the literature in political science, ethnic studies, sociology, and history to examine how race and racialization processes are articulated over time for both groups and entangled with other social structures including class, gender, and nation. Topics include but are not limited to ethnic and panethnic identities, transnationalism, Islamophobia, immigration, residential segregation, incarceration, displacement, and resistance. In particular, emphasis will be placed on the question of political agency and moments of interracial solidarity that range from the Black Liberation Movement to the Asian American Movement in the 1960s and the contemporary Movement for Black Lives to the Model Minority Mutiny. Texts include Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City by Claire Jean Kim, Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans by Fred Ho, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D.G. Kelley, and From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. As we read these texts in class, students will be exposed to intersectional, comparative, and emergent approaches to the study of race, culture, diaspora, and politics that can inform contemporary racial justice movements.

This course explores major texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, focusing on The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and The Genealogy of Morals. Our study is oriented by the idea that Nietzsche is a significant political theorist whose ideas remain generative for reflecting on the impasses, conflicts, temptations, and lines of flight we witness in philosophy, culture, and politics ever since he wrote. Our specific analytic concern is two-sided: to identify the central themes that organize his thinking and animate its changes over time; to consider the relationship between the "arguments" attributed to these texts, and their form, style, or rhetoric, which seem to undo, not secure, any and every argument. These concerns will help us to reflect on Nietzsche's interpretation of nihilism and its bearing on current debates about truth and relativism, resentment and hollowed-out norms, and the meaning of democratic politics.

This course interrogates how and why "Western" or "Eurocentric" perspectives dominate the ways the "Age of Discovery and Exploration" are taught and understood. As a crucial part of this project, we will explore alternatives to these narratives. Most of us educated in the "West" (and many of its former or current colonies) have been taught that the era beginning with Columbus and extending for the next two centuries, has been marked by the agency of "Europeans" whose discoveries led to globalization and modernity. Two not often asked questions in courses on this era will motivate our discussions: what kinds of travel, knowledge production, and artistic creation were people in other parts of the world involved in at the time of these well studied events and why are they excluded from the dominant narrative we are taught? Some additional questions include: in what ways did "European" "adventures," knowledge production and accumulation of profits derive from, or depend on that of other regions ? What impact socially, economically, and environmentally--did the events of this age have both on the peoples and places that were colonized and enslaved and on our contemporary world? To explore how our understanding of the "Age of Discovery" impacts what counts today as "modern," vs. "underdeveloped" or "backwards," we will study works that place our contemporary world in conversation with the "early modern." Materials for this course written, visual, and oral-- will be wide ranging and, at times, innovative in both genre and discipline.

The Vitruvian Man is an image of measure and proportion in the form of an ideal human body. Described in text by the Roman architect Vitruvius and illustrated pictorially by Renaissance architects and artists, the image has enjoyed a long reception in the western world up to the contemporary moment. Its appeal is obvious, making man the measure of all things places human beings at the center of the universe, and it has fascinated artists, architects, designers, philosophers, mathematicians, anthropologists, medical doctors, and more. In this course we trace this iconic figure back to its origins in Greek and Roman architectural, mathematical, and philosophical discourses and examine its emergence in relation to Rome"s contemporaneous transition from republic to empire. We will then explore the figure"s cultural apotheosis in the Renaissance as a symbol of artistic genius and human excellence, a practical problem for artists representing the human body, and a guide for architects seeking to restore the urban civilization of ancient Rome. ""The changing fortunes of the Vitruvian Man in the face of the transformations and crises of modernity will follow and will include explorations of the effects of technological change and total war on the image's centrality. Throughout we will consider the relationship between theory and practice in architecture and the arts; the interaction of textual and visual cultures in the transmission of antiquity; the relationship between the human body, the built environment, and the natural world. Finally, we will continually evaluate and critique the privileged place of this paradigm in western thought.

History, as most of us are taught it in school, has long been written by, and for, the powerful. Oral history, while it has long been practiced informally, was developed as a formal academic approach and research method by scholars and activists in the mid-20th century in order to infuse and nuance history with the voices and histories of disempowered groups and peoples—people of color, women, indigenous communities, differently abled people, political radicals, laborers and the working poor, and the LGBTQ community. In this course, we'll engage in a critical assessment of the practice of oral history, with the goal of understanding the context of its origins and uses and examining the ethics and principles that shape it as a mode of research. We'll read and listen to exemplary oral history interviews by noted practitioners in the field, and practice analyzing oral histories by developing deep listening skills, attending carefully to what is being said, and what is omitted. As the capstone experience of the course, students will design, carry out, and analyze oral history interviews of their own.

This course serves as the anchor for community-engaged course work at Gallatin.It complements the range of course offerings at Gallatin and NYU by focusing on connection between theories of social change and the practice of social change.This course thus gives students a platform to question and start defining their roles in social change, through readings, case studies, conversations with activists, and reflection exercises.“Tools for Social Change” is a course for proactive, humble-yet-ambitious students who are motivated to engage deeply with the challenges of this coursework.This hands-on course will help students make important decisions about their own values and belief systems, and figure out how to put those into practice.Students will then reflect on the experience in the form of small writing exercises and a final project.Guest speakers will include activists from local organizations and former Gallatin students who have gone on to pursue activism.Readings will include a range of “classic” and more contemporary texts on the connection between critical theories and practice, including: Paulo Freire, Martin Luther King, Cornel West, Frances Moore Lappe, among others.

What is the visual, material, and textual evidence for queens and royal women in the ancient world? What were the contours and limitations of their political power, and how did they exercise it? How did their representations model expectations for beauty, femininity, and dynastic continuity? How have ancient queens shaped modern imaginations of women and political power? This seminar addresses these questions by focusing on royal women in ancient Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome, including Hatshepsut, Puabi of Ur, Artemisia II, Cleopatra VII, and Livia. Throughout the semester, we will practice close-looking at images and will use modern theories of gender and sexuality to try to understand ancient constructs of gender and power. Moreover, we will grapple with how to engage with patchy archaeological records, fragments, and decontextualized monuments in reconstructive histories and art histories. We will make use of the objects, museums, and monuments throughout New York City. Note: this semester, the course takes place during a virtual arts and academic symposium at Gallatin called "Queen: Reimagining Power from Antiquity to the Present."

African American Cinema provides a window on sociological conditions, a glimpse into the psychology of race, a commentary on racial relations, and a sense of African American aspirations and dreams.The course will cover the period of “Race” films in the 1920s, moving on to the representation of African Americans during the classical Hollywood period. Successive artistic and political movements like the Harlem Renaissance of the 20s and the Black Arts and Black Power Movements of the 1960s expanded African American expression in all of the arts, and were an inspiration to Black auteurs throughout the 20th Century. We will examine Black independent filmmaking, Blaxploitation, the new African American Cinema of the 90s and the beginning of mainstream Black film in the 21st Century. We will frame our inquiry by asking some central questions: How do currents in African American intellectual history inform films created by African-American filmmakers? How does the historical context surrounding the production of the films shape them? Filmmakers include Oscar Micheaux, Cheryl Dunye, Spike Lee, Charles Burnett, and Julie Dash.

‘We are black, it is true, but tell us gentleman, you who are so judicious, what is the law that says that the black man must belong to and be the property of the white man?’ With these words, Toussaint Louverture’s 1791 Haitian declaration (To Live Free and Die) judiciously centers the intricate interdependence of the written and unwritten law of race. The declaration insists on the contradiction at the heart of the notion of the free and rights-bearing ‘human’ that was being heralded on both sides of the Black Atlantic in what some described as ‘the age of liberty’. This class will take up Toussaint's question and focus on notions of the human that emerge in international law’s imbrication with racial capitalism in the 'early-modern' Atlantic world. Using key moments in the history of international law to anchor our conversation, we will probe the contours of the global order that unfolds through the legal architecture of colonialism, slavery and trade. Our readings will foreground legal scholars such as Anthony Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Susan Marks, Robert Knox, Cheryll Harris and Jenny Martinez. We will also read historians and social theorists such as Eric Williams, Cedric Robinson, Lisa Lowe, Stephanie Smallwood, Sven Beckert, Lauren Benton, Siba Grovogui, Saidiya Hartman and Walter Johnson.

This seminar takes as its central topic the relationship between youth and empire. What does it mean to come of age in a world-system when the key decisions that shape your life might be made in far-off countries that you have never seen? And conversely, why have writers in societies that have recently achieved political independence been drawn to narrate that political transformation through the lens of stories about growing up? We will read a range of different texts and genres, including realist novels, modernist fiction and autobiographical narratives by formerly enslaved people. We will think together about the strengths and limits of these various forms, considering the ways that authors have attempted to reckon with the existential uncertainty of living in a global society. Likely readings will include Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm; and Indra Sinha, Animal’s People.

Einstein’s theory of relativity fundamentally changed the way physicists imagined space and time. His thought experiments are often thought of as day dreams involving falling elevators and clocks in space, but in fact can be drawn on graph-like diagrams that allow physicists to understand and experiment with Einstein’s theory. However, physicists are often unable to construct any visual representation and must resort to heuristic or artistic pictures that tell a convincing story, and not a graphical translation, of the underlying math. How, for example, does one draw 10-dimensions? Does the black hole in the film Interstellar really look like that? What is at stake when our ability to "picture" space-time is insufficient at best and, at worst, completely wrong? The aim of this course will be to understand the relationship between the theories of space-time and its various representations—narrative, pictorial, and diagrammatic—as well as to use these representations to solve real problems in physics. In addition to readings and class discussion, this course will involve a large amount of physics, which depends on understanding and manipulating equations, which will depend on High School math that we will review to get everyone up to speed.

