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.

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-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.

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.

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-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.