Study Away Seminar (SASEM-UG)

From its beginnings, cinema in Germany was embroiled in heated debates about its aesthetic, social and political value: Is cinema a form of art or mere entertainment for the masses? And what does it mean to be a work of art? What is its significance as popular medium? Film’s relevance reaches far beyond the worlds it depicts on screen. It is intrinsically linked to questions of German identity and self-perception. This course provides an overview of the changing roles of cinema in the turbulent history of the 20th century in Germany as they manifests in changing visions of the city. The course aims to give some insight into the competing ideas of intellectual histories and evaluate them from the angle of the visual medium and to thus offer insight in the construction of German identity.

How do social movements form in response to environmental concerns? What makes them effective or ineffective? This course analyses the various social movements that organized in response to environmental concerns. Both historical and sociological dimensions of environmental movements are covered, with particular attention given to how issues of environmental protection and social justice intersect. At NYU Berlin, the course includes American (I), European, and in particular German (II), as well as global movements (III).

This course explores the global phenomenon of growing consumption and waste in cities, as well as the transformation of resources and natural landscapes to serve these trends. A city like Berlin consumes large amounts of energy, water and food, and produces high quantities of waste. But where do these resources come from, and where is waste disposed of? Students engage with these questions in a theoretical, methodological and ethical way by tracing the flows of water, energy, food and waste in and around Berlin and beyond. The course aims to explore urbanization as a global process with fluid boundaries and analyze the connection of cities to the natural resources and landscapes on which they rely. Drawing from geography, anthropology and history, we analyze the relationship between growing consumption and disposal and the expansion of the resource frontier, while identifying the social, environmental and spatial effects this entails.

THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT NYU-BERLIN. This course explores the global phenomenon of growing consumption and waste in cities, as well as the transformation of resources and natural landscapes to serve these trends. A city like Berlin consumes large amounts of energy, water and food, and produces high quantities of waste. But where do these resources come from, and where is waste disposed of? Students engage with these questions in a theoretical, methodological and ethical way by tracing the flows of water, energy, food and waste in and around Berlin and beyond. The course aims to explore urbanization as a global process with fluid boundaries and analyze the connection of cities to the natural resources and landscapes on which they rely. Drawing from geography, anthropology and history, we analyze the relationship between growing consumption and disposal and the expansion of the resource frontier, while identifying the social, environmental and spatial effects this entails.

This course explores Tango as an aesthetic, social and cultural formation that is articulated in interesting and complex ways with the traditions of culture and politics in Argentina and Latin America more generally. During the rapid modernization of the 1920s and 1930s, Tango (like Brazilian Samba), which had been seen as a primitive and exotic dance, began to emerge as a kind of modern primitive art form that quickly came to occupy a central space in nationalist discourse. The course explores the way that perceptions of a primitive and a modern converge in this unique and exciting art. In addition, the course will consider tango as a global metaphor with deeply embedded connections to urban poverty, social marginalization, and masculine authority.

THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT NYU-BUENOS AIRES. Prerequisite: SPAN-UA 9050 Advanced Spanish or SPAN-UA 51 Advanced Spanish for Spanish-Speaking Students (or equivalent courses) Mitos, Íconos y Tradiciones Inventadas seeks to make students familiar with the rich and complex history of Latin America through the study of some of its most known and iconic cultural expressions. It does also work as an introductory map to the most influential and widespread approaches in Latin American social sciences, cultural studies and literary criticism. Thus, students will not only have a first encounter with key historical processes that lie behind some well know cultural icons, but also will be introduced to arguments and ways of writing that help constitute modern Latin American educated Spanish. The course is structured in four topics. The first two weeks work as an introduction, and are devoted to ways of representing political authority in Latin America. The core of the course seeks to study and discuss three issues that are crucial for an understanding of our present: Violence in Latin America, Drugs and the Narco-machine, The Economy of Latin American Passion. Students will study these topics through a variety of cultural materials, including literary texts, film, papers from several disciplines, theater plays, art shows and songs.