This seminar asks, "What does peace look like?" What are the visual narratives of post-conflict societies, and how do they conform to or complicate our generalized notions and expectations around what "peace" means? Taking into account a history of war photography, and the uses of such imagery in journalism and by humanitarian NGOs, we explore the impact of persistently negative visual narratives of countries or regions as we contemplate the value of "peace photography." This seminar examines how the camera can be used to document and reframe received narratives. We study multiple post-conflict countries (including Bosnia, Rwanda, and Colombia), delving into bodies of postwar photographic documentation; we look at each country on its own and also compare countries to see if there are "tropes of peace." Such tropes can have global ramifications, affecting geopolitics, humanitarian endeavor, and, as we"ll see, they play out on a highly personal level as well. Students write analytic papers as well as produce visual projects, and our texts cover journalistic, sociological, historical, and human rights studies while spanning photographic, written, and filmic forms. Guest speakers, photographers who have covered war and/or peace, will deepen our conversations.

Monuments are generally coded masculine and created by men. Yet, “The State,” “Victory,” and “Justice,” for instance, have often been visualized as a female body. In this class, we will examine the patronage, viewing practices, legacies and absences of monuments, memorials, and art to or by women in public spaces.Over the course of the semester, we will take a comparative approach, looking to examples from both the past and the present to interrogate the different ways in which these monuments engage gender’s relationship with power, as well as intersections with race, ethnicity, and status. Our case studies include the iconoclasm of monuments to or by ancient queens such as Cleopatra and Artemisia II; the presence of nude female bodies in public spaces; the absence of women in American political monuments; the (imperial) politics of monuments in East Asia as in the Monuments of Peace to so-called “comfort women”; and women as artists and patrons of public art, from the Roman empress Livia to the contemporary artist Sharon Hayes. We will make use of objects, museums, and monuments throughout New York City.

This course covers the Indian Ocean’s long expanse from the ancient to the medieval period, roughly the 3rd millennium BCE to 1500 C.E. At its broadest, we can delimit the Indian Ocean as stretching around the Arabian Peninsula and South Asia east to the South China Sea, west to Africa’s east coast, and south to Australia. We interrogate how different ethnic, linguistic, religious, and social groups in a borderless world gave and took ideas, beliefs, and practices, making the oceanscape an arena of conflict and community. How did world religions, like Buddhism and Islam, and political forms, like empires and maritime city-states, integrate the seas into social, economic, and political life? From Madagascar to the Malay peninsula, this course navigates land and sea through coins, inscriptions, contracts, letters, travelogues, and legends about merchants, seafarers, pilgrims, and pirates, exploring oral and written traditions in translation from multiple languages – Sanskrit, Greek, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, and Malay. In the course’s epilogue, we consider some of the ways the Indian Ocean is reimagined and reused in more recent times. Readings include: Periplus Maris Erythraei, S.D. Goetein’s Documents from the Cairo Geniza, Roxani Margariti’s Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade, H.P. Ray’s The Winds of Change: Buddhism and The Maritime Links of South Asia, George Hourani’s Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean, Louise Levathes’ When China Ruled the Seas, M.N. Pearson’s Port Cities and Intruders, Lewis and Wigen’s The Myth of Continents.

This course will consider the cultural scene of New York City in the middle of the 20th century with special focus on the role of women, particularly writers.After World War I, many women who were unmarried, non-white, and/or non-heterosexual, moved to New York to escape hometown limits on creative opportunities and personal freedoms.Our discussions may cast doubt on whether New York was the sanctuary of creativity and emancipation it was rumored to be, but the output of New York women artists between World War I and the Vietnam War era was prolific and often critically and commercially significant.How do the stories, music, and images of New York artists represent the city as different from or emblematic of American culture and politics beyond the Hudson?How do their characters, real and imaginary, negotiate sexual, racial, and professional identities?To what extent do these narratives and images speak to the 2020’s?We will explore works by Dorothy Parker, Fannie Hurst, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary McCarthy, Lillian Hellman, Dawn Powell, Ann Petry, Agnes de Mille, Billie Holiday, Patricia Highsmith, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, Yvonne Rainer, Diane Arbus, Elaine de Kooning, Yoko Ono, and Patti Smith.

The Haitian Revolution did not end with the declaration of Independence of 1804.The plantation system and the attempts to revive it were defeated, at great human cost, and the small-farmer neighborhood, with its internally conflicted culture of solidarity, became widespread – but within the confines of a state which exploited it, lived off of it, and was itself riven by disputes over the control of access to the wealth produced by this peasantry. This story is further complicated by the fragmentary nature of the historical record and by the many problems in our methods of understanding these processes. In this course we will ask: What were the major social, political and economic forces which played out in Sainte Domingue/Haiti in the 1789-1845 period? How do individuals fit into these macro-cultural forces? We will discuss colonialism, inter-imperial rivalries and anti-colonial war; mercantilism; slavery; gender; race-thinking and racism; the "Atlantic system;" plantation systems, large estates, labor control; slave and peasant utopias; democracy; the state; militarism and military dictatorship; religions; international trade, loans and the development of new imperial forms of control and neo-colonialism.Constantly invoking the comparative study of revolutions, our study is broken into three sections: (1) The ancien regime, the revolution, and independence (2) The aftermath: attempts to reimpose the plantation system and the invention of neo-colonialism cum new forms of imperial domination; (3) The world that the new peasantry made, its culture and its limits.

In journalism, covering violence spotlights the dangers of the craft: a mistake may bring danger to a source; badly rendering a victimizer may appear as apologia for a crime. And yet, speaking with victims and victimizers are both necessary to report on violence. In this course, by way of analyzing journalistic texts and in conversations with reporters who have covered violence both interpersonal and structural, students will untangle the risks and virtues of working with these sources. The aim: to as much as possible craft guidelines of best practices to follow in reporting heinous acts, whether perpetrated by individuals, by states, or by larger systemic forces. By reading texts like Sala Negra by El Faro from El Salvador, to those of Mexican authors who have covered the world of organized crime, to classics by the likes of Truman Capote and Janet Malcolm, and by hearing directly from journalists like the Frontline's Marcela Gaviria, The New York Times's Boris Munoz, The New Yorker's Francisco Goldman, and NPR/Radio Ambulante's Daniel Alarcon, this course will provide a space to examine and discuss the why and the how of reporting on violence.

How does a nation's understanding of its borders come into being? Conversely, how do borders contribute to fictions about a nation-the possibilities it offers and who is considered a legitimate member of its community? How do multiple and often contradictory discourses and images shape the stories told about migration and the people who migrate? How do migrants document their own narratives as they cross, re-cross, and contest borders? How can their stories along with the work of artists, scholars and activists challenge dominant narratives and unravel the myths that help to give borders and related terms-refuge, asylum, immigrant, citizen--their meaning and even their power? In this course, we will explore the stakes in in the shaping of narratives of borders and migration. Though much of the course will focus on recent crises at the southern border of the United States, we will locate these crises in their longer histories and extended geographies, and we will put them in dialogue with contestations of borders and narratives of migrations in other geographical locations. The seminar will draw from narrative fiction and on-fiction, poetry, historical documents, the work of historians, visual artists, filmmakers, performance artists, political theorists, media scholars and anthropologists. Possible authors/scholars/artists include: Valeria Luselli, Oscar Martínez, Gloria Anzaldua, Alex Rivera, Wendy Brown, Claudia Hernández, Javier Zamora, among many others.

This course explores the history of North Africa during the first millennium AD using historical documents, archaeology, and environmental data, to better understand the past–human experience and to deconstruct colonial narratives of North African history. Within those 1000 years, North Africa witnessed the rise and fall of many empires, and the expansion of Christianity and Islam. Throughout the course, we will ask: how does regionalization and periodization affect our understanding of world history? How do we understand and identify the local population from what sources that survive today? What happens to society when empires collapse? How did trade across the Sahara affect the development of regional powers? While the geographical range of this course will focus mainly on the areas of modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, much attention will be placed on how communities connected within and across the Sahara with sub-Saharan Africa, such as Ghana and Ethiopia. The theme for this course varies from year to year. Previous themes include: the archaeology of Early Islamic North Africa; and North Africa in Late Antiquity. For this Fall 2021, the course’s theme will focus on the first 100 years following the rise of Islam out of Arabia and the effect that monumental event had on North Africa. We will survey a wide variety of evidence from archaeology, art, environmental data, papyri, and historical texts from a diverse selection of languages and authors. By the end, students will be able to discuss and critically critique the sources, narratives, and histories of Early Islam that survive today. More so, they will be able to engage the history of both Islam and North Africa as a part of a wider-human history.

At midcentury, economist Joseph Schumpeter observed that “Capitalism is being killed by its achievements.” Entrepreneurs, in Schumpeter’s view, drove economic growth by introducing new and disruptive business practices. But innovation also threatened existing enterprises and undermined the social stability on which capitalist markets depended. For Schumpeter and the other economic thinkers we will examine in this course, the very features which made capitalism a dynamic economic system—like entrepreneurship and innovation—also spelled its certain failure. Starting with earlier theorists like Adam Smith and Karl Marx, we will focus most of our attention on the twentieth century, examining a group, including Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, Joan Robinson, Karl Polanyi, Frederick Hayek, Hyman Minsky, and Albert Hirschman. How, we will ask, did these thinkers explain the workings and failures of capitalism? How did they combine economic analysis with other disciplinary perspectives to reach their conclusions? And why, after all, has capitalism been so resilient? What insights we can draw for today’s modes of economic organization?

Through much of American history, the nation’s politics have been consumed by “the money question”: What is money? What is it made of? Who controls it? Now, however, we take money for granted. But should we? These questions are far from settled. Are credit cards money? What about Bitcoins? Who decides what counts as money, now? Who gave them the power to decide? These are not idle questions, either. As the global financial crisis made perfectly clear, the money question bears heavily on us all. In this course, we will examine the history of money and finance in the modern United States. Our inquiry will be driven by three broad questions: How have Americans defined what money is? How have they used money and credit in their daily lives? How and why have financial markets changed? In answering these questions, we will draw on business, economic, social, cultural, political and gender history, as well as the history of technology and the history of race. We will also draw connections between the economic practices of daily life and transformations in global financial markets. This knowledge should provide you with a new perspective on the events of the past, while also helping you to see the present in new light.

Information visualization is indispensable to how modern science, government, and business operate because it affords us with a means of communicating and analyzing trends in vast, complex data sets. We depend upon our charts, graphs, diagrams, and timelines both to understand our world and to take action in it. However, we often find ourselves ill-equipped to analyze the designs, epistemological functions, and social impact of information visualizations, despite the fact that they impinge so directly on the production and circulation of knowledge. This course equips participants with a set of theoretical tools for interpreting non-verbal, primarily non-pictorial visualizations so that they can become more critical consumers of information visualizations in their academic and professional work as well as in their day-to-day lives. Furthermore, it is a central contention of this course that, despite information visualization’s certain importance to modern life, it has always been important to the production and circulation of knowledge. As such, readings draw on both premodern and modern examples taken from a wide geographic range. Key theoretical and historical texts will include work by: Marcia Ascher, Jacques Bertin, W.E.B. DuBois, Wendy Hilton, Edward Tufte, and Nikki Usher.

The past century has witnessed the large-scale displacement of bodies across the globe as a result of war, genocide, decolonization, and post-independence dictatorships. As a major historical and political theme, exile has been a focal site of exploring notions of home, identity, belonging, and the body. To anchor the global trend, this course traces the condition of the body under forced transit in the context of contemporary Middle East and North Africa. Looking at the exile literature from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Libya, among other countries, together we look at how exile is embodied, experienced and articulated. In doing so, we pay close attention to two crucial themes. First, we explore how first-hand accounts of displacement navigate and respond to the tropes of representations of Middle Eastern migrants, especially Muslims and/or Arabs in the West. Second, we look at how migration to (often) Western countries enriches, enables or debilitate one’s notion of social commitment. What forms of social and political engagement is shaped through exile? We put first-hand accounts of exilic experience in conversation with theoretical works from postcolonial thinkers of identity including Said, Bhabha, Abu-Lughod, Ahmed, Maalouf.

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 and colonial resistance also serve as essential tools to untangling and mapping the roots and routes of black intellectualism and its discussion of the meaning(s) of freedom and on the practice of humanism. 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 Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, Stuart Hall, Baron de Vastey and Frederick Douglass.

The first monumental statue of a nude woman in the Greek world was reportedly the Aphrodite of Knidos, sculpted by Praxiteles in the 4th century BCE. The sculpture, apparently set up in an open, round temple, so that she could be viewed from all sides, was a hit in antiquity. It became a tourist destination, the subject of ruminations on the nature of sex and the body, and the inspiration for uncountable ancient copies of the nude goddess in various poses. The original statue is lost, but it fundamentally influenced, perhaps more than any other single monument, the later history of European art. Female nudes"including those of Botticelli, Canova, Manet, Dal?"reference the Venus and her famous "pudica" pose, which simultaneously obscures, draws attention to, and, some argue, reduces her to her sex organs. This course takes the Knidian Aphrodite (Venus, to the Romans) and the long legacy of the female nude as its subject. What are the stakes of nudity in the ancient contexts, and how are those stakes gendered? How does the representation of the divine body relate to the real, and in particular to the sexualized female body? How does the legacy of the female nude engage modern discourses of sexuality, gender, and race? Alongside modern essays that take on these questions, our primary sources will draw from ancient and modern visual traditions.

Sufism refers to the world of Islamic mysticism, and is often known in the West through the magnificent work of poet-philosophers like Rumi. In this course, we will collectively journey through the multiple worlds of Sufi thought, and strive to grasp its philosophies, poetics and politics. Reading a selection of texts over thousand years across South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, we will address: How did Sufis understand the connection to the Divine, and strive to create new social worlds and possibilities of being? What is Sufi poetics, and with what conceptual tools do we explore its multiple layers? Ultimately, what is love in the Sufi imaginary? The course will enable students to reflect on non-Western philosophies and histories of Islam, while introducing them to Sufi poetry from a variety of languages including Persian, Arabic, Sindhi, and Punjabi. Course themes include histories of Sufi saints in South Asia, the body, ritual and symbols in Sufi praxis, visual cultures in Sufi lifeworlds, gender and power in poetic thought, and love and spiritual subjectivity as modes of resistance. Key texts include the scholarly works of Annemarie Schimmel and Shahzad Bashir, translated poetic works of Rumi, Hafez, Shah Latif Bhitai, Rabia Basri, and Bulleh Shah, and a range of sonic and visual archives - artwork, songs, and documentaries that illuminate the themes of the class beyond text.

Is anxiety about the climate crisis warranted? As protests rock London, New York and other cities around the world, what does an interdisciplinary view bring to these public debates? This course draws on theories from science studies, decolonial theory, anthropology and climate justice to tease apart a multifaceted - and multicultural - view of our collective ecological predicament. First we take on the political side of climate change by asking questions about its collective nature. How do we think about political collectivity? Then we turn to a critical understanding of the science, both to expose ourselves to some of the underlying facts and to think about science as a socio-political process. Lastly we focus on 'Living with Climate Change' - human practices ranging from fossil fuel cultures and the sociology of protest, to pragmatic attempts to grapple with a rapidly changing climate around the world. We read works from Pope Francis and Montaigne to Donna Haraway and Slavoj Zizek. Far from instilling a predetermined viewpoint, this seminar is designed to impart critical thinking skills for a rapidly evolving global situation.

This seminar begins with the conviction that the arc of modern history for both the U.S. and France has had a similar form. Both countries’s Enlightenment ideals of stunning potential, as found in The Declaration of Independence and The Declaration of the Rights of Man [sic], have often been ballyhooed and ignored, actualized and subverted. At the same time, we have remarked that the specificity of the ambivalent French entanglement with universalism, race, and empire is too rarely understood in the so-called New World. Our focus will be directed to art that in all its manifestations has had a critical role in this dynamic. It has been and continues to be deeply imbricated in the contradictory and reinforcing projects of universalism, race, and empire. But how exactly? What roles have objects played? This is the subject that the seminar will investigate. How have they functioned as symptoms, vectors, or agents in France and in dialogue with sites of French artistic and political ambitions and claims, including New France and Louisiana; the Caribbean; Egypt, North and West Africa; Tahiti and Viet Nam? And what has been their role when it comes to stateless people? Readings and discussions will consider fine art such as painting, drawing, prints, and sculpture, as well as other material objects and products of human and natural manufacture, such as books, the sea, obelisks, shells, textiles, makeup, and clothing.

Neoliberalism is the general title given to a set of economic policies aimed at privatization, ever-increasing commodification, deregulation, state’s withdrawal from social provisions, and curbing the power of labor, the implementation of which began in the 1970s. These policies were rooted in a political economic theory, which viewed the individual’s freedom in the market as the guarantor of his/her well-being, and a bastion against totalitarianism. As such, neoliberalism required a transformation in values and ways of thought and life. Despite the uniformity of neoliberal policies forcefully propagated by the IMF and the World Bank, their implementation in different countries in conjunction with particular political and socio-cultural context has led to unique consequences in each society. The particular focus of this course will be on Iranian neoliberalism. We will be concerned, on the one hand, with the impact of structural and economic transformations of Iranian economy on the political, cultural, and social context of Iran in the past two decades; and on the other hand, we will discuss the construction of neoliberal subjectivity in Iran. In particular, this course aims to encourage students to reflect on the following questions: 1) What did the Iranian culture, economics, and politics look like in late 1980s? 2) How did neoliberalism transform Iranian society, politics, and culture? 3) How did neoliberal ideology become hegemonic in Iran? 4) How was neoliberalism reconciled with the theological aspirations of the Islamic Republic?