This course studies modern and contemporary art and architecture through a strategic focus on the cities of Buenos Aires, New York, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City. We consider key artworks and architectural movements, approaching art history in urban, socio-historical and contextual terms. Emphasis is placed upon the city as a hub for the production and reception of art. Cities are multifarious complexes of paradoxical elements, where rhythms of stasis and motion coexist. Every city absorbs creative interchange, while also triggering different types of transformation. Our speculations on the urban environment will bring up multiple questions that point back to and extend beyond the mere physical structure of the city, discovering arenas of social action. How does art exploits the characteristics of the metropolis? How is art distributed and consumed throughout the dense fabric of the city? We will explore art (primarily Latin American art) as a staging ground for the city, and the city as staging ground for art. Developing comparative perspectives on Buenos Aires, New York, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City will illuminate the particularities of the places under investigation, albeit with reference to aesthetic trajectories as well as broader technological, economic, and social-political changes. New York is included in our selected network of Latin American cities, acknowledging its critical importance as a center of cultural experimentation where artists (including Latin American artists) share ideas in a global context. Work in class will focus on both visual and textual analysis, employing images, manifestos and critical essays. The course includes a lively program of tours throughout Buenos Aires, visits to museums and private art collections, and conversations with guest contemporary artists.

Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist writers in both Britain and the United States were fascinated by Italy. The "Italy and Italians" of the title refers not only to images and characters in the works of the British and American authors we will be reading but also to their affinities with Italian literature. Recurring themes in the course will be history and its uses in literature, gender and sexuality, democracy and aristocracy, language and power, and religion as an instrument of sexual repression.

This course focuses on literary representations of WWI and WWII. The online course pack includes examples of the political and military rhetoric to which Montale and Hemingway objected, historical essays and images (war photographs, recruitment posters, etc.), as well as the shorter texts we are studying. Central themes in the course are the concepts of political literature and historical fiction and the contrasting approaches and theoretical premises of classical realism and modernism. Among the supplementary sources available in the Villa Ulivi library are two good cultural histories on the subject: James Shehan Where Have All the Soldiers Gone and Mark Mazower Dark Continent. Other recurring issues will be gender, sexuality, religion, class politics, kitsch, psychoanalysis, rhetoric, and power.

Black Italia is a cross-disciplinary course exploring issues of "race", identity and citizenship in colonial and postcolonial Italy drawing from Sociology, History, Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies and Cultural Studies. The course is intended to provide students with an extensive overview on the construction and representation of "race" in Italy, as well as its effects on the everyday life of African-descent people in Italian society. Furthermore, through class participation and group work, Black Italia aims to develop students' ability to think critically, use a range of theories from the Social Sciences and to improve their oral and written skills.

London, like New York is a rich and complicated city. Unlike New York however, it has been continuously occupied for just under 2000 years. Almost every epoch of London’s history can be detected in the city’s architecture and distinctive streetscape. This course is designed to work in three ways. Firstly it is an opportunity to learn about London’s architecture and art by physically exploring it. Secondly this class is an introduction to sketching and keeping a travel notebook, a basic and useful skill that any liberal arts student should have an experience of. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this course teaches how to 'read' a town or city. The ability to visually make sense of European built-environment should really help in understanding the architecture of New York City and, of course, town and cities throughout the United States, and anywhere else.

The course will introduce many aspects of transitional justice and explore debates within it. Transitional justice developed in the late twentieth century, although there were many precursors to it. Initially, its main concern was with transitions from repressive dictatorships, but it also quickly evolved into an aspect of peacebuilding in the aftermath of violent conflict. During its early years, a particular approach tended to become dominant. This regarded the goal as facilitating a transition to a Western model of democracy through a set of mechanisms including trials, truth commissions, and memorials. However, this led to numerous critiques and debates, both about the desirability and appropriateness of such goals and about whether the mechanisms were effective in practice. Another important development was in the way the subject was studied. At first, law was the dominant discipline, but transitional justice has become a multi-disciplinary field that includes many subjects within the social sciences and humanities. This course highlights its relationship with peacebuilding, which considers the many processes involved in moving towards a sustainable peace.

THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT NYU-PARIS. This course explores the connections between major French and American expatriate writings of the Modernist period and beyond. As the site of unprecedented cosmopolitanism and creativity, early 20th-century Paris saw the emergence of artistic and intellectual movements that were to have a considerable impact on Western culture to this day. The texts we will be looking at (memoir, autobiography, novel, poem, and essay) reflect a shared sense of inner and outer exile inherent in the modern condition. They deal explicitly with the experience of living and writing on the margins, of belonging or not belonging, of otherness and estrangement in relation to class, gender, sexuality, language, and to Paris as a specific urban environment. Conducted in English

THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT NYU-PRAGUE. Individual or minority revolt against for the time being prevailing majority position, religious interpretation or political rule is an important but often forgotten part of history. Modern Political Dissent class covers this phenomena combining findings from several fields like psychological response to extreme situations, modern history, political and communication theory, art and culture in opposition against perceived injustice and case studies and analyses of important examples of modern political dissent. From interpretation of holocaust or torture survival ordeal and Stockholm syndrome students are led to analyze the context – both psychological and historical – in order to search for possible remedies. Conditions that made totalitarian ideologies so widely acceptable are studied within the context of thought reform and cult manipulations. Works of Robert J.Lifton, Stanley Milgrams and Phillip Zimbardo are used to explain importance of individual responsibility versus obedience to authority. Role modeling and differentiation in communicating minority or dissent values to majority society give a possibility to adjust complex strategies for change.

THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT NYU-PRAGUE. The course is focused on exploring Franz Kafka’s work – stories, novels, diaries and letters – in the context of fin de siècle Prague and the birth of modernism. We will take a closer look at the cultural and social context of Central Europe (literature and the arts, but also the Modernist architecture of Adolf Loos, Simmel’s sociology of the metropolitan life, Freud’s analysis of the unconscious, Brentano’s psychology, the resonance of Nietzsche’s philosophy, or the emergence of new media like phonograph and silent film) in the first two decades of the 20th century. In addition, we will discuss the adaptations of Kafka’s work and its impact on later art, fiction and film (Borges, Welles, Kundera, Roth, Švankmajer). The topics discussed through Kafka’s writings and other related works include: man and metropolis, family, estrangement, authorship, time, writing and media, travelling, territories and identities, languages, animals, art and pain. We will be especially interested in how these phenomena transform when represented in and through the medium of literary fiction.

THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT NYU-PRAGUE. This interdisciplinary seminar is designed to discuss and question the identity of specific nations in European space, which has always been a fascinating crossroad of ideas and ideologies as well as the birthplace of wars and totalitarian systems. The course will cover masterpieces of Russian, Hungarian, German, Polish and Czech cinematography, focusing on several crucial periods of history, in particular WWII and its aftermath, showing moral dilemmas of individuals and nations under the Nazi regime as well as revealing the bitter truth of the Stalinist years.Students will be exposed to brilliant and often controversial works of film art focusing on moral dilemmas of individuals under the stressful times of history. Participants of this course will thus map the European space through the means of film trying to analyze the individual approach to historical events while getting a general picture of Europe in its crucial periods of history - and last but not least learn to appreciate European film art.

The story of the archaeological discipline in the Land of Israel is strongly tied with the major developments that the region has undergone in the last two centuries. This course offers an overview of the history of archaeology in Palestine since the appearance of the first European travelers and missionaries in the mid-19th century, along the vibrant interest of collectors, forgers and robbers in the Promised Land, through the appearance of the first scientific excavations, the rise of the American biblical archaeology and its influence on local Israeli research. Special attention will be given to the way the newly born Israeli archaeology helped to establish the Zionist identity that wished to pass over two thousand years of Diaspora history; the methods by which the nascent Israeli archaeology connected new-comers to the land of the patriarchs and the manner by which Israeli scholars served state interests in the creation of the national Zionist ethos. The aftermath of the Six Days War and the increasing tension between the Bible and archaeology will be discussed in light of the intense debate over the historicity of the Exodus story, Joshua's conquests and the United Kingdom of David and Solomon. Finally, at the turn of the millennium, post-modern archaeology presented a new pluralistic view of the past. This multi-vocal framework will be used as a background for discussing the archaeology of otherness and minorities in 21st century Israel.