The results of scientific inquiry are conventionally understood as established facts, not questions of belief. However, as issues like climate change and mandated vaccinations have become increasingly divisive, we might wonder about the status of science. How does it function in the production of knowledge and as a kind of social practice? Why should people believe scientists when they make claims about the results of their research? What tools are available for understanding the inter-relations between science and the social? Can social science theories help us understand how claims from the scientific community come to be contested in the broader culture? In this course, we explore the Enlightenment origins of scientific objectivity and its claim to dominion over nature before discussing its feminist and ecological critiques. We then turn to major theorists of science and technology to understand their claims to truth. Much of this course is dedicated to critical research by Asian scholars of technology and science in an effort to provincialize European claims to objectivity. The final weeks of the seminar will return us to the theme of domination over nature in order to address toxic ecologies, nuclear weapons technologies and the datafication of climate risk. Readings will include works by Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, JPS Uberoi and Wen-Hua Kuo.

Can oceans be the subject of historical inquiry? Maritime spaces help in thinking beyond nations and national borders that dominate modern global histories, leading us into a world of connected pasts. This course investigates the Indian Ocean's long expanse from the early modern to the modern period from 1500 to the early 20 th century. What changed about movement and exchange across land and sea in the longer transition from empires to nation-states? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite growing European presence in the Indian Ocean littoral, pre-existing networks between East Africa, the Persian Gulf, the Indian sub-continent, and Southeast Asia remained resilient. Yet, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, new shipping technologies, the monitoring of movement across borders, and the introduction of travel documents like the passport became crucial in the formation of nation-states that emerged from colonial empires. From sailors, moneylenders, and pilgrims to convicts and indentured laborers, cultures of mobility connected vast geographies, often defying the logic of nation-states and colonialism. In examining this history, we will cover themes ranging from encounters in port-cities, commodities, smuggling, piracy, and pilgrimage to documents of identity and travel. Readings may include: Broeze's Brides of the Seas, Ewald's Motley Crews: Indian and African Seafarers, Tagliacozzo's Secret trades, porous borders , and Torpey's The Invention of the Passport , and translations from Samarqandi's Account of Calicut and Vijayanagar, Afonso De Albuquerque's Letter from Aden , Linschoten's Itinerario , Munshi Rahman Khan's Autobiography of an Indian Indentured Laborer, and Nawab Sikandar Begam's A Pilgrimage to Mecca .

In The Myth of Sisyphus , Albert Camus writes, “A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, [a person] feels a stranger.” This severing between human and life, between “the actor and the setting,” is, for Camus, what constitutes the absurd. This seminar will explore absurdism as both philosophy and literary movement. In so doing, we will examine the use of absurdism as a response to various material and psychological phenomena: crises of faith, loss of a loved one, war, alienation, boredom, trauma, and fascism. Instead of reading forward (or backwards) in time, the course will perform an absurdist act by reading around chronology. We start with the Pulitzer-prize winning American dramatist, Suzan Lori-Parks’ The America Play (1995), which we follow with Soren Kierkegaard’s crisis of faith in Fear and Trembling (1843). Zhuangzi’s writing on the slippery concept of the Dao (4thncentury B.C.) will then be juxtaposed against critiques of fascism in Sony Labou Tansi’s Parentheses of Blood (1981) and Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896). We then jump back to Aristophanes’ The Birds (414 B.C.) and then forward to Camus’ seminal text, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and Ama Ata Aidoo’s critique of race and gender in Our Sister Killjoy (1977). Samuel Beckett’s post-war Waiting for Godot (1953) will be followed by the Nobel Prize winner, Gao Xingjian’s The Bus Stop (1983), Zakes Mda’s Dead End (1990) on apartheid’sracial madness, and finally, Raymond Queneau’s perspective-bending Exercises in Style (1947). Through these readings, the course will ask: Can an absurdist believe in God? What is the difference between existentialism and absurdism? Why is drama so important to the absurd? Is the absurd (a)political? Is it (a)historical? How does language relate to the absurd? How does race? And finally, why is the absurd seemingly critical to the so-called “modern” condition?

Imagine an omniscient being who knows the position of every atom in the universe—could such a being predict the future? Or imagine all of your experiences are identical to those you’ve had all your life, yet it turns out you have all along been a brain in a vat, stimulated by neuro-electical impulses which lead you to think you are walking abound in the world. Or imagine a being identical to you—a perfect physical duplicate—which does not have conscious experience. Does that mean consciousness is something other than physical? Would such a being be a zombie? Examples like these—fictional scenarios that get the mind moving down a certain track of speculative argument or hypothesis—are called “thought experiments”. The course will explore the literary and philosophical aspects of thought experiments with a number of questions in mind: What do thought experiments add that straight logical argumentation does not? What is the relation of these sorts of explanatory fictions to experiments conducted in laboratory settings? Do thought experiments yield new knowledge about the world? Could works of fiction or films function in their own way as thought experiments? (is Frankenstein a thought experiment? Kafka’s Metamorphosis? an episode of Black Mirror?) The course will look in detail at thought experiments from philosophy, literature and film with emphasis on the entwinement of the humanities and the sciences, and with the aim that a focus on thought experiments helps to dispel assumptions that there is a chasm separating quantitative kinds of analysis from qualitative and imaginative ways of thinking.

It can seem like we are living in an era of constant disaster: climate change leads to more floods and droughts, heatwaves and storms; global urbanization to seismicly active cities leads to massively destructive and fatal earthquakes; highly complex systems on which we increasingly rely fail; radiation, chemicals, and other effluvium of modernity go where they are not intended and harm us. This course takes up the idea of disaster to ask interpretive questions about how and why disasters operate in society. What constitutes a disaster? What makes disasters different from ordinary bad things? How does society shape the experience of disaster, and how does disaster shape society? What makes people vulnerable to disaster? What does it mean to be resilient? Disasters are moments of severe distress, deprivation and also possibility. How people, organizations, and governments have responded and continue to respond to disasters says much about how we imagine society to be and how we hope it will be in the future. Readings may include texts by Kai Erikson, Eric Klinenberg, Rebecca Solnit, Dara Strolovitch, and others.

Intertidal detritus, taxidermied Torah beasts, DIY protest banners, disembodied statue noses, endangered seeds: these are all real collections displayed in “vernacular museums”— communal, unofficial, and often playful anti-institutions that emerge in out-of-the-way places like barns, shipping containers, and elevator shafts. Like vernacular language—everyday forms of speech that remain outside a standardized dialect—vernacular museums are informal, and their organizers resist typical museum organizational structures to preserve and care for curiously specific collections and their communities. In this class, we will explore how knowledge, practice, and affect are produced between people and things in vernacular museums. How might we account for their multiplying as sites of memory, spaces of radical practice, and laboratories for imagined futures? What are their connections with early modern Wunderkammer, cabinets of curiosity, artist-led social practice, natural history dioramas, and the corporate pop-up display? Reading across anthropology, curatorial studies, and critical museology, we will consider this vernacular moment in the history of museums through the work of Walter Benjamin, Fiona Candlin, Marianne Moore, Kathleen Stewart, and Michael Taussig, among others. We will also analyze museums and artist projects including the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Natural History Museum, the Museum of Longing and Failure, BUSH Gallery, Mmuseumm, and the Museum of Everyday Life.

This course explores the genre of documentary film and its historical and aesthetic evolutions in the U.S. It is designed to provide students with a critical vocabulary to define and discuss the specificity of documentary film form, while also interrogating practices of representation in non-fiction film and the genre’s relationship to notions like truth, reality, memory and history. Students will grapple with some of the ethical issues central to documentary filmmaking and examine how non-fiction films have addressed social and political issues relevant to American life at different historical moments. Readings will include the work of Patricia Aufderheide, bell hooks, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Bill Nichols, and Paula Rabinowitz, among others. Filmmakers may include Madeline Anderson, Elizabeth Barret, Garrett Bradley, Adam and Zack Khalil, Sky Hopinka, Cheryl Furjanic, William Greaves, Sterlin Harjo, Terence Nance, Jan Oxenberg, Marlon Riggs, Rea Tajiri, and more.

What was money in antiquity? What is money today? What is market? This course explores the history of a revolutionary socio-economic phenomenon from its birth until today. The students will analyze economic concepts related to currency and exchange, and investigate how these concepts are used in the study of textual, archaeological, and visual evidence to reconstruct the economic life of ancient and modern cultures in China, Central Asia, the Near East, the Mediterranean, and the rest of the world. What were the earliest forms of money? Which social processes led to the creation of money? What were the institutions that issued money? Are there significant differences between ancient and modern monetized economies? Who are the prominent actors in determining the nature of market life and how do they assert their authority in textual and visual evidence? What are the visual devices for building public trust in fiscal policies? The material of study includes archaeological evidence (coins), visual material, decrees by ancient and modern rulers, philosophical and legal discourse on money and market (Plato’s Republic), and discussions by modern authors and anthropologists from Adam Smith and Bronisław Malinowski on exchange systems to Nathaniel Popper on cryptocurrencies.

If you have eaten sugar or rice, drunk coffee, used tobacco, or worn cotton, your life has been shaped by the world the slaves made. Slavery is America’s founding economic and political institution, one which gives shape not only to our economy and politics but to our educational systems and philosophies, our creative works and practices. Enslavement functions as the fishbowl invisibly holding and shaping our lives, and the weather through which we move. Yet consider what most of us learned about slavery: that it took place in the distant past, a different past than revered past of the American revolution and the founding of democracy; that there was an underground railroad, driven by white abolitionists, upon which some of the enslaved passively and anonymously rode to freedom; that it was a southern crime brought to justice by the sacrifice of northern lives; that it ended in 1865 with Lincoln’s magnanimous emancipatory gesture. Through a deep engagement with primary texts of the period, written, drawn, spoken, and sung, we will consider the ways that enslavement has been central to the development of democracy, individual rights and notions of justice, and dreams of freedom. In this class we will consider the ways that enslavement was not democracy’s foil but its foundation. We will break open that narrow sense of enslavement’s geography and temporality and grapple with it as something that has presence in the here and now.

What can comedy tell us about what it means to be human? From its beginnings in the theatrical festivals of fifth-century BC Athens, European comic drama has been inextricably entangled with the study of human nature, culture, and society. Dramatic comedy’s embrace of fiction and fantasy has made it a powerful tool for investigating the relationships between humans and animals; for imagining the Other, and the self; and for interrogating the organization and workings of human communities. At the same time, the genre’s apparent roots in fertility rites, and its evident association with traditional forms of ritual abuse have made it a productive site for philosophical speculation about the origins of human culture and the development of civilization. In this course, we will explore the development of these intersecting discourses in the dramatic and critical traditions of Greco-Roman antiquity and the European Renaissance. Questions we will want to consider include: what role does laughter play in classical and early modern theories about human psychology and human society? How were the comic speculations of pagan antiquity appropriated and transformed by Christian playwrights at the dawn of the age of colonization? What can this tradition tell us about comedy’s capacity for intellectual seriousness - and about the place of play in scholarly inquiry? And, more broadly, how can reading classical and early modern comic dramas enrich or complicate our understanding of modern comedy, in all its multifarious forms? We’ll look for answers in plays by Aristophanes, Euripides, Plautus, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Jonson, and in theoretical texts by Aristotle, Horace, and Castiglione, among others.

The Dutch humanist Erasmus stated, “Man is not born but fashioned.” According to him, identity is not inherent and fixed but is instead cultivated and transmitted. This interdisciplinary seminar will explore the process and politics of identity formation through a case study of modern France and its social, cultural, and political institutions. These questions are particularly salient in this context because since the Third Republic, France has actively sought to transmit a singular national identity, resulting in the investment of a specific developmental period: childhood. Children, after all, become future citizens. To consider the themes of identity formation, childhood, and citizenship, we will situate the concept of French republican identity in its socio-historical context through questions such as: What are the foundations of French identity? How has this identity historically been shaped, and is it open to all groups? In contemporary French society, how does one reconcile republicanism with increasing pluralism? We will then analyze several recent coming of age narratives from a variety of genres—novels, autobiographies, short stories, graphic novels, documentaries, and fiction films—that depict youth in France and the broader French-speaking world. These sources challenge the notion of a unique French identity and instead emphasize diversity, fractures, and contestation through their representations of friendship, love, school, rebellion, injustice and shame.

Building on influences and dreamworlds from theorists, artists, designers, and scientists, RadLab offers an invitation to address what we are calling ‘radical ecologies’, or collective forms of life. We will incorporate experimental methods and field-based techniques in humanities-centered modes of social and cultural analyses to more critically and creatively examine the increasingly porous boundaries that structure our social and biological existence. Some of the topics we will discuss and experiment with include indeterminacy versus risk, multispecies work, the temporality of toxicity, and how we perceive planetary phenomena. Scholars and artists such as Karen Barad, Donna Harraway, Anna Tsing, and Mel Chen are representative of some of the work that will be drawn into our conversations of scientific readings. Students will combine oral presentation, creative projects, and written work to experiment with critical-creative apparatuses that might teach us how to attend and attune more intimately with the materialities of novel, unfamiliar ecologies in everyday lives.

How does theatre practice work as a dialogue generator, as a means for reflection, as a mechanism of awareness-raising and empathy between and among communities? The course proposes an interdisciplinary approach to theatre, starting from the page and extending to the stage, the street and the home of the spectator, as a complete artistic praxis. Looking at case studies from Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine, we will ask: How have communities, conflicts, and ideologies emerged from (post-)colonialism and the formation of the nation-state? How has the long history of mobility (of populations, ideas and languages) in this region shaped the mobility of narratives? How have the contested-ness and tensions of physical spaces, whether populated or lying abandoned, such as buffer zones, shaped communities and their stories? We turn to the methodologies of collaborative and community-based creation, using a workshop process to explore Theatre of the Oppressed, Sited Performance, contemporary Commedia dell'Arte, among others.

Scholars across disciplines are deeply engaged in the study of everyday culture and experience; similarly, literary, performance, and visual artists are investigating everyday life as sources for their work, challenging the terms through which we understand both art forms and everyday life itself. In this course, students will explore a particular aspect of the everyday: the experience of space and place, centered on the vibrant street life of two cities fabled for the continuing allure of their walkers, especially Paris’s poetic roving flâneur—“stroller” doesn’t do the term justice—celebrated since the 19th century. While we can’t go to Paris together, we can walk (literally and figuratively) through the streets of New York, guided by the writing and ideas of others who have looked carefully at the streets themselves, at the movement of people animating them, and at their own experiences as participant/observers. Readings may include works by Walter Benjamin, Rebecca Solnit, Michel de Certeau, Yi-Fu Tuan, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Patrick Modiano, Lauren Elkin, Henry James, and Teju Cole. These scholars and walkers representing multiple disciplines (e.g., philosophy, cultural theory, humanist geography, photography, experimental literature), styles, and practices address urban ambulation through description, reflection, and a range of sociopolitical perspectives on race, class, gender (including the relative dearth of women identified with city walking), and walking itself.

In this course, we study “coming out” as a historical concept and interrogate what the practice now means given the increased acceptance that queer people in the United States have won in recent years. We do this through a close and contextualized study of coming-out narratives that include memoirs, oral histories, and online videos. Gay-rights advocates celebrate coming out as a radical transformation of self-loathing into self-liberation, of shame into pride, of a private characteristic into a public political statement. In the 1970s, activists urged all lesbians and gay men to acknowledge their queer identities publicly. Coming out, they said, would provide role models for closeted people, naturalize a pariah identity, and generate a powerful social movement. When AIDS emerged in the 1980s, many queer people framed coming out as an overtly political act that would instigate action against the disease. More recently, many activists and scholars have argued that coming out and the accrual of civil rights exist symbiotically—the more queer people who come out, the more rights and benefits that queer people achieve. But was coming out ever really straightforward? How do race, religion, education, and gender presentation influence an individual’s decision to come out? Does coming out paradoxically represent a form of assimilation? Is it ever fair to out someone else? And what does it mean to come out today, when even young children may feel supported in proclaiming themselves queer? Works we may encounter include Alison Bechdel’s “tragicomic” Fun Home, Saeed Jones's memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, Michael Warner’s work of social theory Publics and Counterpublics, and Kenji Yoshino’s memoir-cum-legal analysis Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights.

How is the stage like a laboratory? "What is the relationship between dramatic and scientific practice in the Renaissance? "This course will study Shakespearean drama alongside practices of anatomy, cartography, ethnography, mathematics, experimental science, and early forms of "life science." "We will focus on how Shakespeare negotiates the vexing relationship between art and nature and how his plays represent the body, the physical universe, and the cosmos. "Course readings will trace the development of concepts such as "fact," "science," "discovery," and "invention." "Students will gain an in-depth knowledge of Shakespeare"s plays as well as an understanding of the major developments in English scientific thought before the modern era. "Readings will include Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest as well as selections from Ovid, Vesalius, Elyot, Crooke, Harriot, Galileo, and Bacon.

This course examines the role of wonder, experiential learning, and assumptions of the balance and order of Nature in science. We will frame our inquiry through the work of the eccentric polymath and early modern scientist, Athanasius Kircher, who looked both to the past and future in the 17th century. Kircher had himself lowered into Vesuvius volcano to understand its eruptions, invented a mechanical lobster that vomited for verisimilitude, and designed a piano made of cats whose tails would be hit to create music. His work, which he framed as the ‘art of knowing’, was a form of radical interdisciplinarity. We will use Kircher’s inventions and designs as a way of bringing a sense of play and experimentation to scientific questions of the 21st century. Some of the topics we will explore include visualizations of the Earth's interior, germ theory and pandemics, automatons and cyborgs, artificial intelligence in music composition, and interplanetary exploration. We will draw on writing by and about Kircher, scientific data, film, and artist visits as well as work by Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Walter Benjamin, and Umberto Eco. Each student will create a final project that is an experiment, design, or composition which applies early modern scientific concepts to contemporary challenges such as climate change, epidemiology, or social justice.

How did people travel in a world without passports and borders? As difficult as it might be to imagine this possibility in today’s world, in this course we reconstruct the human experience of travel, and its literary expression, in a world unbound by nation-states. Through journeys in two inter-connected maritime arenas, this course examines travel-writing as a literary genre that crystallized between 1400 to 1900. The emphasis is on travelers who crossed conventional or older cultural boundaries, thereby forging a new sense of the world. Each week, we investigate concepts such as curiosity, translation, acculturation, disambiguation, cultural encounters, and boundaries. The materials treated include translations of Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Urdu, and Malay texts to and from the Islamic world (with a specific focus on circulation between the Middle East, South Asia, East Africa, and Southeast Asia) alongside accounts of European (Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, and French) travelers to the Indian Ocean. In this interdisciplinary seminar, students examine the conventions, topoi, and modes of narration in travel accounts while locating early modern texts and their authors within their historical contexts. Students will produce one research paper on a travel account in any language of their choice. The writing process is divided into several stages and students will collectively curate, revise, and workshop paper drafts in class over the course of the semester. Readings may include the Baburnama, Matteo Ricci’s The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, al-Hajari’s The Book of the Protector of Religion against the Unbelievers, Shaikh I‘tisamuddin’s The Wonders of Vilayet, Alam & Subrahmanyam’s Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, and Stuart Schwartz’s Implicit Understandings.

Architecture has played a significant role in the construction, dissemination, and preservation of memory. As a particularly costly and permanent form of memorial, it is the locus for debates and even controversy over a culture’s collective identity and over questions about what to remember and what to forget. This course takes us back to the roots of monument building in ancient Rome, where the terms in which we think about monuments in western culture -- both the conceptual framework and architectural grammar – were essentially shaped. We will then trace the reception of Roman memorial culture in the 19th and 20th century, focusing on moments both of imitation and rejection. Throughout the semester, we will consider how architecture can connect us to the past and facilitate remembrance through its style, form, and location in the urban environment. We will also critically reflect on the relationship between past and present and the value of the architectural monument for our current times.

Who were the Vikings? The horn-helmed and bloodthirsty barbarians of the modern popular imagination bear little resemblance to the actual women and men who inhabited the northern reaches of Europe more than a thousand years ago. Yet the realities of their lives might be even more interesting. The word “viking” originally meant “fjord voyager” or “seafarer.” In correct modern usage, it refers not to one but to many different Scandinavian and North Sea cultures and peoples, the vast majority of whom lived largely peaceful lives of farming, herding, and fishing. In this seven-week course, students will read a selection of the stories that these Viking cultures have left us — rich tales of distinct style and tone that offer a tantalizing glimpse of the imaginative worlds that the Viking people once inhabited. Like us, the peoples of the North Sea region worried over the safety of their families, the unpredictability of their environment, the politics of class and gender identity, and the role of spirituality in their daily existence. As a seminar, we will practice the art of analyzing literature in the service of studying culture, both theirs and our own. We will correct some of the more blatant misconceptions about the Vikings that exist today. And we will ponder the reasons for the overwhelming curiosity that the Vikings still inspire.

What role does history-writing play in our contemporary world? In what forms do we consume it? Is “popular” history a different genre than “scholarly” history? And if it is, should it be? In this course, students will debate these questions and more via a selection of recent books about the medieval European past. All are written by recognized experts in the field. All advance novel ideas through careful examination of primary sources. And all have managed to reach audiences far beyond just the specialized circles of the academic “ivory tower.” Each week, students will analyze how these works of history present convincing interpretations of the past through compelling narrative and gripping prose. Along the way, they will consider what is at stake in the historian’s craft and theorize what history-writing can and should contribute to the complex world of today.

In recent years, Sicily has often figured in the news as a frontline of the ongoing Mediterranean migration crisis. But this is only the latest iteration of a much older phenomenon. Poised between North Africa and the Italian peninsula, and athwart the sea lanes connecting the eastern and western halves of the Mediterranean basin, the island has long been a hub for the movement of peoples and populations around the Mediterranean world. In this course, we will examine the representation of this history of migration and displacement in ancient, medieval, and early modern literature and drama, from the Odyssey and the Aeneid, through the lyric poetry of Ibn Hamdis and the scuola siciliana, to Shakespeare’s late romances. Among the questions we will be considering are: how have Sicily’s own literary traditions been shaped by the island’s long history of contact and exchange between different linguistic, ethnic, and religious communities? How have writers beyond Sicily’s shores used the island as a stage on which to explore broader questions about dispossession and restitution, exile and homecoming? And how might this pre-modern and early modern cultural history enrich our understanding of, and our responses to the present-day politics of Mediterranean mobility? In addition to the texts and authors mentioned above, readings will include works by Pindar, Theocritus, Plautus, Ibn Jubayr, Boccaccio, and Ariosto.

What do we mean when we speak of a national or American mood? What is the relationship between an individual's mood and collective experience and action? What is a mood to begin with? This course will consider these questions in relation to four central moods of 21st century American experience: anxiety, boredom, terror, and awe (with occasional detours for distraction). We will analyze these moods alongside key moments and developments within 21st century American life, including: 9/11 and the War on Terror, stop-and-frisk policing, the second digital revolution, the 2008 financial crisis, the humanitarian crisis on the U.S. border, the presidencies of Obama and Trump, and the COVID-19 pandemic. As we move through this "affective history" of 21st century America, we will consider literary and cinematic works that illuminate the embodied moods and experiences of these events, while simultaneously addressing the following theoretical questions: What is a mood? What is a national mood, and is there such a thing as an "American mood"? How might these national moods be experienced differently by individuals with different bodies and backgrounds? How is mood reflected in different aesthetic forms such as film, literature, television, fashion, music, etc.? Are there ways that our moods might guide us towards new political and social possibilities? Authors / artists studied will include: Massumi, Fukuyama, Baudrillard, Lee, Flatley, Ward, Fincher, Berlant, Ngai, Luiselli, Coates, Obama, Lerner.

The word apocalypse invokes images of end of the world destruction, hellscapes, and plagues. The contemporary usage of the word stretches to inspire fear of the future and dissonance in the present. However, apocalypse fundamentally expresses a sentiment of honesty and hopefulness in the face of challenge and trial. The Greek word apokalypsis, means unveiling, a moment of disclosure, not of what will be, but of what is already present. Layered with poetry, expressive imagery, and prophetic imagination, apocalypticism emphasizes throughout a stubborn and resistant hope (Gk. Hupomone). It is the stubborn hope born out of these ancient communities that inspires a genre that dares to imagine humanity, the cosmos, and the divine interacting, appropriately depicted in oftentimes dramatic ways. This IDSEM course analyzes the apocalyptic genre in Jewish and Christian scriptures. While the course discussion and readings will go beyond the Abrahamic traditions, the main focus will involve the exploration of historical, theological, philosophical, and political themes presented in Apocalyptic texts, with an emphasis on the Book of Revelation.

Infrastructures are often understood to be inert, technical support structures that exist as a sort of background to social and political life. In contrast, this course considers infrastructures as key conduits of social and political power. It draws on an explosion over the last two decades of a critical literature in the humanities and social sciences that upends how we think of infrastructure. The first half of the class explores many of the now foundational texts in geography, anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, and history that unpack the social and political life of infrastructure. The second half of the class then delves into case studies of infrastructural politics across the global South. Through examining the far reaching role of diverse infrastructures—road networks, dams, electricity grids, water and waste management systems, security apparatuses—we will reveal how supposedly neutral systems and technologies play key roles in animating social, political, and economic life. In so doing, we will ask questions like: Why do some infrastructures inspire awe while others incite disgust or rebellion? How have infrastructures served as architectures of racist domination—or, on the other hand—the material fodder for democratic social movements, even revolutions? How does the matter organized by infrastructural systems—trash, water, electricity—shape the kinds of politics these systems engender? Authors may include: Brian Larkin, Antina von Schnitzler, Nikhil Anand, and Ashley Carse.

What does it mean to build and defend culture, sovereignty, and social democracy? What does it feel like to live in a bilingual city? How can historically oppressed and marginalized peoples reckon with their own continued culpability in the oppression of others? What are the continuing legacies of the upheavals of the 1960s? The course explores these questions in contemporary Montréal, Québec’s largest and most diverse city and cultural capital. During the Quiet Revolution, ordinary Quebeckers declared that they would be “maîtres chez nous,” masters in our own house, as opposed to English Canadians, Catholic priests, or autocratic politicians. They remade the city politically, culturally, and architecturally and created modern—secular, social democratic, and nationalist—Québec. This class will take an ethnographic and historical approach to Montréal, using the city as a site to explore questions of nationalism, identity, feminism, art, and globalization. We will explore Montréal through scholarship, visual and performance art, novels, and film. Topics will include national liberation struggles of Québécois and other ethnic groups; bilingualism; nationalized health and child care; visual sovereignty; Expo 67; and Indigenous—specifically Kanien’kehá:ka—sovereignty and nationhood. We may consider work by Denys Arcand, David Austin, Céline Dion, Sean Mills, Alanis Obamsawin, Anne-Claire Poirier, Moshe Safdie, and Skawenatti. The course will be delivered in English, and French is not required.

What kind of thing is a fiction? How do imaginary creations exist in relation to the “real” world? What are the points of contact between actual and imaginary experiences? Is fiction immaterial (an idea) or material (words on a page)? What kinds of knowledge can a fiction produce? Are fictions nothing but lies? This seminar investigates such philosophical problems in the context of pre-modern theories of fiction: what it is, how it works, and why it matters. We will survey a range of genres, including drama, poetry, romance, utopia, travel narrative, philosophical prose, philosophical dialogue, the familiar essay, and the humanist letter. In addition to studying a variety of literary texts from antiquity through the seventeenth century, we will explore how different technical discourses define “fiction” in the period, including poetics, rhetoric, natural philosophy, natural history, ethnography, the occult arts, mechanical philosophy, and theology. Readings will include Hesiod, Plato, Lucian, Mandeville, More, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Webster, Milton, Cavendish, Hobbes, and Behn.

“Utopias of Exclusion” is an interdisciplinary seminar focusing on premodern and early modern utopias in order to explore these paradise spaces and the dystopic elements within them, particularly confinement and exclusion. How do we define a utopia? What can utopian literature tell us about time and place? Why do utopias often require the exclusion of others or limit movement beyond a circumscribed place? How ideal are these “ideal” spaces, particularly if a utopia is a walled city? How can we analyze utopias through the lenses of history, feminism, queer theory, or the place of race, religion, or personal identity? In particular, this class asks us to consider more deeply how our own experiences with shelter-in-place rules and social distancing due to COVID-19, including remote learning, are aspects of even the most utopian societies, where walls that keep people out also keep people in. Readings may include selections from Plato's Republic, Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost; as well as Aristophanes’s The Birds, Thomas More's Utopia, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and a series of “Country House Poems” by early modern authors Aemilia Lanyer (“Description of Cookham”), Ben Jonson (“To Penshurst”), Andrew Marvell (“Upon Appleton House”), and Anne Finch (“Petition for an Absolute Retreat”) for an understanding of the countryside as a kind of paradise. We will also look at a contemporary perspective through Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and will end with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village to examine how walled utopias are depicted cinematically.

What motivates a government to decide to “kill those whose lives it had, by definition, to protect, manage, and multiply”? During the radical 1970s, philosopher Michel Foucault developed the concept of biopower in order to understand why governance has come to increasingly include, by different methods, “the power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” In Foucault’s analysis, the various ways that governments decide to declare ‘war’ on parts of their own populations developed hand in hand with the histories of the modern social sciences: through colonialism, criminology, public medicine, racial eugenics, psychiatry, and security. Our goal in this class is to understand how this approach to government developed during the early modern period, what inspired Foucault to theorize it in the 1970s, and how that these modes affect us in the present. Texts include Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, his lectures at the Collège de France from 1972 through 1979 (The Punitive Society, Psychiatric Power, Abnormal, Society Must Be Defended, Security Territory Population, and The Birth of Biopolitics), biographical writings, interviews, and political communiqués.

Over the past decade, businesses around the world have clamoured to show their environmental credentials. From Shell Oil proudly claiming to be climate sensitive, to new sustainability requirements for rapid urbanization and even mining companies and palm oil plantations touting their success in environmental protection, there is no question that capitalism now presents itself as “green.” But is green business anything more than a color? This seminar will give you a bigger picture by asking, does green capitalism represent a real transformation, or is it limited to superficial technofixes? What is capitalism, and what about it lends itself so readily to the radical manipulation of nature? We will read works by Naomi Klein, Nancy Fraser, Donna Haraway and Kim Fortun, among many others. This course will provide a solid grounding in the political ecology of late industrial capitalism, with special attention to capitalism's natures, plural environmentalisms, and the enterprise of sustainability.

In this course, we will collectively explore the connections between development, decolonization and social justice. Decolonizing, here, is about questioning the approach, assumptions, and impact of development theory and policy, as well as about creating processes that can undo historical and ongoing exclusions such as those based on class, race, gender, language, location, and colonialism. Together, we will examine: Who has the power to frame the meaning of “development" and “progress" in society? How has development been theorized and implemented, and why have development projects generated resistances across the world? How can we decolonize, and remake society in the contemporary conjuncture? Some of the themes that we will explore include the invention of poverty and development, feminist and Marxist theories of social change, food injustice in South Asia and Latin America, militarism and the politics of international aid, decolonizing nature and knowledge, and indigenous ways of being and resistance. We will draw upon texts in development sociology, anthropology, feminist and environmental thought, and indigenous and decolonial studies to inform our analysis. Students will hone their writing and research ability by working on two theory papers, and one final project focused on a contemporary social problem.

According to phenomenology, the task of the philosopher is to describe the ways in which we experience the world as living, sensing, and feeling beings. Phenomenology starts by asking us to cultivate a way of seeing and sensing the world by means of an attentiveness to the present moment of experience that might allow us to describe more authentically the phenomena we encounter. Phenomenologists are concerned with how we experience the appearance of “things themselves,” as Edmund Husserl advocated, whether we are encountering a thunderstorm, a protest, or a painting. In this course we will examine critical texts from the phenomenological tradition beginning with its modern foundation (Edmund Husserl, 1859-1938), attending to the philosophical legacy that followed (Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty), and culminating with contemporary critical phenomenologies (Iris Marion Young, Alia Al-Saji, George Yancy). Because works of art offer some of the most potent and important phenomenological encounters, we will attune ourselves to phenomenologies of architecture (Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space), phenomenologies of dance (dance improvisation and Pina Bausch’s choreography), and phenomenologies of painting (Paul Cezanne and Francis Bacon). We will culminate our study by considering how contemporary critical phenomenology complicates our investigations of these works of art and the ways in which our experiences are conditioned by social and political forces beyond our fashioning.

What is the relationship between Black liberation and the liberation of all people? What is the meaning of decolonization in an economically interconnected and globalized world? Is political violence necessary for substantial social change? These are just some of the questions that inspired the formation of the Black Panther Party and their political strategies as they underwent multiple ideological shifts and splits between 1966 and 1983. At its height, the BPP included dozens of chapters in the U.S., an embassy in Algeria, and coalitions with anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist political organizations across six continents. The majority of its membership was female, young, and poor or working class. This course draws on a range of media in order to construct a nuanced analysis of arguably the most influential and yet misunderstood social movement organization of the past century. Texts include primary documents such as movement writings, state surveillance files, interviews, art and film, as well as contemporary historiographical and scholarly analysis.

Geoffrey Chaucer is routinely listed among the two or three most influential poets and storytellers ever to have written the English language. Most modern readers, however, have never read his work. The dialect in which he wrote is considered too difficult to comprehend, the time period in which he lived too distant. He has become a subject for specialists alone, a writer we read because we feel we must, never just for fun. This is a terrible shame. Few realize that with only a handful of simple tools and a bit of honest practice, even novices can quickly unlock the door to Chaucer’s literary world. Within that world, they find a surprisingly accessible artistic voice – elegantly simple, charmingly self-deprecating, and bitingly, laugh-out-loud, funny. In this three-week intensive course, we will quite literally give new life to this voice: we will spend each class reading Chaucer aloud together, to each other, in a round. Much like a dramatic table read, we’ll recreate the rhythms of his verse, we’ll feel the pulse of his dramatic timing, and we’ll hear the charming cleverness of his wordplay. We’ll learn how Chaucer spoke to his own fourteenth century world. And we’ll think carefully about how he speaks even still to our own. Actors, poets, and spoken word enthusiasts might find particular utility in the course’s intensive immersion. Previous enthusiasm for the Middle Ages will be helpful, but not necessarily required. The only true prerequisites for the course are an interest in literary art and a willingness to try something new.

This seminar uses political and cultural theory to explore the multiple meanings of "emergency" in a moment of declining empire, impending climate catastrophe, uncontained pandemic, racial uprising and incipient fascism -amidst considerable political uncertainty about how each can be engaged. The course content will change somewhat if Joe Biden wins the Presidency, but our themes remain pressing regardless. For even if Trump does not steal the election by a semi-legal coup, at least 35% of the population seems wed to climate denial, immigrant detention, white supremacy, abortion abolition, and militarized repression. Our basic questions thus remain, first, what is the meaning of "fascism" as a term of analysis and judgment in this moment? Second, if the liberal democratic regime of the last 50 years produced these emergencies, in what senses is it possible or desireable to "return to normal?" In this regard, what basic debates about means and end are dividing progressives about the pandemic, a collapsed economy, systemic racism, rampant sexual violence, and climate catastrophe? Third, can politics address pervasive "de-factualization" and rancorous polarization, while projecting a common horizon? Imagine this seminar, therefore, as an opportunity to think about contestable terms of analysis, trauma in differently positioned constituencies, and our choices in narrativizing it. Possible readings: Paxton, Anatonmy of Fascism; Theweleit, Male Fantasies; Benjamin, Theses on History, Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene; Melville, "Barteby the Scrivener," Lear, Radical Hope; Moten & Harney, The Undercommons; Atwood, Handmaid's Tale; Shamsie, Homefire; Butler, Parable of the Sower.

Sufism refers to the world of Islamic mysticism, and is often known in the West through the magnificent work of poet-philosophers like Rumi. In this course, we will collectively journey through the multiple worlds of Sufi thought, and strive to grasp its philosophies, poetics and politics. Reading a selection of texts over thousand years across South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, we will address: How did Sufis understand the connection to the Divine, and strive to create new social worlds and possibilities of being? What is Sufi poetics, and with what conceptual tools do we explore its multiple layers? Ultimately, what is love in the Sufi imaginary? The course will enable students to reflect on non-Western philosophies and histories of Islam, while introducing them to Sufi poetry from a variety of languages including Persian, Arabic, Sindhi, and Punjabi. Course themes include histories of Sufi saints in South Asia, the body, ritual and symbols in Sufi praxis, visual cultures in Sufi lifeworlds, gender and power in poetic thought, and love and spiritual subjectivity as modes of resistance. Key texts include the scholarly works of Annemarie Schimmel and Shahzad Bashir, translated poetic works of Rumi, Hafez, Shah Latif Bhitai, Rabia Basri, and Bulleh Shah, and a range of sonic and visual archives - artwork, songs, and documentaries that illuminate the themes of the class beyond text.

Anger is a formidable emotion with a complex social life. In this course, we examine black feminist writings that ask us to think critically about anger, and develop cultural analyses regarding the work that it can and cannot do. Among the questions we consider are: How do race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender identity determine who is allowed to be angry and whose anger will be attended to? In what ways are we as black women encouraged to think of our anger as unreasonable or unjustified, taught to deny it, squash it, or be afraid it will kill us? What is the relationship of anger to demands for justice? Or, put another way, how is this emotion, long stereotyped and stigmatized, reworked by black feminist scholars, artists and activists who see in it the potential for personal and political empowerment? What do they see as the particular promises and posible pitfalls of angry power? Our inquiry is shaped by contributions from Brittney Cooper, Audre Lorde, Staceyann Chin, bell hooks, CeCe McDonald, Maria Stewart, Claudia Rankine, Roxane Gay, Sara Ahmed, June Jordan and Solange Knowles. Along the way we will note that these authors' and artists' contributions are varied and inconsistent. Rather than come away with a monolithic understanding of black feminist thinking about anger, students will learn to be alive to the differences in approaches and strategies represented by the materials under study here.

We all tell stories; we read, listen to, and watch them. Yet, as Jerome Bruner has remarked, we can also find ourselves struggling to define what constitutes a story: what differentiates it from an argument, a recipe, a listicle? It may be, as Bruner suggests, that our sense of narrative is so naturalized or intuitive that it is hard to explain. It may also be that the word “narrative” has come to be used in so many different contexts and disciplines that getting a grip on it presents a challenge. Luckily, there are an array of analytic and critical tools available, through which we can learn to understand, analyze, and explore narrative forms with precision and clarity. In this course, we will familiarize ourselves with the fundamentals of narrative theory; by examining examples from literature and media, we will deepen our understanding of how stories work and what cultural work they can perform. Joan Didion once wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” In the second half of this course, we’ll complicate this claim. Whose stories get told and how and why? Are there particular forms of storytelling that come to be privileged over others? What are they and what is the source of that privilege? What role do narratives have in the construction of identity and history? Readings will include theoretical texts—Aristotle, Bruner, Puckett, S.Hartman, e.g.—alongside a diverse array of literary texts, which may include Melville, Woolf, Prince, Danticat, Achebe, and others.

James Baldwin once wrote: “Huey Newton is one of the most important people to have been produced by the American chaos.” Despite being known almost exclusively as the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Newton was also a philosopher, scholar, and prolific writer in his own right. This course closely examines his body of work, including unpublished archival writings from his doctoral studies, ranging widely over the fields and topics of race, class, gender, sexuality, evolutionary psychology, ecology, theology, epistemology, ontology, law, war, economy, and political theory. We will read Newton’s works alongside those of his major influences (eg. Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Lenin, Mao, Fanon, Sartre, Malcolm X, and Baldwin) and those that he influenced, in order to develop a more complete picture of Newton’s overarching system of thought. Texts include Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide, the edited collections To Die For the People and the Huey P. Newton Reader, unpublished essays, and Judson Jeffries’ Huey P. Newton: Radical Theorist.

What becomes of life when researchers can materially manipulate and technically transform living things? In this course, we will historically investigate biotechnology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, paying attention to how efforts to engineer life are grounded in social, cultural, and political contexts. Topics include reproductive technologies, genetic engineering and cloning, genetically modified foods, bioprospecting, genomics, stem cells, and biosafety and biosecurity. The course is organized around five crosscutting domains in which we will explore the ethical, legal, and social impacts of biotechnology: (1) food, (2) property and law, (3) sex and reproduction, (4) disease and drugs, and (5) genomic identities. We will read and discuss historical and anthropological accounts of biotechnology, primary scientific publications, legal cases, and speculative fiction. We will learn to evaluate the social constitution and impact of biotechnology on daily life, as well as how to place contemporary issues and debates about biotechnology in sociopolitical and historical contexts. Case studies cover topics such as the Green Revolution, the Recombinant DNA controversy, BRCA gene patents, egg freezing, the Mexican Genome Project, and CRISPR-Cas9. Secondary sources include articles and book excerpts from historians, anthropologists, and sociologists of the life sciences, including but not limited to Cori Hayden, Sarah Franklin, Ruha Benjamin, Kim TallBear, Alondra Nelson, and Amade M’Charek.

The defining events of 2020 – the pandemic and its unequal distribution of death and precarity on people of color, women, and the poor and the continuous police violence and killings of black citizens and the ensuing protests – have led to a call for an alternative political vision based on “care.” In one sense this is a material demand for equal access to healthcare, resources (housing, food, and basic necessities), and protections for “essential workers” (those tasked with care’s labors). In another sense, a politics of care signals a different political imaginary that runs in opposition to liberalism’s discourse of individual rights that has more recently found amplification in neoliberalism’s brutal discourse of personal responsibility and the ever-widening privatization of the commons. This other imaginary insists on our connectedness and interdependence and centers caring for others, our world, and our natural environment. In this course we will explore the material and theoretical demands of a politics of care (and how the material and theoretical are mutually reinforcing). Of course, there is a history of care (and “love”) as central to an oppositional politics from anti-racist and feminist theorists such as Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Joan Tronto. We will begin by first readings these earlier calls for a politics of care before turning to present iterations. Current may include Robin Kelley, George Gonsalves, Judith Butler, Silvia Federici, and Anna Tsing.

How are environmental racism and environmental injustice related to belonging in"and exclusion from"local, national, and international communities? "How do questions about citizenship, rights, and rightlessness relate to environmental racism and environmental injustice? This course addresses questions about how numerous forms of environmental racism and environmental injustice impact people"s access to their human rights"universally guaranteed in principle but so frequently inaccessible in reality. These questions have newfound urgency amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as marginalized communities already subjected to environmental repression have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. Drawing on works from the realms of political theory, international law, literature, activism, and others, we will address relationships between race, class, gender, and environmental injustice. We will discuss fence-line communities. There are powerful connections between so-called "local" environmental injustice and the climate crisis"how are these connections overlooked by international law? We will focus on how communities of color, Indigenous communities, and stateless people are affected by and resist pollution inequity and differential access to healthcare. Historical and contemporary cases include denial of water access (e.g. Flint and Detroit, Michigan; the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza; and Cape Town, South Africa); forced exposure to toxins in armed conflict zones (ranging from the WWII bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War); poisoning from industrial pollution (such as in Minamata, Japan in the 20th century); and international examples of lead poisoning. Scholars, novelists, poets, theorists, and practitioners whose work will be read and discussed may include: Robert D. Bullard, Rachel Carson, Steve Lerner, Harriet A. Washington, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Seyla Benhabib, Benedict Anderson, Antony Anghie, Tōge Sankichi, Ghassan Kanafani, and Yoko Tawada.

In 2020 NYU celebrated the 50th anniversary of Ralph Ellison’s appointment as its Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities; he was the first African American to hold this prestigious university chair. And 2022 will mark the 70th anniversary of Ellison’s most celebrated novel, Invisible Man. This course belatedly commemorates the first event and anticipates the second by reading Ellison’s masterwork and the university archive for what each can teach us about past and present institutional efforts to promote diversity and inclusion. All along the narrative arc of Invisible Man, from its unnamed protagonist’s earnest speech at the absurd battle royale to his abandonment of a tokenized role as black spokesperson for the Brotherhood, today’s student readers encounter--in a very 1950s plot--a number of still-relevant scenarios ripe for analysis. How do we interpret the moments and metaphors of inclusion, integration and assimilation that recur throughout the text? And what do we make of the novel’s end, wherein Ellison’s hero has seemingly abandoned the whole enterprise, choosing instead to self-exile in a hole underground? What do Ellison’s own letters, notes and syllabi from the archives reveal about his attitudes and approach to his distinguished academic appointment? Are there lessons to be drawn from Ellison's case that might help us better read current university policies and prerogatives? Ellison’s documents are here considered alongside more recent books on diversity and the university by Sara Ahmed, Pamela Newkirk and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. Our discussions of these readings allow students to carefully develop their own understandings of the promises and pitfalls of diversity and inclusion efforts, and encourage them to critically reflect on how these strategies impact their own educations at NYU.

This course examines early modernity through the Mughal empire of northern India (ca. 1526-1857), which ruled over a 100 million subjects from diverse social, linguistic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. Contemporary to other Islamic empires, namely the Ottomans in the Mediterranean and the Safavids in Iran, the Mughal world encompassed the Indian Ocean, where the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Danish also arrived at the turn of the 16th century. The course examines Mughal ideologies and state institutions, law, economic changes, religious interactions, and court culture through primary sources (in translation) such as chronicles, poetry, memoirs, administrative documents, legal treatises, travelogues, and material culture. The course will conclude with a brief reflection on the afterlives or the contested legacies of the Mughals today and the stakes of writing about the Indian subcontinent's pre-colonial pasts in the present. Primary source readings include Baburnama, Sidi "Ali Reis" Mirror of Countries, Abu'l Fazl's Akbarnama, A Jesuit Treatise on Emperor Jahangir's Court, and François Bernier's Travels in the Mogul Empire.